Background: As an answer to a discourse on a Swedish school in crisis a large edu-political apparatus has been implemented. Arguments on e.g. decreasing results, segregation, and equal opportunities has reinforced a number of actors to enter the educational field – actors here called "edu-preneurs" (Rönnberg, 2017). The actors offer a multitude of products and services and essential parts of everyday schooling thus become outsourced on external actors using education as an arena to reach the core of the society – the children. This process, nurtured by political reforms such as the possibility to profit on public funds (Jober, submitted) has "re-calibrated" the Swedish school – from a government-dominated and unified educational system to an unruly free market (Ball, 2009; Hamilton, 2011). This market and its edu-preneurs will be investigated in the project 'Education Inc.', funded by the Swedish Research Council (Ideland, Axelsson, Jobér & Serder, 2016). The project aims to study how private actors and logics change the conditions for what counts as good education. Three forms of commodification of education, outlined by Molnar (2006), will be studied: (1) actors selling to schools; (2) actors selling in schools; and (3) actors buying for schools. In order to create a baseline for the Education Inc. project this paper describes one the first sub studies. This sub study aims to scrutinise foremost actors selling toschool when presenting themselves and engage with the school community at a school fair. Research Questions: The overarching aims of the Education Inc. project is to study under what conditions, in what forms and with which consequences 'edu-preneurial' actors engage in Swedish schools. This particular sub study focus on with what objectives do edu-preneurial companies, NGOs and their employees engage in Swedish school. Objectives: The aim of this sub study is to conceptualise and analyse processes on how good intentions and altruistic objectives are used as arguments to justify actors' place in education. An earlier pre-study (Jobér, submitted) showed that tutoring companies, actors in the educational market, used arguments regarding children with special needs to justify their presence and actions. This pre-study raised a number of questions: Will the companies, whatever good intentions, overlook profit? Are arguments regarding children with special needs used as a lever for businesses to survive and profit rather than to help? Similar has been showed elsewhere (Dovemark & Erixon Arreman, 2017), therefore we claim there is a risk that actors in the educational market will not consider all children as profitable enough. There is therefore a need to scrutinize if money spent (through public funds) will increase profits and exclusion rather than to support inclusion, and in addition, if students with low exchange value fit into a neoliberal market. Theoretical framework: We argue that processes in Sweden, which is a traditionally strong and well-trusted welfare state, have become entangled with neoliberal rationalities (see e.g. Dahlstedt, 2009) and that ways of imagine and practice schooling today are shaped by neoliberal logics (Rizvi & Lingard, 2010). The neoliberal state has opened up for a commodification of education (Steiner-Khamsi, 2016) and educational reforms become a way to make up a specific kind of subjectivity (Ong, 2007). The marketization of education is thus not only about earning money, but also about making up meanings and practices of schooling and a certain kind of ideal citizen (Olmedo, Bailey & Ball 2013). This is what Ong (2007) conceptualizes as a neoliberalism which concerns how possible and desirable subjectivities are produced. The questions are what kind of objectives the actors put forward and how this correspond with what kind of desirable subjects that are produced in this neoliberal logic. Method: The sub study presented here will take a closer look at the actors selling to school when they attend a large school fair, SETT, which will take place in Sweden in April. In a pre-study to the larger 'Education Inc.' project this kind of educational 'trade fairs' has been identified as one of the spaces where policy becomes translated and turned into business ideas (Ideland et al, 2006). Observations will take place at this fair by four researchers. The observations will be written down using an observation scheme. The observations will also include photographs of the showcases and the messages that can be found there. In addition the research team will gather advertisement such as flyers and follow ongoing twitter flows. These data will be reflected on within the research group and finally analysed employing an analytical framework developed from the work by Callon (1986, used by, e.g., Hamilton 2011). The aim with this analysis is to more carefully explore how a problem is articulated through the actors and their relationships i.e. the problematisation moment in Callons work (1986). Callon proposes that translation of actions and actors analytically can be studied as four different moments: Problematization, Interessement, Enrolment, and Mobilization. It is the first step, the problematization moment and how a problem is articulated through the actors and their relationship that is in focus here. The problematization is the moment when actors (such as those the selling to schools at the school fair) or clusters of actors articulate a problem. It often involves a focus on a particular goal or a problem to be solved where the actors locate themselves as gatekeepers and problem solvers. Within the problematisation moment, the analysis can show what problems actors enhance (for example, in schools or in society), how do they want to solve these problems, and the argument that makes them indispensable to the problem and action. With this framework we can thus scrutinise with what kind of intentions and objectives these actors engage in Swedish school. Expected Outcomes: The hypothesis is that the observations conducted at this school fair and its following analyses will give insights in with what objectives and intention edu-preneurial companies, NGOs and their employees engage in Swedish school. Building on a pre-study (Jobér, submitted) and earlier research (e.g. Dovemark & Erixon Arreman) the hypothesis is also that the actors will bring forward a number of altruistic arguments. These might regard supporting the society to decrease widening socioeconomic gaps, including children with special needs, opening possibilities to equal opportunities for all, and