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This work presents a dialogue between the Marxist Theory of Dependence, in particular the work of Ruy Mauro Marini, and the Political Economy of Communication, having César Bolaño as a reference, in order to establish a research agenda for the 21st century. To this end, we first present the Leninist elaboration of imperialism and the importance of the category "export of capital". Then, following Marini, we expose the argument regarding the superexploitation of labor power and the transfer of value. Subsequently, after exposing the formulation of communication as a social form, in line with Bolaño, we present two issues: the confusion between the publicity and propaganda functions of communication and the importance of the culture industry in a context of super-exploitation of labor power. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The paper challenges the general perception that the positive–negative freedom discourse privileges negative liberty. It demonstrates that Constant and Berlin's dual freedom conceptual scheme contains the blueprint of a modern concept of positive freedom and it reveals the nature of negative freedom in an entirely new light. Constant's ancient and modern liberties have many similarities with Berlin's two concepts of freedom – positive and negative. The paper shows that these similarities warrant a parallel study and allow us to examine the relation between the two sides of the freedom dichotomy by using the compound terms modern/negative and ancient/positive freedom. It is argued that understanding the relation between the two freedoms depends on accepting ancient/positive liberty as practiced by the participants of modern revolutions. Then we can see why this freedom can both violate and complement modern/negative freedom. The paper argues that the combined tension and mutual dependency of the two freedoms can be explained by tapping into a metaphysical study of human agency, where metaphysics is understood as conceptualisation of moral experience. This helps demonstrate why Constant's modern liberty and Berlin's negative liberty rely on satisfaction as a key category reflecting individuals' capacity for subjective judgement. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The aim of this study is to determine the way education for self-reliance can lead to lifelong learning in previously colonised countries to trigger sustainable development. The intention of the colonial education system was to train individuals for the service of the colonial powers. The colonised people were exploited and dehumanised by their colonial masters and emerged from the colonial period with knowledge that was irrelevant to their lives. This article used the qualitative research method to collect data as it provides a systematic and objective means to make valid interpretations from verbal, visual or written data in order to describe and quantify education for self-reliance in current educational circles. The literature and participants demonstrate the relevancy of education for self-reliance that would lead to lifelong learning to assist in closing the gap left by irrelevant colonial education. The study therefore indicates how the ideas of education for self-reliance can be adopted by decolonised countries to free themselves from depending on the West. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The field of global international relations remains to a great extent aspirational and focussed on the critique of Western-centric perspectives or the appraisal of non-Western theories within their specific geographical and historical contexts. In this essay, we go a step further and transpose a set of Caribbean-based theories that gained prominence in the 1960s and 1970s to apply it to the study of China's contemporary relations with the Caribbean Community, drawing broader implications for China's Belt and Road Initiative. The Caribbean's tradition of critical and radical thought raises important questions about continuing epistemic dependency, structural impediments to development in small and highly open states, and a number of unresolved issues relating to the postcolonial condition in former plantation societies. Drawing upon these insights, we contend that the expectations placed on the emerging 'South–South' link with China are easily overstated, given China's elitist business-centric approach to development, the eschewing of participatory approaches in Sino–Caribbean ventures and the passive incorporation of the Caribbean into China's global vision. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Previous studies have investigated technology's impact on international affairs, but few have analyzed the effect of artificial intelligence on the international system structure. This study integrates heterogeneous datasets and network science concepts with several power factors and artificial intelligence advances as a methodology to understand the evolution of the international system with a perspective around research, knowledge, innovation, and technology as an endogenous variable. Our findings indicate that the international fitness variable could be considered as a mechanism to interpret the system dynamics, especially when artificial intelligence interacts with different topics of the system. Overall, we provide quantitative evidence of the evolution of artificial intelligence innovations and technological power to identify system structure changes, both in central and peripheral countries. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

When historians have examined labour relations in the Belgian Congo, the paradigmatic image is that of rapacious, avaricious metropolitan investors oppressing helpless African communities by dint of a skeletal but violent cohort of intermediaries. Leopold II was exemplary of this trend. Having never set foot in the Congo, he drew vast profits from the territory by means of initiating a series of appalling atrocities as his employees coerced Africans into harvesting rubber in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Such emphasis on exploitation fits with a long-standing scholarly emphasis on African dependency that has also highlighted how capital has leaked out of the Congo and into Europe and North America. Yet this article argues, first, that capital sometimes leaked from Europe to the Congo. Secondly, this essay suggests that not every investor in the Congo was as mendacious and cynical as Leopold II. Some, namely the Lever brothers, came to the Congo in the sincere hopes of establishing Christian, middle class African communities in the bush. But Lever's plans were compromised by the firm's paternalism and their overriding need to turn a profit. