The Hiroshima memory complex

The atomic bomb attack on Hiroshima on August 6, 1945 is one of the most powerful global memories. While the literature on global memories has greatly expanded in recent decades, Hiroshima remains surprisingly understudied. In addressing this lacuna, this paper develops a new theoretical prism for the study of global memories. It argues that the Hiroshima memory cannot be understood in isolation, but rather as the hub in a broader memory complex. This complex is the result of symbolic dialogues that connect Hiroshima with such different events, situations, and memories as Nanjing, Pearl Harbor, the Cold War, and so on. The paper demonstrates how these dialogues have been forged, often in the context of substantial controversy. While distinctly sociological in orientation, the paper takes its main theoretical inspiration from cultural, literary, and history scholars such as Jan and Aleida Assmann, Sebastian Conrad, Astrid Erll, Ann Rigney, Michael Rothberg, Aby Warburg and Mikhael Bakhtin.     

Contextualization and Context Theorizing in Teams Research: A Look Back and a Path Forward

In this paper we review recent field research on teams in the workplace with the objective to help advance research about teams and their external context. We investigate contextualization by reviewing the research settings in which teams have been studied, and we investigate context theorizing by reviewing work where external context variables have been explicitly modeled. We propose guidelines to improve contextualization and avenues to explore context theorizing.     

The Optimal Income Taxation of Couples

This paper analyzes the general nonlinear optimal income tax for couples, a multidimensional screening problem. Each couple consists of a primary earner who always participates in the labor market, but makes an hours‐of‐work choice, and a secondary earner who chooses whether or not to work. If second‐earner participation is a signal of the couple being better (worse) off, we prove that optimal tax schemes display a positive tax (subsidy) on secondary earnings and that the tax (subsidy) on secondary earnings decreases with primary earnings and converges to zero asymptotically. We present calibrated microsimulations for the United Kingdom showing that decreasing tax rates on secondary earnings is quantitatively significant and consistent with actual income tax and transfer programs.     

Researchers experience of misconduct in research in Malaysian higher education institutions

This article offers a qualitative analysis of research misconduct witnessed by researchers during their careers, either by research students or fellow researchers, when conducting or supervising research in their respective departments. Interviews were conducted with 21 participants from various research backgrounds and with a range of research experience, from selected universities in Malaysia. Our study found that misbehavior such as manipulating research data, misrepresentation of research outcomes, plagiarism, authorship disputes, breaching of research protocols, and unethical research management was witnessed by participants among junior and senior researchers, albeit for different reasons. This indicates that despite the steps taken by the institutions to monitor research misconduct, it still occurs in the research community in Malaysian institution of higher education. Therefore, it is important to admit that misconduct still occurs and to create awareness and knowledge of it, particularly among the younger generation of researchers. The study concludes that it is better for researchers to be aware of the behaviors that are considered misconduct as well as the factors that contribute to misconduct to solve this problem.     

Bildung and intercultural understanding

The concept of Bildung, sometimes translated as self-cultivation, is located at the core of an influential tradition of educational thought. A key question concerns the relationship between Bildung and interculturality. Drawing on Wilhelm von Humboldt and Hans-Georg Gadamer, and on the so-called transformative learning theory, Bildung can be interpreted as a process of transforming one’s meaning perspective in encounters with others. A meaning perspective is a set of largely implicit presuppositions underlying one’s habitual ways of thinking, feeling and acting. Confrontation with alternative perspectives can be an opportunity to become aware of one’s own perspective, to critically assess it and to transform it. Thus conceived, Bildung is closely related to interculturality.     

Democracy: The Rule of the 'Demos' - Who is That? The Inherent Contradictions of Modern 'Democratic' Mass Societies

Real-existing democracies tend towards ethnocracies and closed-shop systems. Over-coming the crisis of democracy necessitates its transformation in a new 'commonwealth of persons'. This, in turn, requires the re-theorizing of political action, including of the role of political parties, and the reclaiming of citizenship based on responsibility.     

A WHITER SHADE OF PALE: ON THE POLITICAL ECONOMY OF REGULATORY INSTRUMENTS

We consider an intertemporal policy game between changing governments that differ in their attitudes towards a particular feature of market outcomes, exemplified with environmental pollution. When in power, a government will choose policy instruments and set strictness of regulation with a view to influencing the policy of future, possibly different, governments. We demonstrate that a “brown” government favours emission quotas over effluent taxes, as quotas establish property rights that are costly to reverse. Conversely, a “green” government prefers to regulate by taxes, in order to limit the incentives of future brown governments to ease regulations. Strategic behaviour tends to exaggerate policy differences (making green governments greener and brown governments browner) compared to when such strategic considerations were not an issue. (JEL: D81, D9, H23, L51, Q28, Q38)