Accumulation Strategies Research Articles

Using stable isotopes and C:N ratios to examine the life‐history strategies and nutritional sources of larval lampreys

Natural abundance stable-isotope analysis (δ(13)C and δ(15)N) and C:N ratios were used to study the ammocoete phase of two common non-parasitic lamprey species (least brook lamprey Lampetra aepyptera and American brook lamprey Lethenteron appendix) in two tributaries of the Ohio River (U.S.A.). The C:N ratios suggest that each species employs different lipid accumulation strategies to support its metamorphosis and recruitment into an adult animal. Ammocoete δ(13)C values generally increased with increasing C:N values. In contrast to δ(13)C, ammocoete δ(15)N values were weakly related to the total length (LT) in L. aepyptera, but positively correlated to both LT and C:N ratios in L. appendix. In L. appendix, C:N also correlated positively with LT, and presumably age. A Bayesian mixing model using δ(13)C and δ(15)N was used to estimate nutritional subsidies of different potential food resources to ammocoetes at each site. The models suggested that although nutritional subsidies to ammocoetes varied as a function of site, ammocoetes were generally reliant on large contributions (42-62% at three sites) from aquatic plants. Contributions from aquatic sediment organic matter were also important at all sites (32-63%) for ammocoetes, with terrestrially derived plant materials contributing smaller amounts (4-33%). These findings provide important insights into the feeding ecology and nutrition of two species of lampreys. They also suggest that similar and other quantitative approaches are required to (1) fully understand how the observed stable-isotopes ratios are established in ammocoetes and (2) better assess ammocoete nutritional subsidies in different natal streams.

Practical Investing: Evaluating Actively Managed Mutual Funds in Relation to their Respective Indexes

In today’s world, every working individual is faced with the enormous goal of preparing for retirement and evaluating the myriad of investment options toward that end. This article analyzes actively managed mutual funds in relation to their respective indexes in an attempt to identify which type of investment may be the best long-term wealth accumulation strategy. Specifically, this study focuses on evaluating an investor’s options in preparing for retirement. The average working individual is not equipped to and/or interested in analyzing investment choices, and this study seeks to provide the everyday investor with tools to make better-informed decisions about retirement investing, based on a 10-year historical analysis of annualized rates of returns for mutual funds and their respective indexes.

Increase in takeover protection and firm knowledge accumulation strategy

Research summary: We argue that the extent to which a firm faces takeover threats affects its knowledge structure. In particular, takeover threats may lead to managers' reluctance to adopt a strategy toward firm-specific knowledge accumulation because implementing this strategy requires them to acquire specialized skills, which are at risk under takeover threats. Conversely, takeover protection leads to an increase in firm-specific knowledge. Further, the relationship between takeover protection and firm-specific knowledge is positively moderated by managerial ownership, which helps align managerial interests with those of shareholders. But the relationship is negatively moderated by managerial tenure, as long-tenured managers have already committed to their firms. Using a differences-in-differences method with Delaware antitakeover rulings in the mid-1990s as an exogenous shock, we found results supporting these arguments. Managerial summary: We examined how changes in the Delaware antitakeover rulings in mid-1990s affected the knowledge structure of firms incorporated in Delaware. We reasoned that with a greater level of takeover protection, top managers of those firms incorporated in Delaware felt higher job security, thus providing them stronger incentives to make strategic decisions toward the development of firm-specific knowledge and to make corresponding human capital investments in specialized skills. Empirically, firms incorporated in Delaware were found to have an increase in the level of firm-specific knowledge in their knowledge structure after the mid-1990s. Furthermore, our analysis suggests that the role of takeover protection on top manager incentives is particularly salient when the managers are awarded with more company shares and when the managers have shorter organizational tenure. Copyright © 2015 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.

Infective Juveniles of the Entomopathogenic Nematode, Steinernema feltiae Produce Cryoprotectants in Response to Freezing and Cold Acclimation.

Steinernema feltiae is a moderately freeze-tolerant entomopathogenic nematode which survives intracellular freezing. We have detected by gas chromatography that infective juveniles of S. feltiae produce cryoprotectants in response to cold acclimation and to freezing. Since the survival of this nematode varies with temperature, we analyzed their cryoprotectant profiles under different acclimation and freezing regimes. The principal cryoprotectants detected were trehalose and glycerol with glucose being the minor component. The amount of cryoprotectants varied with the temperature and duration of exposure. Trehalose was accumulated in higher concentrations when nematodes were acclimated at 5°C for two weeks whereas glycerol level decreased from that of the non-acclimated controls. Nematodes were seeded with a small ice crystal and held at -1°C, a regime that does not produce freezing of the nematodes but their bodies lose water to the surrounding ice (cryoprotective dehydration). This increased the levels of both trehalose and glycerol, with glycerol reaching a higher concentration than trehalose. Nematodes frozen at -3°C, a regime that produces freezing of the nematodes and results in intracellular ice formation, had elevated glycerol levels while trehalose levels did not change. Steinernema feltiae thus has two strategies of cryoprotectant accumulation: one is an acclimation response to low temperature when the body fluids are in a cooled or supercooled state and the infective juveniles produce trehalose before freezing. During this process a portion of the glycerol is converted to trehalose. The second strategy is a rapid response to freezing which induces the production of glycerol but trehalose levels do not change. These low molecular weight compounds are surmised to act as cryoprotectants for this species and to play an important role in its freezing tolerance.

