Motivation in a global economy: Lessons from Herzberg

“To summarize, the human animal has two categories of needs. One set stems from his animal disposition, that side of him previously referred to as the Adam view of man; it is centred on the avoidance of loss of life, hungec pain, sexual deprivation, and on other primary drives, in addition to the infinite varieties of learned fears that become attached to these basic drives. The other segment of man's nature, according to the Abraham concept of the human being, is man's compelling urge to realize his own potentiality by continuous psychological growth.”     

Capturing Technological Opportunity Via Japan's Star Scientists: Evidence from Japanese Firms' Biotech Patents and Products

Using detailed data on biotechnology in Japan, we find that identifiable collaborations between particular university star scientists and firms have a large positive impact on firms' research productivity, increasing the average firm's biotech patents by 34 percent, products in development by 27 percent, and products on the market by 8 percent as of 1989–1990. However, there is little evidence of geographically localized knowledge spillovers. In early industry formation, star scientists holding tacit knowledge required to practice recombinant DNA (genetic engineering) were of great economic value, leading to incentives motivating their participation in technology transfer. In Japan, the legal and institutional context implies that firm scientists work in the stars' university laboratories in contrast to America where the stars are more likely to work in the firm's labs. As a result, star collaborations in Japan are less localized around their research universities so that the universities' local economic development impact is lessened. Stars' scientific productivity is increased less during collaborations with firms in Japan as compared to the U.S.     

Through a Glass Darkly: Afrocentrism,War, and World Politics

While the two dominant Eurocentric paradigms of world politics, realism and idealism, place greater emphasis on power and regime type, respectively, in their analyses of war, a recently promulgated Afrocentric paradigm of world politics suggests that cultural characteristics of states are significantly associated with the likelihood of interstate war. Drawing on these competing perspectives, I conduct a data analysis of the relationship between cultural homogeneity and interstate conflict in order to determine the extent to which Afrocentric theses on international conflict are borne out empirically. I find that cultural factors are significant correlates of interstate war as Afrocentrists suggest, although realist and idealist factors are more strongly associated with the likelihood of interstate war. In addition, the findings suggest that multiculturalism—especially ethnic diversity—is a more auspicious path for interstate peace.     

Interactive narrators and performative readers: Gendered interfacing in Heian narratives

In Go Fish, Rose Troche and Guinevere Turner's seminal lesbian film from 1994, one of the protagonists complains that the woman who her friends want to set her up with has cupboards of herbal tea and no sex appeal. In the course of the film, the women end up together, but the joke/not-joke about lesbians and their fondness for herbal tea remains. What can we make of this conjunction? What does the linkage of tea and lesbianism connote and how does tea function within representational economies of lesbianism? On the one hand, tea functions as prelude to eroticism and codes for the opacity of lesbian sex. On the other hand, it also works to consolidate stereotypes about lesbianism. In this essay, the author explores the factors that make this almost joke possible – the gendering of tea as feminine, stereotypes about lesbian feminism – and examine ways in which it has been deployed as a form of lesbian shorthand. In working to understand why tea has evoked this stereotype, a sense of American counter-cultures, Orientalism, and historical memory come together to paint second-wave lesbian feminism as out of touch, politically inactive, and intimidated by sex. But what alternatives might tea open towards? Focusing on tea, then, gives us access to economies of desire and pleasure that both build on perceptions of radical feminism and expands upon it by establishing a vernacular of fluids, taste, and tactility.     

A CELEBRATORY FEMINIST AESTHETICS IN POSTFEMINIST TIMES

In 2011, something surprising happened in terms of Australian feminist cultural memory: a celebratory feminism arrived in the shape of the hugely popular ABC television mini-series, Paper Giants: The Birth of Cleo. Eschewing dour social realism for a stylish and ludic narrative, Paper Giants uses the story of the women's magazine Cleo to tell the story of Australian women's liberation. This essay analyses the components of the mini-series' celebratory feminist aesthetics, examining the ways in which it mobilises feminist tropes to speak an intelligible feminist language in postfeminist times. Further, I detail how women's liberation becomes central to the national historical narrative underpinning the programme.