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The chapter sets out a conceptual taxonomy for thinking systematically about old and new risks perceived to have a global dimension. It uses the complexity of those worldwide risks and the timeline of the disasters they portend to build the analytical scaffolding for understanding our current dynamic governing practices that are evolving to manage them in their diversity. It also sets out the scope conditions for both feasible insurance practices and for the political utility of insurance metaphors. As risk complexity deepens and time horizons lengthen, the potential role of market mechanisms shrinks, and collaborative government appears increasingly necessary.
This chapter introduces the major themes of the book. Insurance practices and related metaphors began expanding rapidly from a European base some 500 years ago. The simultaneous emergence of the modern state was hardly coincidental. Increasingly complex societies energized by market economies required protection from risks of various kinds. This required mobilizing and organizing private capital to achieve common goals. The deepening of markets and development of financial technologies now increases demands for protection beyond conventional borders. But where the fiscal power of the modern state underpinned national insurance and reinsurance systems, the absence of a global fiscal authority is exposed by rising cross-border, systemic, and global risks. That the background condition for necessary innovation in governance is uncertainty has also become undeniable.
This study explores the experiences of Russian relocants in Turkey, focusing on their migration trajectories through overlapping waves of shock, relocation, and partial mobilization, following the Russian invasion of Ukraine in 2022. Initially, Turkey was an attractive destination due to its visa-free access, air connectivity, affordable cost of living, and established post-Soviet community. However, among the nearly one million people who fled Russia, many relocants – primarily young, educated, and entrepreneurial individuals from the information technology sector and oppositional groups – face various uncertainties in Turkey. Drawing on findings from a qualitative study, this research first examines the migration journeys of Russian relocants through their self-narratives, tracing the waves of the exodus in 2022. It then critically analyzes the legal, economic, and social uncertainties they encounter in Turkey. Finally, it explores how the physical and virtual “bubbles” formed in İstanbul function as coping mechanisms to navigate these challenges. Blending staying and returning, bubbles function as temporary “in-between” spaces, allowing Russian relocants to encounter Turkey’s novelties, while maintaining a “transnational double presence” through ongoing ties to their homeland, resulting in a form of “functional adaptation.”
Human-centric uncertainty remains one of the most persistent yet least quantified sources of risk in aviation maintenance. Although established safety frameworks such as SMS (safety management system), STAMP (Systems-Theoretic Accident Model and Processes), and FRAM (Functional Resonance Analysis Method) have advanced systemic oversight, they fall short in capturing the dynamic, context-dependent variability of human performance in real time. This study introduces the uncertainty quantification in aircraft maintenance (UQAM) framework – a novel, predictive safety tool designed to measure and manage operational uncertainty at the task level. The integrated uncertainty equation (IUE) is central to the model, a mathematical formulation that synthesises eight empirically derived uncertainty factors into a single, actionable score. Using a mixed-methods design, the research draws on thematic analysis of 49 semi-structured interviews with licensed maintenance engineers, followed by a 12-month field validation across four distinct maintenance tasks. Results demonstrate that the IUE effectively distinguishes between low, moderate and high-risk scenarios while remaining sensitive to procedural anomalies, diagnostic ambiguity and environmental complexity. Heatmap visualisations further enable supervisory teams to identify dominant uncertainty drivers and implement targeted interventions. UQAM enhances predictive governance, supports real-time decision-making and advances the evolution of next-generation safety systems in high-reliability aviation environments by embedding quantitative uncertainty metrics into existing safety architectures.
Increasing senior leadership diversity and decentralizing decision-making have become imperatives for many organizations, supported by a growing normative literature. However, mixed empirical evidence suggests that these may hinder the decision-making processes required to deliver value to firms and their stakeholders. We argue that diversity and decentralization should instead be viewed as means of organizing towards these ends, and theorize the conditions under which they may harm performance – specifically, the nature of the knowledge problems faced by leaders. Analyzing a 19-year panel of 922 U.S. firms, we find that diversity and decentralization are associated with stronger financial and market performance in uncertain environments but become liabilities under ambiguity, where speed and strategic clarity are critical and homogeneous, centralized leadership is more effective. Stakeholder outcomes are similarly affected, particularly employee wellbeing and ethical political activity. These findings challenge normative claims, with implications for theory, proscriptions, and practice.
