Contingency and Social Change: Collective Engagement in Conditions of Radical Uncertainty

This paper addresses the nexus between contingency, social engagement and change, through investigating the potential of severe (“disruptive”) contingency to bring about new forms of joint agency. By challenging Boltanski's notion of existential tests (which can only be experienced in isolation), the paper argues that social actors can experience disruptive contingent events in an inherently intersubjective manner. Although they severely hinder social interaction, disruptive contingent events enable a possibility of what might be called “negative common knowledge” between social actors which in turn renders certain societal norms meaningless. This possibility is mediated through processes of mutual engagement (calls between actors) that could, further, be transformed into a new “norm circle” (Dave Elder-Vass). Social domination – in particular its “complex” variety – in this context appears as the obstructing of such transformation. A recent political episode in Serbia is analyzed to demonstrate the emancipatory potential of contingency and the logic of complex domination.     

Impact of technology-intensive exports on GDP of Western Balkan Countries

This paper aims to determine, by means of regression analysis, which exported product groups, categorized according to their technological intensity, have the greatest effect on the movements in the volume of GDP p/c of the Western Balkan Countries (WBCs). The analysis, based on statistical-econometric methodology, includes 16 commodity groups per each WBC (Albania; Bosnia and Herzegovina; Croatia; FYR Macedonia; Montenegro; Serbia). The data were collected and presented in accordance with the HS4 system classification, which is also used for development of the ITC’s Trade Map. The results of the analysis show that those commodity groups produced by medium-low and low technology industries have the greatest effect on the change in the volume of GDP p/c in all WBCs in the period 2005–2015.     

IS ECONOMICS A HOUSE DIVIDED? ANALYSIS OF CITATION NETWORKS

We investigate divisions within the citation network in economics using citation data between 1990 and 2010. We consider all partitions of top institutions into two equal‐sized clusters and pick the one that minimizes cross‐cluster citations. The strongest division is much stronger than could be expected to be found under idiosyncratic citation patterns and is consistent with the reputed freshwater/saltwater division in macroeconomics. The division is stable over time but varies across the fields of economics. (JEL A11, D85, I23)     

The praxiological validity of natural scientific practices as a criterion for identifying their unique social-object character: The case of the ‘authentication’ of Goethe's morphological theorem

The author would like to thank Mike Lynch, Eric Livingston, Shelley Schweizer-Bjelic, and the anonymous reviewers of this text for their comments.     

The Promethean role of Europe: changing narratives of the political and scholarly left

ABSTRACT

The gradual abandoning of the ‘socialism in one country’ doctrine during the post-war period and the intensive transformation of European social democracy in the 1990s pushed social democratic politicians and intellectuals into the front line of advocates of a unified and powerful Europe. They contributed to the inclusion of social democratic and environmentalist values in the EU’s official narrative. The success of European integration and George W. Bush’s presidency created the narrative of the Promethean role of Europe. Scholars with a social democratic or environmentalist background created this narrative and it was also shaped by authors’ national contexts.     

Correlation properties of continuous-time autoregressive processes delayed by the inverse of the stable subordinator

Abstract

We define the delayed Lévy-driven continuous-time autoregressive process via the inverse of the stable subordinator. We derive correlation structure for the observed non-stationary delayed Lévy-driven continuous-time autoregressive processes of order p, emphasizing low orders, and we show they exhibit long-range dependence property. Distributional properties are discussed as well.