Ethnicity and place in a ‘disturbed city’: ways of belonging in Imphal,Manipur

This article explores the relationships between ethnicity, place and belonging in the city of Imphal, capital of the state of Manipur in India’s Northeast border region. Manipur has experienced decades of conflict from ethno-nationalist separatism, inter-ethnic territorial disputes and counter-insurgency operations. These ethnic conflicts play out on the urban landscape of Imphal. Control of the city from above is diffused among the civilian government and the armed forces. Non-state actors such as insurgent groups and ethnic organizations exert their own control from below. On such unstable ground, struggles by residents seeking to create place and a sense of belonging affirm ethnic boundaries. These boundaries are not static and the lines between inclusion and exclusion are continually redrawn along existing and emerging fault-lines among the population. Yet these boundaries are also transcended in unusual ways that may seem trivial but in Imphal are essential to realizing alternative ways of belonging.     

Adaptive agent-based manufacturing control and its application to flow shop routing control

The manufacturing industry is currently facing unprecedented challenges from changes and disturbances. The sources of these changes and disturbances are of different scope and magnitude. They can be of a commercial nature, or linked to fast product development and design, or purely operational (e.g. rush order, machine breakdown, material shortage etc.). In order to meet these requirements it is increasingly important that a production operation be flexible and is able to adapt to new and more suitable ways of operating. This paper focuses on a new strategy for enabling manufacturing control systems to adapt to changing conditions both in terms of product variation and production system upgrades. The approach proposed is based on two key concepts: (1) An autonomous and distributed approach to manufacturing control based on multi-agent methods in which so called operational agents represent the key physical and logical elements in the production environment to be controlled – for example, products and machines and the control strategies that drive them and (2) An adaptation mechanism based around the evolutionary concept of replicator dynamics which updates the behaviour of newly formed operational agents based on historical performance records in order to be better suited to the production environment. An application of this approach for route selection of similar products in manufacturing flow shops is developed and is illustrated in this paper using an example based on the control of an automobile paint shop.     

Econometric reviews

New approaches to Modeling, Specification Selection and Econometric Inference, edited by W. A. Barnett and A. R. Gallant.     

Anti-development or identity crisis? Misreading civil society in Meghalaya,India

This paper discusses the complex relationship between civil society and development in Asia by examining the role of ethnic identity in anti-development movements. Local and transnational movements by civil society actors against dams, mines, and deforestation have gained increased attention in academia and activist circles in the last decade, often used as evidence in arguments that development as part of neo-liberalism and/or state-led socialism is faltering. Furthermore, tribal, indigenous, and minority communities are often portrayed as having a closer relationship to the environment, which is seen as instrumental in their opposition to development projects. While agreeing with these arguments to some extent, this paper examines the local context of anti-development movements using research from fieldwork in the Indian state of Meghalaya and argues that struggles over development projects are also struggles over ethnic identity. In Meghalaya, civil society actors from the Khasi ethnic group have opposed several large development projects on the +grounds that these projects will attract labourers from Bangladesh and other parts of India, threatening the survival of the Khasi ethnic group. Damage to the environment, livelihoods, and loss of land are rarely a concern. The failure to recognize the influence of ethnic identity politics in critiques of development raises the risk of misreading both the extent of anti-development sentiments in civil society and the potential for development projects to be reframed by proponents into an acceptable ethnic guise. Furthermore, the actors contesting development through identity politics are overwhelmingly from urban areas, leaving rural people with limited access to civil society. This paper attempts to add a critical perspective to current literature on development and civil society using empirical examples from one of the least researched regions in Asia.     

Methodological Approaches to Assessing Risk Perceptions Associated with Food-Related Hazards

The psychometric approach developed by Slovic and his co-workers has been effectively used to assess risk perceptions associated with different food-related hazards. However, further examination (using questionnaire data and partial correlation techniques) has indicated that technological hazards are highly differentiated from lifestyle hazards, in terms of both hazard control and knowledge about the hazard. Optimistic bias was also seen to vary between hazards. Further research has focused on a particular hazard, genetic engineering. Risk perceptions associated with genetic engineering are underpinned by ethical concern and questions relating to perceived need for the technology, as well as perceptions of risk or harm. However, increasing the specificity of hazard stimuli was found to alter the factor structure of underlying risk perceptions. The utility of preference mapping procedures in determining individual differences in trust in risk regulators is also discussed.     

The Cohort Size‐Wage Relationship in Europe

This paper estimates the impact of cohort size on wages using data on young males in European regions covering 2004–10. The effect of cohort size on wages is identified through an instrumental variables strategy which, in contrast to previous analyses of European data, addresses self‐selection into geographical areas as well as into educational groups. The results suggest that cohort size has a significant negative effect on male wages for individuals with secondary education — the largest group — but not for individuals with less than secondary education or tertiary education. This effect is underestimated if self‐selection into geographical areas is not addressed.     

Psychological and cultural factors in the process of occupational achievement

An eight-equation model embodies the hypothesis that cultural differences among ethnic-religious groups give rise to differences in psychological dispositions, which, though not directly observable, influence occupational achievement, directly or via educational attainment, while being subject to feedback from one or the other of these endogenous variables. Dispositions are reflected in three fallible indicators, constructed from items in a survey interview of native white men in the Detroit area; the survey also secured socioeconomic measures and an estimate of intelligence. The model is block recursive and over-identified. Parameter estimates are secured by a sequence of ordinary least squares and two-stage least squares procedures, after solving out the structural equations to eliminate the unobservable variables. Numerical results do not strongly support the “Protestant Ethic” theory of achievement, but do suggest that the influence of education on occupation is mediated by motivational as well as cognitive and institutional factors.     

A note on deriving rank-dependent utility using additive joint receipts

Luce and Fishburn (1991) derived a general rank-dependent utility model using an operation ⊕ of joint receipt. Their argument rested on an empirically supported property (now) calledsegregation and on the assumption that utility is additive over ⊕. This note generalizes that conclusion to the case where utility need not be additive over ⊕, but rather is of a more general form, which they derived but did not use in their article. Tversky and Kahneman (1992), conjecturing that the joint receipt of two sums of money is simply their sum, criticized that original model because ⊕=+ together with additive utility implies the unacceptable conclusion that the utility of money is proportional to money. In the present generalized theory, if ⊕=+, utility is a negative exponential function of money rather than proportional. Similar results hold for losses. The case of mixed gains and losses is less well understood.