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This brief paper sets out an underappreciated practically oriented paradox and its methodological implications. The paradox is highly relevant to central banks and any organization or agent that seeks to match or anticipate central bank policy, such as other actors in banking and finance. Specifically, there is a divergence between the statistical requirement of stationarity and any macroeconomic policy objective that involves a target that takes a consistent and positive value. This is not merely an esoteric issue of interest to statisticians. It has fundamental implications for policy contexts. When achieved, any policy target, such as inflation targeting, will necessarily result in a unit root. As such, an unintended consequence of successful policy is non-stationarity, which means policy is permanently seeking to actualise conditions that are at cross-purposes with typical analytical statistical requirements. The point and its significance are illustrated beginning with a simple AR model and artificial inflation dataset.

Perceptions of teachers and students about curriculum viability inhibitors are equally important yet may differ. Divergence can lead to destructive friction and adversely affect curriculum viability. Our team aimed to find the perceptions of teachers and students on inhibitors affecting the viability of an implemented medical curriculum, report their convergence or divergence, and explore approaches to reduce divergence. Through a mixed-method approach, using valid and reliable questionnaires, we found the curriculum under review had no clear inhibitors. Whereas teachers exhibited complete agreement that no educational programme inhibitors existed, students did not fully agree. Upon qualitative inquiry, using focus group discussion with students and teachers, we found that 'improving the communication gap', 'enhancing the role of faculty and students in curriculum', and 'improving the assessment process' can reduce the friction between teachers and students. This study provides an approach that identifies the curriculum viability inhibitors and solutions to address them.

Stakeholder frameworks document the nature of sport franchise owners’ interactions with local residents, but there has been little attention on understanding why interactions develop a contentious or collaborative tenor. There has also been little emphasis on understanding whether and how interactions affect revenue-side outcomes. This paper uses the team identification literature to buttress the idea that owners are meaningful points of attachment for fans. It also uses consumer political ideology scholarship to explain that owners’ ideologies—never more visible than today—are important predictors of consumption. The paper proposes and tests a series of hypotheses about the effect of owners’ and residents’ ideological divergence on attendance and spending. Similar ideologies between residents and long-tenured owners were associated with about $8–$10 more spending per fan per game, as well as 2,400–3,950 more fans per game. Implications for academics and practitioners are provided.

Existing research finds that cooperation between militant groups is common and contributes to both capabilities and lethality. Comparatively little is known, however, about how militant alliances are maintained and how they break apart. We argue that leaders are critical to sustaining alliances between militant groups. As a consequence, organizational disruption in the form of leadership targeting can lead to the breakdown of militant alliances. To test this argument, we pair original data on militant alliances with data on leadership targeting to reveal that decapitating an organization’s leader, and particularly its founder, increases the probability that an organization’s alliances terminate. We find that leadership decapitation spurs alliance termination by incapacitating targeted groups, stoking fear among allies, and inducing preference divergence between targeted groups and allies over strategy.

Research on CEO political ideology has demonstrated the construct’s impact on many firm outcomes. Yet, political ideology does not exist in a vacuum; beyond representing a CEO’s values, political i...

Many contend that U.S. state parties are increasingly polarized and nationalized, meaning that they have adopted divergent positions matching their national counterparts’ positions. Such trends reflect a transformation of America's historically decentralized party system. Yet, the precise timing of these related trends—as well as the mechanisms underpinning them—remain unclear. We assess these dynamics using a novel data set of 1,783 state party platforms between 1918 and 2017. Applying tools from automated and manual content analysis, we document a dramatic divergence in the topics emphasized by Democrats and Republicans starting in the mid-1990s, just as congressional speech became polarized. During this period, cross-state differences in each party's agenda decreased and regional/sectoral issues became less prominent, suggesting tight connections between polarization, nationalization, and state agendas. We also find that innovative phrases increasingly debut in state (not national) platforms. Overall, the evidence undercuts claims of top-down polarization emanating from national party leaders in Washington, DC. Polarization at the state and federal levels coincided with the development of an integrated network of activists spanning multiple levels of the polity.

Motivated by the extremely low level of the CBOE VIX accompanied by the high level of U.S. economic policy uncertainty in the period of late 2016 to the end of 2017, we examine the factors affecting the relationship between market volatility and economic policy uncertainty in the United States and the United Kingdom. Our analysis shows that low-quality political signals, higher opinion divergence among investors, and exceptional equity market performance consistently weaken the positive relationship between implied market volatility and policy uncertainty. Our findings help to explain the divergence between the market volatility index and economic policy uncertainty post the 2016 U.S. presidential election and the UK Brexit referendum.

