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AbstractRecently scholars have started to consider the persistence of peripheries in relation to how they are represented by others outside of the region. Drawing on Foucauldian knowledge/power processes and forms of 'internal colonialism', powerful core regions construct and reconstruct knowledge about peripheries as a weaker 'other'. However this denies agency to passive, peripheral 'victims', compromising their capacity to contest their peripherality. We challenge this using Deleuze and Guattari's assemblages and the concepts of affect and perception to develop a conceptualisation of power which allows agency to weaker entities. This enables us to develop better tools for improving peripheral development. We use an innovative Public Engagement research method and a case‐study of Cornwall in the South West of the UK to consider an alternative model with regards to how ideas become accepted and adopted. We claim that analyses of the relationships between core and peripheral regions need to understand the complex cultural assemblages behind regional identities, because this helps us to explore the sites of possibility which offer space for development.

Contemporary public health approaches increasingly draw attention to the unequal social distribution of cigarette smoking. In contrast, critical accounts emphasize the importance of smokers' situated agency, the relevance of embodiment and how public health measures against smoking potentially play upon and exacerbate social divisions and inequality. Nevertheless, if the social context of cigarettes is worthy of such attention, and sociology lays a distinct claim to understanding the social, we need to articulate a distinct, positive and systematic claim for smoking as an object of sociological enquiry. This article attempts to address this by situating smoking across three main dimensions of sociological thinking: history and social change; individual agency and experience; and social structures and power. It locates the emergence and development of cigarettes in everyday life within the project of modernity of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. It goes on to assess the habituated, temporal and experiential aspects of individual smoking practices in everyday lifeworlds. Finally, it argues that smoking, while distributed in important ways by social class, also works relationally to render and inscribe it.

The purpose of this study was to formulate effective and efficient institutions of Revolving Fund Loans for Community Forest Plantation development (RFL CFP) in accordance with variation of field conditions. Benchmarking techniques were used to formulate the institution of RFL CFP. For that purpose, Independent of Direct Assistance Rural Agribusiness Development (IDA RAD) from the Ministry of Agriculture was selected as a benchmark as it was good in performance. The study was conducted in three provinces, i.e. Riau, South Kalimantan (November 2008 to April 2009) and West Java (May 2009 to February 2011). Comparative study was used to analyze the institutions based on the agency theory. The results showed that the institutional of RFL CFP have not accomodated the differences in characteristics, perceptions and capacities of the parties. As a result, the institutions have not been able to overcome the risk of moral hazard, adverse selection and high transaction costs. On the other hand, the institution of IDA RADhas a positive impact on agency relationship. High repayments by IDA RADagent and the increasing number of agents each year have proved the impact.

The research was to juridically analyze the implementation of budgeting control in Central Sulawesi Provincial Development Planning Agency and idenyify their job performance in case of manipulation inprovincial fund management. It was a normative research adopting juridical and conceptual approaches. The sources of date were primary and secondary. The results of the research showed 2 findings. (1) the control was applied during planing, implementation, management, reporting and acountability of the provincial budget. Such a step was preferable to prevent financial manipulation and losses since preventive measures agains financial manipulation were perceived to be better than currative ones. Having gained Reasonable Without Exception financial reporting predicate twice, the Central Provincial Goverment would be more encoraged to better prepare transparent and effective accrual-based financial accountability reports in order to be more consistent to good governance principle. (2) The performance was evaluated to identivity progresses in the programs and activities in order to gain indicators that the Agency was clean, transparent and accountable in the processes of fair and effective budgeting in consistent with the good governance principleKeywords : clean, transparent and accountable budgeting control, based ongood coorporate governance principle.

Currently a vast number of scientific publications in Russia and abroad are devoted to the phenomenon of Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA). Success factors of the Agency are usually identified as: a recruitment policy of research managers, scientific resources of the Agency's contractors, unique super-system of the DARPA's external environment and significant costs of R&D initiatives spent by the US Department of Defense. At the same time, systems engineering and technical assistance (SETA) contracting in the implementation of DARPA's high-risk projects have been neglected as a rule by the time. This paper describes the role of SETA-support contractors in ensuring the success of DARPA's ambitious projects and the impact of government contracts technical support on perspective defense R&D programs. The SETA rate in total R&D expenditures of DARPA are evaluated as 7,4-9,9%. Finally, the possibility of implementation of best practices and experiences of SETA system utilization for technological support of perspective high-risk R&D programs for governmental Russian agencies is analyzed. Note: Downloadable document is available in Russian.

