Late 1980s Research Articles

Internal CSR and the decline of organised labour: a possible elective affinity?

Purpose This paper aims to explore the potential relationship between internal corporate social responsibility (CSR) and the decline of organised labour in countries of the global North. Given the opposing trends since the late 20th century and the widespread adherence of internationally recognised labour standards in CSR codes, standards, and reporting frameworks, questions arise about the disparity between CSR rhetoric and practice regarding the collective rights of in-house employees. The paper further explores the tendency in CSR scholarship to overlook violations of collective rights for in-house employees in the global North. Design/methodology/approach To examine whether there is an elective affinity between the rise of CSR and the decline of organised labour, the paper uses a discursive institutionalism approach, providing a meta-theoretical analysis of academic literature on internal CSR. A scoping review methodology was used to identify relevant literature and compile it into an empirical corpus for a metatheoretical analysis. The empirical corpus, consisting of 38 articles, was generated through a Google Scholar (GS) search guided by the following questions: (1) What are the dominant conceptual framings of internal CSR? (2) What are the dominant roles and practical aspects of internal CSR? Findings The paper identifies two key disparities in the literature: (1) between rhetoric and practice regarding the collective rights of in-house employees in the global North and (2) between the extensive CSR research on violations of collective rights of value chain workers and the limited attention to in-house employees’ collective rights. The analysis highlights two factors contributing to these disparities: the integration of internal CSR into the corporate managerial toolbox and the distinction in CSR discourse between core labour standards and workplace issues. The analysis shows that internal CSR has an elective affinity with the decline of organised labour. Research limitations/implications While scoping reviews are often standalone studies, this paper used the methodology for its stated purpose. Limitations include the broad span of internal CSR across various academic fields and reliance solely on GS. Measures taken to enhance inclusivity were unlimited review period, refined inclusion criteria and keywords during the selection process and cross-checks of cited articles. Social implications Considering the implications of the decline of organised labour on workers’ collective voice, poverty and the distribution gap in wealth and income, this paper suggests that for CSR to play a significant role in advancing sustainable social justice, scholars and practitioners should look at ways to reduce the disparity between rhetoric and practice regarding employees’ voice and collective rights. Originality/value The paper lays the foundation for a better understanding of the potential links between internal CSR and the decline of organised labour. It addresses a gap in the literature on the interrelations between CSR and organised labour in the global North and proposes root causes of this gap. This contribution enriches the scarce literature exploring the potential elective affinity between CSR and transformations in the global economy and labour markets since the late 1980s. Finally, the paper deepens the understanding of the implications of CSR for employees’ collective rights and voice as well as for organised labour.

Distributive Conflict, High Inflation, and Stabilization Programs in a Small Open Economy Framework: The Case of Argentina in the 1980s

ABSTRACT The debates between demand-pull and cost-push theories of inflation have shaped stabilization programs since the 1923 German hyperinflation. This article combines elements from the modern revival of the Classical tradition of value and distribution and the Latin American Structuralist Approach to analyse the political economy behind Argentina's high-inflation regime and stabilization policies from 1983 to 1989. Our main hypothesis is that exchange rate dynamics play a crucial role in stabilizing distributive configurations and price dynamics in a small open economy with conflicting claims. High external debt, persistent devaluation expectations, and exchange rate policies imposed by international creditors to safeguard the economy's repayment capacity are identified as the primary causes behind the failure of stabilization attempts in Argentina during the late 1980s.