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article explores the political stakes of reprising the last statements of executed offenders as an artistic gesture. Last words represent a potential site of contestation of the sovereign power that is both reflected and constituted in the spectacle of capital punishment. Works of art reprising and recirculating these last words may, but do not necessarily, embody and amplify this disruptive potential. Jacques Derrida has suggested that claims of literary autonomy from the sovereign law in fact rely on the same logics of transcendence and idealisation that sustain the practice of the death penalty. This poses the problem of political commitment: is it possible to engage with the last words of the condemned without perpetuating the logics that underpin the spectacle of capital punishment itself? The figure of Echo, the mythical repeater of the last words of a sentence, might allow us to envisage a position of critical dependency: her repetitions neither transcend nor claim autonomy from the spectacle they partly reproduce, yet they differ from it nonetheless. The works of Luis Camnitzer (Last Words, 2008) and Vanessa Place (Last Words, 2015) are examined as examples of critical dependency's minimal potency. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article uses a network approach and a negative binomial regression model (NBRM) to shed light on the association between Domestic Investment (DI) and Foreign Direct Investment (FDI) in interlinking Chinese cities in a space of flows. The empirical analysis is based on 2743 FDI and 9315 DI projects covering 77 Chinese cities. We address the question of what the association is between DI network measures and city attractiveness for FDI, and if the geographic distance of DI matters. While the physical distance of DI activity is found to have a negative association with FDI, city functional proximity and structural position in the DI network are found to have a positive association. We conclude that strategic policies to stimulate cross-territorial economic ties between Chinese cities should be advantageous in attracting inward foreign investment. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this article, we examine the tendency toward stagnation in the Argentinean economy, as a dependent economy, in the context of a new development model that emerged in this country before the neoliberal crisis in 2001. The initial boom of accumulation in the period 2002-2007, after the devaluation of the peso, has been challenged for various tensions that emerged, in our perspective, for the dependent economic structure of Argentina in the years 2007 and 2008. These tensions were increased after the European economic crisis and China's slowdown in 2012-2014, leading to the stop of the accumulation process and the start of economic transition to the different development model. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper proposes a critical comparative reflection on migration as a factor of peripheralization processes in the Western Balkan and Baltic regions. In their respective geographical positions, the Western Balkans and the Baltics stand at different ends of the European map: south-east and north-east. Regarding their historical and political positions, however, these are very diverse: the Western Balkans were part of Yugoslavia (except Albania) while the Baltic republics (Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania) were annexed to the Soviet Union after the Second World War. Currently, Croatia is already a member of the European Union, as the three Baltic countries are, while the rest of the Western Balkans are not. The article argues that apart from economic and geographical factors, usually taken into account in describing peripheries and cores, migration processes and discourses powerfully construct some places as dynamically moving towards a 'core' while others remain confined to a 'periphery'. By paying special attention to 'scientific discourses', the aim is to broaden our understanding of theories and practices of peripheralization, where migration tends to be under-theorized. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Highlights • We apply panel cointegration approach to the data covering 1893–2010 and four francophone West African countries. • We find a strong long-term relationship between tax revenue and international trade in these countries. • We find a strong long-term relationship between tax revenue in these countries and economy in European countries. • We find a strong long-term relationship between tax revenue in these countries and tax revenue in France. Abstract Which factors have driven fiscal revenue in Sub-Saharan Africa in the long run? We address this question by studying quantitatively the long-term relationship between fiscal outcomes, economic expansion and external dependency in four francophone West African countries – Benin, Côte d'Ivoire, Niger and Senegal – between 1893 and 2010. Using panel co-integration modelling we find a long-term relationship between, on the one hand, tax revenue and local economic development, proxied by international trade, and, on the other hand, tax revenue and developments of the economy and taxation in the former colonizing power France. The results indicate that economic expansion has been a significant factor in driving the long-term development of tax revenue in West Africa, just as it was in historical Europe, but also point to the historical vulnerability and external dependency of the fiscal systems of the four West African countries. We suggest that the wider implication of these results is that they point to the importance of deepening our understanding of how domestic contexts interact with external economic and institutional external forces to shape African fiscal systems, in contrast to factors such as inter-state warfare that are ubiquitous in narratives of historical European taxation and state development. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article provides information on a study which investigated network and environmental linkages between manufacturers and dealers. A discussion is presented about the concept of power and dependence among business organizations. The authors present an analysis of literature about interorganizational studies and offer a comparison on the management style of for-profit and non-profit organizations. Details are presented related to economic arrangements and the effects of various types of transactions on power structure with in organizations.