reaching out to students living in rural areas of Sweden. However, as shown in above earlier studies, these are complicated arguments, given for example that a number of initiatives in the educational market, such as private tutoring, is not used at all by those with low incomes (Björkman, 2014, 21 November). There are reasons to believe that the expected outcomes from this pre-study not only will show what kind of altruistic objectives the actors use to justify their presence but also bring forward initial data that in forthcoming studies can be used to identify if the actors in educational market desire profits rather than inclusion and equal opportunities for all. References: Ball, S. (2009). Privatising education, privatising education policy, privatising educational research: network governance and the 'competition state', Journal of Education policy, 24(1), 83-99. Callon, M. (1986). Elements of a sociology of translation: Domestication of the Scallops and the Fishermen of St Brieuc Bay. In J. Law (Ed.), Power, Action and Belief: A New Sociology of Knowledge? London: Routledge, pp 196-233. Clarke, J. (2002). A new kind of symmetry: Actor-network theories and the new literacy studies. Studies in the Education of Adults, 34(2), 107-122. Dahlstedt, M. (2009). Governing by partnerships: dilemmas in Swedish education policy at the turn of the millennium, Journal of Education Policy, 24(6), 787–801. Dovemark, M. & Erixon Arreman, I. (2017). The implications of school marketisation for students enrolled on introductory programmes in Swedish upper secondary education. Education, Citizenship and Social Justice, 12(1), 1–14. Hamilton, M. (2011). Unruly Practices: What a sociology of translations can offer to educational policy analysis. Educational Philosophy and Theory, 43(1), 55–75. Ideland, M., Axelsson, T., Jobér, A. & Serder, M. (2016) Helping hands? Exploring school's external actor-networks. Paper accepted for ECER, Dublin, August 2016. Jobér, A. (submitted). How to become Indispensable: Tutoring Businesses in the Education Landscape. Submitted to Special Issue of Discourse titled Politics by Other Means: STS and Research in Education. Latour, B. (2005). Reassembling the social: An introduction to actor-network theory. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Molnar, A. (2006). The Commercial Transformation of Public Education, Journal of Education Policy, 21(5), 621-640. Olmedo, A., Bailey, P. L., and Ball, S. J. (2013). To Infinity and Beyond…: heterarchical governance, the Teach For All network in Europe and the making of profits and minds. European Educational Research Journal, 12(4), 492–512. Ong, A. (2007). Neoliberalism as a mobile technology. Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers, 32(1), 3-8. Rizvi, F. & Lingard, B. (2010). Globalizing education policy. London: Routledge. Rönnberg, L. (2017). From national policy-making to global edu-business: Swedish edupreneurs on the move. Journal of Education Policy, 32(2), 234–249. Steiner-Khamsi, G. (2016). Standards are good (for) business: standardised comparison and the private sector in education. Globalisation, Societies and Education 14(2).
Azerbaijan is a secular, majority-Shiite, oil and gas-rich country whose per-capita income quadrupled in real terms during the period 2004-10. While rising incomes have reduced poverty, steps towards a more secure, diversified economy are held back by a public sector that rests on vested interests, patronage-based incentive structures, and ingrained patterns of behavior that include significant rent extraction, particularly from the non-oil economy, with minimal checks and balances from Parliament, the private sector, and civil society. Bank engagement in Azerbaijan at the country level focused on areas which had government support. Some modest results have been achieved, even though in many cases modern laws and practices were adopted without adequate plans for implementation. At the project level, the Bank has supported the strengthening of project implementation units (PIUs) and tools for monitoring, and governance and institutional filters have signaled that Governance and Anticorruption (GAC) processes need to be embedded in the Bank projects. At the sector level, the Bank's work was highly relevant in supporting oil revenue transparency, primary education, roads, and the development of safeguards. It was substantially relevant in public financial management, and private sector development and procurement. Bank engagement was moderately relevant in decentralization, civil service reform, and accountability institutions.
Defining appropriate institutional and financing arrangements is crucial to achieve sustainable social protection in Myanmar. This will require setting up overarching coordination mechanisms, with strong political leadership at the union level complemented by a more prominent role for region/state governments and local-level structures in social protection programming, financing, and delivery. This will lead to an effective and sustainable social protection system that addresses local priorities and increases accountability to citizens.
All countries have a formal economy and an informal economy. But, on average, in developing countries the relative size of the informal sector is considerably larger than in developed countries. This paper argues that this has important implications for housing policy in developing countries. That most poor households derive their income from informal employment effectively precludes income-contingent transfers as a method of redistribution. Also, holding fixed real economic activity, the larger is the relative size of the informal sector, the lower is fiscal capacity, and the more distortionary is government provision of a given level of goods and services, which restricts the desirable scale and scope of government policy. For the same reasons, housing policies that have proven successful in developed countries may not be successful when employed in developing countries.