Not Everyone Will Be Taken into the Future? The Role of Forecasting in International Relations Theory

The 2010s witnessed intensified debates in international academia on the relationship between theory and forecast, but Russian scholarship remained detached from these discussions. This article intends to examine the contribution of theory to forecasting in IR, identifying prospects for combining the prescriptive, explanatory, interpretive and predictive functions of science. It reveals the origins of both theoretical skepticism about prediction and the countercriticism of futile theorizing. The article reveals the limitations of both the hypothetico-deductive model of scholarship, which dominates the discipline, and the statistical inductivism that opposes it. The analysis begins by identifying the different classes of theories in international relations studies. It demonstrates that the basic assumptions of normative, deconstructive, and interpretive theorizing are poorly compatible with prediction. The article further scrutinizes the ambivalent attitude of explanatory theories towards the matter, claiming the fundamental unpredictability of social interactions. It explores the growth in expectations since the late 2000s that the accumulation of big data and the advancement of methods for processing them will provide predictions without relying on explanatory inferences. Nevertheless, the value of scholarship for foreign policy practice requires a combination of theoretical explanations and predictive studies. This article suggests that for theory to play a major role in forecasting, forecasts must play a major role in theorizing. In this sense, reluctance to test their logical inferences with predictions exemplified by scholars poses a barrier to the development of IR studies.

Immunosuppressive therapy: methodological and ethical observations

Over the past 20 years, the therapy of autoimmune diseases has undergone considerable progress. Since the initial use of corticosteroids in the treatment of rheumatoid arthritis in the late 1940s, a large number of therapeutic agents and various treatment protocols have been produced and tested.

Lesotho and the QwaQwa Ski Resort, 1975–82: Border Disputes and South Africa's Increasingly Deadly Responses

Abstract In the late 1970s and early 1980s, the terrain of the diplomatic and security landscape of Southern Africa shifted dramatically. South Africa declared various Bantustans “independent,” but they were not recognized by other countries. Small regional states like Lesotho increasingly took more combative diplomatic stances, aided by Cold War connections and, in this case, a local border dispute. This article examines a proposed ski resort that South Africa wanted to build in the QwaQwa Bantustan on Lesotho's border starting in 1975. Because of Lesotho's diplomatic and military escalation, the Khoptjoane resort was never built, but the lengthy dispute contributed to the sidelining of the apartheid regime's diplomats in favor of its securocrats. Thus, we argue the failed ski resort contributed to the atmosphere in which Pretoria greenlit the Maseru Massacre of 1982, presaging the apartheid regime's increased 1980s willingness to use its military superiority against township residents and Southern African neighbors alike.

The Malacca dilemma of the Raj: the Indian Uprising of 1857, the Second Opium War, and the British proposal of a Kra passage

Abstract In the late 1850s and early 1860s, the idea of building a passage through the Isthmus of Kra in the Malay Peninsula was hotly debated amongst British officials, merchants, and investors. This study finds that the British East India Company's rule over the Straits of Malacca had been a dilemma for itself and British merchants in China. The Second Opium War and the Indian Revolt of 1857 exacerbated the dilemma and pushed some British policymakers and investors to seek an alternative route between India and China. The proposal of the Kra passage was the response and solution to the Malacca dilemma. In historicising the Kra passage proposal and putting it in the context of the British empire's simultaneous crises in Asia in the mid-nineteenth century, the case of the proposed Kra passage reveals the complex relations between different actors within the British empire and the challenges of integrating multiple imperial interests into a British world system

Invisibilization of the unwanted Others? Feminist, queer, and postcolonial perspectives on the 1951 Refugee Convention’s drafting

The 1951 Refugee Convention represents the legal cornerstone of today’s global refugee protection, which is supposed to apply to all refugees regardless of their origin, gender identity, or sexual orientation. But did the Convention’s drafters have such a complex approach in mind? This paper analyzes the Convention’s drafting at the United Nations and the final conference in the late 1940s and early 1950s from feminist, queer, and postcolonial perspectives. By drawing on subalternity and absence, and using interpretive analysis of historical sources, the paper focuses on politics—who was (not) involved in debates—and policy—who was (not) considered under the refugee definition. The analysis reveals pervasive asymmetries, with western androcentrism inherently shaping the drafting. The western, white, heterosexual man was the standard filter for the powerful decision-maker and the protection subject, whereas women, LGBTQ+ and colonized people were neglected in politics and policy. Their exclusion was not merely a side effect of the political landscape at the time but reflects the reproduction of western androcentric power, which ultimately invisibilized the subaltern Others in the creation of international refugee law.

