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This paper discusses how culture impinges on the reading and the understanding of texts. It investigates the idea that culture is a manifestation of difference, and proposes 4 approaches for the translator, expanding on Schleiermacher’s classic idea of translation as leaving the writer in peace by moving the reader to the writer or vice versa. The characteristics, strengths and weaknesses of each approach are illustrated. The first suggestion is “translating from cultures”. This is an anthropological approach overtly framing the text within its context through thick translation. The second main approach “translating for cultures”, closely follows Schleiermacher. The approach is divided into 2 parts, depending on whether the translator wishes to highlight or reduce the difference. Highlighting difference is favoured by cultural studies scholars to protect vulnerable groups and difference itself; while reducing difference, favoured by linguists aims to reduce barriers to the text. The final approach, “translating between cultures” is an intercultural approach, which accepts that the reader’s “cultural filter”, will always distort and otherwise affect reading of the translation. In all cases, it is necessary to construct the model or ideal reader, as it is through imagining the reader that the most appropriate approach can be ascertained.

Our roots and the roots of many other ORTECcers are in the Operations Research (OR) department of the Econometric Institute of the Erasmus University Rotterdam. Now we employ 450 people with a quantitative background, who generate a turnover in applied OR of about €40 million. By the definitions of accountants this means that we are now a ‘large’ internationally operating company. The title of the paper might suggest that the focus of this paper is the past. However, as we learned from historical scientists, understanding the past is especially important to make better, and better founded, decisions in the future. That is also the objective of this paper: Describing a view on 25 years of applied OR, in order to attribute to a strong continuation of further growth. Worldwide aging and the strong trend of globalization because of the impressive growth of the economies in India and China, strongly forces the western world to increase productivity.1 From the Nobel prize-winning work of Solow we know that more than 80% of productivity increase comes from creating and better exploiting knowledge. It is our view that exponential growth of successful applied OR, based on models that indeed represent ‘constructive knowledge’, is needed and attainable. Learning from the past, we describe our views and plans to get there. As a result of aging and the need for higher productivity well-educated OR professionals will remain to have great (probability 1) chances of employment on the labor markets for decades. By elaborating on this, we hope that the paper is also a stimulus for current OR students, and an attracting force for future OR employees who are now working on their future at high school.

This paper examines the expansion of the OECD's Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA) and associated growth in the influence of the OECD's education work. PISA has become one of the OECD's most successful ‘products’ and has both strengthened the role of the Directorate for Education within the organization and enhanced the significance of the organization in education globally. We provide an overview of the OECD, including organizational changes in response to globalization and the changing place of the Directorate for Education within the organization, particularly with the development of PISA in the late 1990s. We show how the OECD is expanding PISA by broadening the scope of what is measured; increasing the scale of the assessment to cover more countries, systems and schools; and enhancing its explanatory power to provide policy-makers with better information. The OECD has also developed the Programme for International Assessment of Adult Competencies (PIAAC) and PISA-based Tests for Schools, which draw on the PISA template to extend the influence of its education work to new sites. The paper draws on data from 33 interviews with past and present personnel from the OECD, the International Association for the Evaluation of Educational Achievement (IEA) and the English and Australian education systems, as well as analysis of relevant OECD documents. We argue that PISA, and the OECD's education work more broadly, has facilitated new epistemological and infrastructural modes of global governance for the OECD in education.

Globalization has resulted in a marked increase in the number of academic economists who have entered the international job market. Previously, the national markets were much more self-contained. Young economists could be confident of finding a tenured professorship in their own country. During the recent decades, virtually all member countries of the European Union and many Asian countries have joined the international market for economists today dominated by the United States. While private connections and ‘old boys’ networks’ remain an important instrument for obtaining academic positions, being published in internationally recognized journals has become a conditio sine qua non. Many universities assign professorships based on the number of publications in top academic journals and citations. At the same time, the revolution of the Internet has opened new ways to ‘publish’. Everybody can put his or her writings on their homepage, in working paper series (such as SSRN, CESifo, or CREMA), in editorially run electronic journals (such as Economists’ Voice or Vox), and in organized or spontaneous blogs. These publication channels have the great advantage over traditional journals of being quick (often even immediate) and of approximating the idea of an intellectual discourse. There are few, if any, restrictions, i.e. there is generally no peer reviewing. Many scholars today keep themselves informed by screening and selectively downloading the summaries of these Internet publications. However, when the manifold existing versions are finally revised and printed in a journal, the paper is often only cited and is rarely read. As a result, journal publications no longer impart new knowledge and ideas but serve as a certification that a paper has been deemed worthy of a narrowly defined