This paper explores the employment implications of integrating service robots in waste management. Using the scenario technique method, 14 critical influencing factors were identified and analyzed to develop a Best-Case, Worst-Case, and Trend scenario. A SWOT analysis was used to identify implications and develop measures. The findings indicate that service robots can enhance working conditions and enable service expansion but pose risks like job displacement without proper education and reskilling. The study underscores the need for regulatory frameworks, workforce adaptation, and education to ensure socially sustainable robotic integration.
Current quantitative methods for estimating product-related environmental emissions face limitations in supporting sustainable design, particularly in second-life product strategies. This paper highlights challenges in accurately assessing emissions and environmental impacts under existing regulations, which often fail to reward designs enabling circularity. Through examples of current practices, it underscores methodological ambiguities and regulatory gaps, proposing a research agenda for improved tools and frameworks. These advancements aim to better support the design, production, and certification of sustainable, second-life-ready solutions, fostering more effective environmental impact reduction. Additionally, the paper emphasizes the need for regulatory adaptation to incentivize circular design practices, ensuring a fair evaluation of products conceived for second-life applications
Uncertainty in coping with sustainability demands poses a challenge to decision makers concerned with manufacturing companies’ product engineering. Therefore, our paper reports on a newly developed guide to address their uncertainty and support them in initiating targeted sustainability action. The guide, based on an interview study (n = 25; 4 company cases and 1 consultancy) and a systematic literature review, addresses decision makers in product engineering and beyond. It was initially applied and evaluated in company workshops. The guide provides success criteria and reflection questions for each step toward targeted sustainability action: understanding, operationalizing, and implementing. This paper outlines the main concepts behind the guide and contributes to the literature by suggesting a novel approach to sustainability action in product engineering by addressing uncertainty.
Policy making in areas of scientific uncertainty may be shaped by the public’s stated preferences (SP). SP surveys provide respondents with information about the scenario, typically from expert sources. Here, we tested whether respondents’ pre-existing confidence in the ability of experts in general to provide reliable information was associated with (a) status quo bias, (b) response certainty and (c) willingness to pay (WTP) estimates. Using 670 responses to a 2020 choice experiment on microplastic restrictions in the UK, we show that being ex ante more confident was significantly related to less frequent status quo choices and higher response certainty. However, we only observed differences in mean WTP for our ‘microplastics released’ attribute. Our findings suggest that confidence in expert-provided information shapes how respondents engage with SP surveys, particularly in contexts of scientific uncertainty. Future work to further understand determinants and consequences of perceived expert trustworthiness would be insightful.
People’s decisions may change when made in a foreign language (FL). Research testing this foreign language effect (FLE) has mostly used scenarios where uncertainty is expunged or reduced to a form of risk, whereas real-life decisions are usually characterized by uncertainty around outcome likelihood. In the current work, we aimed to investigate whether the FLE on decision-making extends to uncertain scenarios. Moreover, as it is still unclear what linguistic and psychological factors contribute to the FLE, we tested the effects of participants’ FL background, cognitive style and risk-taking attitude on decision processes under certain and uncertain conditions. Overall, we report null effects of language context (native versus foreign language) and problem condition (certain versus uncertain prospects) on participants’ choices. In addition, we found that both FL background and decision makers’ traits modulated participants’ choices in a FL, without emerging into the ‘classic’ FLE on decision-making. However, the direction of such effects was complex, and not always compatible with previous FLE theories. In light of these results, our study highlights the need to reconceptualize the FLE and its implications on decision-making.
