Lenovo＇s European Dream

正ACCORDING to the latest report on the global PC industry,released by two market research institutions–IDC and Gartner–China’s Lenovo Group took 16.7 percent of the global market in the second quarter of 2013,overtaking Hewlett-Packard to become the world’s largest personal computer producer.Lenovo has achieved this result two years in advance of the expectations of Gianfranco Lanci,president of Lenovo EMEA(Europe,Middle East and Africa).From France to Europe as a Whole Lenovo divides its target market into     

SUPERVISION REGIMES,RISK, AND OFFICIAL REACTIONS TO PAROLEE DEVIANCE*

Parolee deviance has emerged as a central issue in policy debates about crime and punishment in American society as well as in scholarship on “mass incarceration.” Although the prevailing approach to studying parolees conceives of parole violations as outcomes of individual propensities toward criminal behavior (i.e., criminogenic risk), we consider how indicators of individual risk and characteristics of formal social control systems combine to account for reported parole violations. Using data on California parolees, we examine the effects of parolees’ personal characteristics, their criminal histories, and the social organization of supervision on parole violations. We advance the notion of a “supervision regime”—a legal and organizational structure that shapes the detection and reporting of parolee deviance. Three components of a supervision regime are explored: 1) the intensity of supervision, 2) the capacity of the regime to detect parolee deviance, and 3) the tolerance of parole officials for parolee deviance. We find that personal characteristics and offense histories are predictive of parole violations. However, we also find that introducing supervision factors reduces the effects of offense history variables on violation risk, suggesting that the violation risks of serious, violent, and sexual offenders are partially explainable through the heightened supervision to which they are subject. In addition, we find that supervision intensity and tolerance are generally predictive of violation risk. Capacity effects are present but weak. We conclude with a discussion of how the supervision regimes concept illuminates the gap between macro‐ and micro‐analyses of social control.     

Modeling and testing the diffusion of expectations: An EITM approach

This paper uses the empirical implications of theoretical models (EITM) framework to examine the consequences of the asymmetric diffusion of expectations. In the spirit of the traditional two-step flow model of communication, less-informed agents learn the expectations of more-informed agents. We find that when there is misinterpretation in the information acquisition process, a boomerang effect exists. In this equilibrium the less-informed agents’ forecasts confound those of more-informed agents. We apply the EITM approach to a key economic variable known to have a relation to economic fluctuations – inflation expectations. Using surveyed inflation expectations data for the period, 1978–2000, we find the boomerang effect exists. One implication of this finding pertains to economic policy and economic volatility: because policymakers have more information than the public, the boomerang effect can lead policymakers to make inaccurate forecasts of economic conditions and conduct erroneous policies which contribute to economic instability.     

The welfare courts: A socio-legal analysis of risk management through modern strict liability

The aim of the essay is to offer an adequate theoretical framework for a socio-legal analysis of risk management by the legal system. Law and risk are the two most important concepts to be clarified. Unlike the law, whose function consists in the temporal stabilisation of normative expectations, the perspective of risk is characterised by the possibility of changing the criteria for decisions based upon the evaluation of the consequences of those decisions. In the context of a modern society, characterised by an increasing demand for protection for people injured by new technologies, one observes certain difficulties in the attempt to adopt a risk perspective within the legal system. The result of this process is the new law of tort based upon the modern principles of strict liability. While strict liability can be shown to be effective in managing conflicts relating to technological accidents, its most negative effects are the increasing instability of legal structures and interference with the activities of other subsystems of society, such as medicine and the economy.     

‘It’s deemed unmanly’: men’s experiences of intimate partner violence (IPV)

This study investigated male victims’ experiences of female-perpetrated intimate partner violence (IPV). Seven participants were interviewed and the data were analysed using Interpretative phenomenological analysis (IPA). Four essential themes were revealed. (1) Participants identified themselves as victims of abuse (experiencing physical and multiple forms of abuse). (2) They felt they were victims of controlling abuse (through the use of children and isolation). (3) Respondents experienced manipulation through gendered stereotypes of abuse. (4) They felt it was different because they were men. The participants within this study were often deeply affected by the abuse they had experienced. Previous research has found male abusers use societal structures and norms to enable their abuse. The participants in this study felt that their female abusers were equally adept doing this, although the mechanisms were different. Further research should look at the processes by which abusers of either gender control and abuse their victims.     

