Stable International Environmental Agreements with a Stock Pollutant,Uncertainty and Learning

In this paper I address the question of how uncertainty about damage costs and the possibility of resolving that uncertainty in the future affects the incentives for countries to join an international environmental agreement. I use a two-period model with a stock pollutant where the number of countries generating pollution can be arbitrarily large. The stability concept employed is such that size of the stable IEA can be anywhere between 2 and the grand coalition of all countries depending on parameter values. The dynamic structure allows two different membership rules for an IEA: fixed (countries commit at the outset to be members for both periods) or variable (countries decide each period whether to join). I show that with fixed membership learning results in at least as high membership and global welfare as no learning (unless both the expected value and variance of damage costs are high). With variable membership, learning leads to higher membership (in the second period) but lower global welfare than no learning. For most parameter values variable membership results in higher global welfare than fixed membership.     

Precarious leisure: (re)imagining youth,transitions and temporality

ABSTRACT

The precarity of young people’s transitions to work has been a longstanding focus in youth studies. As Furlong and others have demonstrated, processes of social, political and economic restructuring have led to a pronounced instability for young people entering the labour market. While the notion of labour market precarity has gained attention, the ‘contamination’ of precarity into other spheres of life such as leisure has been less developed. This article seeks to extend these debates through interrogation of the concept of ‘leisure precarity’. Drawing on a qualitative study of youth leisure in Glasgow, it argues that temporal anxieties have reframed young people’s experiences and understandings of leisure such that young people have come to fear ‘empty’ or unproductive time. The pressures of juggling work and study, or looking for work, meant that most participants in our research had limited time free for leisure, and temporal rhythms became fragmented between past, present and future. The paper argues that these multiple and contradictory leisure dispositions reveal new forms of individualisation and uncertainty, as well as traditional patterns of inequality, thereby bringing youth transitions into dialogue with the study of precarity in the twenty-first century.     

Critical Realism,Managers and Information

Many accounts of contemporary management raise the issue of the effective use of information, but little is said about how this is to be achieved. This paper sets notions of ‘information literacy’, drawn from higher education, against the reflections of a small group of managers. This indicates that there are a number of dimensions, notably the relationship of information use to organizational power, that are not adequately catered for in current conceptions of information literacy. It is argued that existing accounts focus excessively on the construction of meaning without taking into account the constraints on such construction. Drawing on resources from critical realism, these constraints are taken to relate both to the individual's embodied nature and to the structural dimensions of their practice. Exploration of these constraints is felt to require attention to the temporal dimension of social analysis and to an examination of the interrelationships between structure and agency.     

Reflections on engaging with an advisory network in the context of a ‘sensitive’ research study

This article surfaces issues about the often-used but widely under-reported practice of working with advisory fora. We critically reflect on our experiences working with an advisory network when co-designing a research study about a ‘sensitive’ subject. We discuss the following: 1) How the network evolved as a matter of ethical and pragmatic choices; 2) Potential issues when discussing sensitive issues ‘outside’ of the participatory or participant context; and 3) Practical and epistemic issues involved in (not) ‘taking’ advice. We suggest that although sensitive research is more conventionally aligned with more ‘radical’ forms of participatory practice, advisory networks can present a useful and sometimes more appropriate form of inclusion and engagement for some advisors and for some types of research study. The article should, therefore, be of interest to a wide range of academic and practice-based health and social care staff and, in particular, those who plan to use advisory fora in their work.     

Beyond Bluff oysters? Place identity and ethnicity in a peripheral coastal setting

Studies of culture and place form a long tradition in geography but, within rural studies, less attention has been given to the ways in which contrasting ethnicities intersect with specific places and landscapes. Recently, an increasing number of authors have noted how dominant Anglophone, western, ethnicities (frequently labelled ‘white’) have been privileged in British, Australian and New Zealand settings and this paper engages that literature. We use a detailed case study of place identity in Southern New Zealand to show how a composite appreciation of ethnicity provides a deeper understanding of place identity. As such we demonstrate how place and ethnicity intersect via diverse landscapes, social interaction sites and cultural practices.