ENGOs and environmental bargains: A comparative analysis of forest conflicts in Tasmania and British Columbia

Doctoral thesis (2008)

This thesis focuses on environmental non-governmental organizations (ENGOs) and their roles in forest conflicts in Tasmania, Australia, and British Columbia (BC), Canada. ENGOs challenge vested economic ... [more ▼]

This thesis focuses on environmental non-governmental organizations (ENGOs) and their roles in forest conflicts in Tasmania, Australia, and British Columbia (BC), Canada. ENGOs challenge vested economic interests in order to give greater priority to environmental values. These challenges are often highly conflictual especially with regard to resource use. EN GOs use conflicts and more cooperative forms of behaviour to create environmental bargains with other institutions, notably business, government, labour, and Aboriginal peoples, to achieve their goals. This thesis compares and contrasts environmental bargaining in the forest economies of Tasmania and Be. Conceptually, the thesis elaborates on the theme of environmental bargaining from an institutional perspective that identifies ENGOs as central actors. Environmental bargaining is context sensitive and features the integration of multiple perspectives, dimensions, and voices. Processes and outcomes are interpreted along two dimensions, distribution of power between actors and forms of decision-making ranging from non-participatory to participatory forms. Empirically, the thesis draws upon interviews with over 80 representatives of ENGOs, companies, governmental agencies, and other NGOs in Tasmania and Be. In both places, environmental bargaining was characterized by high levels of conflict and played out on multiple spatial levels led by increasingly global ENGOs. While ENGOs in BC increased their bargaining power through international markets campaigns, Tasmanian environmental groups used national and international support to strengthen their power base. In BC environmental bargaining became more consensual and participatory over time leading to considerable changes in management practices and conservation but also changes in underlying values and perspectives. In Tasmania bargaining was dominated by non­ participatory forms of decision-making that did not reduce conflict potential even though the remapping of Tasmania's forests from industrial uses to protected area status has been relatively greater. In general, ENGOs are important in restructuring and remapping resource peripheries from economic to environmental imperatives as reflected in the bargaining outcomes. Moreover, environmental bargaining is contingent on place and a closer look at the cultural, economic, and political characteristics of the two regions offers explanations as to why environmental bargaining and outcomes differ. [less ▲]

Der Amoklauf und die Möglichkeiten einer Medienkulturwissenschaft

in IASL Online (2008)

Les conventions d'actionnaires et pactes d'associés : les clauses relatives au capital ou à la répartition des bénéfices; clauses relatives à l'exercice du pouvoir

Conference given outside the academic context (2008)

Artefact-based annotations. Theory and applications

Doctoral thesis (2008)

Reachability analysis of continuous-time piecewise affine systems

in Automatica (2008), 44(12), 3189-3194

This paper proposes an algorithm for the characterization of reachable sets of states for continuous-time piecewise affine systems. Given a model of the system and a bounded set of possible initial states ... [more ▼]

This paper proposes an algorithm for the characterization of reachable sets of states for continuous-time piecewise affine systems. Given a model of the system and a bounded set of possible initial states, the algorithm employs an LMI approach to compute both upper and lower bounds on reachable regions. Rather than performing computations in the state-space, this method uses impact maps to find the reachable sets on the switching surfaces of the system. This tool can then be used to deduce safety and performance results about the system. [less ▲]

Conceptions of globalization in African and Western newspaper corpora

in Wolf, Hans-Georg; Peter, Lothar; Polzenhagen, Frank (Eds.) Focus on English: Linguistic structure, language variation and discursive use. Studies in honour of Peter Lucko (2008)

Corpus-informed EAP syllabus design: a study of lecture functions

Scientific Conference (2008, November 22)

Increasing student and lecturer mobility along with the spread of English as an academic lingua franca (Mauranen, 2006) means a growing number of university lecturers in Europe are delivering at least ... [more ▼]

Increasing student and lecturer mobility along with the spread of English as an academic lingua franca (Mauranen, 2006) means a growing number of university lecturers in Europe are delivering at least some lectures in English. Well-designed English for Academic Purposes (EAP) courses can help lecturers whose first language is not English in meeting this challenge and findings from corpus linguistic research on authentic lectures are invaluable in informing decisions about the development of such courses. However, a comprehensive corpus-based account of language use in English language lectures does not exist, although recent publications by Biber (2006) and Crawford Camiciottoli (2007) constitute significant contributions to such a description. This paper aims to add to our understanding of what language is used for in lectures by providing an overview of language functions (e.g. interacting, evaluating, organizing discourse, class management) as related to the reported purposes of lectures (e.g. knowledge transfer and the socialization of students into disciplinary communities). This functional framework is based on a manual inspection of British lectures using qualitative methods, with larger stretches of speech being assigned to particular functional categories on the basis of lexico-grammatical features, an understanding of the text and generic knowledge (Dudley-Evans, 1994). Biber, D. (2006). University language: a corpus-based study of spoken and written registers. Studies in Corpus Linguistics 23. Amsterdam: John Benjamins Publishing Company. Crawford Camiciottoli, B. (2007). The language of business studies lectures. Amsterdam: John Benjamins. Dudley-Evans, T. (1994). Genre analysis: an approach to text analysis for ESP. In Coulthard, M. (ed.). Advances in written text analysis. (pp. 219-228). London: Routledge. Mauranen, A. (2006). Spoken discourse, academics and global English: a corpus perspective. In Hughes, R. (Ed.). Spoken English, TESOL and applied linguistics. (pp. 143-158). Basingstoke: Palgrave MacMillan. [less ▲]

Route diversity on the internet: a natural way to improve the network traffic

Doctoral thesis (2008)

Deformation quantization and cohomologies of Poisson, graded and homotopy algebras

Doctoral thesis (2008)

Daughters taking over the family business: A gender analysis

in ISBE (Ed.) ISBE Conference 2008 Proceedings (2008, November)

This paper investigates the succession process as perceived and lived by daughters taking over the family business, with a gender perspective. Despite the rich literature on the succession process in ... [more ▼]

This paper investigates the succession process as perceived and lived by daughters taking over the family business, with a gender perspective. Despite the rich literature on the succession process in family firms, few studies use a gender approach, though an increasing number of ventures are launched, taken over and managed by women, largely contributing to the economic development. In line with Dumas (1998), Barbot et al. (2005) and Vera & Dean (2005), our research aims at analyzing the succession process when daughters take over the family business. Our contribution is a gender analysis of the process, including the social phenomena of separation and hierarchy, with a focus on family composition. Using the model of Cadieux et al. (2000), we identify at each stage of the succession process, the key actors of the environment, we analyze their interactions and see how they open opportunities or rise difficulties in terms of legitimacy for daughters. The qualitative thematic analysis of eleven detailed case studies reveals a strong influence of the presence or absence of a son on the motivations and positioning of daughters, as well as on the construction of their legitimacy towards family and stakeholders. This study leads to several implications for public and private initiatives. [less ▲]