Walter Brendel and the dawn of transplantation research in Germany

Walter Brendel was a physiologist who headed the Institut of Experimental Surgery at the University of Munich (LMU) from 1961 until 1989. His legendary career began with the development of an anti-human lymphocyte globulin (ALG) at his Institute during the late 1960s. The initial successful treatment of a small number of patients culminated in the co-treatment of the first successfully heart-transplanted patient in Capetown, South Africa (successful reversal with ALG of an acute allograft rejection). Walter Brendel was a pioneering personality whose work has laid a wide platform for the promotion of interdisciplinarily conducted innovative research programs in various domains of translational science and medicine. Among the many innovative achievements, the most notable are: discovery of involvement of the alternative pathway of complement activation in hyperacute xenograft rejection; induction of immunological tolerance to horse IgG as a means to prevent anaphylactic reactions during ALG therapy; development and clinical implementation of the extracorporeal shock wave lithotripsy for extracorporeal destruction of renal and ureteral calculi. The legacy of Brendel continues with the foundation of the Walter-Brendel Kolleg für Transplantationsmedizin (i.e., the German Transplant School for Transplantation Medicine), which has been held annually since 1994.

The Question of Blanchot in Beckett’s Three Dialogues and The Unnamable

Abstract While the possible influence of the French writer Maurice Blanchot on Samuel Beckett’s writing has long been one of the more vexing questions in Beckett scholarship, textual echoes, thematic correspondences and circumstantial clues now make it likelier than not that Beckett encountered Blanchot’s writing in the late 1940s and early 1950s. The personal documents of Georges Duthuit—Beckett’s close friend in this period, during the writing of both Three Dialogues (1949) and the ‘Trilogy’ of novels (1951–1953)—shed further light on this connection. They suggest that Three Dialogues is a continuation of Beckett’s decades-long thought on habit, as first articulated in Proust (1930), and that Duthuit (re)introduced Beckett to Blanchot’s work at the time of writing Three Dialogues. This article explores connections between Blanchot’s Thomas l’obscur (1941) and ‘De l’angoisse au langage’ (1943), and published and manuscript versions of Beckett’s Three Dialogues and L’Innommable, as well as between the problematics posed by the latter two texts. Finally, it suggests that L’Innommable is not a reflection but a radicalization of Blanchot’s thought, such that Blanchot missed the full extent of its radicality in his own review of the novel.

Automated robotic systems in surgical practice

The use of robotic systems has long gone beyond experimental medicine. More than 200 thousand operations per year are carried out with the use of just the most popular robotic complex Da Vinci. Further development of robotics will contribute to improvement of quality and accuracy of surgical interventions. Even now, it enables reduction of postoperative complications to almost zero. This review presents the analysis of the results of introducing robots into surgery. An overview of the data presented in PubMed, Cochrane Library, Science Direct and eLIBRARY was performed.

Decarceration in Southern Europe: Notes on Climate Change in the Penal Field

AbstractAgainst the backdrop of the economic and political crises affecting Europe in the late 2000s and early 2010s, incarceration rates began to shrink in many European countries, ushering in a decarceration period that continues to this day—albeit with cross-border divergences. In fact, Europe was the world region with the greatest decline in incarceration rates in the 2010s. Evidently, this unexpected shift stands in stark contrast to the penal populism policies characterising penality in global north regions in the 1990s and 2000s, as well as to the mass incarceration path still followed by many global south jurisdictions in the 2020s. Spain is a suitable national case to examine this recent turn, since Spanish incarceration rates increased almost eightfold in just three decades, before an intriguing and steady decline began that is almost unparalleled in western Europe. This paper focuses on the Spanish case, exploring the background and proximate causes that have enabled the current decarceration scenario. In addition, it scrutinises if and to what extent the changes witnessed in the Spanish case reverberate across wider European regions. In so doing, the paper attempts to grasp the climate change impacting the penal field in many global north jurisdictions.