Of the sectors comprising international capital markets, insurance and reinsurance have attracted relatively little attention from students of politics. New social conventions and financial instruments arising from the invention of probabilistic calculation and the discovery of risk began to spread around the world five centuries ago. Today, states and firms are harnessing the logic of insurance to address an expansive array of risks confronting their societies. In Insuring States in an Uncertain World, Louis Pauly examines the history and politics of pragmatic experiments aimed at governing complex global risks. His fascinating and accessible narrative explores the promise and the challenges of multi-faceted insurance arrangements in arenas ranging from nuclear energy production and international financial intermediation to those focused on environmental change, infectious diseases, and disruptive new technologies. At a time when the foundations of global order are under mounting stress, Pauly makes the case for limited and effective political innovation.
Chapter 2 frames the book, drawing on structuration theory and ontological security studies to provide its theoretical underpinnings. This chapter begins by exploring the claims of positive influences of different tools found in the transitional justice project on ensuring non-recurrence of conflict. It proposes that while both scholars and practitioners remain unsure of what ‘works’ for a meaningful ‘Never Again’, they remain faithful that something does and that some transitional justice is better than none. The chapter then delineates some common threads based on these multiple promises of non-recurrence to reflect on the characteristics of transitional justice as a structure. Finally, the chapter theoretically complicates the existing position of non-recurrence in transitional justice scholarship by asking questions about temporality, security, and the purpose of transitional justice as a global project. In doing so, it provides a new outlook on the ontological security/transitional justice nexus and discusses where non-recurrence fits within it.
undate is an ambitious, in-progress effort to develop a pragmatic Python package for computation and analysis of temporal information in humanistic and cultural data, with a particular emphasis on uncertain, incomplete, and imprecise dates and with support for multiple calendars. The development of undate is grounded in domain-specific work on digital and computational humanities projects from multiple institutions, including Shakespeare and Company Project, Princeton Geniza Project, and Islamic Scientific Manuscript Initiative. With increasing support for different formats and calendars, Undate aims to bridge technical gaps across different communities and methodologies. In this article, we describe the undate software package and the functionality of the core Undate and UndateInterval classes to work with dates and date intervals. We discuss why this software exists, how it expands on and generalizes prior work, how it compares to other approaches and tools, and its current limitations. We describe the development methodology used to create the software, our plans for active and continuing development, and the potential undate has to impact computational humanities research.
Chapter 1 should have left you with an understanding that innovation is absolutely central to the functioning of the modern economy and a key strategic concern for companies. In this chapter, we will examine why innovation is also inherently difficult. We will begin with a very material understanding of this challenge, as Abernathy lays out how the nature of the production process that enables short-term competitiveness can be anathema to the development of innovation. To nuance what Abernathy calls the Productivity Dilemma, we then move on to March’s analysis of how different modes of organizational learning and managerial decision-making can lead to a similar trade-off between short-term and long-term competitiveness. Finally, we emphasize the ways that innovation is made still more difficult by its inherent uncertainty.
Researchers propose wider individual and societal benefits (or broad elements of value) be included in economic evaluations (EEs) of medicines. This study investigates opinions of Australian stakeholders regarding the inclusion of broader value elements in reimbursement decisions for medicines for rare diseases in Australia.
Method
Stakeholders were invited via email to complete an online survey about their views on broader elements of value in HTA. Responses were summarised using descriptive statistics and compared using chi-square statistics.
Results
Forty-four respondents (academia (n=11), private sector (n=33)) completed the survey between October 2023 and May 2024. Only 27% of stakeholders agree the current information about the sources of value considered in reimbursement decisions is sufficient. Stakeholders consistently agree labour productivity (>50%), adherence (>80%), reducing uncertainty due to a new diagnostic (>70%), disease severity (>71%), value to caregivers (>70%), and equity (>70%) should be considered in HTA. The majority (>70%) agreed managed entry agreements (MEA), risk share arrangements (RSA), and multi criteria decision analysis (MCDA) be used in reimbursement decision making for medicines for rare diseases. Significantly fewer academic stakeholders (40%) versus private sector (77%), believe an increased willingness-to-pay threshold be applied to medicines for rare disease.
