Hidden in full view: the organization of public secrecy in Miéville’s The City and the City

ABSTRACT

In this article, we explore China Mieville’s novel The City and the City as a literary experiment for analyzing the dynamics of public secrecy. We explore public secrets as an intrinsic part of organizational life and as a framework for paying attention to the politics of organizing. First, we focus on the novel’s invention and use of the verb ‘unseeing’ to bring out the embodied and sensuous aspects of public secrecy as part of organizational processes. Second we unfold how, although the content of public secrets may turn out to be less spectacular than expected, it is exactly their mundaneness which is key to their political importance. This is important because in an increasingly disorganized and uncertain world, secrecy proliferates and the visibility of secrecy is often a strategic move to justify certain hidden actions.     

The “ethical loneliness” of male sexual violence survivors in Northern Uganda: gendered reflections on silencing

In this article, I explore the gendered silencing of conflict-related sexual violence against men and of male survivors’ lived realities in Northern Uganda using the frame of masculinities. Utilizing Stauffer’s conceptual framework of “ethical loneliness,” I elucidate how male survivors’ experiences of sexual violence are characterized by various layers of externally imposed silences by different actors and institutions often over decades. I demonstrate that the harms experienced by survivors in Northern Uganda are characterized by silence, isolation and abandonment, “compounded by the cruelty of wrongs not being heard” and constituted through multiple rounds of neglect. Exemplified through the narrative of a male survivor, I argue that in particular, the externally imposed silencing by institutions designed to listen entrenches further harms. I unpack how these layered silences are gendered and conditioned by socially constructed incompatibilities between masculinities and vulnerabilities, which disallow men to openly speak about their sexual violations and to seek services and support. Working with the concept of “ethical loneliness,” I propose a novel theoretical framework for analyzing the effects of externally imposed and gender-specific silencing with wider utility beyond male sexual violence, applicable to survivors of political and wartime gendered violence more broadly.     

IMMIGRANTS' GENES: GENETIC DIVERSITY AND ECONOMIC DEVELOPMENT IN THE UNITED STATES

This paper examines the relationship between immigrants' genetic diversity and economic development in the United States during the late nineteenth and the beginning of the twentieth centuries, a period commonly referred to as the age of mass migration from Europe to the New World. Our panel model estimates show that during this period, immigrants' genetic diversity is significantly positively correlated with measures of U.S. counties' economic development. There exists also a significant positive relationship between immigrants' genetic diversity in 1870 and contemporaneous measures of U.S. counties' average income. (JEL J11, O51, Z13)     

Polarization, Information Collection and Electoral Control

We identify the conditions under which voters can induce political parties to collect information and to select policies which are optimal from the representative voter’s point of view. We show that when parties are office motivated the voting rule should encourage parties to collect information. Voting rules that focus on the opposition party sometimes dominate voting rules that focus on the incumbent party. When parties are policy motivated, they also have to be motivated to select good policies. Generally, it is easier to stimulate policy motivated parties than office motivated parties to collect information. However, in contrast to office motivated parties, policy motivated parties will sometimes select policies that conflict with the representative voter’s interest.     

How Opportunistic Culture Affects Financial Performance in Outsourcing Relationships: A Meta-Analysis

Although a substantial body of research has analyzed the overall impact of outsourcing on firm performance measured in shareholder value, a major portion of the between-study variance remains unexplained. Asset specificity related to the outsourcing category (e.g., a business process versus information technology) alone can explain only some of the observed differences in stock market reactions. By integrating insights from transaction cost economics and outsourcing research, we first explain how expected buyer opportunism negatively affects the overall performance of the outsourcing relationship and ultimately, the buyer's own shareholder value. We further argue that this opportunism can be predicted by national culture. We test this hypothesis by applying meta-analytic techniques to compare 4216 outsourcing announcements of firms from 19 cultural backgrounds. The results reveal that an opportunistic culture, represented by a high level of assertiveness combined with a low level of institutional collectivism, is a highly statistically significant predictor of stock market reactions to outsourcing announcements. When further integrating the outsourcing category, the meta-analytic weighted least squares regression becomes a strong predictor of stock market reactions to an outsourcing announcement.     

Interkulturelle Kommunikation als Voraussetzung für interkulturelles Coaching unter Berücksichtigung der rumänischen Kultur

Professional coaching in intercultural contexts requires adapting the “tool” of coaching to this specific focus. Coaching in intercultural contexts is based on a thorough understanding of intercultural communication. History, and specifically social history, of cultures and nations are essential to understanding intercultural processes. The intercultural coach also needs to possess advanced foreign language competence in order to communicate meanings in the target language.     

Phillips-Perron-type unit root tests in the nonlinear ESTAR framework

Summary In this paper, we propose Phillips-Perron type, semi-parametric testing procedures to distinguish a unit root process from a mean-reverting exponential smooth transition autoregressive one. The limiting nonstandard distributions are derived under very general conditions and simulation evidence shows that the tests perform better than the standard Phillips-Perron or Dickey-Fuller tests in the region of the null. We would like to thank conference participants of the Pfingsttagung 2005 in Münster for their helpful comments.