The ratio of vision to data: Promoting emergent science and technologies through promissory regulation,the case of the FDA and personalised medicine

Pharmacogenetic tests provide genetic data to tailor drug treatment and were widely predicted to be one of the first fruits of the Human Genome Project. In the mid-2000s, the US Food and Drugs Administration (FDA) became an advocate for pharmacogenetic testing, but its efforts to build a market for this new technology brought the agency into dispute with other regulatory actors over the type of evidence needed for the adoption of pharmacogenetic testing, in particular the importance of randomized control trials. The warfarin case highlights the tension between a new form of promissory regulation driven by future expectations and FDA's established role as protector of public health; and the controversy can be conceptualized as a struggle over regulatory epistemologies within a complex polycentric regulatory space. Our case study addresses two themes central to the burgeoning scholarship on the governance of emergent science and technologies (EST): the political economy of regulation, in particular the role that regulators play in creating markets for EST; and the epistemological politics of regulatory science, in particular the controversy that arises when regulators modify scientific standards to accommodate EST. Linking these two themes is the concept of promissory regulation: the idea that regulatory policy may be shaped by an institutional commitment to the transformational potential of EST. This concept sheds new light on the neo-mercantilist nature of contemporary regulatory capitalism.     

Spatializing the future: financial expectations,EU convergence and the Eastern European Forex mortgage crisis

Existing accounts of failure to predict the financial crisis focus on the complexity of the financial system, and are less useful for understanding crises in non-securitized markets. We examine the roots of optimism leading up to the Eastern European mortgage crisis through the case of Hungary, and use recent theories of expectations, which understand them as both pragmatic and fictional practices that commonly incorporate narratives. Based on archival research and interviews with bankers, regulators and legislators, we demonstrate how the EU convergence narrative was central in forming optimistic expectations. Fusing the underspecified convergence process with an orientalist geographical imaginary, this narrative and its associated measures translated growing indebtedness as ‘catching up’ with Europe, de-emphasized exchange rate risk through a belief in European convergence and precluded crisis scenarios originating in the European Union. Our findings contribute to theories of how economic expectations are formed, stabilized and maintained by developing the concept of ‘spatializing the future’, denoting practices that handle uncertainty by charting the future as movement in concrete geographical or abstract space, along externally verifiable pathways.     

Strategic coalition voting: Evidence from Austria

Strategic coalition voting assumes that voters cast their vote in a way that maximizes the probability that a preferred coalition will be formed after the election. We identify three decision contexts that provide incentives for strategic coalition voting: (1) a rental vote of a major party supporter in favor of a preferred junior coalition partner perceived as uncertain to pass a minimum vote threshold, (2) avoiding a wasted vote for the preferred small party that is not expected to pass the minimum vote threshold, and (3) explicit strategic coalition voting to influence the composition and/or portfolio of the next coalition government. The results based on a nationally representative survey conducted before the 2006 Austrian general election generally support these hypotheses.     

社会预期的不确定性——青少年社会化过程中面临的困境之一

良好的心理预期和社会预期是青少年顺利实现社会化的动力和源泉。在社会转型时期,价值观的冲突,代际关系的冲突,家庭伦理与家庭结构的变迁,社会控制难度的加大,使社会预期的不确定性进一步突显,青少年社会化过程面临新的困境。     

Information diffusion within the electorate:: the asymmetric transmission of political–economic information

This paper examines the connection between information and expectations. Drawing upon Lazarsfeld et al.'s (Lazarsfeld, P.F., Berelson, B., Gaudet, H., 1944. The People's Choice. Duell, Sloan, and Pearce, New York) classic work on communication flows, we devise an asymmetric transmission model of expectation formation. This model assumes that the expectations of the less informed segments within the electorate are influenced by the expectations of more informed groups but that the opposite does not hold. We use educational differences as a proxy for information heterogeneity. A vector autoregression (VAR) analysis on monthly surveys of inflation expectations supports the asymmetric transmission hypothesis.