From July 1915 onwards, leave granted to the front fighters allowed them to spend a few days in the rear. From 6 days in 1915, these leaves increased to 7 days in 1916, then to 10 days in October 1917. Approached from a global perspective, this research seeks to link the social and cultural history of war through the methods of cultural anthropology of social facts, without neglecting the political or military dimensions. The plan followed articulates three levels of analysis, the real, the symbolic and the imaginary, using a very varied corpus of sources. The research is based in particular on the analysis of 200 directories of police station reports in Paris (known as "mains courantes"), which have made it possible to build up a database of some 6,000 pass-holders and 6,000 deserters. Analyses of the social and cultural phenomena linked to permission in the capital use the quantitative study of this abundant source, which provides information on many aspects of the lives of individuals and Parisian neighbourhoods, and is not limited to delinquency. This source thus makes it possible to place the reflection in the perspective of social changes over time. The database has also made it possible to map certain phenomena, such as prostitution, desertion or the relations of soldiers on leave with civilians, women or allied soldiers. Finally, the police reports, which are often consistent, give flesh to an individualised social micro-history.The first part retraces the military, political and administrative construction of the permissions, as well as the logistical stakes of their transport by train, which is also studied from an anthropological perspective. It uses mainly classical military and political sources, but integrates testimonies and representations. The permissions regime set up in 1915 in France was marked throughout the war by permanent improvisation, but evolved and underwent a major reform in October 1916 when the French HQG made permissions a statutory allowance of seven days granted three times a year. Although decisions on permissions were the responsibility of the High Command, citizens and politicians played an important role in successive reforms by putting pressure on the government to grant fairer and longer permissions to men. The ideological stakes of permissions are evident in committees or in debates in the Assembly, in which left-wing MPs give a speech on the rights of republican citizens and the social stakes of recreational leave, which reinforces F. Bock's conclusions on the involvement of parliamentarians in the conduct of the war. At the individual level, the combatants have become involved through demands which show that for them there is a close relationship between the rights and duties of soldiers, and that their sacrifice is not without retribution, if only symbolic. In the context of a dehumanizing industrial war, leave had a great role to play in sustaining combatant morale over the long term. The calamitous management of the permissions in 1915 and 1916 explains the place taken by the permissions in the claims of the mutinees during Spring 1917, whereas they were now more regular and distributed with equity: it is especially as a symbol of the condition of the citizen-soldier and of his rights and duties that they are brandished by some combatants, confirming the study of L.V. Smith on the Vth ID. In this respect, leave is part of the evolution of the relations between the Army, the Republic and the citizens.It should be pointed out here that the theoretical weight of discipline is constantly called into question by the transgressive practices of furloughers, which are particularly evident during train journeys: defying authority, ridiculing employees, travelling first class in disregard of regulations, or seeking to illegally extend their leave.In the long term of the war, furloughs also provided a waiting horizon for a long overdue peace, and played a decisive role in men's ability to endure the war. The cycle of anticipation, experience and recollection of leave thus feeds into family letters or conversations between soldiers, and allows individuals to develop plans, even if the leaves arouse very ambivalent feelings. The second part focuses on the experience of being on leave in the capital, where Parisians rediscover a familiar world, while uprooted and isolated combatants from invaded regions, colonies or allied countries discover a mythical city as tourists. Paris was thus the main centre for furloughs in France, and probably of all the countries at war, receiving about 100,000 men per month, for a cumulative total of about 4 million furloughs between 1915 and 1918. The study conducted is based primarily on a statistical analysis of the directories of the minutes of the Paris police stations. The combatants' stay in the capital reveals the entrenchment of the combatant identity, confirming what is known about the importance of a specific culture born of shared experience, but it also combines with the signs of a lingering civilian identity. While political or working communities have not been studied, the strength of family ties, domestic habits, work gestures or neighbourhood sociability indicate that men are resettling into a familiar daily routine, despite the upheavals caused by the war in Paris. The subject lends itself to an analysis of gender identities through the reunion of couples and the confrontation of male and female communities. Relations between men and women have remained good, mainly thanks to the women in the family, but those of the couples are more tense, due to the suspicion that hangs over the companions. Generally speaking, male-female relations are part of banal practices whose cyclical dimension is mainly reflected in the symbolism surrounding certain gestures or words. The study of leave has also shown that female emancipation is limited, as indicated by women's resistance to the sexual solicitations of those on leave. Finally, the demographic stakes of furloughs can be seen in their impact on nuptiality, but their effects are more modest on the birth rate, which they do not compensate for. The relations of the soldiers on leave with the various components of Parisian society during the war (women, foreigners, allied soldiers) testify to the great credit enjoyed by the soldiers at the rear, even if the importance of theatricalization in Parisian space led them to sometimes violent transgressions of the social order, particularly towards police officers, underlining the redefinition of moral standards while invalidating the thesis of widespread "brutalization", since these practices were part of long-term conscriptive and popular Parisian traditions.The soldiers' stay was also an opportunity to identify the social and cultural circulation between the front and the rear, which contributed to the renewal of the distended links between civilians and combatants between 1914 and 1915. The expression of a need for recognition by the soldiers is coupled with a desire to forget the war, which underlines the complexity of individual reactions to the tension of war. Soldiers on