Ph. Licentiate Seminar

On February 3, 2012, Ina Blind, PhD Candidate in Economics at IBF, defended her licentiate's dissertation at Department of Economics, Uppsala University, consisting of two papers: 1) Tenure mix and social mix in metropolitan Stockholm and 2) All aboard? Commuter train access and labour market (with Matz Dahlberg and Olof Åslund). Discussant was professor Peter Fredriksson, Department of Economics, Stockholm University.

2012-02-08

The flows of money

Brett Christophers, IBF, has written the article "Follow the thing: money" in Environment and Planning D: Society and Space. Drawing on the work of David Harvey among others, the article explores the idea of applying Marx's famous critique of commodity fetishism to a commodity rarely considered amenable to such a critique: money, which Marx called the "god of commodities". The editors of the journal considered the article sufficiently important and provocative to invite a prominent scholar of money, Emily Gilbert, to write a formal response, to which Christophers was invited to reply. The response and reply are published alongside the original article.

2012-01-25

Riots and segregation

Per Adman, former researcher at IBF, has written the report Riots, Segregation and Local Government Actions: A Missing Theoretical Perspective. Residential segregation is often associated with circumstances such as unemployment, lack of opportunities to exert political influence, and widespread political alienation. These factors seem to be connected with the occurrence or riots. Still, structural factors such as these cannot, in themselves, explain why riots take place instead of peaceful protests or complete inactivity. The author argues, that more attention should be paid to the triggering incidents and the actions of local government actors, especially representatives of institutions of social control, such as the police, courts, and local politicians. The aim of the report is to develop this theoretical approach and illustrate it with empirical data on the 1992 Los Angeles riot, the most violent riot in the USA since the 1960s.

2012-01-18

Adaptation to Windowlessness

Terry Hartig, IBF, together with Tina Bringslimark and Grete Grindal Patil at the Norwegian University of Life Sciences, Ås, Norway, has written the article "Adaptation to windowlessness: Do office workers compensate for a lack of visual access to the outdoors?" In the study, the authors investigated whether office workers compensate for the lack of a window by bringing plants and pictures of nature indoors. The authors used cross-sectional survey data from 385 Norwegian office workers and they found that windowless office workers had roughly five times greater odds of having brought plants into their workspaces than workers with a window view, independent of age, gender, type of office, job demands, control over work, and personalization. They had also three times greater odds of having brought pictures of nature into their workspaces. The authors suggest that environmental design can support the office workers’ individual efforts toward compensation or ensure that the places they occupy have compensatory features.

2012-01-04

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