The present contribution takes cultural semiotics as its theoretical vantage point ontranslation, and delves specifically in the concepts of diversity and standardness asthey develop characteristically within the semiosphera (Lotman [1984] 2005).Standardness and diversity define the complex maze of intra-cultural relations thatprefigure and possibilitate the intercultural relation, especially through translation.The semiosphere is the sociocultural system within which the standard texts of theculture coexist with the rest in a hierarchy that places the standard at a position ofprominence. The standard texts of a culture occupy a core position in a hierarchythat defines them as forming the educated core. They are texts that partake of theprestige and pre-eminence of the group that circulates them, distinguishable fromthe substandard texts in the same culture. Within a semiosphere the standard is anorm and the reference point for the interpretation of symbolic value, which, forlanguage and translation studies, relies on the subcultural (High vs. Low)differentiation existing in the intraculture and conditioning the forms of crossculturaltransference. On one hand we claim that translation per se should beradically reconceptualized as being the process that possibilitates communicationthrough an understanding of diversity within –and through– discourse and, also, as aprocess of management of that diversity in pursuit of interpretative convergence(intertextual, intersubjective, intercultural) from an initial position of linguisticdivergence. This divergence is resolved in translation. On the other hand we need tounderline the importance of the individual translators’ task within these widersociocultural processes. The important role played by translators in the modernization of theirsemiospheres will be discussed presently in relation to a highly significant case,which was the onset of Anglo-American Imagism and Literary Modernism at the endof the Meiji Era, or the end of the Victorian era. It was not coincidental that afterdecades of novel translation work (from Japanese into English and from English intoJapanese) conducted by translators like Noguchi, Hearn, Fenollosa, or Ezra Pound,the modernization of Japanese and Anglo-American literature would take place. Inthe process of translating, these translators were learning from Source textualityhow to write Target texts whose new hybrid forms taught them, and the literary profession surrounding them, how to renovate the standards of their nativesemiospheres.

European dieselization, i.e. the sustained increase in the diesel share in the passenger car fleet, is associated with the first EU strategy to reduce CO2 emissions from passenger cars. This paper aims to contribute to the literature on dieselization by looking at EU international trade flows in passenger cars, a perspective seldom found in the literature. Trade data confirm that the bulk of EU diesel trade flows occurs between EU partners, although diesel imports from other, non-EU countries are also significant. Besides, the external competitiveness of the EU car industry is clearly based on petrol cars. The analysis of trade data also reflects previous findings on the increase in car size. On the policy side, the divergence between CO2 from new car registrations and total CO2 emissions from passenger cars during the dieselization era proves that strategies for decarbonization should not rely exclusively on efficiency gains, demand policies are also needed. The dieselization phenomenon warns of the major inertia that road transport policies can have. The analysis of EU car trade also underlines the need to coordinate environmental policy with other relevant countries in the international car market.

This study investigates how supermajority rules in a legislature affect electoral competition. To this end, we construct a probabilistic voting model and show that supermajority rules magnify the divergence of policy platforms generated by aggregate uncertainty about the electoral outcome. Thus, supermajority rules involve an important trade-off: they induce the convergence of policies for non-commitment issues, while also causing the divergence of policies for commitment issues. In addition, we show that the effect of aggregate uncertainty on the optimal voting rule depends on whether its source is a large district-specific shock or a small number of competitive districts.

There has been recent attention to the political divide between urban and rural voters in the United States. It is possible that as rural and urban voting behavior has diverged, this has been driven by increasing social conservatism among rural voters. However, given that the average American is not ideologically constrained nor stable, this may not be the case. Using data from the 2010–2014 Cooperative Congressional Election Study Panel Study, this analysis compares the ideological constraint and stability of rural, suburban, and urban Americans. The results show that there has not been a divergence in rural, suburban, and urban ideologies or issue opinions in recent years. Rural and suburban respondents are more conservative than urban respondents on average, but they are not consistent conservatives, and their presidential votes are not primarily driven by a consistent set of conservative issue opinions.

A more positive cultural trust bias by an equity analyst's country of origin toward a firm's headquarter country is associated with significantly more positive stock recommendations. The cultural bias effect is stronger for eponymous firms whose names mention their home country and varies over time, increasing with negative sentiment. I find evidence of a negative North-South bias during the European debt crisis and UK-Europe divergence amid Brexit. Share price reactions to recommendations by more biased analysts are weaker, and more biased recommendations are worse at predicting monthly stock returns. More positively biased analysts also assign higher target prices.

Model organisms such as mice are important for basic research and serve as valuable tools in preclinical translational studies. A challenge with translating findings from mice to humans is identifying and separating evolutionarily conserved mechanisms in the immune system from those diverging between species. A significant emphasis has been placed on defining conserved gene regulation principles, with divergent mechanisms often overlooked. We put forward the perspective that both conserved and divergent mechanisms that regulate gene expression programs are of equal importance. With recent advances and availability of datasets, immunologists should take a closer look at the role for genetic diversity in altering gene expression programs between mouse and human immune cells.

Through 2020, Asbury Theological Seminary largely built an introductory course for those preparing for graduate-level study in seminary disciplines. Through that work and the collaborative efforts between our research librarian, Writing Center, and instructional designer, we have discovered shared concerns, knowledge, and new insights into how to help our students. Great synergy was found in terms of information literacy, citations, using information well, and a desire to see students/patrons succeed. Points of divergence were found in terms of organizational structures (siloes) and a potential conflict between a “do for” rather than “teach how” staff focus. Recommendations also are given at the close regarding having writing resources available for patrons in contexts where there is not a writing center.