leave sought to become exhilarated and to enjoy the pleasures of Parisian life such as the cinema, café-concert and prostitution, behaviours that contrasted with the puritanical norms of wartime. Permissions take their place here in the movement for the democratisation of leisure and holidays that has been underway since the end of the 19th century and confirm the relevance of drawing a parallel between the world of work and the war from the point of view of combatant mobilization factors. This question was explored in depth through the role of furlough in the mobilization of civilians and combatants. The stay of combatants in the rear presented risks from the point of view of controlling public opinion and the movements of soldiers. However, the complexity of the political and military stakes, particularly in 1917, the conditions for carrying out surveys on the state of mind of the Parisian population, and the weight of rumours during the war, made the study of public opinion delicate. On the other hand, permissions do appear to be one of the ways of desertion during the war, even if police sources do not allow for an exhaustive study of this subject, which is still poorly documented in France. The motivations put forward by the suspects indicate the wide variety of conditions in which men became deserters and it is difficult to say what effect the fear of punishment had on their actions. Police sources also make it possible to trace the modalities of the desertion experience, as well as the social profile of late deserters. The third part is devoted to the representations of furlough and furlough-holders that it confronts with the realities described above, based on the study of the press from the rear and the "newspapers from the front", postcards, novels, plays or songs, and with an emphasis on distinguishing the effects of transmitter and medium on the images produced. The stereotype of the combatant perceptible through the images of permission thus contributes to structuring the gap between civilians and combatants in a Parisian setting that crystallizes ambivalent representations. Indeed, soldiers on leave played an important role in the evolution of the wartime system of social representations by embodying the relationship between the combatant community and the civilian community. The figure of the permissionnaire illustrates the fundamental role of ethics in the identity processes of the First World War and in the construction of a social and cultural field specific to "combatants". The logics of civilian guilt on the one hand, and the need for recognition of combatants on the other, are articulated to give substance to combatant stereotypes. In many cases, the relationship of representation is perverted when the values for which combatants are recognized at the rear differ from those to which they aspire. Numerous, highly stereotypical and enduring, civilian representations carry the myths of heroism and virility attributed to warriors. Those constructed by the combatants are more intermittent and deferred, but their persuasive force is usually greater, due to the weight of the testimony between 1914 and 1918, which is perpetuated after the war, carried by the veterans' speeches. Several systems of representation thus coexist, become contaminated and evolve over the course of the war. In all cases, there is a great contrast between combatant myths and the social practices of the furloughers, particularly in their relations with women. ; A partir de juillet 1915, des permissions accordées aux combattants du front leur permettent de passer quelques jours à l'arrière. D'une durée de 6 jours en 1915, ces congés passent à 7 jours en 1916, puis à 10 jours en octobre 1917. Abordé dans une perspective globale, ce travail cherche à relier l'histoire sociale et l'histoire culturelle de la guerre grâce aux méthodes de l'anthropologie culturelle des faits sociaux, sans négliger les dimensions politiques ou militaires. Le plan suivi articule trois niveaux d'analyse, le réel, le symbolique et l'imaginaire, en utilisant un corpus de sources très varié. Celui-ci s'appuie en particulier sur l'analyse de 200 répertoires de procès-verbaux des commissariats parisiens (connus sous le nom de "mains courantes"), qui ont permis la constitution d'une base de données d'environ 6 000 permissionnaires et 6 000 déserteurs. Les analyses des phénomènes sociaux et culturels liés à la permission dans la capitale utilisent l'étude quantitative de cette source foisonnante, qui renseigne sur de nombreux aspects de la vie des individus et des quartiers parisiens, et ne se limite pas à la délinquance. Cette source permet ainsi d'inscrire la réflexion dans la perspective du temps long des évolutions sociales. La base de données a aussi permis la cartographie de certains phénomènes, comme la prostitution, la désertion ou les relations des permissionnaires avec les civils, les femmes ou les soldats alliés. Enfin, les comptes-rendus de la police, souvent consistants, donnent chair à une micro-histoire sociale individualisée.La première partie retrace la construction militaire, politique et administrative des permissions, ainsi que les enjeux logistiques de leur transport en train, qui est aussi étudié dans une perspective anthropologique. Elle utilise principalement des sources militaires et politiques classiques, mais intègre témoignages et représentations. Le régime des permissions mis en place en 1915 est marqué pendant toute la guerre par une improvisation permanente, mais évolue et connaît une réforme majeure en octobre 1916 lorsque le GQG fait des permissions une allocation réglementaire de sept jours accordée trois fois par an. Bien que les décisions en matière de permissions relèvent du Haut Commandement, les citoyens et les politiques ont joué un rôle important dans les réformes successives en faisant pression sur le gouvernement pour accorder des permissions plus équitables et plus longues aux hommes. Les enjeux idéologiques des permissions sont évidents dans les commissions ou lors des débats à l'Assemblée, au sein desquels les députés de gauche portent un discours sur les droits des citoyens républicains et les enjeux sociaux des congés de détente, qui conforte les conclusions de F. Bock sur la participation des parlementaires à la conduite de la guerre. A l'échelle individuelle, les combattants se sont impliqués par des revendications qui témoignent qu'il y a pour eux une relation étroite entre les droits et les devoirs des soldats, et que leur sacrifice ne va pas sans rétributions, ne seraient-elles que