No abstract

The capacity of developing economies to narrow the gap in living standards with the OECD nations depends critically on their ability to imitate and innovate new technologies. Toward this end, developing economies have access to three avenues of technological advance: technology transfer, domestic R&D, and foreign direct investment. This paper examines the contributions of each of these avenues, as well as their interactions, to productivity and knowledge production within Chinese industry. Based on a large data set for China's large and medium-size enterprises, the estimation results show that technology transfer-whether domestic or foreign-affects productivity only through its interactions with in-house R&D. Foreign direct investment does not appear to facilitate the adoption of market-mediated foreign technology transfer. Firms wishing to produce patentable knowledge do not benefit from technology transfer; patentable knowledge is created exclusively through in-house R&D operations.

In this paper, we study urban migrants' sense of place in Guangzhou, China, focusing on the structural relations between place attachment, identification and dependence as the three key place dimensions. Through both quantitative structural equation modelling and qualitative analysis of in-depth interviews data, our research suggests that migrants' sense of place demonstrates complex relationships between the three registers of emotional attachment, identity formation and functional dependence. The construction of sense of place is also related to the personal experiences of living as urban 'outsiders' . Our research also reveals a striking difference between the city and community levels in terms of the ways in which migrants' sense of place is constructed. Urban migrants tend to exploit the functional utilities of microscopic urban spaces to meet their demands for recreation, education and socialisation. On the other hand, their sense of place to the city is largely compromised by their attachment to the hometown and conditioned by their personal identification to the city.

Given the rapid diversification and mutation of public space and public life across the globe, this article theorises epistemologies of publicness that move the research agenda beyond the conceptual straitjacket of presence, accessibility and visibility. It develops three theoretical approaches: public space as situated and lived; public space as assemblage; and public space as a liminal zone between inclusion and exclusion. Signposting more open-ended, flexible, processual, performative and ambivalent conceptions of publicness and public space, this article represents one of the first attempts to systematically map the permutations of new theoretical and conceptual developments in the research of public space.