This book is a selection of papers from a conference which took place at the University of Keele in July 1982. The conference was an extraordinarily enjoyable one, and we would like to take this opportunity of thanking all participants for helping to make it so. The conference was intended to allow scholars working on different aspects of symbolic behaviour to compare findings, to look for common ground, and to identify differences between the various areas. We hope that it was (...) successful in these aims: the assiduous reader may judge for himself. Several themes emerged during the course of the conference. Some of these were: 1. There is a distinction to be made between those symbol systems which attempt, more or less directly, to represent a state of affairs in the world (e. g. language, drawing, map and navigational skill) and those in which the representational function is complemented, if not overshadowed, by properties of the symbol system itself, and the systematic inter-relations that symbols can have to one another (e. g. music, mathematics). The distinction is not absolute, for the nature of all symbolic skills is, in part, a function of the structure of the symbolic system employed. Nonetheless, this distinction helps us to understand some common acquisition difficulties, such as that experienced in mathematics, where mental manipulation of symbols can go awry if a child assumes too close a correspondence between mathematical symbols and the world they represent. 2. (shrink)

The World Trade Organization (WTO) is a multilateral trade organization that, at least partially, governs trade relations between its member states. The WTO (2011a) proclaims that its “overriding objective is to help trade flow smoothly, freely, fairly and predictably.” The WTO is a “treaty-based” organization – it has been constituted through an agreed, legally binding treaty made up of more than 30 articles, along with additional commitments by some members in specific areas. At present, 153 states (...) are members of the WTO, which collectively make up over 97 percent of all trade worldwide (WTO 2011b). Together, the WTO treaty specifies the rights and obligations of its member states. To become a member of the WTO, a state must treat the agreement as a “single undertaking.” Members cannot choose à la carte which agreements – for example, regarding tariffs, or trade in services or intellectual property – they want to accede to and which they do not. Instead, they must take on the obligations of the agreement in toto. The WTO is one of the most consequential governance institutions in the world, a lodestar of political debate about globalization (see globalization), attracting increased interest from moral and political philosophers in recent years (James 2006; Moellendorf 2005; Risse 2007; Brock 2009). (shrink)

After briefly surveying the mission and principles of the World Trade Organization (WTO), I argue that international trade may be assessed from the perspective of justice, and that the correct account of justice for these purposes is egalitarian in fundamental principle. I then consider the merits of the WTO's basic commitment to liberalized trade in the light of egalitarian considerations. Finally, I discuss the justice of several WTO policies. While noting the complexity of the empirical issues relating to (...) the effects of trade institutions and policies, I conclude that egalitarians have reasons to object to certain of the principles and policies of the WTO. (shrink)

It was October 2014, and Ebola was raging out of control in Guinea, Liberia, and Sierra Leone. Margaret Chan, the World Health Organization's director‐general, defended the organization against charges that its response was late and ineffective: “We are a technical agency, with governments having first priority to take care of their people.” In January 2015, the WHO executive board undertook a systematic reform of the agency's performance, and Chan again offered a defense: I followed protocol, leaving it (...) to the Africa office (AFRO) to respond. Yet the three nations could not possibly have stemmed the outbreak alone, and AFRO was known to be dysfunctional.Ebola represents an inflection point requiring fundamental reform for the WHO. A failure of leadership will impact its status and legitimacy for a generation. Here, I offer five reforms that would transform it and ensure that it fulfills its constitutional mission as “the directing and coordinating authority on international health work.”. (shrink)

The "surrogate colonization" of Palestine had a foreign power giving to a nonnative group rights over land occupied by an indigenous people. It thus brought into play the complementary and conflicting agendas of three culturally distinguishable parties: British, Jews and Arabs. Each party had both "externalist" [those with no sustained practical experience of day to day life in Palestine] and "internalist" representatives. The surrogate idea was based on a "strategic consensus" involving each party's externalist camp: the British ruling elite, the (...) leadership of the World Zionist Organization and the Hashemite Dynasty of Arabia. The collapse of this triangular consensus, which put an end to the policy but not the process of surrogate colonization, resulted from irreconcilable antagonisms within and between the major currents of each internalist camp. A focus on the land problem in Palestine highlights contradictions in each party's internalist agenda, which forestalled a rift between the Jewish and British sides of the consensus long enough for the Zionist settlement in Palestine to acquire territory and to develop a largely self-sufficient economic, cultural, political and military infrastructure. (shrink)