symboliques. Dans le contexte d'une guerre industrielle déshumanisante, les permissions avaient un grand rôle à jouer pour soutenir le moral combattant dans la durée. La gestion calamiteuse des permissions en 1915 et 1916 explique la place prise par les permissions dans les revendications des révoltés du printemps 1917, alors même qu'elles étaient désormais plus régulières et distribuées avec équité : c'est surtout comme symbole de la condition du soldat-citoyen et des droits et des devoirs de celui-ci qu'elles sont brandies par certains combattants, confirmant l'étude de L.V. Smith sur la Vème DI. A ce titre, les permissions s'inscrivent dans l'évolution des relations entre l'Armée, la République et les citoyens.Il faut souligner ici que le poids théorique de la discipline est constamment remis en cause par les pratiques transgressives des permissionnaires, qui sont particulièrement manifestes pendant les trajets en train : défiant l'autorité, tournant en ridicule les employés, voyageant en première classe au mépris des règlements, ou cherchant à prolonger illégalement leur permission.Dans le long terme de la guerre, les permissions ont aussi constitué un horizon d'attente qui s'est substitué à celui d'une paix qui se faisait attendre, et ont joué un rôle décisif dans la capacité des hommes à "tenir". Le cycle de l'anticipation, de l'expérience et de la remémoration des permissions alimente ainsi les lettres familiales ou les conversations entre soldats, et permet aux individus d'élaborer des projets, même si les permissions suscitent des sentiments très ambivalents. La seconde partie s'attache à l'expérience de la permission dans la capitale, où les Parisiens retrouvent un univers familier, tandis que les combattants déracinés et isolés, originaires des régions envahies, des colonies ou des pays alliés, découvrent en touristes une ville mythique. Paris est ainsi le principal centre de permissionnaires en France, et vraisemblablement de tous les pays en guerre, accueillant environ 100 000 hommes par mois, soit un total cumulé d'environ 4 millions de permissionnaires entre 1915 et 1918. L'étude s'appuie ici principalement sur l'analyse statistique des répertoires des procès-verbaux des commissariats parisiens. Le séjour des combattants dans la capitale révèle l'enracinement de l'identité combattante, confirmant ce que l'on sait de l'importance d'une culture spécifique née d'une expérience partagée, mais celle-ci se combine aussi aux signes d'une identité civile rémanente. Si les communautés politiques ou de travail n'ont pas été étudiées, la force des liens familiaux, les habitudes domestiques, les gestes du travail ou la sociabilité de voisinage, indiquent que les hommes se réinstallent dans un quotidien familier, malgré les bouleversements occasionnés par la guerre à Paris. Le sujet se prête à une analyse des identités de genre à travers les retrouvailles des couples et la confrontation des communautés masculines et féminines. Les relations entre hommes et femmes sont restées bonnes, principalement grâce aux femmes de la famille, mais celles des couples sont plus tendues, en raison du soupçon qui pèse sur les compagnes. D'une manière générale, les relations hommes – femmes s'inscrivent dans des pratiques banales dont la dimension conjoncturelle se traduit surtout par la symbolique qui entoure certains gestes ou paroles. L'étude des permissions a aussi permis de montrer que l'émancipation féminine est limitée, comme l'indiquent les résistances des femmes aux sollicitations sexuelles des permissionnaires. Enfin, les enjeux démographiques des permissions se manifestent dans l'incidence de celles-ci sur la nuptialité, mais leurs effets sont plus modestes sur la natalité, dont elles ne permettent pas de compenser la chute. Les relations des permissionnaires avec les différentes composantes de la société parisienne du temps de guerre (femmes, étrangers, militaires alliés) témoignent du grand crédit dont bénéficient les soldats à l'arrière, même si l'importance de la théâtralisation dans l'espace parisien les conduit à des transgressions parfois violentes de l'ordre social, notamment envers les agents de police, soulignant la redéfinition des normes morales tout en infirmant la thèse d'une "brutalisation" généralisée, puisque ces pratiques s'inscrivent dans des traditions conscriptives et des traditions populaires parisiennes de long terme. Le séjour des soldats est aussi l'occasion de repérer les circulations sociales et culturelles entre le front et l'arrière, qui contribuent à renouer entre civils et combattants des liens distendus entre 1914 et 1915. L'expression d'un besoin de reconnaissance par les soldats se double d'une volonté d'oublier la guerre qui souligne la complexité des réactions individuelles à la tension de la guerre. Les permissionnaires cherchent à se griser et à profiter des plaisirs de la vie parisienne comme le cinéma, le café-concert ou la prostitution, des comportements qui contrastent avec les normes puritaines du temps de guerre. Les permissions prennent ici place dans le mouvement de démocratisation des loisirs et des vacances engagé depuis la fin du XIXème siècle et confirment la pertinence d'une mise en parallèle du monde du travail et de la guerre du point de vue des ressorts de la mobilisation combattante. Cette question a été approfondie à travers le rôle de la permission dans la mobilisation des civils et des combattants. Le séjour de combattants à l'arrière présentait des risques du point de vue du contrôle de l'opinion publique et des mouvements des soldats. La complexité des enjeux politiques et militaires, notamment en 1917, les conditions de réalisation des enquêtes sur l'état d'esprit de la population parisienne ou encore le poids des rumeurs pendant la guerre, rendent toutefois l'étude des opinions publiques délicates. En revanche, les permissions apparaissent bien comme une des voies de la désertion pendant la guerre, même si les sources policières ne permettent pas une étude exhaustive de ce sujet, encore peu documenté dans le cas français. Les motivations avancées par les suspects indiquent la grande diversité des conditions dans lesquelles les hommes deviennent déserteurs et il est difficile de se prononcer sur l'effet de la peur de la sanction sur leurs actes. Les sources policières permettent aussi de retracer les modalités de l'expérience de la désertion, ainsi que le profil social des permissionnaires en retard. La troisième partie est consacrée aux représentations de la permission et des permissionnaires qu'elle confronte aux réalités précédemment