Temperature is one of the most important environmental stimuli to record and amplify. While traditional thermoelectric materials are attractive for temperature/heat flow sensing applications, their sensitivity is limited by their low Seebeck coefficient (similar to 100 mu V K-1). Here we take advantage of the large ionic thermoelectric Seebeck coefficient found in polymer electrolytes (similar to 10,000 mu V K-1) to introduce the concept of ionic thermoelectric gating a low-voltage organic transistor. The temperature sensing amplification of such ionic thermoelectric-gated devices is thousands of times superior to that of a single thermoelectric leg in traditional thermopiles. This suggests that ionic thermoelectric sensors offer a way to go beyond the limitations of traditional thermopiles and pyroelectric detectors. These findings pave the way for new infrared-gated electronic circuits with potential applications in photonics, thermography and electronic-skins. ; Funding Agencies|European Research Council (ERC) [307596]; Knut and Alice Wallenberg foundation; Swedish Foundation for Strategic Research; Swedish Energy Agency; Advanced Functional Materials Center at Linkoping University; Swedish Governmental Agency for Innovation Systems [2015-04859]

Politics, and by extension states, are marginal in debates about the genesis, evolution and functioning of the global value chain (GVC)-based global economy. We contend here that the core complexity of state agency and state power needs to be much more carefully understood in GVC and related debates, as a basis on which the governance of the evolving GVC world can be properly theorised as revolving around the inseparability of economic and political power. We advance a framework for understanding the role of politics and states in the construction and maintenance of a GVC world, using a three-fold typology of facilitative, regulatory and distributive forms of governance, and propose a notion of 'outsourcing governance' as an attempt to capture the ways in which states purposefully, through active political agency, have engaged in a process of delegating a variety of governance functions and authority to private actors. Our overarching argument is normative: 'outsourced governance' of the form we currently observe is associated with regressive distributional outcomes, and is antithetical to an inclusive and sustainable global economy.

This study aims to determine the consistency of Fixed Asset Recording and Reporting on Local Government Finance and Asset Management Agency Regions (BPKAD) Kendari City under PP No. 24 of 2005. The method used is descriptive analysis. Processing and analysis of qualitative data is done interactively which consists of four steps, namely: 1) collection of data, 2) data reduction, 3) Presentation of data, 4) Withdrawal conclusion / verification. The results showed that the activity of recording and reporting of fixed assets is carried out by the Finance and Asset Management Agency Regional Kendari accounting period in 2010-2012 is not in accordance with Regulation PP No. 24 of 2005 on the Government Accounting Standards. This is because the presence of a discrepancy between the records maintained by the presentation contained in the financial statements, in addition to that there is an error in the classification and disclosure activities and the non-realization of fixed assets depreciation on fixed assets and no presentation of Notes to the Financial Statements as on education.Keywords: Recording, Reporting, Fixed Assets

In this article I explore the ways in which legal language, discourses, and narratives construct new dominant identities for women who kill their children. These identities are those of the 'bad', 'mad', or 'sad' woman. Drawing upon and critiquing statutes, case law, and sentencing remarks from England and Wales, I explore how singular narrative identities emerge for the female defendants concerned. Using examples from selected cases, I highlight how the judiciary interpret legislation, use evidence, and draw upon gender stereotypes in carefully constructing macro-narratives which produce gendered identities for filicidal women, thus nullifying the challenge these women pose to appropriate femininity and the motherhood mandate. Each of the narrative identities discussed deny the agency of the female defendants that they are attached to, albeit in subtly different ways, by denying their ability to make any degree of choice in relation to their filicidal actions. Although such identity construction and agency denial may not always be damaging to these filicidal women per se, its pervasiveness within legal discourse reinforces and reproduces damaging gender stereotypes surrounding women and femininity.

This article concentrates on Catholic mission teachers in Southern Tanzania from the 1890s to the 1940s, their role and agency in founding and developing the early education system of Tanzania. African mission teachers are an underrated group of actors in colonial settings. Being placed between colonized and colonizers, between conversion and civilising mission, between colonial rule and African demands for emancipation, between church and government and at the heart of local society, their agency was crucial to forming African Christianity, to social change and to a newly emerging class of educated Africans. This liminal position also rendered them almost invisible for historiography, since the colonial archive rarely gave credit to their vital role and European missionary propaganda tended to present them as examples of successful mission work, rather than as self-reliant missionary activists. The article circumscribes the framework of colonial education policies and missionary strategies, it recovers the teachers' active role in the colonial education system as well as in missionary evangelization. Finally, it contrasts teachers' self-representation with the official image conveyed in missionary media.

