EU update

This is the latest edition of Baker & McKenzie’s column on developments in EU law relating to IP, IT and telecommunications. This article summarises recent developments that are considered important for practitioners, students and academics in a wide range of information technology, e-commerce, telecommunications and intellectual property areas. It cannot be exhaustive but intends to address the important points. This is a hard copy reference guide, but links to outside web sites are included where possible. No responsibility is assumed for the accuracy of information contained in these links.     

Issues and the presidential primary voter

Most agree that voting in presidential general elections is largely contingent on the evaluations of the candidates, issues, and parties. Yet inpresidential primary elections the determinants of voter choices are less clear. Partisanship is inconsequential, information about candidate personalities and policy positions is scarce, and a fourth factor, expectations, may influence voters. In this paper, we reconsider the influence ofpolitical issues in presidential primaries. We argue that past work has not adequately considered how issues matter in primary elections. Primaries are intraparty affairs, and the political issues that typically divide the parties are not very relevant in primaries. Instead, we focus on the policy issues each candidate chooses to emphasize in their quest for the nomination, which we call policy priorities. With data gathered about media coverage of the presidential contenders in the 1988 primaries, and using exit poll data from the 1988 Super Tuesday primaries, we show that issues, as policy priorities, do matter in presidential primary elections. This research also implies that primary campaigns matter, since information concerning the policy priorities of the candidates reaches the intended audience.An earlier version of this paper was presented at the Annual Meeting of the Midwest Political Science Association, Chicago, IL, April 1992.     

The minimum wage and the poor: The end of a relationship

The belief that minimum-wage legislation helps the working poor is one reason for its continued popular support. The authors track the household incomes of low-wage workers and find that a radical transformation has occurred in the half century since the passage of the original minimum-wage law. Today most low-wage workers live in households well above the poverty line. Hence, those living in poverty will get only about 11 percent of the gains from the higher minimum-wage increase proposed in the Kennedy-Hawkins Bill. Low-wage workers in families with incomes three or more times the poverty line will get nearly 40 percent. Thus it is not clear that increases in the minimum wage make good policy even if no jobs are lost as a result.     

An actor‐oriented approach for strengthening research and development capabilities in natural resource systems

This article is concerned with strengthening research and development capabilities in natural resource systems, especially systems oriented towards reducing rural poverty. It reviews current planning, monitoring and evaluation (PME) literature and identifies five major areas of concern: (1) the lack of systematic and usable methods for qualitative assessment; (2) the narrow focus of current activities; (3) the failure to address the political nature of evaluations; (4) the lack of integration of PME methods with the practice of research and development; (5) the need for methods that facilitate flexibility, learning and replanning in process projects. Major new approaches for PME in process projects are reviewed and some gaps are identified. The article develops an ‘actor oriented approach’ for strengthening research and development (R&D) capabilities in natural resource systems. This holistic approach identifies major actors in an overall R&D system and concentrates on the determinants of flows of information between actors. Two major tools are presented: an actor linkage matrix and a determinants' diagram. The use of these tools is illustrated with a retrospective case study from the Kavango region of Namibia, and the potential strengths and weaknesses of the approach are discussed. Copyright © 1999 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

kinship across species: learning to care for nonhuman others

This essay responds to Donna J. Haraway’s (2016) provocation to ‘stay with the trouble’ of learning to live well with nonhumans as kin, through practice-based approaches to learning to care for nonhuman others. The cases examine the promotion of care for trees through mobile game apps for forest conservation, and kinship relations with city farm animals in Kentish Town, London. The cases are analysed with a view to how they articulate care practices as a means of making kin. Two concepts are proposed, ‘learning from’ and ‘facing’ the Other, which are thickened through discussions of how caring takes place in each case in relation to a particular category of nonhuman other: animated tree and urban farm animal. Thus while attendant to situations of care involving a specific nonhuman subject, the cases also broker thinking on learning from and facing (the) other kinds of trees and animals, and the interspecies dynamics of which they are a part. The intersectional implications of the practice sites and participants are elaborated, to complexify and affirm situated but also reflexive approaches to caring. In doing this, the authors attend to their own positionalities, seeking to diversify Western-based ecofeminist engagements with caring, while asking what their research can do for the nonhuman other. They formulate and apply a collaborative methodological approach to the case studies, developed through cultivating attentiveness to the nonhuman subject of research. The authors consider in particular how attentiveness to the nonhuman other can facilitate practices of knowing that further a non-anthropocentric and non-innocent ethic of caring. By further interconnecting situations of caring for nonhuman animals and plants, the authors advocate for practices of care that antagonise how species boundaries are drawn and explore the implications for learning to care for nonhumans as kin.     

Waves of Publications on Chinese Women and Gender Studies

ABSTRACT

This essay traces the evolution of Chinese women and gender studies in academia since the 1970s through a discussion of a number of prominent Western-language book publications that reveal changing scholarly approaches and attitudes toward this subject. It makes evident that within several generations the field has developed from a study favoured by left-leaning academics to a subject fed by multi-disciplinary approaches and integral to China scholarship. The review demonstrates how researchers sought sources and means to expose the once-buried literary and artistic achievements of imperial era women while modern history and literary experts as well as anthropologists and other social scientists countered long-standing narratives of women’s oppression, and pursued alternative scenarios to show how Chinese men and women have transformed their culture and society. There is also attention given to publications about masculinity, same-sex cultures, and the one-child policy. The review concludes that more contact between Western and Chinese scholars on women and gender studies will enrich and expand the dimensions of this field.