Demystifying China's Innovation Machine

China’s extraordinary economic development is explained in large part by the way it innovates. This book explains how it innovates, which has important implications not only for China but also for the rest of the world. Contrary to widely held views, China’s innovation machine is not created and controlled by an all-powerful government. Instead, it is a complex, interdependent system composed of hundreds of millions of elements, involving bottom-up innovation driven by innovators and entrepreneurs and highly pragmatic and adaptive top-down policy. Using case studies of leading firms and industries, statistics, and policy analysis, the book argues that China’s innovation machine is similar to a natural ecosystem. Innovations in technology, organization, and business model resemble genetic mutations which are random, self-serving and isolated initially, but the best fitting are selected by the market and their impacts are amplified by the innovation machine. This machine draws on China’s massive number of manufacturers, supply chains, innovation clusters, and digitally literate population, connected through supersized digital platforms. China’s innovation suffers from a lack of basic research and reliance upon certain critical technologies from overseas; its scale (size) and scope (diversity) possess attributes that make it self-correcting and stronger in the face of challenges. China’s innovation machine is most effective in a policy environment where the market prevails; policy intervention plays a significant role when market mechanisms are premature or fail. The book concludes that the future success of China’s innovation will depend on continuing policy pragmatism, mass entrepreneurship and innovation, and the development of the ‘new infrastructures’.

We Have Plenty of Water, Don’t We? Social Norms, Practices, and Contentions in a Drought-Ridden Country

Climate and land use change pose global challenges to water policy and management. This article furthers calls for integrated research conceptualizing water management as a holistic, interdependent system that may benefit from sociological research. To better understand how socioenvironmental change affects lifestyle expectations and experiences, interviews with in-migrants (relocated to inland Australia from metropolitan cities), industry and government informants are thematically analyzed. Results show in-migrants engage in adaptive water management and conservation strategies to enhance water security, yet call for council provision of water management education to minimize vulnerability. Industry informants perceive few water supply or pollution issues, favoring technological solutions to support unfettered growth and water amenities, while de-prioritizing environmental sustainability goals. Government priorities reflect drought narratives in Australian water policy reform and show concern about meeting consumer water supply and preserving water quality. With predictions of greater weather severity, including flooding, and in-migrants’ difficulty managing heavy rainfall, national legislation and policy modifications are necessary. Specifically, normalizing climate variability in policy and social identities is desirable. Finally, practices prioritizing water scarcity and trading management over environmental protection indicate a need to surpass environmental commodification by depoliticizing water management.

THE PRINCIPLES OF GUIDED EVOLUTION OF SOCIETY – A SYSTEMIC PERSPECTIVE

Since the beginning of the 21st century, many regions in the world have faced with economic volatility, political instability, environmental degradation, cultural wars and various cyber threats, which only intensified during the coronavirus pandemic. The reason behind these crises is a fragmented character of human interactions that are motivated by self or local interest, despite the fact that we are becoming increasingly interconnected in complex global networks. From a systemic perspective, human interactions in contemporary society are motivated by centrifugal social forces, promoting independence and an increased sense of entitlement, exclusive individualism, hostile competitiveness, all of which are completely purposeless, even harmful in today's global society. We are constantly trying to implement pre-global individualistic values in a global interdependent system, thus causing "cracks" in the social fabric of reality, which we could especially witness during the coronavirus pandemic. In order to bring about a change in current trends, a paradigm shift is required, first of all in human values, which would increase existing centripetal social forces. This means that the generation living today must formulate a commitment to global citizenship alongside involvement in local citizenship. In order to protect ourselves from future outbursts of pandemics and other similar systemic crises, a new vision of human society is required which fosters openness, care for the "other", and mutual responsibility across national borders, as well as cultural, religious, racial, gendered and other divides. The only effective response to global crises is – global response.