Conclusions
Academic and private sector stakeholders hold similar views when considering medicines for non-rare and rare diseases. Stakeholders favour considering more value elements in HTA than referred to in the Pharmaceutical Benefits Advisory Committee (PBAC) guidelines. This study highlights further advice is needed on the factors considered in reimbursement decisions and how that would influence guidelines.
One of life’s most fundamental revelations is change. Presenting the fascinating view that pattern is the manifestation of change, this unique book explores the science, mathematics, and philosophy of change and the ways in which they have come to inform our understanding of the world. Through discussions on chance and determinism, symmetry and invariance, information and entropy, quantum theory and paradox, the authors trace the history of science and bridge the gaps between mathematical, physical, and philosophical perspectives. Change as a foundational concept is deeply rooted in ancient Chinese thought, and this perspective is integrated into the narrative throughout, providing philosophical counterpoints to customary Western thought. Ultimately, this is a book about ideas. Intended for a wide audience, not so much as a book of answers, but rather an introduction to new ways of viewing the world.
Augmented reality (AR) is a technology designed to display three-dimensional virtual elements in a real environment. This technology could reduce the cognitive load of marine operators by simplifying information interpretation. However, field tests often reveal qualitative reports of inaccurately projected virtual elements. To address this issue, we present a theoretical model to quantify the error between virtual projections and their observed positions. Numerical simulations, using normal random variables, indicate agreement between the predicted model variance and the error’s standard deviation. Furthermore, a real navigation experiment is conducted where observed errors are inferior to corresponding estimates for error bounds, further indicating the model’s adequacy. The proposed model enables real-time error estimation, system performance prediction and the specification of accuracy requirements. Overall, this study aims to contribute to the systematic definition of accuracy standards for AR-based maritime navigational assistance.
Earth–outer space interactions challenge conventional legal structures through dynamics that transcend jurisdictional boundaries and temporal scales. International law historically operates through specific spatiotemporal assumptions: geometric space, chronometric time, and cartographic politics. These elements structure how legal authority is conceptualised and enacted. This study recognizes the interconnectedness between Earth and outer space, positioning legal thought and practice within planetary and cosmic contexts. This integrative framework moves beyond anthropocentric and state-centric paradigms to address the indeterminate nature of multifaceted systems. The research employs an interdisciplinary methodology that integrates legal theory and doctrine, systems engineering, and systems science to analyse emergent phenomena such as orbital debris dynamics. The study concludes that addressing Earth–outer space interactions effectively requires not merely integrating existing legal regimes but reconceptualizing core legal concepts to align better with complex, multi-scalar and emergent dynamics.
The first 24–48 hours of a health emergency require the responding health agency to communicate with the public about what they know, what they don’t know, and what they are doing to find new information. By engaging in initial messages early in a crisis, health agencies can demonstrate credibility and build trust with the public. This chapter deconstructs initial messages and identifies four critical message components: addressing uncertainty, expressing empathy, making a commitment, and providing messages of self-efficacy. By delivering initial messages early and often a health agency can demonstrate the Crisis and Emergency Risk Communication (CERC) principles of Be First, Be Right, Be Credible, Show Respect, Express Empathy, and Promote Action. The chapter provides practical steps on how to write initial messages and provides quick response communication planning and implementation steps such as identifying communication objectives, audiences, key messages, and channels and developing communication products/materials. This chapter also includes key tips related to spokespeople, partner agecies, and call centers regarding ensuring message consistency during an emergency response. Uncertainty reduction theory is highlighted. A student case study analyzes the Flint Water Crisis using the CERC framework. Reflection questions are included at the end of the chapter.