Globalisation has entered the academic vocabulary despite, or perhaps because of, its conceptual imprecision. Indeed it has been argued that:

it is largely because of their ambiguities that mere words are capable of… independent action as forces in history. A term, a phrase, a formula which gains currency or acceptance because one of its meanings, or of the thoughts which it suggests, is congenial to the prevalent beliefs, the standards of value, the tastes of a certain age, may help to alter beliefs, standards of value and tastes, because other meanings or suggested implications, not clearly distinguished by those who employ it, gradually become the dominant elements of its signification (Lovejoy, 1936: 14).

The future will decide if this evolution is to happen to globalisation, a term born in a period of diminishing economic expectations, poor economic performance, ‘the end of socialism’ had conquered all before it as a disorganised capitalism superseded the Keynesian interregnum of the West and arose from the rubble of the command economies in the East.

Empirically estimated politico-economic models which study the interdependence between the economy and the polity are confronted with competing models using the hard test of ex ante forecasts. The politico-economic models in which the government is taken to act in a political framework (it wants to be reelected and to put its ideology into action) yield superior forecasts compared to the models in which a ‘benevolent dictator’ government directly reacts to macroeconomic conditions. These results suggest that political influences are indeed important and can be adequately analysed in the framework of politico-economic models.

This paper explains the key themes and areas of debate covered by this symposium. While the focus of these papers is predominantly on the US higher education system – with just one paper from the context of a UK HEI – it is clear that some common themes and issues can be identified from the various case studies that are discussed. The question of how to define internationalisation; the process of how to encourage and measure internationalisation; and the design and delivery of an internationalised curriculum – particularly in relation to study abroad schemes – are themes that run across the five papers. Drawing from the work undertaken in this symposium, this paper concludes by suggesting a number of areas and questions that merit further investigation and evaluation.

Meals-on-wheels services in Ireland and elsewhere rely heavily on volunteers to operate. Meals-on-wheels services that draw extensively on volunteers’ contributions both benefit from and augment social capital within communities. Based on interviews with voluntary and paid meals-on-wheels coordinators and staff carried out in early 2007, this article examines: (1) the recruitment and retention of volunteers; (2) motivations for volunteering; (3) the nature of the contributions of volunteers; and, (4) the future role of volunteering within the service. The article argues that volunteerism in meals provision for older adults in Ireland is in crisis. The recruitment and retention of volunteers may be improved if service providers gain a better understanding of the motivations of volunteers and develop strategies to ensure that volunteers have an opportunity to engage in work that corresponds to their original motivations, which includes enhancing the social capital of their communities.

The creation of a common market in capital is a basic component of the European Community's single market programme. This article provides an explanation of the factors which have shaped the single market for capital in terms of three ‘perspectives’ which supplement each other and which collectively provide a substantive explanation. These perspectives include: (i) the policy requirements and politico-economic context of the single market programme; (ii) the complex and multi-faceted nature of regulation in the financial services field; and (iii) the political balance of power between the national, EC and international agencies involved in financial regulation. Each of these three perspectives contributes salient insights unavailable to the other two. Collectively they provide an explanation of how the liberalisation of capital movements and financial services has actually involved creating a more sophisticated regulatory order rather than simply reducing the volume of regulation.

As a journal, Language has a substantial history of publishing articles about areas of linguistics now commonly identified as language documentation, revitalization, and reclamation. The significance of this vein of research is exemplified by the collection of articles published by Ken Hale and colleagues in this journal in 1992 (Hale et al. 1992). These articles present themselves as case studies of language revitalization, outlining arguments for the importance of linguistic training and assessing language vitality and diversity, all with more relevance than ever nearly three decades later. LANGUAGE REVITALIZATION AND DOCUMENTATION, a new section of the journal, will build upon the base of knowledge as a venue for peer-reviewed research articles in language revitalization and documentation. As the inaugural associate editor for this journal section, I outline a framework for the section as a starting point for submissions.

Once upon a time, when the discipline of politics established itself in the closing decades of the nineteenth century, scholars focused on the state and had a notion of political man - the statesman - operating within the constraints and opportunities integral to a nation’s history and constitutional system of rule. For much of the twentieth century, political scientists have been much less attentive to the state: they have seen it as a woolly abstraction and so have chosen to redefine and expand their frame of disciplinary reference to embrace other things. Political scientists got increasingly excited about the significance of the political behaviour of ordinary individuals and groups in the larger society. Moreover, they often argued that this behaviour pressed in to determine the actions and policies of elected governments in the West.