décrites en se fondant sur l'étude de la presse de l'arrière et des "journaux du front", des cartes postales, des romans, des pièces de théâtre ou des chansons et en s'attachant à distinguer les effets d'émetteur et de support sur les images produites. Le stéréotype du combattant perceptible à travers les images de la permission contribue ainsi à structurer le fossé entre civils et combattants dans un cadre parisien qui cristallise des représentations ambivalentes. En effet, les permissionnaires jouent un rôle important dans l'évolution du système de représentations sociales du temps de guerre en incarnant les relations de la communauté combattante à la communauté civile. La figure du permissionnaire illustre le rôle fondamental de l'éthique dans les processus identitaires de la Première Guerre mondiale et dans la construction d'un champ social et culturel propre aux "combattants". Les logiques de la culpabilité des civils d'une part, et du besoin reconnaissance des combattants, d'autre part, s'articulent pour donner corps aux stéréotypes combattants. Dans bien des cas, la relation de représentation est pervertie quand les valeurs pour lesquelles les combattants sont reconnus à l'arrière diffèrent de celles auxquelles ils aspirent. Nombreuses, très stéréotypées et durables, les représentations civiles drainent avec elles tout le poids des mythes de l'héroïsme et de la virilité attribués aux guerriers. Celles construites par les combattants sont davantage intermittentes et différées, mais leur force de persuasion est a priori plus grande, en raison du poids du témoignage entre 1914 et 1918, qui se perpétue après guerre, porté par les discours anciens combattants. Plusieurs systèmes de représentations coexistent donc, se contaminent et évoluent au fil de la guerre. Dans tous les cas, on relève un grand contraste entre les mythes combattants et les pratiques sociales des permissionnaires, en particulier dans leurs relations avec les femmes.
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Fifty years is a long enough time to dissipate the impact of war. In the United States, the Vietnam War is no longer much discussed. Scholars still plow the field, but the war that tore America apart, spurred a counterculture movement, killed 57,000 Americans (and vastly more Vietnamese, Laotians and Cambodians), led to a restructuring of the U.S. military and the all-volunteer force, and was an impetus to Desert Storm no longer shapes the discourse.My students were born in 2002 or 2003; they're voting age. Even those with living grandparents who served in Vietnam don't know much if anything about the conflict. Of course, there have been intervening failures that proved costly, although not on the same scale. But proximity bias — the hard-wired human tendency to accord greater importance to things that are closer than others in time or distance — ensured that the mayhem generated by the Iraq and Afghan Wars would eclipse the awfulness of Vietnam.The Yom Kippur War of 1973 has likewise receded in the Israeli imagination. But its specter is more complex. The 2,500 Israeli soldiers killed (a fraction of the 15,000 Arabs who perished) was three times the per capita human cost of the Vietnam War to the United States. I was in Israel during that time, and everyone knew someone who'd been killed. The war was also far shorter, about 10 days, so the casualty list had an outsized emotional impact. It was not the long slog of Vietnam, but rather an avalanche.Early in the war, Syrian armor destroyed the Israeli tank brigade deployed to the Golan Heights and reached Gesher B'not Yaakov (Jisr Banat Yaqub). Just beyond it was the Jezreel Valley. The prospect of a large Syrian armored formation penetrating the Israeli heartland was as ghastly for Israelis as it must have been thrilling for the Syrians. The United States has never experienced anything like this, including 9/11.In the space of this instant, violence burgeoned. The largest tank battle since World War II, when German and Soviet armored juggernauts collided at Kursk, unfolded on the Golan. Fierce battles developed in the Sinai and then on the left bank of Suez, where Israeli forces encircled an entire Egyptian army. A week into the war, the U.S. launched its largest-ever intra-war arms transfer. For days, U.S. C-5 cargo aircraft touched down at Israeli airfields every six minutes. The airlift, however, occurred after Israel had regained its balance and counterattacked, halting an hour outside of Damascus and holding Egyptian territory — in addition to the Sinai, where Israel stopped the main thrust of Egyptian armor toward the mountains passes and destroyed the advancing units.The war also included other dramatic moments. Apparently believing that the Soviets were preparing to intervene militarily on Syria's behalf, the Nixon administration raised the United States' nuclear readiness level, an extraordinary step. Saudi Arabia led an OPEC oil embargo against the United States that carried profound implications for its economic and political stability for the ensuing decade, bringing the so-called long summer of postwar economic growth to an end and guaranteeing an era of sluggish economic growth and high inflation.The long-term effects of the war on Israel were profound as well. The outcome, despite the phenomenal recovery of Israeli forces under the much maligned but in fact highly competent IDF chief of staff, was traumatically dislocating for an Israeli public accustomed to thinking that its victory in the 1967 war rendered the state immune to Arab military challenge.Within four years, the Labor Party that had dominated Israeli politics in one form or another since 1948 was dislodged. Trust in the old elites was shattered. The intelligence community failed to credit the Egyptian and Syrian commitment to waging war. Across the board there was a conviction that the conditions under which the Arabs would launch an offensive simply did not exist. And Military Intelligence disregarded Mossad's success in recruiting a senior member of Egyptian President Anwar Sadat's entourage who underscored that a war was in the cards. Moreover, the Israeli prime minister, Golda Meir, who had presided over the disaster, had heeded stern guidance from Nixon and Kissinger not to preempt Arab war preparations when these were finally acknowledged 24 hours before the start of hostilities.Whether or not this was a wise call on Washington's part, it certainly increased the butcher's bill Israel was to pay and undermined the Labor government. Meir would come under attack later for having