Living the good life? The rise of urban mixed-use enclaves in Metro Manila

Gated communities and other forms of privatized enclaves have become features of many cities. The rise of urban mixed-use enclaves, which integrate functions of work, entertainment and living, is a relatively new and understudied phenomenon that is expanding rapidly throughout the Global South. In this article, we advance the concept of enclave urbanism through a case study of Eastwood City in Metro Manila, the Philippines. We trace the enabling factors for mixed-use enclave creation and assess how the different functions are marketed and integrated in practice into one “live–work–play” development. Based on extensive qualitative research, we argue that the global capital accumulation strategy of real estate developers leads to a strong focus on production and entertainment functions, but neglects questions of liveability. We reflect on the implications of our findings for mega-urban regions and urban studies research.

Settler colonial urbanism: notes from Minneapolis and the life of Thomas Barlow Walker

This article considers the explicit link between the historical production of the Twin Cities metropolitan area (Minneapolis and St. Paul, MN) and the violence of settler colonization by examining the life and contributions of one of the urban region’s most celebrated ‘city builders’, Thomas Barlow Walker. Drawing on recent scholarship in the emergent subfield of settler-colonial studies, it demonstrates that Walker’s rise to local fame and fortune is inseparable from strategies of dispossessive accumulation that operated to valorize and legitimate the territorial and social claims of settler colonists, over and above those of Indigenous peoples. In doing so, this article aims to challenge revisionist presentations that interpret the urban region as a strictly settler creation and demonstrates that settler colonial dispossession retains an explicit material trace in the urban present.

LGAR - Land grabs, the agrarian question and the corporate food regime

Over the last decade civil society organizations and activist-scholars have pointed to “land grabbing” as one of the central issues to have emerged in the world food system. In particular, land grabbing was identified as a new and immediate international development issue by the non-governmental organization GRAIN in 2008 (www.farmlandgrab.org). Since that time land grabbing has generated a voluminous literature of a highly variable quality—some scholarship is outstanding and some is shoddy (Oya, 2013). This contribution seeks to clarify what constitutes land grabbing and why it takes place, as well as the key challenge that scholars and civil society activists face in confronting land grabbing in the context of the question of feeding the world. The central argument is that when a structuralist political economy is used to interpret the land grab phenomenon, it becomes analytically clear that contemporary land deals demonstrate that dispossession by displacement, or what has historically been known as the “so-called primitive accumulation”, has been resurrected as an accumulation strategy of global capitalism witnessing, for the first time in decades, the limits to the market. It is an accumulation strategy that cannot, however, deliver food justice or deal with the climate emergency.

Simultaneous regulation of cell size and chromosome replication in bacteria.

Bacteria are able to maintain a narrow distribution of cell sizes by regulating the timing of cell divisions. In rich nutrient conditions, cells divide much faster than their chromosomes replicate. This implies that cells maintain multiple rounds of chromosome replication per cell division by regulating the timing of chromosome replications. Here, we show that both cell size and chromosome replication may be simultaneously regulated by the long-standing initiator accumulation strategy. The strategy proposes that initiators are produced in proportion to the volume increase and is accumulated at each origin of replication, and chromosome replication is initiated when a critical amount per origin has accumulated. We show that this model maps to the incremental model of size control, which was previously shown to reproduce experimentally observed correlations between various events in the cell cycle and explains the exponential dependence of cell size on the growth rate of the cell. Furthermore, we show that this model also leads to the efficient regulation of the timing of initiation and the number of origins consistent with existing experimental results.