PurposeThis paper aims to establish a theoretic framework to provide a fundamental understanding of cyberspatial objects, their existence and their identification scheme while providing a connection between cyber-enabled spaces and cyberspace. It develops an avenue to quantify general philosophical and theoretical questions, precisely, inherently spatial basis that produces an unprecedented space–time continuum, in which cyber-enabled relations evolve.Design/methodology/approachMultidisciplinary theoretical approaches are needed to describe complex systems, which in this paper are integrated in a quest for the principles underlying the structural organization and dynamics of cyberspace. A theoretic framework is presented, and the spatial conception of cyber-enabled physical, social, information and thinking spaces and entities existence are provided.FindingsWith spatial objects and spatial properties, cyberspace is inherently spatial. Its basic constructs are founded on its spatial qualities and producing radical space–time compression, cyber-enabled spaces in which dynamic relations develop and thrive. The cyberspatial object operations are primarily built on foundations that depend on physical space and other spatial metaphors. Information space, basically missing in the literature, is an important part of cyberspace.Research limitations/implicationsThis work suggested a novel analytical approach to describing cyberspace from broader perspectives and fields. Due to the novelty and divergence of cyber concepts, an interdisciplinary study and methodology are needed. Thus, more research toward theoretical direction could help many of the practical implementations of concepts.Practical implicationsThe research is of particular significance in cyberspatial mechanics to describe the dynamics and behavior of cyber physical systems. For example, object-based analysis functions like spatial query, node pattern analysis, cluster analysis, spatial similarity analysis and location modeling.Originality/valueComplementing the existing literature and defining information space to the research sphere, a theoretical framework providing a fundamental understanding of cyberspatial objects and the general cyberspace foundation has been proposed, resulting in a formalized concept of existence, interactions and applications and services, with respect to philosophy, science and technology, respectively.

Investments aligned with environmental, social, and governance (ESG) principles are rapidly growing globally. In the exchange traded fund (ETF) industry, this gives rise to the power of ESG rating firms that have the influence to direct capital flows into ETFs tracking the indexes. This article examines the issues of substantial ESG rating divergence across rating firms, the impact on investors’ choices, and the influence on the ETF industry. The divergence appears to be the greatest in social and governance components, and is often qualitative in nature. The author found that certain economic sectors are more prone to ESG rating divergence than others. She presents a case study about two ESG ETFs that are viewed quite differently under various rating lenses, and offers suggestions to investors, advisors, and analysts on how to research ESG ETFs, given the major rating divergence. The article concludes with ways the ETF industry could improve its practices collectively to better serve investors with clarity and to sustain the growth of ESG impact investments. Key Findings ▪ This article intends to shed new light on the outsized influence of rating companies on the ETF industry. It examines the impact of ESG rating divergence on ETF product choices and the ETF industry. ▪ The study found substantial differences in opinion on ESG ratings among leading rating firms. The divergence is the greatest in the social and governance components, where the measurements tend to be qualitative. The author found that certain economic sectors are prone to more severe rating divergence than others, requiring more scrutiny. ▪ In a case study, the author demonstrats how two ESG ETFs similarly rated by one rating firm can be viewed quite differently under the rating lenses of other firms. The author provides practical suggestions for product research and comparisons.

Scholarship of local migration policies identifies a variegated landscape of convergence and divergence between governance scales in times of restrictionism but pays less attention to the simultane...

Social norms comprise of “the rules and standards that are understood by members of a group, and that guide and/or constrain social behaviour without the force of laws. Social norms are the public rules of action and thought, acting as the backbone of societal habits, routines, and customs, and legal frames. In African settings, influence is organized mostly along with the gender, age, and religious structures. Religious people play the spiritual and advisory roles in the sexual activities of the adolescents. The standing norm drawn from the religious and social beliefs is “no sex before marriage.” In the communities where the research was done, sex was traditionally linked to marriage. Today more than ever, the Church is currently confronted with a divergence of opinion about sexual relationships and marriage. The reality of our society is the question as to whether the traditional understanding of marriage is still relevant as far as facilitating the believers to make meaningful and responsible choices. The intention of this paper is not to dismiss or under-value the institution of marriage, but rather to re-negotiate the structure of sexual matters in our modern society. The paper works with the concept of social norms in order to shed more light on the role of the Church in the transformation of social norms. Using a thematic analysis on a hypothetical case of a pregnancy of an adolescent in a community, data was interrogated with a series of questions for measuring norms, namely: who the reference group is, what is typical in the group, what is approved of in the group, and whether or not the social norm is conjoint or disjoint.