Wicked Stepmother, Best Friend, and the Unaccounted Space Between

Blended families are increasingly common, yet our understanding of these families—especially the role of stepmothers—is limited and lacks a critical focus. Such lack is a problem when recognizing that the stepmother is one of the most culturally stigmatized family positions. Guided by family systems theory, which recognizes the family as an interdependent system where roles are created and maintained through interactions, we seek to provide a deeper understanding of how stepmothers navigate the difficulties that accompany their stigmatized role. Instead of writing about the stepmother role in the family system from an outside perspective, we use critical duoethnography to write from inside the system by composing first-person, collaborative, reflexive accounts of our lived experiences as stepmothers that highlight the unique work we do within our blended families. Our accounts engage an intersectional lens where we embrace our layered identities—as stepmothers, women, feminists, and academics who hail from the working class and have differing ethnic backgrounds—to write ourselves out of the simplistic, and often negative, cultural ideas about stepmothers. Our primary goal is to provide a dynamic illustration of the nuanced, messy, and multifaceted experiences of (step)m(Other)ing—hence the strategic use of parentheses to encapsulate such experiences. We pinpoint the struggles we encounter in striving to find a balance between establishing a close bond with our (step)children and taking on a more authoritative parental role—all with the threat of the “wicked stepmother” stereotype looming over us. Ideally, our insider accounts help to untangle the lived experiences of stepmothers from the grip of a pervasive, distorted, denigrating, and essentializing cultural construct.

One Health, One National Park: A Contribution to New Perspectives and Economics for Modern Times

One Health is a concept that sees human, animal, and environmental health as parts of a single interdependent system. The Covid-19 pandemic, its implications reaching far beyond the direct effects of a coronavirus on people’s health, underlines the importance of this increasingly influential perspective. In practice, One Health has its roots in early affiliations of human and animal health science. Over time, each sphere of inquiry evolved to address its own agenda. Recently, veterinary scientists have led the reintegration, extension, and promotion of One Health sciences to address modern-day problems in which health and people’s general wellbeing are viewed as inseparable. A prerequisite is to set out a framework of concepts and principles enabling clear definition of problems, interrelationships needing to be understood, and the level of aggregation appropriate for quantitative analysis. This paper extends the framework by considering economic trade-offs that inevitably must be made in the human, animal, and environmental sub-systems, and the consequences when policy interventions are superimposed on them. The New Forest National Park in southern England is a case where this perspective is essential. Following the Stone Mountain definition of One Health, first a conventional approach linking human and animal health is taken. Lyme disease, Alabama rot, bovine tuberculosis and strangles are examples of diseases known to be of significant concern. The focus is finding scope for socially efficient risk reduction in response to mitigation resource use. Superimposed on the grazing livestock subsystems are support payments for commoner farmers. The financial incentives provided by what effectively are headage payments have caused animal inventories to grow so much that the wider environment may well be subject to adverse spillover effects that merit investigation.

“They Try and Break Us But They Can’t”: The Cultural Ethos Youth of Color Engage and Rely on to Persevere and Navigate Racial Stressors in the U.S. Public Education System

This study aimed to identify factors that contributed to adaptive coping young people of color engage and rely on to navigate racial stressors in the public education system and to persist into college. The study included 20 undergraduate college students between 18 and 22 years who participated in retrospective interviews documenting critical incidents of racial stressors and coping. Participants self-identified as majority Black/African American (68%) and other nationalities including Honduran, Mexican, and Sudanese. A socioecological systems framework guided in-depth coding of interviews and identified college-going cultural ethos, relational ties, sense of agency, and emotional acuity themes. Findings suggest participants existed in an interdependent system of affirmation and validation that geared them toward college aspirations amid racial stressors encountered in the U.S. public education system. Discussion centers on the value of building the capacities of youths’ social ecologies to affirm their identities and validate their presence in the U.S. education system.