Abstract Since the seminal contribution of McCallum (1995), border study has been introduced to broader fields. However, it's still a puzzle that how administrative boundaries affect the process of urban land expansion. In this study, we develop the Stage Model of Border Effect on urban land expansion based on Core-Periphery Theory and divide the evolutive process of border effect into four stages: the invisibility stage of administrative boundaries, the differentiation stage of administrative boundaries, the channelization stage of administrative boundaries and the evaporation stage of administrative boundaries. In the model, urban land distribution of different cities in urban agglomeration is in high-level balance after the evolution which is from low-level equilibrium to none-equilibrium state during the invisibility stage and the evaporation stage. Then, Beijing-Tianjin-Hebei region is fully studied based on conditionalβconvergence analysis. Research results show that the model is well adapted to empirical study and evolutive process of border effect on urban land expansion in the region experienced the invisibility stage of administrative boundaries, the differentiation stage of administrative boundaries and the channelization stage of administrative boundaries from 1990 to 2010. We also find that the wider the gap between cities of different administrative ranks is, the larger the border effect tends to be. When border effects of different cities are equal and measure results are "1″, process of urban land expansion enter the evaporation stage of administrative boundaries. Additionally, impact of boundaries on urban land expansion is a long-term and cumulative process. The longer the research period is, the more significant the border effect tends to be. These findings can serve as basis of theoretical support and policy recommendations in breaking restriction of boundaries, delimiting the urban growth boundary and contributing to the rational expansion of urban land. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The research on a creative economy has been gaining momentum globally in the recent years, but the associated concepts such as the cultural economy, the creative class, creative cities and so on, have typically been urban or national in orientation. There is evidence showing that many important developments in creative industries take place now in almost all parts of the globe. One of the creative industries which may serve as a vivid example of the complex interplay between the global core and the local periphery is film industry. The paper aims to discuss rise of film production locations and specialised film services in European global semiperipheries. Globalisation of film industry involves the expansion of production away from the established and globally recognised centres, such as Hollywood or Western Europe. While some researchers refer to this development as a 'runaway production', this paper examines it through a broader look to core-periphery relations and points out their implications and consequences from the perspective of European countries (with a focus on post-socialist countries of East Central Europe). [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

We are all dependent, none more so than the rich and powerful, who could not maintain their status without an army of servants, in spite of their contempt of the 'dependency culture' of the poor. Chronic illness is a common source of dependency. It forces people to rely on the state - and, if they are lucky, a network of goodhearted friends. The formal social contract is often underpinned by this much more personal one of support from friends. But the nature of gratitude towards giving friends is complex - Melanie Klein is much better known for her early writing on envy than her later view of gratitude 'as an expression of love and thus of the life instinct, and as the antithesis of envy'. There is no political literature on gratitude. Political discourse more usually depends on creating resentment. But recognition of the blessing of gratitude can change your life - your relation to friends, and to those working in state social and medical services. It makes it possible to accept gifts - and one's dependence on others. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper identifies the similarities and differences among Latin American structuralism, dependency theory, and Thorstein Veblen's Imperial Germany (1915), exploring the connection on such as aspects as path dependency, technology, and economic policy. Imperial Germany is similar to many of the principal policy recommendations espoused by the structuralists and dependency theorists. Nevertheless, structuralism is closer to the ideas of the institutionalists and Veblen himself. In conclusions, the structuralists and Veblen's version in Imperial Germany agree that an industrial policy ought to be guided by the government, even though Veblen and the institutionalists clearly see social change through technological improvement, which is missing from structuralism. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