The Early Formation of the Moscow School of Landscape Painting. Landscape Class of the Moscow School of Painting and Sculpture (MUZHV), 1844–1857

The article delves into the formative years of the landscape class at the Moscow School of Painting and Sculpture (MUZHV), whose growth parallels the advancement of the landscape genre in Russia during the latter half of the 1 9th century. It explores the pioneering efforts of Karl Ivanovich Rabus, the inaugural head of the class, and evaluates his instructional techniques in landscape painting. His methods introduced academic traditions of landscape painting to the School, thereby laying the groundwork for its future development. Additionally, the article delineates the challenges encountered by the nascent landscape painting tradition, attributable to a range of internal and external factors.Drawing from archival records and periodical sources, the author endeavors to reconstruct a detailed portrayal of the class's early years (1844-1857), emphasizing the pivotal role of students in the evolution of artistic life and the formation of the art market in Moscow. The research enhances scholarly knowledge by bringing into focus the identities of the class's students, most of whom are lesser-known artists, alongside their artistic creations, enriching our comprehension of Russian landscape painting during the late 1800s.

The politics of the anti-politics machine of agricultural commercialization: Uganda and Tanzania in the Longue Durée

ABSTRACT Powered by global financial institutions, philanthrocapitalists and development agencies, agricultural commercialization is once again at the forefront of development discourse and policies, especially since the late 2000s. The cornerstone of this development approach is that by investing in raising agricultural productivity, supporting infrastructure, and introducing climate-smart agricultural systems, with private sector investments all along the food value chain, Africa will transform into a breadbasket for the world. In the last decade, Uganda and Tanzania have enthusiastically embraced agricultural modernization discourses, becoming test beds of new ‘frontier’ blueprints: ‘responsible’ agricultural commercialization projects, ‘inclusive’ business models and ‘sustainable’ contract farming schemes. This paper takes issue with the de-politicizing discourse of the value chain paradigm by exploring diachronically the genealogies of agricultural commercialization in Uganda and Tanzania from colonial times, across post-independence state-led modernizations, to the present neoliberal reforms. It argues that mainstream development narratives tagged to commercialization projects have worked as an ‘anti-politics machine’ making invisible to the public eye the widespread land dispossession, rural pauperization and social conflicts it entails.

THE UN ACTIVITIES ON FACILITATING THE APPLICATION OF INFORMATION AND COMMUNICATIONS TECHNOLOGY FOR THE PURPOSES OF DEVELOPMENT IN THE 1990S

In the early 3rd decade in the 21st century, the information and communications technology (hereinafter referred to as ICT) is regarded as an inalienable factor of the international development. This article presents the analysis of the events related to the outset of the UN involvement in this factor promotion at the turn of the 1980s and further until the late 90s. It marks out the most important measures initiated at the UN main and subsidiary bodies aiming at the ICT study as a development factor and the international community’s political will mobilisation on the ICT’s broadest possible adoption and application. Within the period under consideration, three stages marking the expansion of the UN involvement in the ICT issues, from attracting general attention to their importance in the development towards the drafting of recommendations for the international community on bridging the digital divide, are proposed by us. The article finds out that these recommendations just as other UN activities in the development field worked in favour of the globalisation and evidently reflected the neoliberal paradigm. However, in the meantime they counterbalanced market fundamentalists and provided the grounds for the need of planning the international aid for developing nations and guaranteeing social focus in the national ICT policies.

Growing apart: Declining within- and across-locality insurance in rural China

We consider risk sharing in rural China during its rapid economic transformation from the late 1980s through the late 2000s. We document an erosion of consumption insurance against both household-level idiosyncratic and village-level aggregate income shocks, and show that this decline is related to observable economic changes: the shift out of agriculture, the decline of publicly owned Township-and-Village Enterprises, and increased migrant work. Further evidence suggests that as these changes took place at the village level, higher levels of government failed to offset these effects through the tax-and-transfer system, leaving households more exposed to both idiosyncratic and village-aggregate risk.

