Residues in the Secular: Whale Bones and Other Theological Relics1

This article develops the concept of the “theological relic”: a facet of secular life and culture that maintains traces of (and so remains bound in some way to) its genealogy in the theological. The theological relic, then, is something that fails to be either robustly religious or properly secular. It is, instead, a product of the relations between these social spaces. The article illustrates this concept by examining a cultural history of the whale, highlighting this creature's complex bonds with the theological. The whale, in other words, is figured as a theological relic: a creature of the secular that remains shrouded enough by traces of the theological that these vestiges of divinity are implicated in the whale's powerful late‐twentieth‐century cultural reconfiguration.     

The assessment of the non‐economic Environment in European companies

Abstract

The rapid changes in today's competitive environment can have a tremendous impact on company's performance. Companies have to tie resources to monitor these changes in order to survive. Political risk assessment is a managerial tool to cope with the uncertainties in the political environment.

The aim of the study was to find out how large European companies use this tool in their planning process. Of the responding companies 52.2 percent monitored their political environment regularly as a part of their on‐going planning process. Results of the study are presented in the paper.