ArgumentScientific uncertainty is fundamental to the management of contemporary global risks. In 2009, the World Health Organization declared the start of the H1N1 Influenza Pandemic. This declaration signified the risk posed by the spread of the H1N1 virus, and in turn precipitated a range of actions by global public health actors. This article analyzes the WHO's public representation of risk and examines the centrality of scientific uncertainty in the case of H1N1. It argues that the WHO's risk narrative (...) reflected the context of scientific uncertainty in which it was working. The WHO argued that it was attempting to remain faithful to the scientific evidence, and the uncertain nature of the threat. However, as a result, the WHO's public risk narrative was neither consistent nor socially robust, leading to the eventual contestation of the WHO's position by other global public health actors, most notably the Council of Europe. This illustrates both the significance of scientific uncertainty in the investigation of risk, and the difficulty for risk managing institutions in effectively acting in the face of this uncertainty. (shrink)

“I want my leadership to be judged by the impact of our work on the health of two populations: women and the people of Africa.” This is how Dr. Margaret Chan, the current Director-General of the World Health Organization , described her leadership mission. The reason behind this mission is evident. Women and girls constitute 70% of the world’s poor and 80% of the world’s refugees. Gender violence against women aged 15–44 is responsible for more deaths (...) and disability than cancer, malaria, traffic accidents, and war. An estimated 350,000 to 500,000 women still die in childbirth every year. The negative health implications of absolute poverty are worst in Sub-Saharan Africa and South Asia. Hence, Chan aims to have the biggest impact on the world’s poorest people. (shrink)

This paper addresses the issue of food security in developing countries and how agriculture plays an important role in achieving not only food security, but also in reducing poverty and promoting sustainable development. The promotion of trade liberalization by the World Trade Organization (WTO) through the Agreement on Agriculture (AoA) has undermined the productive capacity of developing countries and their comparative advantage in the agricultural sector, marginalizing small-scale farmers and benefitting the big corporations. The paper looks at the (...) issue of intellectual property rights that big corporations have for seeds and their effects on small-scale farmers, and how corporate social responsibility (CSR) is insufficient to regulate the dominance of big corporations in the food and agricultural market. The paper is divided into seven sections: trade liberalization and food security, the WTO and the AoA, the effects of the AoA on developing countries, the role of transnational corporations (TNCs) on food security, CSR and TNCs, policy recommendations, and conclusions. (shrink)

Organization in a tangled world -- Process views of organization -- Alfred North Whitehead on process -- Bruno Latour on relativizing the social, and the becoming of networks -- Niklas Luhmann on autopoiesis and recursiveness in social systems -- James March on decision processes and organization : a logic of streams -- Karl Weick on organizing and sensemaking -- A scheme for process based organizational analysis -- Some implications for organizational analysis.

The purpose of the paper is to examine trade boycott of Arab countries of Danish goods and role of WTO.

Under the WTO’s dispute settlement procedures, a party that has been injured by a scofflaw state’s failure to comply with its trade obligations may retaliate against the scofflaw state by withdrawing equivalent trade concessions. Legal and economic commentators generally view retaliation as an economically perverse strategy for enforcing freetrade norms. This Article explores an alternative explanation, arguing that retaliation may provide the optimal enforcement mechanism for trade liberalization given the prevalence of low compliance incentives and high enforcement costs in international (...) cooperation agreements. The Article argues that retaliation is superior to other remedial options because it enables an injured state to inflict maximum political costs on the scofflaw state by mobilizing powerful export groups in the scofflaw state against protectionist policies. Furthermore, this Article shows how the presence of significant protectionist groups in the injured state, which stand to benefit from retaliatory measures, also improves the injured state’s ability to commit to retaliation. Even if states have asymmetric preferences about protectionist policies, retaliation threats can still be credible since there is uncertainty about each state’s retaliation costs. Finally, the Article concludes that contrary to the conventional wisdom, the substantial role of uncertainty in this model indicates that specific performance, and not compensation, ought to be the goal of the WTO’s enforcement mechanism. (shrink)

A companion volume to In the Realm of Organization, this book explores in detail the intricate relationships that exist between technology, representation and organization from a diversity of perspectives, relocating the study of organization in wider social theory.