This article reported a case study investigating small group interaction patterns in online collaborative writing tasks and factors influencing team collaborations. Participants included six Asian EFL university students who formed two small groups and were engaged in two online collaborative writing tasks via Google Docs. Data collection included the participants’ use of writing change functions and language functions during the collaborative writing processes revealed through Google Docs archives and collaborative essays. Semi-structured interviews were employed to examine factors influencing small group collaborations. The findings revealed that the two teams exhibited divergent interaction patterns, but the patterns of interaction remained consistent within each group across both tasks. The qualitative content analysis showed factors that affected team collaborations were individual goals, learners’ English proficiency, individual roles, and the use of collaborative agency. The findings may help elucidate the divergence of online collaborative writing and provide insightful information for instructors to design collaborative writing activities and assist EFL learners in the co-construction of writing tasks.

The purpose of this paper is to understand the dynamics of private sector employment in China in recent years and to provide insight into the effects private sector employment has had on internal variations in growth and development. Our findings indicate a divergence in employment sources in cities and the countryside, a growing spatial divide between areas that rely on state-owned enterprises for employment, and places where the private sector is an increasingly important employer. We conclude that private enterprises are essential drivers of prosperity in urban China but are less significant for employment or growth in rural areas.

In the current crisis period, the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) have provided a framework for new norms about governance of and access to external financing that emphasize stimulating investor interest and creating a suite of innovative instruments to address major development challenges. However, the inadequacies associated with extant financing streams are in sharp relief since they do not address damages and losses associated with the climate crisis. The current global configuration aimed at generating from “billions to trillions” of development finance are awfully mute on historical responsibility for the uneven and extreme consequences facing climate-impacted communities in the Global South. This paper interrogates the role of the SDGs, in particular SDG17, in both adducing financialisation as an evolutionary process, further extracting profit from racialized communities, and a source of instability in the global economy. It points to the manner in which the “trillions” deemed necessary are ostensibly mobilized in pursuit of financial returns to be made from climate disaster that generate further debt, dispossesses racialized populations in the global south, and thereby ushering in a new era of “bond-age” and coloniality. Current development financing arrangements under the SDGs would increase the cost burdens and compromise the Global South’s capacities to democratically manage and meet their developmental needs due to accumulating losses and damage from major extreme climate-induced events. Loss and damage compensation for marginalised developing countries at the forefront of the climate crisis must therefore come from another source: climate reparations. Climate reparations offer an appropriate encompassing philosophical and policy apparatus for first understanding the magnitude of climate breakdown, and second for mounting a response to ongoing environmental harm in vulnerable countries that is centred on climate justice.

No matter what the different cultural backgrounds are, they will always collide and generate divergence on the same point of intersection and then continue moving forward in the direction of collective cognition. At present, the global world is facing severe pestilence disasters; China Art Circle made many responses immediately at the beginning of the epidemic situation and tried to fight the epidemic situation, encourage the front-line medical staff and provide energy for them. However, when the epidemic situation in China trends to calm, the art theme about the epidemic situation also suddenly keeps silent. It looks like calm without great waves; however, through investigating Western art, it is found that the Western Art Circle has different orientations on the attitude to disasters; considering its inner core, it maps the further understanding of groups with different cultural backgrounds on the cognition of other shores of life- different life and death idea influence the social outlook, view of life and expectation of life fate of different groups. Meanwhile, they also promote the society to show different introspection paths while facing disasters. The study uses empirical analysis to identify and collect the image information from classical paintings of the East and the West. The results show that compared with Western art, Chinese art conveys a message that focuses more on maintaining the country's stability.

Since 2015, Burkina Faso has faced a rapid deterioration of national security, giving rise to new Security Force Assistance (SFA) programmes. This article investigates a ‘peacebuilding’ SFA project...

For centuries, both scientists and philosophers have discussed the nature of species resulting in c. 35 species concepts proposed to date. However, in our opinion, none of them incorporated neither recent advances in evolutionary genomics nor dimensionality of species in befitting depth. Our attempt to do so resulted in the following conclusions. Due to the continuous nature of evolution (regardless of its rate and constancy), species are inevitably undefinable as natural discontinuous units (except those originating in saltatory speciation) whenever the time dimension is taken into consideration. Therefore, the very existence of species as a natural discontinuous entity is relative to its dimensionality. A direct consequence of the relativity of species is the duality of speciators (e.g., incipient species) meaning that, in a given time, they may be perceived as both being and not being a species. Finally, the most accurate way to reflect both the relativity of species and the duality of speciators in species delimitation is probabilistic. While the novelty of these ideas may be questionable, they still deserve more extensive attention from the biological community. Here, we hope to draw such attention by outlining one of the possible pathways towards a new kind of probabilistic species delimitation methods based on the probability of irreversible divergence of evolutionary lineages. We anticipate that our probabilistic view of speciation has the potential to facilitate some of the most serious and universal issues of current taxonomy and to ensure unity of the species-level taxonomy across the tree of life.

During the past 6 decades, Systemic Functional Linguistics (henceforth SFL) has constantly provided new guidance for language research. In the process, Richard Hudson, Robin Fawcett, Gordon Tucker ...