App-centric mobile media and commoditization: Implications for the future of the open Web

This paper traces linkages between the commoditization of the Web and what we call “app-centric media.” By this we mean a media environment composed of a multitude of discrete-but-connected software applications and their associated protocols, platforms, frameworks, and institutions. The rapid growth of app-centric media, we argue, is directly dependent on the development and commercialization of the (mobile) Internet, as well as on the business models embedded in the development of key native app platforms such as iOS and Android. The emergence of app-centric media, particularly in relation to mobile media, is having a marked effect on conceptualizations of the Web. The prevailing rhetoric concerning the development of the mobile Internet and app-centric media employs imagery of autonomy, empowerment, and independence for both the users and producers of apps. We argue that the commoditization central to the commercial development of the mobile Internet evidences a fusion of neoliberal rhetoric valorizing worker autonomy, individual empowerment, and entrepreneurial independence, with a mode of production consonant with “cognitive capitalism” (Dyer-Witheford, 2014; Vercellone, 2007). Our analysis is divided into three sections. The first looks at the early development of the mobile Internet in relation to the accumulation strategies of cognitive capitalism including the structural importance of “value networks” and the “putting-out system”; the second deals with the commercialization models underpinning the two dominant app platforms, Apple’s iOS and Android; the third addresses the development of HTML as a means of production and describes how HTML5 is framed as a prospectively more “open” competitor to the existing platform duopoly. It concludes by briefly examining the development of the Firefox OS mobile platform—and whether this platform resists or incorporates the forms of commoditization associated with app-centric media generally.

Constitutive modeling of plain concrete subjected to cyclic uniaxial compressive loading

The paper presents a constitutive modeling for concrete in compression that takes into account the damage increment for constant and variable amplitude stress cycles. It is based on the model proposed by Sima et al. modified to improve the damage accumulation strategy. The method makes use of the envelope theory and can potentially be used for fatigue analysis. The comparison with experimental tests results available in literature and tests carried out by the Authors allowed the validation of the constitutive model.

Water, Water Lords, and Caste: A Village Study from Gujarat, India

Access to and distribution of water is deeply intertwined with structures of power. Strategies of accumulation by dispossession have acquired sustained significance under contemporary regimes of gl...

A PRODUÇÃO DA NATUREZA COMO ESTRATÉGIA DE ACUMULAÇÃO

Aims to understand the production of nature as accumulation strategy analyzing the acquisition of biotech company FuturaGene by Suzano Pulp and Paper. It starts with the hypothesis that such acquisition has the mark of the production of nature as an accumulation strategy, as supports us the Marxist geographer Neil Smith. It proposes a geographical reading of this movement of capital in order to establish a critical reflection about how Suzano has used new mechanisms of accumulation, as the development of biotechnology, to enlarge their profits and convert the discourse of sustainability in commodification of nature. The text is divided into four parts, plus the introduction: the first part is promoted a historical overview of Suzano; then it is analyzed critically the acquisition of FuturaGene; the third part explores the concept of production of nature as a response to the need to understand the case studied, as well as it presents the geographical reading of the production of nature as accumulation strategy in order to show how the acquisition of FuturaGene is in line with the current Suzano growth strategy; Finally, in the conclusions, it promotes a summary of the observations considered pointing out that the raised elements allows the assumption that the acquisition of FuturaGene by Suzano Papel e Celulose indicates for new capitalist accumulation mechanisms.

Raising Successful Children: Children as Accumulation Strategy and the Renegotiation of Parenting Arrangements in Singapore

This paper examines how material and emotional investments in childrearing are rendered culturally meaningful in Chinese middle-class families in Singapore, and its consequences for family life. The competitive education system is a major concern for families with young children, and parents often invest substantial resources and energy in their children’s upbringing. The ‘overburdening’ of middle-class schoolchildren appears in most modern societies, as childhood has become a site of accumulation and commodification. But how can we understand the cultural logics of this seemingly global phenomenon? How is the representation of the child as accumulation strategy entangled with a gendered renegotiation of parenting strategies in everyday life? How do states shape and define notions of the value of children in and through existing policies and ideologies? Based on ethnographic data, I will illustrate how parents with young children perceive and handle childrearing, parenting arrangements and the meaning of educational success.

Housing prices in urban areas

This paper develops a framework to explain the uneven development of housing prices in cities. Since the main price component of housing is capitalized rent, the financial base of this rent is analysed. Therefore three categories of accumulation strategies are defined: places of production, places of consumption and places of business services. The restructuring of urban economies after the crisis of Fordism is interpreted as a shift from places of production to places of consumption or business services. Subsequently, the disciplining function of places of production on housing prices eroded, resulting in uneven price developments.

France in limbo: On the struggles over accumulation strategies in models of capitalism – The case of the pacte de responsabilité

In January 2014, France’s socialist president announced a major turn in his crisis exit strategy, the pacte de responsabilite, providing up to €35 billion in tax reductions to companies. By analysing the discourses of different actors of the left bloc (trade unions and parties), I seek to show how France is currently struggling with the accumulation strategy at the base of the French model of capitalism. While some actors of the left bloc pursue the continuation or strengthening of an accumulation strategy led by internal demand, others are accepting of or pursuing the export orientation favoured by supranational actors like the EU. Meanwhile, it remains to be seen whether the path of capital-friendly austerity that bolsters export orientation will be a successful strategy for Hollande and for France’s political economy.