Despite the high adoption level of Facebook and other social network sites (SNSs) in Norway, local level voluntary associations have not embraced SNSs to the same degree. Regular websites are the main web representation, and information provision is the main function of the associations’ web representations. Using quantitative data on website content and organizational characteristics we have analyzed which factors hinder SNS adoption. The results point to size and complexity of associations and to age-based digital divides among members as important factors for having a profile on a SNS. It seems that a certain numerical point must be reached in terms of organizational and community size, for SNSs to be useful. Also, older members, smaller economy and a low degree of formalization in associations might hamper the implementation of SNSs in associations. Using Norway as a critical case, this article contributes new knowledge about web communication in voluntary organizations, an increasingly important field of research internationally.

Civil society leadership training programmes are a new phenomenon, and they are often overlooked by civil society scholarship despite being linked to the professionalisation of the sector. In this article, we examine 14 Swedish leadership programmes in order to identify leadership ideals in the sector. Drawing on the notion of ‘symbolic boundaries’, we argue that leadership programmes produce horizontal boundaries in relation to other societal sectors and vertical boundaries between leaders of the sector and other members. Together, these symbolic boundaries form a leadership ideal that detaches leaders from their organisation and internal democratic processes, instead depicting leadership as a question of personal characteristics and values. Leaders in the sector need to be authentic and to anchor their leadership in the personal values they hold. Theoretically, our analytical model may prove useful in the study of other empirical phenomena in civil society.

This review surveys the state of research on nonprofit communication and collects and summarizes the resulting advice for nonprofit communication practice. The citations of research papers since 2000 were collected from standard bibliographic databases and selected bibliographies. The resulting collection of papers was summarized and synthesized into relevant themes and organized into five broad categories: (1) strategic planning, (2) management, (3) development, (4) outreach, and (5) accountability. From these broad themes, comparisons and contrasts arise between the research and current practice of nonprofit communications.

We study how donors decide about which charity to give to. To this end, we construct a theoretical model that clarifies the conditions under which the stand-alone benefit from giving, the charity price (i.e. the fundraising expenditure and overhead costs claimed by the charity providing services), and the information cost (i.e. the cost of information acquisition) inform giving decisions. We define the price of giving as the sum total of charity price and information cost. The model shows that giving decisions might be affected by a price–information trade-off—a condition where donors care about the charity price because they want their donations to maximise charitable output, but dislike searching for the charity price because it is costly. The literature is then reviewed to test the explanatory power of the theoretical model. The review provides evidence in favour of a price–information trade-off.

Some phonologically significant generalizations result from processes, often formalized as rewrite rules, while others result from interactions among independently motivated processes, often formalized in terms of serial ordering. We adopt these general formalizations of processes and interactions to address two questions. One is the interaction question: what are all the possible forms of interaction between two processes? The other is the opacity question: what makes an interaction between two processes opaque? We show that these questions are best addressed with a rigorous algebraic formalization of processes and their pairwise interactions, describing the complete formal typology of process interactions and identifying the formal properties of those interactions that lead to different types of opacity.

While there are very clearly some structural constraints on pronoun interpretation, debate remains as to their extent and proper formulation (Bruening 2014). Since Reinhart 1976 it has commonly been reported that bound-variable pronouns are subject to a c-command requirement. This claim is not universally agreed upon and has recently been challenged by Barker (2012), who argues that bound pronouns must merely fall within the semantic scope of a binding quantifier. In the processing literature, recent results have been advanced in support of c-command (Cunnings et al. 2015, Kush et al. 2015). However, none of these studies separates semantic scope from structural c-command. In this article, we present two self-paced reading studies and one off-line judgment task which show that when we put both c-commanding and non-c-commanding quantifiers on an equal footing with regard to their ability to scope over a pronoun, we nonetheless find a processing difference between the two. Semantically legitimate but non-c-commanded bound variables do not behave like c-commanded bound variables in their search for an antecedent. The results establish that c-command, not scope alone, is relevant for the processing of bound variables. We then explore how these results, combined with other experimental findings, support a view in which the grammar distinguishes between c-commanded and non-c-commanded variable pronouns, the latter perhaps being disguised definite descriptions (Cooper 1979, Evans 1980, Heim 1990, Elbourne 2005).

This article examines the trust hypothesis: the claim that asymmetric information can explain the existence of non-profit enterprise in certain markets. We argue that this hypothesis, in order to be viable, has to meet three challenges: ‘reputational ubiquity’, ‘incentive compatibility’ and ‘adulteration’. Drawing on modern agency theory, we conclude that the trust hypothesis stands on shaky ground. It can be sustained only under particular conditions that have been neither carefully described in theory nor subject to empirical assessment. The available evidence, patchy and inadequate as it is, seems to suggests that there are some ownership-related differences in aspects of organisational performance connected with asymmetric information. However, there is little evidence that this relates to trust per se or provides a rationale for the existence of non-profit ownership in these industries. We conclude with a plea for substantial research on consumer expectations and provider motivations.