Over most of the 20th century, evolutionary biologists predominantly subscribed to a strong form of "micro-mutationism," in which adaptive phenotypic divergence arises from allele frequency changes at many loci, each with a small effect on the phenotype. To be sure, there were well-known examples of large-effect alleles contributing to adaptation, yet such cases were generally regarded as atypical and unrepresentative of evolutionary change in general. In 1998, Allen Orr published a landmark theoretical paper in Evolution, which showed that both small- and large-effect mutations are likely to contribute to "adaptive walks" of a population to an optimum. Coupled with a growing set of empirical examples of large-effect alleles contributing to divergence (e.g., from QTL studies), Orr's paper provided a mathematical formalism that converted many evolutionary biologists from micro-mutationism to a more pluralistic perspective on the genetic basis of evolutionary change. We revisit the theoretical insights emerging from Orr's paper within the historical context leading up to 1998, and track the influence of this paper on the field of evolutionary biology through an examination of its citations over the last two decades and an analysis of the extensive body of theoretical and empirical research that Orr's pioneering paper inspired.

The pallium is the largest part of the telencephalon in amniotes, and comparison of its subdivisions across species has been extremely difficult and controversial due to its high divergence. Comparative embryonic genoarchitecture studies have greatly contributed to propose models of pallial fundamental divisions, which can be compared across species and be used to extract general organizing principles as well as to ask more focused and insightful research questions. The use of these models is crucial to discern between conservation, convergence or divergence in the neural populations and networks found in the pallium. Here we provide a critical review of the models proposed using this approach, including tetrapartite, hexapartite and double-ring models, and compare them to other models. While recognizing the power of these models for understanding brain architecture, development and evolution, we also highlight limitations and comment on aspects that require attention for improvement. We also discuss on the use of transcriptomic data for understanding pallial evolution and advise for better contextualization of these data by discerning between gene regulatory networks involved in the generation of specific units and cell populations versus genes expressed later, many of which are activity dependent and their expression is more likely subjected to convergent evolution.

The increased use of algorithms to support decision making raises questions about whether people prefer algorithmic or human input when making decisions. Two streams of research on algorithm aversion and algorithm appreciation have yielded contradicting results. Our work attempts to reconcile these contradictory findings by focusing on the framings of humans and algorithms as a mechanism. In three decision making experiments, we created an algorithm appreciation result (Experiment 1) as well as an algorithm aversion result (Experiment 2) by manipulating only the description of the human agent and the algorithmic agent, and we demonstrated how different choices of framings can lead to inconsistent outcomes in previous studies (Experiment 3). We also showed that these results were mediated by the agent's perceived competence, i.e., expert power. The results provide insights into the divergence of the algorithm aversion and algorithm appreciation literature. We hope to shift the attention from these two contradicting phenomena to how we can better design the framing of algorithms. We also call the attention of the community to the theory of power sources, as it is a systemic framework that can open up new possibilities for designing algorithmic decision support systems.

This article explores the dispute settlement elements of the UK-EU Trade and Cooperation Agreement’s novel Level Playing Field rebalancing obligations, consisting of a requirement not to lower standards in areas of labour, the environment and subsidy policy such that an adverse material impact results to trade or investment flows between the parties. The test for violations of these provisions is narrowly framed, requiring strong evidence of significant harms and carefully calibrated retaliation. The system is enforced through review by a dedicated Panel of Experts procedure, just as other aspects of the LPF are subjected to the TCA’s general dispute settlement system of state-to-state arbitration which excludes jurisdiction of either the UK or EU courts. The article will argue that the substantive and procedural features of the TCA’s LPF mechanism affords wide opportunity for parties to practice regulatory divergence while evincing a commitment to shared values.

Rulers face challenges in governing distant or hostile populations. In response, they may coopt elites from those groups into relationships of indirect rule, thereby boosting their perceived legitimacy and ensuring compliance with their policies. Because a ruler’s goals diverge from a hostile population’s preferences, an important tension results: the elite’s cooperation becomes more valuable to the ruler, but their ability to foster compliance is strained. How does that tension influence the ruler’s governance strategy and the resulting bargain between the ruler and the elite? I construct a model of cooptation showing that a legitimating elite’s bargaining power is non-monotonic with respect to preference divergence between a ruler and the citizenry. Bargaining power for the elite is increasing in preference divergence at low levels and falls discontinuously once divergence passes a threshold. Preference divergence therefore carries implications for rulers’ institutional choice, as cooptation is only viable at intermediate levels of popular discontent. I apply the model to the Ottoman Empire’s system of indirect rule and show that it explains several features of regime-elite relations.

Following the launch of family planning programs in the 1960s and 1970s, there has been a divergence in fertility transition across Muslim countries. Bangladesh and Pakistan provide an interesting ...

The spread of globalization and Internet-related technologies have contributed toward the emergence of convergence, divergence, and global consumer culture as three alternative perspectives to expl...