After the global crisis the Core-Periphery Divide has deepened in the EU between the most developed Core countries and the East-Central European (ECE) countries that has been most manifest in the violations of rule of law (RL) by Poland and Hungary. This process of confrontation with the EU rules and values has been termed in the paper as De-Europeanization that has been analysed in its historical trajectory from the "Copenhagen Dilemma" to the "Juncker Paradox", as both of them have encouraged the ECE autocratic regimes by their neglectence. Namely, the paper argues first that the Copenhagen criteria have not been well prepared for regulating the accession of the New Member States (NMS), since the EU has not elaborated a proper facilitating mechanism for the sustainable Europeanization of NMS. Therefore, the Copenhagen Dilemma has emerged in the EU, which means that after the accession the EU has not had the legal tools to correct the divergence from democracy in NMS. The legal toolkits - the infringement process and the Article 7 procedure - have not been effective to enforce RL in ECE, as the increasing conflicts with Poland and Hungary have demonstrated. Moreover, for second, due to the "polycrisis", the Juncker Commission has focused on the priorities of the Core and it has neglected these violations of EU rules and values. This neglectence and inaction has been counterproductive because it has increased the RL conflicts and has given manoeuvring room for the hard populist ECE regimes that has been described in this paper as the Juncker Paradox. The main reason for the ECE divergence from the EU mainstream has been their failure in the catching up process to produce competitive economy and sustainable democracy. In order to achieve this stage both the EU needs to reconstruct is legal toolkits as part of its new integration strategy and the ECE states have to overcome their current socio-political crisis that has produced these hard populist regimes. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Many islands promote their destinations by including islets that surround them. Conscious of the competitive tourism market, the move is based on the need for tourism diversification. Islets are endowed with unique flora and fauna, and when included in the tourism package, islets receive considerable prominence in the gaze of tourists looking for authentic experiences. Mauritius Island has not lagged behind in adopting this trend. Studies show that islets surrounding Mauritius are major tourism assets, but these seem to have received insufficient attention in tourism studies. The current study uses Jordan's core-periphery model to investigate Ilot Bernaches, one of the popular islets of Mauritius. The uniqueness of this study is two-fold: first, it seeks to investigate implications of tourism development at Ilot Bernaches, and second, it makes a case for setting up an islet management authority. The research design is based on a mixed methodology. The major findings reveal that Ilot Bernaches has potential to diversify the existing tourism product and adds value to the Mauritian tourism product. The study discusses destination management implications, makes recommendations regarding tourism development at Ilot Bernaches, and sets the groundwork for further studies of islets in tourism. It is recommended that an islet management authority be established to help cope with core-periphery tensions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This essay looks at how Fanon’s work on the postcolonial state can be used to interpret political changes in the postcolonial world, particularly his call to “stretch Marxism”. I use his notion of a dependent “native bourgeoisie” created through colonialism to look at the Egyptian capitalist class under British colonial rule, the Nasser era and the Sadat era. I argue the Nasserist ruling class did not resemble the dependent “native bourgeoisie” Fanon spoke of as emerging right after the end of colonial rule, and that it was the Egyptian bourgeoisie under British colonial rule and the ruling class formed by Sadat that more closely fulfilled this role. Moreover, I argue Fanon’s call to understand capitalist development in postcolonial contexts as tied to colonialism provides a useful lens through which to revisit the evolution of the Egyptian postcolonial state. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The cultural and political-economic valences of psychoactive drugs in the Global South offer critical insights on local and international fault lines of social inequality and profiteering. Historically, in a classic primitive accumulation process the trafficking of industrially produced euphoric substances across the globe have wreaked havoc among vulnerable populations while extracting profit for the powerful. The complex flows of capital generated both by illegal addiction markets and also by the mobilisation of licit public funds to manage their mayhem, however, suggest the contemporary utility of the concept of ‘predatory accumulation’. The Enlightenment-era concept of ‘primitive accumulation’ usefully highlighted state violence and forcible dispossession in the consolidation of European capitalism. A contemporary reframing of these processes as predatory accumulation, however, highlights contradictory, nonlinear relationships between the artificially high profits of illegal drug sales, repressive governmentality and corporate greed. It sets these patterns of destructive profiteering in the context of our moment in history. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

The present article plots a critical route through two currents of thought, dependence theory and all studies related to the problem of coloniality. Coloniality--the highest form of material subjugation and epistemic violence exercised by dominant peoples--also makes up a body of hegemonic accounts that form the same matrix into which colonial regimes of knowledge and power are inserted. Colonialism, incidentally, should be spoken of in the plural, as it underpins and defines many areas. Dependence and coloniality, conversely, are tantamount to two theoretical developments that bear witness to the huge potential in unraveling the different dimensions of the complex political, economic, and cultural processes that constitute colonial denomination. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article examines the publication practices in the field of communication and media studies (CMS) by analyzing the main patterns and features of Scopus-indexed journals. I generated randomly selected samples from Q1 to Q4 quartiles and investigated the connections between the publisher and the content of a given periodical, the internationality and center-periphery indexes, and coauthor networks. Using the results to test the paradigm of dependency theory in CMS, I find that the publisher's location eminently affects the content of a journal. Authors from dependent countries are underrepresented in the most prestigious journals, and, although authors from developed countries frequently collaborate with one another, their coauthorship with authors from dependent countries is idiosyncratic; therefore, authors from dependent countries tend to look for alternative ways to produce noticeable publications. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Since independence Côte d’Ivoire has been an important feature of the debate on dependency in development theory, as Côte d’Ivoire was either a ‘mirage’ for the dependency school, or a ‘miracle’ according to mainstream development theorists. Against economicism and an instrumental view of these dynamics, Jean-François Bayart proposed a renewed understanding of dependency, without denying its existence. This article discusses the relevance and heuristic capacities of the concept of extraversion to understand how elites in Côte d’Ivoire mobilised resources derived from their relationship with the external environment since the end of the post-electoral crisis in 2011. These practices – material and symbolic – are important to understand Alassane Ouattara’s first term (2011–2015) and put international peace building and state building policies in perspective. At its core, it raises many key issues for Côte d’Ivoire: the post-colonial quest for autonomy and the issue of dependency, the complex relationship between state formation and globalisation, and the specific context of the francophone space. The strength of extraversion is to highlight the agency of the African subject – in this case its elites – but we should not forget both the historicity of the specific insertion of Africa in the world, as well as the dynamics of change, against univocal causal interpretation. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This paper analyses the genre of 'methodology-as-technique', which we suggest provides the underpinning logic for a particular conception of scientific rigour that is increasingly regarded as normal in globalized management research. Based on a qualitative interview study of management researchers in the peripheral context of India, we associate the methodology-as-technique genre with social scientific methods of organizing, conducting and disseminating knowledge founded on Western neo-imperialism and colonialism. Our analysis draws attention to the consequences of the genre of methodology-as-technique which relate to a narrowing and displacement of research goals, erasure of context, and devaluation and marginalization of alternatives. By providing insight into how methodology-as-technique comes to dominate in peripheral locations such as India, we suggest that these normative constraints also present an opportunity for denaturalization, by making what is increasingly seen as normal appear alien or strange. We conclude by arguing that countering restrictive definitions of rigour in management research relies on development of a more expansive and inclusive conception of the global that fosters indigenous ways of knowing and promotes decolonizing methodologies. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Why are some intellectual milieus more prone to universalism than others? Ultimately, it is about power and who can afford to ignore whom. While the international status and recognition of a specific intellectual community--linguistic, urban, national, or regional--are obvious factors, they do not fully account for why the step from local experience to universal claim is shorter for some and longer for others. By combining an actor-oriented discussion of the processes through which intellectuals claim universal validity and applicability for concepts with a discussion of center-periphery tensions in transnational exchange, this article explores the logic of conceptual universalization from the perspective of the European margins. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Neoliberal models of development are usually characterized by emphasis on individual responsibility and strong individual property rights. Such models often promote transformation of social, environmental, and political capital into economic or financial capital, and facilitate transfer of wealth and resources from national patrimony to ownership by a few. In the Honduran model of national development, privatization takes on a dual meaning. The major sources of wealth are privately owned by a few; the responsibility for many basic state or public functions becomes the responsibility of the individual. Mechanisms of privatized dependency take the place of state services, creating burdens, problems, and duress for those with few resources by providing essential services but always with threat of withdrawal, mechanisms of popular control that subsidize the model of development. The model exhibits weaknesses that make it vulnerable and probably unsustainable. Expansion of economic and financial capital at the expense of preserving and developing environmental and social capital undercuts the future of national development. State control of the popular resistance this system engenders depends in part on foreign security aid that is politically vulnerable. The entire model is a chain of dependency that runs in both directions, from foreign investors and security aid to national elites to the majority of the population. It is subsidized by the misery of Hondurans and the always uncertain investment and security aid paid for by foreign populations. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article focuses on the debate related to the new directions in comparative capitalism (CC) research. It focuses on the neglect of contestation and struggles for emancipation in capitalism along with dependency and dependent capitalist development. It focuses on the pluralism and dialogue in the CC mainstream. It focuses on theorising and empirically analyzing contestation in various capitalist societies.