ignored Sadat's peace feelers following the 1969 War of Attrition along the Suez Canal. Sadat, however, tended to frame his overtures as demands for an upfront Israeli withdrawal from all of the Sinai Peninsula, which the Israeli government could not meet. There was plenty of blame to go around. In any case, combined with serious ethnic tensions generated by the political mobilization of Mizrahim — Jews who had immigrated from the Arab states of the Middle East and North Africa — the cratering of Labor credibility enabled the ascendance of the Likud Party.Half a century later, what lingering significance does the war have? Israel and Saudi Arabia are negotiating normalization, which will entail a civilian Saudi nuclear capability that is inherently dual-purpose. The Abraham Accords have already normalized Israel's relations with Bahrain, the UAE, Sudan, and Morocco. Egypt and Jordan have longstanding peace treaties with Israel. Syria has been neutered by a long, destructive civil war. Lebanon has ceased to exist as a functioning state and has not engaged Israel in hostilities since 2006. Two eviscerating wars with the United States removed Iraq as a potential combatant of the old rejectionist front.A cataclysmic ground war between Israel and its neighbors has been inconceivable during this veritable Age of Aquarius. But if the Yom Kippur War is no longer relevant, the present irenic reality — excluding the West Bank and Gaza — is largely due to the instrumentalization of that conflict by the Nixon administration for the purpose of peacemaking. One really can't contemplate these developments without implicitly thinking about the 1973 war.Another potent outcome of the war was the diplomatic process that surrounded the ceasefire and the years that followed. Kissinger gets credit for this, not unfairly. He was not one to waste a crisis. He seized the opportunity the war presented to use Sadat's evident interest in joining the Western camp and Israel's reliance on American support to bind each closer to Washington while crowding out the Soviet Union. Although his diplomatic strategy yielded disengagement agreements on both fronts, the fact remains that Egypt and Israel had embarked on a quiet bilateral process even as the guns were still cooling.Sadat had waged the war to shatter the status quo by drawing Israeli blood and bringing the U.S. into the conflict. His goal was the negotiated return of Sinai to Egyptian control. The war, for him, had a clear and well-defined political purpose. Although the seven years that preceded the Camp David Accords were at times touch and go — down to the climactic talks themselves — the so-called peace process would be difficult to imagine without the bloody impetus of 1973. Kissinger's key insight, regrettably abandoned by his successors but seemingly grasped now by Beijing, is that it pays to maintain ties with both sides in a conflict.As the Arab-Israeli conflict has devolved to Israel and the Palestinians, this lesson of the 1973 war has faded for Israel as well. Israel's use of force now has no political objective. Its purpose is solely conflict management and deterrence. To borrow from Lord Carrington's verdict on NATO, it is to keep the Palestinians down, the U.S. out, and wealthy Persian Gulf states in.Yet, perversely, the possibility of change is in the air. Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu's far-right coalition partners are less interested in managing the level of violence on the West Bank than in informally annexing it. Their commitment to Israeli settlement of the West Bank is greater than their interest in grand geopolitical deals that might boost the Tel Aviv stock exchange but defer redemption of biblical lands. One could construe the hard right's agenda as restoring a true political objective to Israel's fight with the Palestinians.The 1973 war also altered Israeli military doctrine. Planners have recognized that — beginning with that war — Israel has not won any major ones. (Neither has the United States.) The reasons for this are legion, but one stands out: the losers do not concede defeat. They take a licking but keep on ticking. Hence the most recent development in Israel's military doctrine, accorded the acronym Mabam, meaning "the battles between the wars."The idea is that major wars are no longer decisive and will therefore recur periodically. The best course is to delay these wars and weaken adversaries' ability to wage them by fighting draining low-level battles in the interim. This makes some sense, naturally, but militates against any attempt to leverage the fighting to achieve durable peace. This applies to the Palestinians as well. Their violence is expressive, perhaps reflecting their view that there is no conceivable political objective.There's a larger theme here, though. The international system was vastly different in 1973. The Cold War framework in which the United States and Soviet Union conducted their foreign policies and made it possible for Sadat to conduct a war with such a bold but cogent purpose is long gone. We will see whether the U.S.-China in the Middle East recreates it.The leftist post-colonial Arab states that fought Israel are scarcely even remembered. The Israeli state and society that fought the Yom Kippur War, like the America that waged war in Vietnam, no longer exists. The values that animated it no longer shape the nation's thoughts and actions.Fifty years after the war, this should come as no surprise. In the ongoing demonstrations against judicial reform in Israel, one can see veterans of 1973 claiming that their wartime sacrifice would be betrayed by the triumph of the hard right. They are correct, but they're old duffers and out of touch with young Israeli mainstream voters, who, if they dwell on the 1973 war at all, likely see the left as the guilty party. Thus, policy makers, mostly in the West, can noodle about the war's lessons for diplomacy and statecraft, but for Israel — and the Arabs — it's ancient history.
