The Body as Situation: A Darwinian Reading of The Second Sex

Challenging the influential view that the chapter on biology in the first volume of The Second Sex is exposing scientific myths in severe prose, in the view of this paper, the chapter is as much about scientific facts as it is an intriguingly open-ended dialogue between phenomenology and science. Beauvoir’s consuming epistemological and scientific preoccupation with the category of biology is analysed in a bid to advance a new, naturalist–feminist conception of Beauvoir’s theory of natural history. The analysis unravels the theoretical edifice, with its tensions between Beauvoir’s selective but brilliant appropriation of recent discoveries in evolutionary biology and genetics and certain deliberate rejections and omissions of Darwinian evolutionary thinking. Contrary to Beauvoir’s intentions, she ends up conflating the term biology with, in particular, reproductive physiology, and perpetuating the ill-fated division between body and psyche. In contributing to a reformulation of an empirically grounded approach to the embodied mind and situated body, this paper debates some promising insights from contemporary neuroscience and primatology. These insights are critical to theory development, based on a non-anthropocentric stance and non-dualistic understanding of the mind–brain continuum and the body as a situation.     

The Relational Dynamics of World Bank Survey Missions

This article demonstrates that World Bank internal learning has led to significant changes in how the organization interacts with government officials through survey missions. Reviewing evidence of institutional learning and associated changes in practice and focusing on the relational modes being manifest in technical assistance, the article identifies three main phases of World Bank survey missions: general survey missions (1940s–1960s), country assistance strategies (1990s–2000s), and country partnership frameworks (2010s). Overall, World Bank reviews have repeatedly highlighted the importance of non-hierarchical interactions between Bank staff and country officials. In recent years, practice has begun to catch up with these operational insights.     

Brexit: A Cliff Edge or a Small Bump in the Road?

It is becoming increasingly accepted, not least by the Prime Minister and opposition leadership, that the negotiation of a comprehensive trade relationship with the EU is necessary to prevent the UK economy falling off a ‘cliff edge’. This concern is shaping the UK's strategy towards negotiations with the EU and has provided at least part of the motivation for the UK to consider requesting a transition period to facilitate the Brexit process. But how accurate are these fears? What evidence is there for the existence of a ‘cliff edge’? How disastrous would it be for the UK to revert to trading with the EU on the same basis as most other countries in the world, namely according to World Trade Organisation rules? This article seeks to address these issues and it highlights a number of implications for policy makers which flow from understanding the available evidence a little more clearly.     

The impact of the Second World War on postwar social spending

The huge quantitative literature on postwar social spending almost entirely neglected war as a possible explanatory factor of social spending dynamics. Given the mass carnage and the enormous social needs caused by the Second World War, this is quite astonishing. This article examines for the first time, whether, and in what ways, the Second World War affected cross‐national differences in public social spending of 18 Western welfare states over the course of the Golden Age. Using panel regressions, it is found that the war strongly affected social spending until the late 1960s. The evidence demonstrates that the Second World War is not simply a temporal watershed structuring different phases of welfare state development, but rather a crucial factor for understanding cross‐national differences in welfare efforts and social expenditure dynamics in the postwar period.     

Gender and Vernaculars in Digital Humanities and World Literature

Abstract

This article discusses the large-scale and world-encompassing aspirations of digital humanities and world literature and their methodological accordance with the analysis of literature in smaller languages and of texts understood in social, transnational, and gendered contexts. Are Digital Humanities and World Literature establishing themselves as fields utilizing analytical tools that are at odds with the aims and perspectives of feminist literary history and reception history as a part of literary history? We argue that gender research and theory is insufficiently developed in both computational literary history and World Literature. An unproblematic understanding of translations, canonization, English as a global language, and the use of large-scale computational methods and formalized interpretive models is in many cases not beneficial for the understanding of texts by women writers or from feminist perspectives. Drawing on feminist criticism of computational methods and arguments for specialized rather than generalized knowledge about literary history, we propose that digitization in some form, be it a bibliographical database or digitization of a corpus of texts, may be thought of as part of the research process in projects oriented towards gender and cultural exchange.     

国际组织对公共养老保险改革的影响

本文采用文献法和历史分析法,研究了国际组织在不同阶段对各国公共养老保险改革施加影响的途径和方式,尤其是国际组织在我国养老保险"统账结合"制度的建立与发展过程中发挥的作用。在此基础上,提出了针对我国养老保险制度改革的政策建议。     

The Pyu Ancient Cities World Heritage application: lessons from Myanmar on transnational advocacy networks

The announcement of 22 June 2014 from the World Heritage Committee that Pyu Ancient Cities had been added to the World Heritage List was significant for Myanmar, since it represented the country’s first World Heritage site. The World Heritage listing was the culmination of a process driven by a convergence of forces originating from within and outside of Myanmar. An interpretation of Pyu Ancient Cities as involving a transnational network of supporters echoes the work on transnational advocacy networks, which looks to phenomena involving transnational efforts to advance particular issues on behalf of activists against their government. This study examines Pyu Ancient Cities by producing a model that helps to illuminate the efficacy of its social network to engage in transnational advocacy.     

Sectoral linkages at the beginning of the 21st century: The role of Polish economy in global production structures

This paper provides a first attempt in analyzing the role of Polish economy in the production structure of the global economy in the early years of the 21st century. For the purpose of this analysis, we propose a new approach in which two most important aspects of interindustry linkages in a global input-output model are examined. Contrary to previous studies focused on output-oriented key sector analyses in post-communist CEE economies, we focus on a fundamental policy target variable – income per gross output. In order to analyze the issues in question in a dynamic framework, the empirical results are based on the 2000 and 2014 global intercountry input-output tables for the 28 EU countries as well as 15 other major countries in the world.     

The birth and development of the language of global development in light of trends in global population,international politics,economics and globalisation

The 1940s saw an intensification of worldwide interest in the problems of development and underdevelopment. One consequence of this was a rapid evolution of the language of global development. The reconstruction of its genesis is most commonly attempted through the analysis of literature on the subject and accounts by those who took part in or observed the debates of the time concerning the world’s development and structure. This article proposes a different approach which locates important events in the evolution of the modern language of global development on timelines tracing populational, political, socio-economic and civilisational processes.     

内战反对派武装的联盟构建与内部冲突——以叙利亚内战为例

在内战进程中,不同的反对派武装组织有时会构建起联盟共同反抗政府军,而有时则会相互袭击引发内部冲突。对于此现象的解释已是当前内战研究理论的重点。通过回顾既有研究对此问题提出的物质因素和理念因素解释,文章认为单纯的理念因素和物质因素均无法解释反对派联盟的形式与瓦解。因此,文章提出了一个将物质因素和理念因素进行整合的分析框架,分析理念因素与物质因素交互影响反对派联盟形成和内部冲突。在政府军实力较强的情况下,理念因素无法起作用,而反对派内部实力均衡与否也将使得理念因素对联盟构建产生不同的影响,并且外部支持则会加强理念在反对派联盟形成中的影响作用。文章以叙利亚内战作为阐释性案例,采取案例内比较的方式,对提出的逻辑进行分析。