Designing Efficient Institutions for Science-Based Entrepreneurship: Lesson from the US and Sweden

The recent scientification of commercial technology has brought the interface between universities and industry into sharp focus. In particular, academic entrepreneurship, i.e., the variety of ways in which academics take direct part in the commercialization of research, is widely discussed. The purpose of this paper is to suggest a framework for identifying the strategic individual decisions involved when educational choice is translated into science-based entrepreneurship. Identifying these decisions also allows us to hypothesize what incentive structures should be crucial. Our suggested framework is informally tested by an in-depth examination of the experiences of Sweden and the US. Despite large levels of R&D spending and comprehensive government support schemes, science-based entrepreneurship has been far less important in Sweden compared to the US. Our analysis points to weaknesses in the Swedish incentive structure in key respects: the rate of return to human capital investment, incentives to become an entrepreneur and to expand existing businesses, and insufficient incentives within the university system to adjust curricula and research budgets to outside demand. Several policy measures during the 1990s have reduced the weaknesses in the Swedish incentive structure. The current emergence of a more vibrant entrepreneurial culture in Sweden in some areas is consistent with these changes. Our analysis suggests that a policy aimed at encouraging science-based entrepreneurship should focus on strengthening individual incentives for human capital investment and entrepreneurial behavior both within universities and in business.     

Operational criteria for the determination of suicide

Suicide is an important public health problem for which we have an inadequate public health database. In the United States, decisions about whether deaths are listed as suicides on death certificates are usually made by a coroner or medical examiner. These certification decisions are frequently marked by a lack of consistency and clarity, and laws and procedures for guiding these decisions vary from state to state and even from county to county. Without explicit criteria to aid in this decision making, coroners or medical examiners may be more susceptible to pressures from families or communities not to certify specific deaths as suicide. In addition, coroners or medical examiners may certify similar deaths differently at different times. The degree to which suicides may be underreported or misclassified is unknown. This makes it impossible to estimate accurately the number of deaths by suicide, to identify risk factors, or to plan and evaluate preventive interventions. To remedy these problems, a working group representing coroners, medical examiners, statisticians, and public health agencies developed operational criteria to assist in the determination of suicide. These criteria are based on a definition of suicide as "death arising from an act inflicted upon oneself with the intent to kill oneself." The purpose of these criteria is to improve the validity and reliability of suicide statistics by: (1) promoting consistent and uniform classifications; (2) making the criteria for decision making in death certification explicit; (3) increasing the amount of information used in decision making; (4) aiding certifiers in exercising their professional judgment; and (5) establishing common standards of practice for the determination of suicide.     

Reading twentieth century urban black cultural movements through popular periodicals: a case study of the Harlem Renaissance and South Africa’s Sophiatown

There exists a long history of debate among scholars in the humanities and social sciences regarding the potential of literature and popular culture to be socially transformative and to generate collective identities that empower a community. This transformative power of literature and popular culture, particularly in terms of the value granted to oppressed peoples seeking expression or catharsis, represents perhaps the truest value of cultural production. Its long-term contributions to the resilience of racially oppressed communities both in the USA and worldwide cannot be overstated. In Sophiatown and during the Harlem Renaissance, two periodicals, Drum and The Crisis, allowed black writers and readers alike to share in the formation of new modes of identity that spoke back in a firm voice to the long-standard stereotypes of blackness that permeated white-dominated popular culture. In both South Africa and Harlem, these publications gave voice to a distinctly black and urban culture, resisting notions of the “tribal” or “plantation” black subject. These movements were historically significant both within the study of black culture and literature and within the trajectory of socially transformative political movements.