Success in academic archaeology is strongly influenced by the publication of peer-reviewed articles. Despite the importance of such articles, minimal research has explicitly examined the factors influencing publishing decisions in archaeology. In order to better understand the landscape of archaeological publishing, we distributed a short survey that solicited basic professional and demographic information before asking respondents to (1) identify journals that publish important archaeological research, (2) identify journals that people who read archaeological academic CVs value most highly, and (3) rank the factors that affected their decisions about where to submit an article for publication. Our results from 274 respondents generated a list of 167 individual journal titles. Prestige was viewed as the most important factor that affected publishing decisions, followed by audience and open access considerations. There was no relationship between respondent-generated journal rankings and SCImago Journal Ranks (SJR), but there were significant differences in average SJR by gender and career stage. Responses showed consensus on only a small number of highly ranked archaeology and science-subject journals, with little agreement on the importance of most other journals. We conclude by highlighting the areas of disciplinary consensus and divergence revealed by the survey and by discussing how implicit prestige hierarchies permeate academic archaeology.

The increasingly global scope of biomedical research and testing using animals is generating disagreement over the best way to regulate laboratory animal science and care. Despite many common aims, the practices through which political and epistemic authority are allocated in the regulations around animal research varies internationally, coming together in what can be identified as different national constitutions. Tensions between these periodically erupt within the laboratory animal research community as a ‘cultural war’ between those favouring centralised control and those advocating local flexibility. Drawing on long-term engagement with key events and actors in these policy debates, I propose these national differences in the constitution of animal research can be understood through the intersection of two key variables: i) the location of institutional responsibility to permit research projects and ii) the distribution of epistemic authority to shape research practices. These variables are used to explain the development of different policy frameworks in the UK, Europe, and the USA, and identify where there is convergence and divergence in practice. Concluding, I suggest the way these approaches are combined and enacted in different countries reflects different national civic epistemologies, which are coming into conflict in the increasingly global networks of laboratory animal science.

Literature on the challenges and marginalisation of women in higher education and leadership has focused mostly on the voices of women in understanding their experiences. The structural and cultural milieu of the higher education landscape has continuously been put forward as part of a complexity of contributing factors to the challenges. In exploring literature, the author found little that brings men’s voices to the discourse. Seeking the voices of men in leadership, was with the understanding that in occupying positions of power and influence, they are strategically positioned and have agency in transforming the structural and cultural milieu. The article focuses on challenges experienced by women on a trajectory to the highest levels of higher education leadership, and engages with men’s perspectives on the higher education structural and cultural milieu. The focus is on areas that women have highlighted as barriers within this milieu. The article engages with the conversations with men, including vice chancellors, undertaken as part of a research project, to explore whether there is a common view and understanding of the higher education environment and women’s experiences and challenges in this context. Further, whether men in leadership exercise their agency in influencing and challenging the status quo. The article concludes that though there may not necessarily be a divergence in perspectives regarding the milieu and women’s experiences therein, this may only be at an empirical/observed level. The deeper, underlying structures and mechanisms that retain the status quo have neither been recognised nor engaged. There is also the danger of complacency and lack of exercising agency in disrupting the status quo, which may contribute to the lack of change. The findings also foreground a wrestling with a myriad of challenges as experienced within the higher education sector, contributing to the lack of prioritising a focus on women towards leadership.

In philosophy, agency is construed in terms of desires and means-end beliefs as reasons for actions. Psychological theories of goal-directed behavior provide a formal bridge between objective contingency knowledge and subjective beliefs, missing from such accounts. In this review, I argue that, because they conflate contingency and reward, theories of goal-directed behavior are nonetheless themselves unsuitable as accounts of agency. I then review behavioral and neuroscientific data suggesting that the recently proposed construct of instrumental divergence might serve as a normative and descriptive psychological index of agency that constrains and motivates goal-directed choice.

Chinese Quadrisyllabic Idiomatic Expressions (henceforth QIEs) are highly productive in the modern language. They can be used to understand the cognitive processing of structure and meaning during reading comprehension, as in the patterning of [qian-A-wan-B] ‘1k-A-10k-B’ (e.g. one-thousand army ten-thousand horse). However, little is known about the underlying mechanisms of QIEs during reading comprehension. Adopting the framework of Construction Grammar, in the present study, we aimed to study the convergence and divergence between native speakers and L2 learners in the processing of Chinese idiomatic constructions. In the present study, twenty-three native university-level Mandarin speakers and twenty-three L2 learners of intermediate and advanced levels of Mandarin, all speakers of the non Sinosphere, participated in the experiment, and were instructed to make a semantic congruency judgment during the presentation of a QIE. Our results showed that, for both native speakers and L2 learners, semantically transparent idiomatic constructions elicited much shorter RTs than semantically opaque idiomatic constructions. Our behavioral results also showed that native speakers processed low frequency QIEs faster than high frequency ones, implying semantic satiation to impede the interpretation of high frequency idioms. For L2 learners, it was semantic transparency, rather than frequency, that played a more prominent role in idiom processing.

Environmental movements play an increasingly pivotal role in societal responses to pressing issues, such as climate change. These movements are often multi-scalar, spanning locations, ideological o...

