The huge corpus of work on consumption still lacks theoretical consolidation. This is most obvious when contemplating the situations of different disciplines, where there is very little common ground (see, for example, the review in Miller 1995). But the problem is no less great in individual disciplines like sociology, for example, where output seems to me to have been bipolar, generating either abstract and speculative social theory or detailed case studies. Moreover, case studies have been skewed towards favourite, but restricted, topics—fashion, advertising and some forms of popular recreational activity—with particular attention paid to their symbolic meanings and role in the formation of self-identity. These case studies, perhaps encouraged by prominent versions of the abstract theories which say that the consumer has no choice but to choose and will be judged in terms of the symbolic adequacy of that choice (e.g. Bauman 1988; Giddens 1991), very often operated with models of highly autonomous individuals preoccupied with symbolic communication. Believing that these approaches give a partial understanding of consumption, this chapter sketches an alternative, avoiding methodological individualist accounts of ‘the consumer’, which are concerned as much with what people do and feel as what they mean.

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Consumption and Theories of Practice

A detailed review of the education sector in Australia as in the data provided by the 2006 edition of the OECD's annual publication, 'Education at a Glance' is presented. While the data has shown that in almost all OECD countries educational attainment levels are on the rise, with countries showing impressive gains in university qualifications, it also reveals that a large of share of young people still do not complete secondary school, which remains a baseline for successful entry into the labour market.

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Education at a Glance

http://www.ausicom.com/filelib/researchlibrary/intermediaries_innov.pdf

Intermediation and the role of intermediaries in innovation

The State of Food and Agriculture

Organisations increasingly rely on external sources of innovation via
interorganisational network relationships. This article explores the diffusion and
characteristics of collaborative relationships between universities and industry, and
develops a research agenda informed by an ‘open innovation’ perspective. A
framework is proposed, distinguishing university-industry relationships from other
mechanisms such as technology transfer or human mobility. On the basis of the
existing body of research, the role of practices such as collaborative research,
university-industry research centres, contract research and academic consulting is
analysed. The evidence suggests that such university-industry relationships are widely
practiced whereby differences exist across industries and scientific disciplines. While
most existing research focuses on the effects of university-industry links on
innovation-specific variables, such as patents or firm innovativeness, the
organisational dynamics of these relationships remain under-researched. A detailed
research agenda addresses research needs in two main areas: search and match
processes between universities and firms, and the organisation and management of
collaborative relationships.

/pdf/university-industry-relationships-and-open-innovation-1265ss1r7c.pdf

University–industry relationships and open innovation: Towards a research agenda

The new competition for land: Food, energy, and climate change

The vast majority of products (i.e. goods and services) are provided to the consumer through several co?ordinated and contributing agents acting together. This paper is concerned with improving our understanding of processes of provision and innovation that involve several contributing and co?ordinated agents (firms or organizations). The distributedness of provision and innovation varies in scale and takes a variety of (dynamic) forms (or modes), and their analysis brings to the fore the significance of dependency and asymmetric power relations between classes of economic agent. The approach thereby opens up considerations on ?distributed innovation? beyond those addressed by the ?systems of innovation? perspectives.

Analysing distributed processes of provision and innovation

The BSE epidemic, GM foods, avian flu, the growth of supermarkets and the crisis in obesity have shaken consumer trust in food. Uncovering surprising differences between countries, Trust in Food examines this and challenges the idea of the consumer as a sovereign individual, demonstrating how consumption is institutionalized within society.

Trust in Food: A Comparative and Institutional Analysis

In this book, the complexity and the significance of the foods we eat are analysed from a variety of perspectives, by sociologists, economists, geographers and anthropologists. Chapters address a number of intriguing questions: how do people make judgments about taste? How do such judgments come to be shared by groups of people?; What social and organisational processes result in foods being certified as of decent or proper quality? How has dissatisfaction with the food system been expressed? What alternatives are thought to be possible? The multi-disciplinary analysis of this book explores many different answers to such questions. The first part of the book focuses on theoretical and conceptual issues, the second part considers processes of formal and informal regulation, while the third part examines social and political responses to industrialised food production and mass consumption. Qualities of food will be of interest to researchers and students in all the social science disciplines that are concerned with food, whether marketing, sociology, cultural studies, anthropology, human nutrition or economics.

Qualities of food

Governments in Europe and elsewhere have renewed their attention to the fiscal regulation of their economies in order to close tax loopholes and boost revenues in response to the financial crisis. The article uses a neo-Polanyian ‘instituted economic process’ approach to explore and explain the uniquely high level of bogus self-employment in the UK construction industry, facilitated by confused law and stimulated by a bespoke construction fiscal regime, resulting in endemic tax evasion. It examines how the co-evolution of employment status law and a sector-specific fiscal regime maps tightly onto the emergence of mass self-employment, as evidenced by comparative labour market and sectoral statistics. Seeing competition as an instituted process within these distinctive market arrangements, it identifies a form of ‘degenerative competition’, driving out both genuine direct-employment and self-employment, and driving in bogus self-employment, with its attendant substantial fiscal losses, failed skill reprodu...

Mark Harvey

Papers

The new competition for land: Food, energy, and climate change

Analysing distributed processes of provision and innovation

Trust in Food: A Comparative and Institutional Analysis

Qualities of food

The evolution of false self-employment in the British construction industry: a neo-Polanyian account of labour market formation