Boundaries, barriers and belonging

Barriers to development: pushing the boundaries

Why some countries have failed to create democracy, wealth and happiness for their people is one of the great questions of our time. This essay encompasses a description of the multiple barriers to development that may have different characteristics, according to the context and the social structures that maintain these conditions. It would be arrogant to pretend to have all the solutions for t...

The boundaries of firms as information barriers

When contracts are incomplete, the property-rights theory of firms suggests that ownership of physical assets provides better outside options, which in turn strengthen the owner’s incentives to invest in the enterprise. This approach is less suitable for human capital firms such as management consulting that lack physical assets. This article develops an alternative theory for integration that ...

Crossing boundaries and breaking barriers Distributing leadership in schools

Barriers to Horizontal Gene Transfer: Fuzzy and Evolvable Boundaries

The existence of numerous types of barriers to horizontal gene transfer (HGT) is well documented. Nevertheless, no barrier is impervious, and all kinds of genes can occasionally find their way into organisms different from the ones in which they evolved. This by no means implies a free flow of genes across taxa, but, rather, the existence of complex networks of loopholes across barriers that co...

Crossing Borders and Shifting Boundaries of Belonging in Post-Wall Europe. A Gender Lens1

Borders and boundaries are central to states and their nations. Physically marked borders as well as imagined communities (Anderson 1991) and their limes – boundaries are the frame for the praxis/management exercised by the state authorities on both sides. They are also the frame for the usage of the border and related boundaries by the local and by more distant populations. In this text the fo...