Once focused primarily on European and Chinese history, South Korea's world history courses are moving toward a global approach that spans multiple regions. In the midst of this curricular shift, we examined how Korean teachers conceptualize world history for themselves and for their instruction. We interviewed eight Korean teachers using card-sorting tasks and a think aloud methodology. Findings revealed that all participants sorted the cards differently when considering instruction compared to when they sorted cards for their own understanding, (...) suggesting the role of teachers as instructional gatekeepers even in a country with a centralized National Curriculum. The Korean teachers discussed three instructional challenges in making these changes: connecting world historical events to students’ present lives, unpacking for students events that spanned across large amounts of time and space, and managing students’ preconceived notions or attitudes about different cultures. The ways in which participants dealt with these challenges differed. Additionally, in-service teachers made more complex connections between events and focused less on regions than did pre-service teachers. We discuss the cultural tools that Korean participants used in making instructional decisions as well as implications for curriculum development and teacher education for world history in South Korea and beyond. (shrink)

ArgumentThis article gives the background to a public lecture delivered in Hebrew by Edmund Landau at the opening ceremony of the Hebrew University in Jerusalem in 1925. On the surface, the lecture appears to be a slightly awkward attempt by a distinguished German-Jewish mathematician to popularize a few number-theoretical tidbits. However, quite unexpectedly, what emerges here is Landau's personal blend of Zionism, German nationalism, and the proud ethos of pure, rigorous mathematics – against the backdrop of the situation of Germany (...) after World War I. Landau's Jerusalem lecture thus shows how the Zionist cause was inextricably linked to, and determined by political agendas that were taking place in Europe at that time. The lecture stands in various historical contexts - Landau's biography, the history of Jewish scientists in the German Zionist movement, the founding of the Hebrew University in Jerusalem, and the creation of a modern Hebrew mathematical language. This article provides a broad historical introduction to the English translation, with commentary, of the original Hebrew text. (shrink)

In this volume, Arieh Saposnik examines the complicated relations between nationalism and religious redemptive traditions through the case study of Zionism. He provides a new framework for understanding the central ideas of this movement and its relationship to traditional Jewish ideas, Christian thought, and modern secular messianisms. Providing a longue-durée and broad view of the central themes and motivations in the making of Zionism, Saposnik connects its intellectual history with the concrete development of the Zionist project in Israel in (...) its cultural, social, and political history. Saposnik demonstrates how Zionism offers lessons for a politics in which human perfectibility continues to serve as a guiding light and as a counter-narrative to the contemporary politics of self-interest, self-promotion and 'post-truth.' This is a study that bears implications for our understanding of modernity, of space and place, history and historical trajectories, and the place of Jews and Judaism in the modern world. (shrink)

International organizations such as the United Nations, the World Trade Organization, the European Union and the World Bank play an increasing role in international politics. This broad-ranging and up-to-date textbook provides a theoretical and empirical introduction to the politics and policies of such organizations.

This essay expands on the recent writings on Levinas’s politics by discussing his explicit comments about international relations. Levinas embraces neither a naive idealism nor a cold realism. Instead, he searches far a third way, that is, an oscillation between idealism and realism. There is a place for realism, but the power of the state must be held in check by the ethical responsibility for the Other. This oscillation is examined in relation to Levinas’s writings on “place” and Zionism. Levinas (...) also callsfor an oscillation betweenthe enrootedness to a place or nation and the higher ethical responsibility forthe Other. The essay concludes with a discussion of some very controversial remarks Levinas made about the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. (shrink)