AbstractWe analysed a set of medical certificates to investigate howGPs portray patients who seek disability benefits in Norway, focusing on patient centredness, agency and involvement. We performed a qualitative linguistic analysis of 33 medical certificates collected throughout Norway that were strategically selected based on the patients' sex, age and diagnosis. We found that patients were represented as passive carriers of symptoms, in whom agency was low, failed, conditional or non‐existing, or as passive objects of the actions of impersonalised others. Conversely, symptoms were foregrounded as independent and powerful actors. The patient's experience of illness was sometimes reported, but the perspective of theGPtended to be doctor oriented, rather than patient centred. The policy of the social services, which emphasises patient involvement, patient centredness and work, rather than social benefits, was almost completely absent from these medical certificates. If medical certificates are to be a valid basis for decisions within the social services, we suggest that doctor paternalism in these documents must give way to considering the patient as an involved and co‐responsible individual in the processes of disability assessment.

In international energy policy, programmes and consumer research, a dominant ideal consumer is emerging. This consumer is typically a human adult who has the agency to make autonomous, functional and rational decisions about his or her household's energy consumption. This article seeks to disrupt this dominant anthropocentric conceptualisation of the consumer and provide new ways of knowing and potentially intervening in the lives of energy consumers. Drawing on qualitative research conducted with householders living in Sydney, Australia, and theories of practice, materiality and agency from sociology and science and technology studies, we seek to understand consumers as human and nonhuman actants operating in distributed assemblages of practice. We explore the implications of conceptualising non-traditional consumers of energy, such as babies, pets, pests and pool pumps, as performers of or materials in practices that consume energy. Our analysis provides new ways of potentially intervening in patterns of energy consumption. We argue that policy makers need to refocus their attention on finding routes into assemblages of practice to achieve change. We conclude by calling for further exploration and recognition of the myriad curious consumers found in households.

This paper addresses why customers at times prefer traditional practices deemed more authentic to a domain, particularly where these practices had previously been discarded as inferior. I argue that customer demand for authenticity can be triggered when extrinsic rewards (i.e., fame or money) increase in prominence in a market, causing audiences to doubt the motives of the market's producers. I examine this dynamic in the context of Major League Baseball, where appreciation for traditional stadium features seemingly arose after the advent of free agency heightened awareness and coverage of the economic rewards in the sport. Experimental analysis validates the proposed mechanism, whereby increased fan exposure to extrinsic rewards increases concern about player inauthenticity, which increases preference for traditional stadium features. Quantitative analysis of attendance patterns provides external validation for these experimental findings by showing that authenticity was more highly preferred, in the form of higher relative attendance in traditional-style ballparks, by those fans more exposed to free agency. Conclusions are drawn about the role that perceptions about motives play in market perceptions of authenticity and valuation of authentic cultural objects.

Previous research on gender and sports has focused on the ways women athletes emphasize their femininity to counter critics who conflate female athleticism with mannishness and lesbianism. My findings from an ethnographic study of three roller derby leagues suggest that many "rollergirls" view their hyper-feminine, sexualized uniforms as a playful and pleasurable expression of their sexual agency, not as a means to prove their femininity or heterosexuality. By combining these uniforms with a full-contact sport, rollergirls attempt to "undo gender" by actively resisting the gender binary that equates athleticism and toughness with masculinity. Yet my findings also illustrate the importance of considering the social context in which these performances take place. While rollergirls assert that wearing sexualized, feminine uniforms is a "choice," others feel pressured to dress "sexy" in order to attract fans. In addition, their uniforms sometimes lead to unwanted attention from some men in the crowd who misinterpret the intended meanings of their self-presentation. This research emphasizes the importance of understanding women's individual feelings of agency in the context of social inequality.

This paper examines recent forms of post-identity thought within contemporary gender theory, specifically the works of Rosi Braidotti, Elizabeth Grosz and Bobby Noble. Despite the many insights that these theories offer, I argue that they suffer from what Lois McNay has labelled 'social weightlessness' insofar as their models of subjectivity and agency are disconnected from the everyday realities of social subjects. I identify two ways in which this social weightlessness is manifested in radical gender theories that endorse a post-identity politics: (i) they overlook the social and political importance to many individuals of establishing stable, coherent identities; (ii) they are unable to offer a satisfactory account of agency. I suggest that these issues arise, at least in part, from the anti-recognition stance adopted by such radical gender theorists. I argue that by incorporating a properly nuanced model of recognition back into their theories they can imbue their accounts with a properly grounded model of the subject that is responsive to the inequalities and oppressions that infuse the particular concrete contexts in which we experience and live out our identities.