Social network data usually contain different types of errors. One of them is missing data due to actor non-response. This can seriously jeopardize the results of analyses if not appropriately treated. The impact of missing data may be more severe in valued networks where not only the presence of a tie is recorded, but also its magnitude or strength. Blockmodeling is a technique for delineating network structure. We focus on an indirect approach suitable for valued networks. Little is known about the sensitivity of valued networks to different types of measurement errors. As it is reasonable to expect that blockmodeling, with its positional outcomes, could be vulnerable to the presence of non-respondents, such errors require treatment. We examine the impacts of seven actor non-response treatments on the positions obtained when indirect blockmodeling is used. The start point for our simulation are networks whose structure is known. Three structures were considered: cohesive subgroups, core-periphery, and hierarchy. The results show that the number of non-respondents, the type of underlying blockmodel structure, and the employed treatment all have an impact on the determined partitions of actors in complex ways. Recommendations for best practices are provided. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In proposing 'a structural theory of imperialism' nearly half a century ago, Johan Galtung made center-periphery relations central to peace research theory and more generally to the way scholars from the periphery see international relations. Galtung took an imperialist system to be a special case of a 'dominance system'; any such system enforces an unequal distribution of privilege and material well-being through mechanisms of direct, structural and cultural violence. I propose to re-write Galtung's structural theory by taking rules and rule to perform the function that he assigned to violence. I conclude that today's global imperialist system is ruled through a functionally segmented hegemony, supported by hierarchical coercion against a heteronomous backdrop. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article reveals how center-periphery relations have unfolded, over time, in language policy processes in one nation - Timor-Leste - on the global periphery. We take a longue durée perspective on the language policy processes at work in this historical context, showing how different regimes of language were imposed, in the past, by colonisers from distant centers - in Portugal and then in Java, Indonesia. Then, turning to the post-independence period, we show how a new order of indexicality, forged within the Resistance to the Indonesian occupation, formed the basis for current language policy in Timor-Leste, with Portuguese and Tetum as co-official languages. We also demonstrate that this agentive policy move, from the global periphery, oriented Timor-Leste to new and more complex center-periphery relations, to a 'lusophone' world, with Portugal and Brazil as key players. Our account of contemporary policy discourses in Timor-Leste, and of the consequences for language policy implementation, on different scales (national and local), draws on recent research of an ethnographic and multiscalar nature conducted in Timor-Leste (Da Costa Cabral, 2015). [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article takes as its departure point the questions ‘Which discourses figure in the news media’s coverage of natural disasters?’ and ‘What are the possible unintended consequences of this type of crisis communication?’ The overall aim is to elucidate the development of risk discourses, struggles over discursive legitimacy, and shifts in argumentation to legitimate or delegitimate certain actors and actions in relation to a widespread and devastating wildfire in the summer of 2014 in Sweden. The chosen media outlets are one national agenda-setting morning newspaper, one national evening tabloid, and one local newspaper. All coverage in these newspapers from the period of the wildfire (1–31 August 2014) were selected and analyzed. By employing a critical discourse analysis of three different newspapers’ crisis communication flows during the one-month-long wildfire, we show how crisis communication is in fact embedded in discourses of power related to gender and rurality. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

It is widely believed that China’s growing links to the global economy are translating into increased Chinese political influence abroad. This article explores this possibility quantitatively by examining whether increased trade with China correlates with an increased willingness by countries to accommodate Chinese interests. I use newly collected data that capture cross-national variation in the willingness of individual countries to support Chinese government positions relating to Taiwan and Tibet, and China’s status as a market economy. I find that increased trade dependence on China is correlated with an increased likelihood of taking an accommodating stance on the economic issue (market economy status). But the evidence linking trade to an accommodating stance on the political issues is more ambiguous. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article investigates core-periphery relations within the enlarged EU by assessing the involvement of member-states in the international division of labor. In order to do so, it constructs indexes of core-periphery divisions, supplemented with an analysis of the position of EU countries in global value chains, utilizing the World Input-Output Tables. The article sheds new light on the organization of core-periphery divisions. It also demonstrates Central and Eastern Europe’s successful integration into the global value chains as well as its significantly larger dependence on global production networks, as opposed to Southern and North-Western Europe. The article outlines that in terms of absolute contribution to value chains, the countries of Central and Eastern Europe are advancing to the level of the Southern countries, with their continued dependency on foreign capital and technologies. