Jewish Identity in the Modern World: Its Nature and Dynamics, pt. 2

Discussion of Jewish Identity and its development through the Enlightenment, Antisemitism and Zionism.

Jewish Identity in the Modern World: Its Nature and Dynamics, pt. 1

Discussion of the development of Jewish identity, considering the Enlightenment, Antisemitism, and Zionism.

Democracy, cosmopolitanism and national identity in a ‘globalising’ world

Broadly globalising processes have been in train for centuries, but contemporary discourse about globalisation is here located within a specific historical context, particularly characterised by new forms of communications and the pressures on states produced by the decline of Keynesianism and the end of the Cold War. Coincident changes also led to a growing interest in national identities, marked not least by the founding of this journal in 1999. Globalisation, a series of processes rather than a single force, has a range of effects on states, nations and national identities, including accommodation and adaptation as well as resistance. Indeed, globalising forces, such as democratisation, are shown to require nation-building. Attempts to impose order on international society through cosmopolitan devices are arguably more inimical to national identities. As with nations, cosmopolitanism involves an imagined community. Because this necessarily exists outside time, the building of a sense of trust and commonality across people and territory is however more challenging. Without popular ownership, it is argued, cosmopolitanism is often more likely to appear a threat than a boon. Building a global civil society, or indeed local democracies, is also unlikely when so many societies still lack local versions anchored in some form of national identity.

The world without outside

The world is all that there is. In the world, ontology and epistemology coincide. The thing and the perspective are part of it, scale is ingested in its multiplicity, communication stops at the world's edge. By reading together Deleuze and Guattari's plane of immanence and Niklas Luhmann's proto-global concept of Weltgesellschaft (“world society”), I suggest a conceptualisation of the world as the materiality of the multiple spaces of creation in an insular, all-inclusive immanence. Deprived of an outside, the world pushes its own understanding of circumference through, first, the expansion of its own limits through the process of worlding, and, second, the multiplication of modes of material (self-)production through its process of othering. Thus, the world swells up from the inside and expands on both the material and the semantic level, producing a multiplicity of fractal microcosms. Issues of responsibility and justice arise that are intricately linked to the materiality of the world and take place in and between the various bodies and spaces of the world but without an overarching hierarchy or principle. This approach is a way of counteracting the all-pervasive Hegelian understanding of synthesis, arguing instead for a plenitude that brims with positivity and that can never become fully complete. The world remains its own infinite process of worlding.

Against divisiveness: Digital workers of the world unite! A rejoinder to César Bolaño and Eloy Vieira

This piece is a short rejoinder to César Bolaño’s paper The Political Economy of the Internet and related articles (e.g., Comor, Foley, Huws, Reveley, Rigi and Prey, Robinson) that center around the relevance of Marx’s labor theory of value for understanding social media. I argue that Dallas Smythe’s assessment of advertising was made to distinguish his approach from the one by Baran and Sweezy. Smythe developed the idea of capital’s exploitation of the audience at a time when both feminist and anti-imperialist Marxists challenged the orthodox idea that only white factory workers are exploited. The crucial question is how to conceptualize productive labor. This is a theoretical, normative, and political question. A mathematical example shows the importance of the “crowdsourcing” of value-production on Facebook. I also point out parallels of the contemporary debate to the Soviet question of who is a productive or unproductive worker in the Material Product System.

The Turtle Garden: Tan Kah Kee’s last spiritual world

This paper explores the role of diasporic subjects in China’s heritage-making through a case study of the Turtle Garden built by Tan Kah Kee in Xiamen, China. Tan is the first person with Overseas Chinese background who built museums in the P.R. China and has been regarded as a symbol of Overseas Chinese patriotism. This paper argues that the Turtle Garden, conceptualised as a postcolonial ‘carnivalesque’ space, is more than a civic museum for public education. It reflects the owner’s highly complex and sometimes conflicting museum outlook embedded in his life experience as a migrant, his encounter with (British) colonialism in Malaya, and integrated with his desire and despair about the Chinese Communist Party’s nation-building project in the 1950s. Rather than a sign of devotion to the socialist motherland as simplistically depicted in China’s discourse, the garden symbolises Tan’s last ‘spiritual world’ where he simultaneously engaged with soul-searching as a returned Overseas Chinese and alternative diasporic imagining of Chinese identities and nation. It brings to light the value of heritage-making outside centralised heritage discourses, and offers an invaluable analytical lens to disentangle the contested and ever shifting relationship between diasporic subjects, cultural heritage and nation-(re)building in the Chinese context and beyond.

Managerial Discretion in the Arab World: New National-Level Antecedents

Based on a sample of six Arabian countries, our study examines the effect of cultural practices on CEO discretion. Using a panel of senior consultants, we extend the national-level framework of managerial discretion and find that an encompassing array of cultural practices play a crucial role in shaping the degree of discretion provided to CEOs. We empirically demonstrate that power distance, future and performance orientation along with gender egalitarianism and assertiveness has positive relationships with managerial discretion. However, institutional collectivism, uncertainty avoidance and humane orientation negatively affect the degree of discretion provided to CEOs. As such, our results indicate that executives are able to take idiosyncratic and bold actions to the extent to which the cultural environment allows them to do so. Finally, we find new national-level antecedents of managerial discretion that haven’t been considered in earlier studies.

An heuristic approach for optimal location of gas supply units in transportation system

The best places to locate the Gas Supply Units (GSUs) on a natural gas systems and their optimal allocation to loads are the key factors to organize an efficient upstream gas infrastructure. The number of GSUs and their optimal location in a gas network is a decision problem that can be formulated as a linear programming problem. Our emphasis is on the formulation and use of a suitable location model, reflecting real-world operations and constraints of a natural gas system. This paper presents a heuristic model, based on lagrangean approach, developed for finding the optimal GSUs location on a natural gas network, minimizing expenses and maximizing throughput and security of supply.The location model is applied to the Iberian high pressure natural gas network, a system modelised with 65 demand nodes. These nodes are linked by physical and virtual pipelines – road trucks with gas in liquefied form. The location model result shows the best places to locate, with the optimal demand allocation and the most economical gas transport mode: by pipeline or by road truck.

Optimization model for medium term natural gas commitment

In this paper we study the optimal natural gas commitment for a known demand scenario. This study implies the best location of GSUs to supply all demands and the optimal allocation from sources to gas loads, through an appropriate transportation mode, in order to minimize total system costs. Our emphasis is on the formulation and use of a suitable optimization model, reflecting real-world operations and the constraints of natural gas systems. The mathematical model is based on a Lagrangean heuristic, using the Lagrangean relaxation, an efficient approach to solve the problem. Computational results are presented for Iberian and American natural gas systems, geographically organized in 65 and 88 load nodes, respectively. The location model results, supported by the computational application GasView, show the optimal location and allocation solution, system total costs and suggest a suitable gas transportation mode, presented in both numerical and graphic supports.