We present a study of social effects of climate change as experienced by local communities, based on field research and analysis in Western Siberia, from southern taiga to tundra. The results of field anthropological research reveal different attitudes of local residents to climate change. We compare the key trends of climate change with the perspectives of local residents, based on memories, subjective experiences, and local environmental knowledge. Our results highlight a significant divergence of the subjective assessments of residents from objective data on the dynamics of changes in certain environmental elements. We explore how the human subjective perception of natural processes, their consequences and impacts, are influenced by such factors as: type of settlement, age, gender, level of education and how collective stereotypes and judgments merge information in attitude formation. We also address the need to reconcile observed climate change impacts and perceptions to enable decision-makers to engage more constructively with the local population to develop and implement adaptation. SUPPLEMENTARY INFORMATION: The online version contains supplementary material available at 10.1007/s13280-021-01621-y.

Reading is a critical process for conscious learning and enhancing knowledge; however, little is known about reading in interpreters’ professional lives. We used an online survey to collect information about the reading habits of signed language interpreters (n = 1,382) and spoken language interpreters (n = 601) to examine overall patterns, as well as variations, between the groups. The interpreters responded to questions regarding (a) engagement with reading types, (b) hours spent reading, (c) motivations for reading, (d) factors that reduce engagement in reading, (e) reading in which interpreters should engage, (f) relevance of reading to professional practice, and (g) priority of research topics for reading. Similarities were found between the groups, with divergence in three areas – reading preparation materials, reading research studies, and the types of research studies the participants wish to read. The results provide insights into professional interpreters’ engagement with reading and its application to their professional practice.

This paper reports the research findings from an online survey of parents of primary-age pupils in Northern Ireland during the COVID-19 pandemic. The aims of the study were to explore how parents supported their child/ren’s home learning;to ascertain the communication, guidance and resources between home and school;and to learn from the experiences of parents to enable more effective practices to be established should similar circumstances arise in the future. The survey yielded 2,509 responses and highlighted the divergence of practices in relation to home-school communications across schools as well as the challenges experienced by parents, particularly those who had one or more children with special educational needs and/or those who had Free School Meal Entitlement. The study was guided by Epstein’s Framework of the Six Types of Involvement, most specifically the spheres of parenting, learning from home, communication, collaborating with the community and decision-making. Within Epstein’s framework, the challenges and tensions between family, school and work are explored. Recommendations are made that will be helpful to parents, schools, teacher-educators, policy-makers and researchers in informing the shape and delivery of education in Northern Ireland and internationally both during and following the challenge of the current COVID-19 pandemic and for similar situations that may arise in the future. The findings and conclusions are relevant not only to the Northern Ireland education context, but also make a valuable contribution to global dialogue on what this experience has revealed about inequities in education systems and how these should be addressed going forward. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR] Copyright of Educational Review is the property of Routledge and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

For more than a decade, research on heritage speakers’ (HSs’) mood selection has documented a high degree of variability in their interpretation and use of mood morphology in variable contexts. Most of the previous literature, however, has focused on late-acquired alternations, and often limited analyses to one form (i.e., subjunctive), making it difficult to draw conclusions about HSs’ knowledge of mood distinctions. This study intends to fill this gap by examining Spanish HSs’ (n = 76) and Spanish-dominant controls’ (n = 25) interpretation and use of an early acquired mood alternation, where the presence of indicative or subjunctive conveys the report of an assertion or a command. Results from two experimental tasks reveal that, even though HSs’ performance tends to differ from that of controls’—especially at lower levels of proficiency—the nature and extent of their divergences suggests the need to embrace a more nuanced analysis of HSs’ linguistic outcomes when examining modal contrasts.

This paper investigates the role of human capital in explaining divergent employment growth within advanced economies. It adds a spatial dimension to William J. Baumol’s theory of ‘unbalanced growth’ by linking it with the concept of ‘job polarization’. We develop a theory of ‘geographical unbalanced growth’ that explains divergent employment trajectories in terms of skill restructuring. The theory is operationalized via a novel shift–share extension, which is applied to Australian data. We find evidence of ongoing regional divergence and for our proposed mechanism. The findings reinforce the importance of active policies to attract high-skilled jobs to non-metropolitan regions.

Neste artigo, insistimos na defesa de uma proposta de conciliação teórica-metodológica entre duas teorias linguísticas preocupadas com a mudança linguística – a Gramaticalização e a Sociolinguística –, destacando o pioneirismo da Linguística brasileira na elaboração dessa proposta, que passou a ser conhecida como “Sociofuncionalismo”. Para tratar dos pontos de convergência e divergência entre Teoria da Gramaticalização e Teoria da Variação e Mudança Linguística, partimos dos trabalhos de Naro e Braga (2000) e de Görski e Tavares (2013, 200-?), por terem sido os primeiros a responderem questões relevantes que levariam ao trabalho de interface entre os dois modelos teóricos. Ilustramos essa proposta de conciliação com casos de perífrases verbais de aspecto cursivo que, resultantes de gramaticalização, podem ser abordadas sob perspectiva sociofuncionalista. Primeiramente testamos dois critérios de gramaticalização – frequência de uso e parâmetros de auxiliaridade – e depois mostramos os contextos de variação entre as perífrases, provando, assim, a pertinência da proposta.