Corporate Social Responsibility Activity Combinations for Sustainability: A Fuzzy Set Analysis of Korean Firms

We examine how combinations of corporate social responsibility (CSR) activities yield high performance in Korean companies by addressing two related questions to expand our limited knowledge. First, what combinations of CSR activities yield high performance? Second, how do CSR activities form an interdependent system based on different corporate contexts? We draw the 2012–2018 data from the Korean Economic Justice Institute index for a fuzzy set qualitative comparative analysis. The results reveal several effective CSR activity factor combinations under the given strategies and management environments. Companies with a high performance exhibit complementarity between social contribution, environmental management, fairness, and employee satisfaction. By contrast, companies with a low corporate performance show no complementarity between relatively unrelated activity factors. For companies with a low financial performance from CSR activities, most of the causal pathways focus only on activities at the primary stakeholder level, with weak diversity of CSR activities’ combinations at the primary and secondary stakeholder levels. These results indicate not only the appropriateness of CSR activity factor combinations for companies’ strategy and management environment contexts, but also their effectiveness, and are expected to provide companies with significant implications for CSR activities.

Corporate Social Responsibility Activity Combinations for Sustainability: A Fuzzy Set Analysis of Korean Firms

We examined how combinations of corporate social responsibility (CSR) activities lead to high performance in Korean companies. This study addressed two related questions to expand our limited knowledge in this area. The first was what combinations of CSR activities achieve high performance. The second was to identify how CSR activities form an interdependent system, depending on different corporate situations. Korean Economic Justice Institute index data, from 2012 to 2018, were used with fuzzy set qualitative comparative analysis, and the results revealed several effective CSR activity factor combinations under given strategies and management environments. Companies with high performance exhibit complementarity between social contribution, environmental management, fairness, and employee satisfaction. By contrast, companies with low corporate performance show no complementarity between relatively unrelated activity factors. For companies whose CSR activities lead to low financial performance, most of the causal pathways focused only on activities at the primary stakeholder level, with weak diversity of CSR activities’ combinations at the primary and secondary stakeholder levels. These results indicate not only the appropriateness of CSR activity factor combinations for companies’ strategy and management environment contexts, but also their effectiveness, and are expected to provide companies with significant implications for CSR activities.

Crash dynamics of interdependent networks

The emergence and evolution of real-world systems have been extensively studied in the last few years. However, equally important phenomena are related to the dynamics of systems’ collapse, which has been less explored, especially when they can be cast into interdependent systems. In this paper, we develop a dynamical model that allows scrutinizing the collapse of systems composed of two interdependent networks. Specifically, we explore the dynamics of the system’s collapse under two scenarios: in the first one, the condition for failure should be satisfied for the focal node as well as for its corresponding node in the other network; while in the second one, it is enough that failure of one of the nodes occurs in either of the two networks. We report extensive numerical simulations of the dynamics performed in different setups of interdependent networks, and analyze how the system behavior depends on the previous scenarios as well as on the topology of the interdependent system. Our results can provide valuable insights into the crashing dynamics and evolutionary properties of interdependent complex systems.

Interdisciplinary approach in research and teaching: advantages and problems of application

The article deals with the interdisciplinary approach as an interdependent system of knowledge integration, expressed in research and teaching.The interpretation of the term “interdisciplinary approach in research and training” by E.M. Mirsky is taken as a basis, he interdisciplinary interaction is considered as a relationship between the systems of disciplinary knowledge in the process of integration and differentiation of sciences and collective forms of work of scientists in different fields of knowledge in the study of the same object.The article is based on an interdisciplinary approach the scientific base and system of education as a complex of fundamental and taxonomic disciplines are considered. The interdisciplinary connections with the focus on the effectiveness of training are considered. It contains the consistency of educational programs, determined by didactic goals and content. Interdisciplinary connections with the competence approach allow transferring knowledge, skills and abilities from one sphere of science and professional activity to another. Interdisciplinary approach is aimed at linking academic disciplines.There are several formats of implementation of an interdisciplinary approach to teaching at universities in the specialty “Economics”, based on an interdisciplinary approach offers to form the competence in the study of economic disciplines.The contradictions in the assimilation of knowledge, ideas and researching methods between the Sciences are smoothed out, and there is a complex application of the theory and practice obtained on the basis of the study of disciplines in professional activities. Both significant advantages and problems arising from the use of an interdisciplinary approach are noted.