Topologies and topographies of Ireland's neoliberal crisis

In this paper, we explore successive waves of neoliberalization in Ireland. We contend that neoliberalization remained largely “invisible” during the Celtic Tiger because a property bubble permitted a period of debt-driven growth, but was revealed and politicized by the crisis. Mobilizing the ideas of topology and topography, we explore the relationships which unfolded between the “financialization” of the global economy and the two twin pillars of the Irish crisis narrative: property and debt. We conclude that there is a need for future studies to consider how neoliberalism, financialization and uneven development are being reshaped by geographically situated responses to the crisis.     

‘The Biosciences Knowledge Value Chain and Comparative Incubation Models’

This research derives from an EU DG Enterprise (IPS Programme) project on bio-incubation, called Bio-Link. The Bio-Link project is innovative in three ways. First, it involves an international comparative analysis of biotechnology incubators of the kind that is rarely if ever done. Second, the incubator representatives are monitored and investigated by an academic partnership team. Third, there is a stated aspiration by the incubator companies to engage in co-incubation across borders. Co-incubation is, as far as we are aware, a new kind of boundary crossing innovation in which advanced start-up businesses are assisted to enter other national markets and/or benefit from specialised services or scientific, technological, or commercial knowledge absent in the home country but present in a partner country. Evidence from research on European, Israeli and North American bioincubators is included to compare, contrast and enable future judgements of incubator appropriateness to biotechnology.     

THE NEW POLITICS OF MEDICINE

THE NEW POLITICS OF MEDICINE
Brian Salter
Palgrave Macmillan, 2004, 236 pp., £17.99 (pb) ISBN: 0333801121     

Adolescents' self-perceptions of their strengths

A sample of 960 adolescents drawn from the general population was asked to complete a 22-item scale relating to their self-perceived strengths. The mean score for the 492 boys was 14.9 and that for the 486 girls was 14.4; the difference was not statistically significant. There were, nevertheless, differences for some of the items. In particular, more boys saw themselves as good at sport, confident, popular, having lots of hobbies, and attractive, while more girls saw themselves as reliable, kind, independent, and affectionate. Regression analysis suggested that boys' strengths depended upon parent, peer and school attachment, part-time work, and the number of physical activities with which they were involved. Girls' strengths were best predicted by parent attachment and the number of physical activities with which they were involved.The Dunedin Multidisciplinary Health and Development Research Unit is supported by Medical Research of New Zealand. It also draws upon the involvement of several departments of the University of Otago.Received B.Sc. (Hons.) from University of Hull (U.K.). Research interests include child health.Received Ph.D. from University of N.S.W. (Aust.). Research interests include child and adolescent mental health.     

Do conduit neutrality mandates promote or hinder trust in Internet-mediated transactions?

As the Internet evolves and matures, Internet Service Providers (“ISPs”) have devised increasingly diversified business models for serving downstream end users and upstream content providers. The need to accommodate subscriber demand for more bandwidth also necessitates efforts by ISPs to generate higher revenues by differentiating service on the basis of subscriber access requirements and other customer-specific demand characteristics. ISPs have identified new strategies to diversify their offerings on the basis of price, quality of service, transmission speeds, permissible amount of capacity uploaded and downloaded, legitimate network management objectives and the demand for customer-specified network features.     

International development institutions and national ­economic contexts: neo-liberalism encounters India’s indigenous political traditions

Drawing on the case of India, which since 1991 has been undergoing a far-reaching programme of market-oriented reform, this paper argues that the World Bank and other transnational development actors have been unable to adjust themselves ­sufficiently to indigenous ideological traditions that affect the sustainability of economic liberalization. While markets are becoming increasingly embedded at the level of institutions, they are not achieving what might be termed ‘ideological embeddedness’. The paper maps the ideological context facing market reformers in India by looking at the relationship between, on the one hand, the idea of swadeshi (an indigenous form of economic nationalism), and on the other, three competing forces in Indian politics. The paper concludes by arguing that it is the mutual antipathy among these political forces, rather than any fundamental incompatibility between swadeshi’s precepts and the embedded-market framework, that prevents organizations like the World Bank from adapting swadeshi as an indigenous basis for framing its approach to market embeddedness.