The present article is a critical engagement with Aleksei Yurchak’s Everything Was Forever until It Was No More: The Last Soviet Generation. It contends that, as rich as Yurchak’s insights on the language culture of Brezhnev’s Stagnation have proven to be, his account ends up seriously misrepresenting the Stalinist episode in the life of Soviet ideology. This misrepresentation is due, in large part, to the problematic use of post-structuralist models, and particularly of Claude Lefort’s theorization of ideology in the modern era. Through a re-examination of Lefort’s “Outline of the Genesis of Ideology in Modern Societies,” the present article advances an alternative understanding of the discursive “shift” in Soviet ideology. Yurchak has argued that, before being set afloat in the 1950s, Soviet official discourse was held together through the figure of the “external master,” Stalin himself. The master is able to mask what Yurchak terms the “Lefort paradox” of Soviet ideology and which he glosses as the divergence between ideological enunciation and ideological “rule.” Yet Yurchak misreads Lefort’s theory, and specifically the latter’s references to “master” and “rule.” When these terms are restored to their proper theoretical significance, it becomes possible to formulate in a new way the contradictory duality at the heart of Soviet ideology. The article contends, contra Yurchak, that this is not the duality of enunciation and actual exercise of power; but rather the split internal to ideological discourse, between the “rule of reality” and the “reality of the rule.” The “shift” of Soviet ideological discourse begins as a slippage between these two ideological representations, and not as the removal of some anchor external to representation.

This article provides a comparative overview of the current law of unjust enrichment in Hong Kong, examining how this body of law developed and diverged from its original English roots. Unjust enrichment law in Hong Kong largely mirrors that in England, retaining its nature as a subsidiary cause of action and the four-stage framework for unjust enrichment: (i) enrichment of the defendant; (ii) at the expense of the claimant; (iii) unjust factor; and (iv) defences. Most of the elements of the four-stage framework also follow the English approach, apart from defences to unjust enrichment. In this regard, the legal position in Hong Kong differs from that of England in several ways. The ‘wrongdoer’ and ‘bad faith’ bars to the change of position defence are interpreted far more broadly in Hong Kong. This divergence is unfortunately problematic, as it involves a misreading of previous English jurisprudence, leads to harsh results, and significantly limits the ability of the change of position defence to support the development of the law of restitution. The illegality defence in Hong Kong also differs by following the previous ‘reliance principle’ in Tinsley v Milligan, rather than the ‘range of factors’ approach in Patel v Mirza, especially due to the uncertainty engineered by the latter approach.

Climate change impacts threaten farmers’ livelihoods and global food security. Adaptation to climate change can protect both farmers and our food supply. Structurational divergence theory (SD theor...

The present study investigates whether native speakers of German phonetically accommodate to natural and synthetic voices in a shadowing experiment. We aim to determine whether this phenomenon, which is frequently found in HHI, also occurs in HCI involving synthetic speech. The examined features pertain to different phonetic domains: allophonic variation, schwa epenthesis, realization of pitch accents, word-based temporal structure and distribution of spectral energy. On the individual level, we found that the participants converged to varying subsets of the examined features, while they maintained their baseline behavior in other cases or, in rare instances, even diverged from the model voices. This shows that accommodation with respect to one particular feature may not predict the behavior with respect to another feature. On the group level, the participants of the natural condition converged to all features under examination, however very subtly so for schwa epenthesis. The synthetic voices, while partly reducing the strength of effects found for the natural voices, triggered accommodating behavior as well. The predominant pattern for all voice types was convergence during the interaction followed by divergence after the interaction.

This paper develops a model of the U.S. housing market that explains much of the time series of rents and house prices since World War II. House prices depend on expectations of future rents. We show that rents are tied to regional income inequality, and therefore, house prices are determined by how much faster incomes are growing in richer regions. This theory also matches many cross-sectional facts, including regional variation in rents and prices, differing house price sensitivities to national trends, patterns of inter-state migration, and surveys of income expectations. An industry shift-share instrument provides causal evidence for our channel. The model implies that while interest rates have an ambiguous effect on house price levels, low rates increase house price volatility.

The modern world has given rise to a new phenomenon known as ‘divergence of sciences’, meaning that various scientific activities occasionally affect a particular matter in different and sometimes contradictory ways. Considering this phenomenon, this paper discusses the relationships between the mutual interplay of legal, managerial, and engineering activities pertaining to the sustainable development of green buildings and has designed and explained a legal management model with an approach to green buildings in Iran as its main contribution. For this purpose, the qualitative research method was adopted, which entailed interviewing subject experts through the snowball research method, in combination with the quantitative method. The necessary requirements and identified indicators including, General Practical Approaches, Engineering, Managerial and Legal Indicators (EI, MI, LI), presented in this study, can significantly help coordinate the aggregate force of the three disciplines, and the main priorities set to achieve the comprehensive sustainable development goals (SDGs). According to the analyses of fifty-one identified indicators and their influence in four different fields on the SDGs, the study underscored the theory that even in the engineering world there is not a significant difference between these four fields in terms of implementing the SDGs.