Civil society challenges the global food system: the International Monsanto Tribunal

ABSTRACT

The global food system has severe implications for human health, soil quality, biodiversity, and quality of life. This paper provides an analysis on how transnational alliances challenge the global food system. We illustrate this by focusing on the activities and hearings of the International Monsanto Tribunal (IMT), held in the Hague in 2016. The IMT provided a platform for civil society and enabled transnational alliances to demand attention for local struggles and legal disputes in relation to Monsanto’s products. With the involvement of independent and renowned experts, the knowledge exchange between local victims and civil society was enhanced, and the IMT reinforced social movement’s goals towards demanding justice for the negative effects associated with the global food system. The advisory opinion determined that Monsanto’s practices are in violation with human rights standards. The IMT exemplified that there is an immediate need for structural change in the current global food system.     

Lutz Leisering und Stephan Leibfried (with contributions by Petra Buhr, Monika Ludwig and others): Time and poverty in western welfare states. United Germany perspective

Ohne Zusammenfassung     

"Our Greatest Treasure, the Child": The Politics of Child Care in Hungary, 1945-1956

This article explores child care and preschool educational policiesin Hungary from the end of World War II until the 1956 revolution,focusing mainly on the forms of organization of preschool education,methods of financing, and the quality of educational facilities.Special attention is devoted to the gender dimension of theeducational system, provisions concerning women’s employment,and women’s entitlements as mothers and caregivers. Thearticle considers preschool education as the point of collisionbetween (forced) productive and reproductive roles of womenin the socialist system. In addition to analyzing the legislationon child care, the article studies the different stages of thepolicy process, in an effort to identify how competing discourseson welfare policies by multiple actors and agencies—suchas the state, parties, local and county administrators, variousinterest groups, the women’s movement, and parents—werestrategically used in political narratives striving for dominancein the political field. It is also concerned with the implementationof these laws, and with their effect upon those directly affectedby these policies.     

Children's and Adolescents' Expectations of Aggressive Responses to Provocation: Females Predict More Hostile Reactions in Compatible Dyadic Relationships

Children and adolescents between 6 and 15 years of age were asked to report on typical same‐sex peers’ aggressive responses to a hostile act that had occurred in dyads and groups that were either compatible or incompatible. Results demonstrated that females were expected to display the highest levels of aggression in compatible one‐on‐one relationships as opposed to in compatible group relationships or in incompatible relationships. Males did not differ across the type of relationship in the level of aggression that they were expected to display. The connection between investment in a relationship and aggression is considered.     

Hidden Second‐order Stationary Spatial Point Processes

In the existing statistical literature, the almost default choice for inference on inhomogeneous point processes is the most well‐known model class for inhomogeneous point processes: reweighted second‐order stationary processes. In particular, the K‐function related to this type of inhomogeneity is presented as the inhomogeneous K‐function. In the present paper, we put a number of inhomogeneous model classes (including the class of reweighted second‐order stationary processes) into the common general framework of hidden second‐order stationary processes, allowing for a transfer of statistical inference procedures for second‐order stationary processes based on summary statistics to each of these model classes for inhomogeneous point processes. In particular, a general method to test the hypothesis that a given point pattern can be ascribed to a specific inhomogeneous model class is developed. Using the new theoretical framework, we reanalyse three inhomogeneous point patterns that have earlier been analysed in the statistical literature and show that the conclusions concerning an appropriate model class must be revised for some of the point patterns.     

The role of organizational facilitators in promoting job-related mental health and group service effectiveness: a two-wave analysis

This study aimed to add to knowledge by providing a more systematic integration of work characteristics, workers’ health and performance. The two-wave multi-source study was conducted to test the relationship over time between the healthy states of groups of service-oriented workers and their service effectiveness when their organizations provide facilitators such as training, technical support and autonomy. The study takes healthy states to be a composite of affective-motivational and competent collective states (collective vigour and service competence) and service effectiveness. Service effectiveness was a combination of service quality as assessed by customers and their loyalty intentions. Data from 53 hotels and restaurants in Spain were aggregated from 256 boundary workers (i.e. workers in direct contact with customers) and 530 customers at Time 1 and from 470 customers at Time 2 six month later. Structural equation modelling showed that organizational facilitators at Time 1 were related to the service effectiveness reported by customers at Time 2, and also that there was a relationship between service effectiveness at Time 1 and the healthy states reported by the groups at Time 2. That is, contrary to what is widely believed, there was an influence of performance on well-being.     

Identifying the determinants of foreign direct investment: a data-specific model selection approach

In this paper, we examine the potential determinants of foreign direct investment. For this purpose, we apply new exact subset selection procedures, which are based on idealized assumptions, as well as their possibly more plausible empirical counterparts to an international data set to select the optimal set of predictors. Unlike the standard model selection procedures AIC and BIC, which penalize only the number of variables included in a model, and the subset selection procedures RIC and MRIC, which consider also the total number of available candidate variables, our data-specific procedures even take the correlation structure of all candidate variables into account. Our main focus is on a new procedure, which we have designed for situations where some of the potential predictors are certain to be included in the model. For a sample of 73 developing countries, this procedure selects only four variables, namely imports, net income from abroad, gross capital formation, and GDP per capita. An important secondary finding of our study is that the data-specific procedures, which are based on extensive simulations and are therefore very time-consuming, can be approximated reasonably well by the much simpler exact methods.     

Genetic algorithms with path relinking for the minimum tardiness permutation flowshop problem

In this work three genetic algorithms are presented for the permutation flowshop scheduling problem with total tardiness minimisation criterion. The algorithms include advanced techniques like path relinking, local search and a procedure to control the diversity of the population. We also include a speed up procedure in order to reduce the computational effort needed for the local search technique, which results in large CPU time savings. A complete calibration of the different parameters and operators of the proposed algorithms by means of a design of experiments approach is also given. We carry out a comparative evaluation with the best methods that can be found in the literature for the total tardiness objective, and with adaptations of other state-of-the-art methods originally proposed for other objectives, mainly makespan. All the methods have been implemented with and without the speed up procedure in order to test its effect. The results show that the proposed algorithms are very effective, outperforming the remaining methods of the comparison by a considerable margin.