The transnational entanglements of James Liberty Tadd’s drawing curriculum: a curious chapter in the history of human potential

ABSTRACT In 1928 the Yugoslav journal Radna Škola put forward the perplexing claim that James Liberty Tadd (1853–1917) was one of the most significant and influential American educators. Why was this otherwise unknown art educator put into transnational circulation as responsible for the perceived success of education in the United States? Following the 1898 publication of his magnum opus, New Methods in Education, Tadd enjoyed a modest international reputation, but he is little known today. Adopting an “entanglement” approach to global histories of education, this article focuses on the messy tangling together of different actors, devices, discourses, and practices involved in this transnational transit. The article argues that the most salient aspect of Tadd’s introduction to a Yugoslav educational public in the late 1920s is an educational approach that purported to be transformational in how it unlocked human potential. This is to view “potential” as an object that circulates in the world and to suggest that histories of education should include study of the ways that the uppermost possibility spaces of human experience have been understood in relation to education in different times and spaces.

Beyond the panel: cinematism and affective responses in Itō Junji’s Tomie

ABSTRACT Itō Junji has been a renowned horror author since his work Tomie was released in the late 1980s. Tomie tells the story of an eponymous vengeful entity who, after being killed by her classmates on a school trip, leads men she encounters to madness and to her assassination which leads to her multiplying and being reborn again. Previous studies have focused on gender-based readings of the violence and body-horror elements in Tomie, yet little attention has been given to how this latter works in tandem with other elements as affective devices. By drawing upon several concepts related to affect, this paper analyzes the use of horror manga to evoke affective and somatic responses in readers. It shows that the manga’s use of panelling and composition techniques associated with cinema plays an essential role in the creation of dread and anticipation. Additionally, the exploration of abjection and body horror reveals how these contribute to the reader’s responses which oscillate between sympathy and somatic empathy. Ultimately, this study highlights how horror manga, as a visual medium with cinematic traits, can elicit responses in readers similar to horror cinema and offers a potential theoretical framework for the broader study of horror manga.

The rise of Porto artist collectives and the birth of democratic collaboration over fifteen years of daily art practice

ABSTRACT This article documents and analyses a phenomenon of collectivisation involving approximately forty artist collectives that emerged in Porto, Portugal between the late 1990s and 2013, with a particular focus on how horizontal collectivism led in turn to new models of citizenship and participatory democracy. I present an overview of historical precedents concerning certain aspects of this phenomenon, especially in relation to Portugal’s relatively recent (1974) end to forty-eight years of dictatorial rule. Artists came to play an important role in developing and spreading the democratic values that were subsequently enshrined in the Portuguese constitution of 1976. Recently, the Covid-19 pandemic came to prove that the revolution’s legacy is still alive, and the constitutional principles are still orienting the Portuguese artists. Today’s growing neoliberalisation of democracy raises the question of how the Portuguese constitution remains the main guarantor of the citizen’s most fundamental right to participatory democracy and to be more active citizens.

Steric and Electronic Influence of Excited-State Decay in Cu(I) MLCT Chromophores.