This paper investigates the relationship between regional and national identities in the age of globalisation, with particular reference to the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN). For members of ASEAN, economic integration is seen as a necessary step forward in order to (i) reduce reliance on Western countries during times of economic crisis and (ii) speed up the recovery process in the aftermath of a crisis. The concept of an ASEAN Economic Community represents a step towards achieving this goal. However, by means of a case study, this paper demonstrates that the idea of an ASEAN Economic Community does not yet have sufficiently solid foundations. Cracks appear when member states act in response to national interest. Given the frequency of friction between member nations, and the fact that ASEAN members are quite diverse in both economic and cultural respects, there is still much more to be done to realise the objective of forming an effective and credible regional economic group. In this paper some suggestions are offered that might assist with the achievement of this goal.

To create a competitive advantage and generate superior performance, firms must first identify rivals. However, there is little understanding of how perceived environmental uncertainty affects competitor identification, why some firms are better at identifying domestic versus foreign rivals, or how competitor identification is related to firm performance. In this paper we theorize that perceived environmental uncertainty is an important antecedent of competitor identification; it influences how many competitors a firm identifies. Our theory also suggests that different firm characteristics influence domestic/foreign competitor identification and that there is an inverted-U shaped relationship between under/overidentification of competitors and firm performance. Based on a large sample of Taiwanese firms, we find support for each of these ideas. Our study helps reinforce the importance of competitor identification for firm success. Copyright (c) 2015 ASAC. Published by John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.

This paper addresses the role of the Internet in global collective action through an analysis of the scale practices of the Indymedia network. Indymedia is a worldwide network of interlinked websites run by volunteers organised in local Independent Media Centres (IMCs). These websites, a global site at http://www.indymedia.org and over one hundred local sites, are meant to empower activists groups by providing them with a media platform. The case study focuses on the role of the Internet in four facets of collective action: grievances and alternatives, organisation, mobilisation and identities. The analysis deals more specifically with scales, examining scaling practices in the light of three scale metaphors (scale as level, scale as size, scale as relation). While scales are also framed as bounded areas (territorial communities to be served) and as levels when targeting specific government agencies, the prevailing scale frame is that of a network of scales in which the local and the global mutually constitute each other.

Science has seen considerable change in recent decades with the emergence of a new economic and sociopolitical contract between science, the nation, state, and private commercial interests. Generally regarded as having been precipitated by globalization, these changes in the sciences are beginning to be documented by a range of commentators. Clearly, science's changing forms hold profound implications for the development of science education. As there is little science education scholarship exploring the implications sciences' altering forms, this paper attempts to investigate the relationship at more depth. Detailing this relationship is important because it can help formulate new questions, and methods for their investigation, relevant to the work of science education in the newly global world. © 2008 Wiley Periodicals, Inc. J Res Sci Teach 45: 617–633, 2008

Analysis of the contemporary food system has shown a progressive displacement of ‘natural’ processes in favour of those characterized as ‘industrial.’ Thus, an instrumentalized form of nature has come to prevail within the food sector. And yet, the contemporary literature on the processes of globalization and standardization in the food system has underestimated the reassertion of more ‘natural’ products in alternative food circuits. In this paper we seek to combine understandings of the conventional food sector with analysis of alternative circuits so that we can show how different ‘worlds of production’ come together in the sphere of food production. Utilizing two case studies from Italy, we indicate that the main trajectory of development in the food sector is not towards globalized and standardized production but is towards a fragmentation of production processes in which different trends can be seen to co-exist. The status of ‘nature’ differs according to the particular productive world that dominates. However, we indicate that a growing concern for the natural component of food is driving some of the most significant changes currently running through the food sector.