Is income breeding an appropriate construct for waterfowl?

Breeding birds use a range of nutrient accumulation and allocation strategies to meet the nutritional demands of clutch formation and incubation. On one end of the spectrum, capital breeders use stored nutrients acquired prior to clutch formation and incubation to sustain metabolism during reproduction, while on the opposite end, income breeders derive nutrients solely from exogenous sources on the breeding grounds. Blue-winged Teal (Anas discors) are an ideal candidate to test for adoption of an income strategy among migratory waterfowl because of their small body size, temperate breeding range, and timing of reproduction relative to pulses in nutrient availability within breeding habitats. We collected migrating and pre-breeding Blue-winged Teal (n = 110) during the warmest spring in over a century in the southern edge of the species’ breeding range, which produced ideal conditions to test for adoption of an income breeding strategy among migratory waterfowl. Regression analyses revealed that females accumulated protein and fat reserves early in follicle development and appeared to mobilize at least some reserves coincident with the onset of clutch formation. Accumulation and subsequent mobilization of nutrient reserves was inconsistent with adherence to an income breeding strategy and suggested breeding Blue-winged Teal used capital (albeit locally acquired) for reproduction. Our results add to existing knowledge on the ubiquity of endogenous nutrient reserve accumulation prior to and during reproduction by waterfowl, perhaps suggesting endogenous nutrient reserves are universally used for clutch formation or incubation to some degree. If indeed Blue-winged Teal and other waterfowl universally use capital for breeding, research and conservation efforts should shift from evaluating whether an income breeding strategy is used and focus on when and where necessary capital is acquired prior to clutch formation.

Capitalist Formations of Enclosure: Space and the Extinction of the Commons

Despite their theoretical and political potential, recent debates on enclosure usually lack an effective consideration of how space is mobilized in the process of dispossession. This article connects the analysis of enclosure's general spatial rationality to a range of illustrations of its particular formations and procedures. Enclosure is understood as one of capitalism's “universal territorial equivalents”, a polymorphous technique with variegated expressions in time but also with a consistent logic that uses the spatial erosion of the commons to subsume non-commodified, self-managed social spaces. In response to the ever-changing nature of commoning, successive regimes of enclosure reshape the morphologies of deprivation and their articulation to other state and market apparatuses in order to meet shifting strategies of capital accumulation and social reproduction. Through a spatially nuanced account of these phenomena, I outline a tentative genealogy of enclosure formations that allows tracking diverse geographies of dispossession across different scales and regulatory contexts in various historical stages of capitalist development.

The Oxford Handbook of Global Modernisms

The Oxford Handbook of Global Modernisms

Biokapitalismus und Inwertsetzung der Körper

The article discusses the ways in which bio-capitalism has been analyzed and criticized during the last decade. In contrast to analyses that reduce bio-capitalism to the emergence of bio-tech-industries and the respective transformations of capitalist accumulation, the author argues for an understanding of bio-capitalism as specific mode of bio-politics that does not only involve new strategies of accumulation but also transformations of subjectivities and modes of livings. In particular, the article explores three critical perspectives – bioethics, the critique of marketization, and attempts to rethink political economy – and asks how they contribute to a critical understanding of bio-capitalist modes of the production, circulation and consumption of body materials.

Binging and purging: agrofood capitalism and the body as socioecological fix

Theorizations of the spatial fix classically look to geographical expansion as the fix for capitalism's perennial crises of overaccumulation. Recent scholarship, evident in this theme issue, extends this thinking to the socioecological, recognizing that many ‘fixes’ these days involve appropriating or reconfiguring nature anew. This paper extends this yet further, by considering the body as a site of socioecological fixes. In recognition of Harvey's original notion of the spatial fix being always in relation to limits, this theorization puts a finer point on scholarship on the body as an accumulation strategy which has not always acknowledged the dialectical elements of this strategy. The body as a site of both limits and fixes is traced through the case of food marketing and processing strategies designed to overcome the obstacle to capitalist accumulation enshrined in Engel's law. These have in part contributed to the so-called obesity epidemic; and they are also involved in the commodified cures designed to resolve it—metabolism-defying diet foods being the example par excellence. These are designed to overcome particular limits of accumulation but, in doing so, produce new problems that are only partially resolved. Although the examples provided in this paper are limited to obesity and its putative cures, the larger point is to shed light on capitalism's potential to significantly rework bodily processes and spaces in ways conducive to ongoing accumulation, as immanent in the bioeconomy.