ConspectusFor the past 11 years, a dedicated effort in our research group focused on fundamentally advancing the photophysical properties of cuprous bis-phenanthroline-based metal-to-ligand charge transfer (MLCT) excited states. We rationalized that, by gaining control over the numerous factors limiting the more widespread use of CuI MLCT photosensitizers, they would be readily adopted in numerous light-activated applications given the earth-abundance of copper and the extensive library of 1,10-phenanthrolines developed over the last century. Significant progress has been achieved by recognizing valuable structure-property concepts developed by other researchers in tandem with detailed ultrafast and conventional time-scale investigations, in-silico-inspired molecular designs to predict spectroscopic properties, and applying novel synthetic methodologies. Ultimately, we achieved a plateau in exerting cooperative steric influence to control CuI MLCT excited state decay. This led to combining sterics with π-conjugation and/or inductive electronic effects to further exert control over molecular photophysical properties. The lessons gleaned from our studies of homoleptic complexes were recently extended to heteroleptic bis(phenanthrolines) featuring enhanced visible light absorption properties and long-lived room-temperature photoluminescence. This Account navigates the reader through our intellectual journey of decision-making, molecular and experimental design, and data interpretation in parallel with appropriate background information related to the quantitative characterization of molecular photophysics using CuI MLCT chromophores as prototypical examples.Initially, CuI MLCT excited states, their energetics, and relevant structural conformation changes implicated in their photophysical decay processes are described. This is followed by a discussion of the literature that motivated our research in this area. This led to our first molecular design in 2013, achieving a 7-fold increase in excited state lifetime relative to the current state-of-the-art. The lifetime and photophysical property enhancement resulted from using 2,9-branched alkyl groups in conjunction with flanking 3,8-methyl substituents, a strategy we adapted from the McMillin group, which was initially described in the late 1990s. Applications of this newly conceived chromophore are presented in solar hydrogen-producing photocatalysis, photochemical upconversion, and photosensitization of [4 + 4] anthracene dimerization of potential interest in thermal storage of solar energy in metastable intermediates. Ultrafast transient absorption and fluorescence upconversion spectroscopic characterization of this and related CuI molecules inform the resultant photophysical properties and vice versa, so the most comprehensive structure-property understanding becomes realized when these experimental tools are collectively utilized to investigate the same series of molecules. Computationally guided structural designs generated newly conceived molecules featuring visible light-harvesting and 2,9-cycloalkane substituted complexes. The latter eventually produced record-setting excited state lifetimes in molecules leveraging both cooperative steric influence and electronic inductive effects. Using photoluminescence data from structurally homologous CuI MLCT excited states collected over 44 years, an energy gap correlation successfully modeled the data spanning a 0.3 eV emission energy range. Finally, a new research direction is revealed detailing structure-photophysical property relationships in heteroleptic CuI phenanthroline chromophores that are photoluminescent at room temperature.

Parallel reaction monitoring targeted mass spectrometry as a fast and sensitive alternative to antibody-based protein detection

The reliable, accurate and quantitative targeted detection of proteins is a key technology in molecular and cell biology and molecular diagnostics. The current golden standard for targeted protein detection in complex mixtures such as complete cell lysates or body fluids is immunoblotting, a technology that was developed in the late 1970s and has not undergone major changes since. Although widespread, this methodology suffers from several disadvantages, such as the inability to detect low-abundant proteins or specific posttranslational modifications, the requirement for highly specific antibodies, the lack of quantitative power and the often-tedious practical procedures. Mass spectrometry (MS) based targeted protein detection is an alternative technology that could circumvent these caveats. Here, we compare immunoblotting with targeted protein mass spectrometry using a parallel reaction monitoring (PRM) regime on the Orbitrap mass spectrometer. We show that PRM based MS has superior sensitivity and quantitative accuracy over immunoblotting. The limit of detection for proteolytic peptides of a purified target protein was found to be in the mid- to low-attomole range and approximately one order of magnitude higher when embedded in a complex biological matrix. The incorporation of synthetic heavy isotope labeled (AQUA) peptides as internal calibrants into the PRM workflow allows for even higher accuracy for both the relative and absolute quantitation of tryptic target peptides. In conclusion, PRM is a versatile and sensitive technology, which can overcome the shortcomings of immunoblotting. We argue that PRM based MS could become the method of choice for the targeted detection of proteins in complex cellular matrices or body fluids and may eventually replace standard methods such as Western blotting and ELISA in biomedical research and in the clinic.