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Research summary: In this paper we adopt a core-periphery approach to specify the direct and indirect effects of social capital on organizational performance. We suggest that social capital deriving from stable task relationships between organizational members has a direct positive effect on organizational performance. Said effect depends, in both strength and functional form, on whether actors involved in stable dyads are located at the core or at the periphery of the organization. We also argue that core and peripheral social capital affect performance indirectly by moderating the organization's ability to leverage its human capital to improve performance. Results from a 48-year study of the National Basketball Association support our arguments and bear important implications for strategic human resource practices and organizational performance in competitive settings. Managerial summary: Stable work relationships among employees generate trust, more efficient work routines, common understanding and thus higher organizational performance. These benefits depend on the location of such stable relationships in the organization. Relational stability among core organizational members has an immediate, strong impact on performance, an effect that plateaus as stability grows. Stable relationships between core and peripheral members have instead a weaker, yet linear effect on performance. The location of stable relationships is also critical to leverage the talent of core employees, whose contribution to performance is stronger when relational stability is high in the organizational core, yet hindered by stable relations between core and periphery. Such findings provide relevant implications for strategic human resource management, in particular for choices regarding team composition and managing stars. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article proposes Amazonia as a site to think world politics. The Amazon is invisible in the study International Relations (IR), yet its experiences are deeply global. I present the international dynamics at play in Amazonia at different historical moments to posit that this periphery has contributed to forging the political-economy of what is refer to as the core. The Amazon's absence from the study of IR speaks about the larger inequality in processes of knowledge production. Serious engagements with Amazonia are one way to invite a plurality of worlds in the production of theories, disrupting global divisions of labor in knowledge production ally. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this paper we examine the rise and consolidation of the Justice and Development Party (Adelet ve Kalinma Partisi, AKP) by analyzing its success in local elections. Our examination of the durability of the AKP takes into account existing explanations of Turkish electoral politics such as economic voting, center-periphery relations, and traditional party cleavages, as well as the clientelistic tendencies of Turkish parties. We argue that the intensification of neo-liberal economic policies encouraged the AKP to seek alternative sources for distributive politics, which it found in Turkey's Mass Housing Administration (TOKİ). Using political, economic, and socio-demographic data for 900 municipal districts in Turkey, we empirically analyze the relationship between TOKİ financed housing projects and the AKP's success in the three mayoral elections between 2004 and 2014. Our results show that while traditional explanations of Turkish party voting account for some of the AKP's success, distributive politics in the form of TOKİ housing projects is a stronger predictor of the party's durability. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper compares the motivations and characteristics of the recent migration to London of young-adult graduates from Germany, Italy and Latvia. Conceptually the paper links three domains: the theory of core-periphery structures within Europe; the notion of London as both a global city and a 'Eurocity'; and the trope of 'crisis'. The dataset analysed consists of 95 in-depth biographical interviews and the paper's main objective is to tease out the narrative similarities and differences between the three groups interviewed. Each of the three nationalities represents a different geo-economic positioning within Europe. German graduates move from one economically prosperous country to another; they traverse shallow economic and cultural boundaries. Italian graduates migrate from a relatively peripheral Southern European country where, especially in Southern Italy, employment and career prospects have long been difficult, and have become more so in the wake of the financial crisis. They find employment opportunities in London which are unavailable to them in Italy. Latvian graduates are from a different European periphery, the Eastern one, post-socialist and post-Soviet. Like the Italians, their moves are economically driven whereas, for the Germans, migration is more related to lifestyle and life-stage. For all three groups, the chance to live in a large, multicultural, cosmopolitan city is a great attraction. And for all groups, thoughts about the future are marked by uncertainty and ambiguity. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In the present study we examine through network model and transactional analysis the structure of participants' funds assigned to cover their own payments and payments initiated by their clients (third party) in the Mexican Real Time Payment system SPEI. First we build two networks by splitting the number of transactions in two sets of operations, namely payments initiated by third parties and by participants. Our main finding in this regards is that both networks have a core-periphery structure and third party payments help to increase connectivity at the core. From the transactional analysis, we found that third party payments use 47% of the total amount of funds - an indication that participants have strong interest to settle third party payment on real time. Further, in the case of third parties' payments the ratio of external funds vs. funds formed with incoming payments, is 15%-85%, whereas for transactions initiated by participants this ratio is 19%-81%. This finding is an evidence that with third party payments banks are able to increase the overall level of recycling in the system. Copyright © 2015 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

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Our paper focuses on the spatial differentiation of economic development in Romania. We use spatial econometric methods (spatial autocorrelation) in order to determine the differentiation of the country in core regions and peripheries. The analysis is carried out on the regional spatial scale (NUTS 3 units or counties) and covers the period 2000-2011. The main results show a pronounced spatial polarization and spatial autocorrelation of economic development (proxied by GDP per capita) in Romania in some core regions (the capital Bucharest), while an extended periphery, comprising the eastern part of Transylvania, Moldova and northern Muntenia is lagging behind. The analysis of the multidimensional development (Human Development Index) has revealed the existence of some regional polarizing centres (Ia?i, Constan?a), while the spatial configuration of cores and peripheries shows a different picture: beside the capital region, there is a second core area in the central part of Transylvania, while the eastern periphery is centred on the county Brăila. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The following paper attempts to reconstruct the cultural-oriented vision about pre-modern history in the Romanian Principalities at the crossroads of late-eighteenth century Europe in the main works of the Romanian historian Alexandru Duţu. We will mainly deal with pre-modern texts. At the same time, we will contrast this cultural outlook on the local history with other scientific attempts to penetrate into the process of modernization of Eastern Europe during the period discussed. The opposing perspective, as far as we could delineate it, comes from the field of economic history, political science (in respect to nations, nationalism and nation-building) and the vision of modernization in the school of historical materialism. The chasm between the two viewpoints highlights both the merits and the inherent limits of Alexandru Duţu's approach. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper analyses the regional determinants of exit in developing countries, using Argentina as an illustrative case. We find evidence of a dynamic revolving door by which past entrants increase current exits, particularly in the peripheral regions. In the central regions, current and past incumbents cause an analogous displacement effect. Also, exit shows a U-shaped relationship with respect to the informal economy, although the positive effect is weaker in the central regions. These findings point to the existence of a core-periphery structure in the spatial distribution of exits. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In order to expand our understanding of user innovation and entrepreneurship in emerging Web environments, this study examines users’ entrepreneurial cognition in virtual space. We explore this topic in the social virtual world of Second Life, where user-to-user sales of virtual goods have spurred new entrepreneurial ventures and a burgeoning in-world economy. Although users’ consumption of virtual goods has been examined in several studies, user entrepreneurship, or the creation/sales of virtual goods, has received scant attention. The study elicits the social representations of ‘virtual entrepreneurship’ of entrepreneurs in those worlds. To understand the meanings of virtual entrepreneurship we conducted interviews with 24 virtual entrepreneurs. Using core-periphery analysis, we identified a structure of the representation of virtual entrepreneurship consisting of 3 core conceptual components (Self-supporting, Widespread virtual business, and Social nature of business) and 12 peripheral concepts. This exploratory research contributes initial insights into the cognitive underpinnings of entrepreneurship in the emerging virtual economy. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

With the publication of Dialectica de la dependencia (The Dialectics of Dependency) by Ruy Mauro Marini, Latin American social theory was able to culminate a great effort in the interest of formulating a theory of dependent capitalism and the laws by which it is reproduced. At the center of diverse characteristics, the superexploitation of the labor power is raised as a fundamental element in articulating and explaining the current tendencies in the reproduction of capital in the region. This essay argues that it is the development of value in itself that encourages the tendencies to violate it. Along the same lines, the political dimension of Marini's analysis is emphasized, highlighting the responsibilities of local ruling classes in the reproduction of dependency. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]