Die Verortung der Gesellschaft: Durkheims Verwendung des Begriffs „Substrat“

This article presents and discusses Durkheim’s idea that society can be considered as a thing, an object. It shows that this “objective” character immediately begs the question of the location of society, of its position in space. The article detects in Durkheim’s work several changes of position, but concludes nonetheless that the sociologist eventually took the social to be “inside us, yet without us”: the social consists entirely in representations, but in representations of a specific kind insofar as they are not the product of individual thought and directly constrain it. How, exactly, can the mental life of individuals be taken to be the ultimate location of society? This question is discussed from the perspective of the relationship of society to the material world, i.e., in Durkheim’s vocabulary, from the perspective of the “substratum” of society.     

Capitalization and Depreciation of Infrastructure by State and Local Governmental Entities

Proposals for capitalizing and depreciating infrastructure foreshadow a significant change in financial reporting for state and local entities. Justifications for present practices are examined. Costs and benefits of proposed changes are reviewed. Alternative practices are described.     

Rethinking the marketing of World Heritage Sites: Giving the past a sustainable future

Despite significant global prestige and a strong brand presence, UNESCO World Heritage Sites remain underfunded with many unable to self-sustain. Increasing government budget constraints have further restricted funds and UNESCO's “World Heritage Fund”—UNESCO's sole source of financial assistance available to sites—has fallen to approximately $3M USD per annum. Few sites are able to fully offset these budget constraints through tourist revenue alone, and those able to do so often require additional repairs due to damage from visitors exceeding the site's capacity. Although this situation is widely acknowledged within the heritage literature, few papers have proposed long-term strategic solutions beyond marketing and management plans for individual sites. The authors address this pressing issue by questioning whether World Heritage Sites in general are currently being marketed in an optimized manner and proposing a new framework for creating stronger and more appropriate relationships between visitors and sites using Berthon et al.'s the Aesthetics and Ontology model. The authors argue that clarifying and optimizing the marketing of World Heritage through this lens with its focus on the consumption experience of visitors and other stakeholders will yield positive results for both the management of the sites and for their impact on surrounding communities. Furthermore, the authors recommend that policies surrounding the management of these valuable resources and sources of tourist revenue be modified to reflect these findings.     

Food Safety Regulation and the Conflict of Interest: The Case of MeatSafety and E. Coli 0157

The Food Standards Agency (FSA) aims to remove the longstanding conflict of interest between producers and consumers which is thought to lie at the heart of the rising number of food safety problems of recent years, to restore consumer confidence, and to protect public health. This paper sets out firstly to understand what the conflicts are, how they arise and their implications for food safety, and secondly to provide some means of evaluating the proposals for the Food Standards Agency. It does this by examining the current food safety regulatory regime as it relates to e. coli 0157, one of the problems that gave rise to the FSA and an exemplar of the problems of meat safety, and places it in its wider economic context.
The results show that the financial pressures on the food industry were such that food hygiene was largely dependent upon external regulation and enforcement. But the deficiencies in the conception, design and implementation of the Food Safety Act, which was fundamentally deregulatory and privileged producer interests, permitted the food safety problems to grow. The case also, by illustrating how the interests of big business predominate in the formulation of public policy at the expense of the public, reveals how the class nature of the state affects public policy and social relations. Without addressing these issues, the problems they give rise to will remain. While the case is based on experiences in Britain, the problem of food safety and the issues raised have an international significance.