Mind the Income Gaps? Experimental Evidence of Information’s Lasting Effect on Redistributive Preferences

Social Justice Research - Individuals reject economic inequality if they believe it to result from unequal opportunities. This paper argues income gaps between groups determined at birth, based on...     

The structure and dynamics of the global network of inter-firm R&D partnerships 1989–2002

Research and development (R&D) partnerships are formed to share the risks and benefits of R&D. At the macro level, they result in a globe-spanning network that can be a valuable source of international knowledge spillovers. This network is the subject of a considerable body of literature. Often-made claims are that R&D collaboration is an important activity in a competitive environment, but that the importance of international partnerships has declined over time. Furthermore, it is claimed that collaborations are disproportionally concentrated within the developed economies. However, this literature fails to account for variations in the sizes of underlying firm populations between countries and over time. We argue that these population sizes create an opportunity structure of available collaboration partners for firms, and that ignoring variations in this structure potentially leads to erroneous conclusions about the structure and dynamics of the R&D network. To address this problem, we study the structure and dynamics of the global R&D network on an international and cross-industry scale using longitudinal data for 1989?C2002. We integrate data on public firms and their R&D partnerships and confront earlier findings with our data and a set of methods, which enables us to correct for the structure and dynamics in the firm population. While our study confirms previous findings concerning the worldwide trend in collaborative activity, it also shows that results on individual countries need correction. In particular, the importance of R&D collaboration for US companies is overestimated, while their openness towards foreign partners is underestimated.     

Brothers in arms or at arms? IG‐Metall in 1994: Confronting recession and unification

The protracted collective bargaining dispute in German manufacturing during spring 1994 displayed a variety of characteristics fundamental to an understanding of the social unification process in Germany. This article focuses on contextual conditions affecting the negotiating and compromise formation process. This serves to illustrate the ‘turbulent environment’ under which industrial relations are currently taking place. To illustrate this argument the article analyses the requirements and obstacles to finding a compromise in the 1994 bargaining round. The core challenge consisted in displaying a degree of organisational flexibility on both sides of the bargaining table. At the heart of this challenge is the search for a new architecture in German industrial relations which includes coming to terms with the combined effects of unification and economic restructuring.     

Constitutional considerations of the escrowed encryption standard

In the physical world, spaces are tangibly defined to secure privacy. The cyberspace equivalent of sealed envelopes and locked doors is encryption. Encryption uses hardware and/or software to ensure that electronic communication is not intercepted by unwelcome and unintended parties. The technology allows communicators transmitting across telephone lines to encode conversations or data.

Sophisticated encryption technology protects legitimate privacy, but it may also cloak illegal activities by obstructing electronic surveillance by law enforcement agencies. The Escrowed Encryption Standard is a federal plan to protect telephone and computer communication from illegal interception and allow government access to these communications for surveillance. This article examines the plan's possibly adverse impacts on constitutional rights, with specific attention to the First, Fourth and Fifth amendments.     

Sudden Death in Marfan Syndrome

Marfan syndrome is an autosomal dominant genetic disorder of the connective tissue. The most serious complications of this syndrome are defects of the heart valves and aorta. Aneurysms of thoracic aorta are known to develop in Marfan syndrome. Other causes for development of aneurysms of the thoracic aorta are trauma, infections, valve and arch anomalies, genetic disorders, and atherosclerosis. These aneurysms upon rupture may lead to sudden deaths. They are usually detected during routine screening or follow‐up of such persons suffering from Marfan syndrome and upon death will be certified by the treating physician. Thus, an autopsy surgeon rarely comes across such deaths. One such case of sudden death due to cardiac tamponade consequent upon rupture of dissecting aortic aneurysm in a 33‐year‐old male who complained of throbbing pains in the chest, radiating to back, became breathless, cyanotic and died on the way to hospital is being presented here.     

Strong and weak family ties revisited: reconsidering European family structures from a network perspective

Family systems appear to be an important factor framing people's individual behavior. Thus far, family systems have been primarily addressed on a macro regional level with indirect measures. Revisiting Reher (1998) and the family ties criterion, the main question of this paper is to examine to what extent we perceive family structures differently in Europe by taking direct measures of the structures of people's broader social networks into consideration. Based on the Survey of Health, Ageing and Retirement in Europe (SHARE), we derived two indicators of family regimes based on individual-level data regarding the density of ego social networks: contact frequency and geographic proximity among network members. We aggregated these data and mapped them on the NUTS 2 level regions for various locations in Europe. The results of our analyses exhibit that, based on these two network indicators, significant differences in family structures between European regions exist. These results confirm the classification of strong family Southern and comparatively weaker family Northern European regions to a large extent, though substantial regional differences in and between countries are also revealed. Our findings demonstrate that the classification of European regions largely depends on which indicator of network density we consider. This is particularly obvious in the Eastern European regions where the classification markedly differs according to the type of network indicator. Intriguingly, social networks in Central European regions can be characterized as rather loose, often even looser than the ‘traditional’ weak ties in Scandinavia. Family regimes can, therefore, be regarded as a construct of multiple dimensions of which one dimension may be classified as weak while the other can be strong at the same time.     

Adapting violence for state survival and legitimacy: the resilience and dynamism of political repression in a democratizing South Korea*

Capacity in violence and its utilization is generally understood to be a first-order condition of the state-building process. As capacity increases and a state gains supremacy over would-be competitors, the use of violence by the state is hypothesized to decline, especially in polities that have made the democratic transition. However, we here demonstrate theoretically and empirically that the conventional wisdom is inadequate. We argue that political violence ubiquitously evolves according to the changing socio-political environment and varying tasks of the state.

Using the case of South Korea, a high-capacity, consolidated democracy, as a prism for theory building and corroboration, this study chronicles the evolution of political violence from the state’s explicit mobilization of thugs to suppress opposition at the early stage of state building through its collaboration with criminal organizations for developmental projects to the manipulation of quasi-governmental organizations after democratization in the late 1980s, coeval with the traditional use of public sources of force. We specifically look at how political development, that is, democratization, has produced new demands for – and constraints on – political violence and how post-authoritarian governments have responded.