Author's introductionWhile sociologists have paid a great deal of attention to how political elites matter for the emergence and development of social movements, they have focused less explicitly on how political elites matter for the culture of social movements. Considering the amount of attention paid to culture in the field of social movements, this issue is an important one to address. This essay reviews work that directly and indirectly addresses this relationship, showing how political elites matter for various aspects of movement culture, like collective identity and framing. It also reviews literature that suggests how movement culture comes to impact political elites. The essay concludes by drawing from very recent scholarship to argue that to best understand political elites and the culture of social movements, we need to think about culture and structure as intertwined and to understand how relations matters in the construction of meaning.Author recommendsArmstrong, Elizabeth, and Mary Bernstein 2008. 'Culture, Power and Institutions: A Multi‐Institutional Politics Approach to Social Movements.'Sociological Theory 26(1): 74–99.This is a very recently published article that advances a fairly complex understanding of the relationship between culture, power, and institutions. The authors conceptualize social movements as phenomena that emerge in a society where power is distributed, enacted, and challenged across multiple institutional contexts. While they review a range of empirical cases to illustrate their concerns about the power of the political process model, they largely focus on gay and lesbian activism to illustrate the application of their 'multi‐institutional politics approach'.Davenport, Christian 2005. 'Understanding Covert Repressive Action: The Case of the U.S. Government against the Republic of New Africa.'Journal of Conflict Resolution. 49(1):120–40.Davenport's article is a good place to think about how cultural aspects of social movements impact repression. He examines how covert intelligence‐gathering activities were directed against the Republic of New Africa, a Black Nationalist organization, in Detroit, Michigan and finds that the racial identity of the challengers was a significant factor in determining who was targeted. Importantly, he shows how the identity of groups, along with their strategy and goals, affect the way they are perceived and treated by political elites.Johnston, Hank and Bert Klandermans 1995. Social Movements and Culture. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.This volume remains one of the best edited collections of readings on the relationship of social movements and culture. Top scholars in the field of social movements review the conceptualization of culture in movement studies, cultural processes in movements, and methods for studying culture and collective action.Laraňa Enrique, Hank Johnston, and Joseph R. Gusfield, eds. 1994. New Social Movements: From Ideology to Identity. Philadelphia, PA: Temple University Press.This is an important edited volume in which leading scholars in the field present both case study of movements (for example, of the women's movement and student movements) and theoretical and conceptual assessments of the role of culture and identity in movements.McCammon Holly J., Karen E. Campbell, Ellen M. Granberg, and Christine Mowery. 2007. 'Movement Framing and Discursive Opportunity Structures: The Political Successes of the U.S. Women's Jury Movements.'American Sociological Review 72: 725–49.McCammon and her co‐authors examine factors that explain activists' state‐level success in winning women the legal right to serve on juries. One of their key findings is that activists' use of particular frames was more successful when those frames resonated with the current state of legal discourse. In other words, to win, activists must advance claims that resonate with discourse established by political elites.Meyer David S., Nancy Whittier, and Belinda Robnett, eds. 2002. Social Movements: Identity, Culture and the State. New York: Oxford University Press.This is another excellent edited volume that offers essays by leading scholars on the relationship between identity, culture, and the state. Meyer's introduction is particularly useful for the topic at hand, as he points out the ways that state action and polities often create the basis for a challenging group's collective identity.Polletta, Francesca. 1998. 'Legacies and Liabilities of an Insurgent Past.'Social Science History 22(4): 479–512.In this article, Polletta examines the different ways in which members of the United States Congress commemorate Martin Luther King, Jr., and finds that they most often emphasize King's legacy of community service and institutional politics over disruptive insurgency. For black legislators, however, the story is more complicated, as they must also carefully caution that King's legacy has not been fully realized. Polletta shows that how the culture of movements gets integrated into the discourse of elites is shaped by how elites are situated in a network of relationships—with other elites, with their own social groups, and with challengers.Online materials Social Movements and Culture http://www.wsu.edu/~amerstu/smc/smcframe.html Sponsored by the American Studies program at Washington State University, this site provides great links to bibliographies, movement websites, and other resources. Speech Prepared for March on Washington, 1963 http://www.crmvet.org/info/mowjl.htm Read the text of Congressman John Lewis' speech at the March on Washington, referred to at the beginning of the article. Sociology Eye http://sociologycompass.wordpress.com/ This website, associated with Sociology Compass, is a great site for thinking about how a range of contemporary issues are sociologically important. Check it out to look for posts related to social movements, culture, and political elites. Though a post may not directly seem to address the issue, oftentimes you can think about the ways in which a discussed subject implicitly tells you something about how the three things relate.Sample syllabusBelow I provide suggestions for topics and readings that might be assigned in a range of courses, including: a general social movements course, a course focused on social movement culture, or a sociology of culture course with a unit on social movements.Topic: Culture and Social MovementsMcAdam, Doug 1994. 'Culture and Social Movements.' Pp. 36–57 in New Social Movements: From Ideology to Identity, edited by Enrique Laraňa, Hank Johnston, and Joseph R. Gusfield. Philadelphia, PA: Temple University Press.Swidler, Ann. 1995. 'Cultural Power and Social Movements.' Pp. 25–40 in Social Movements and Culture, edited by Hank Johnston and Bert Klandermans. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.Snow, David A., E. Burke Rochford, Jr., Steven K. Worden, and Robert D. Benford 1986. 'Frame Alignment Processes, Micromobilization, and Movement Participation.'American Sociological Review 51: 464–81.Williams, Rhys H. 2004. 'The Cultural Contexts of Collective Action: Constraints, Opportunities, and the Symbolic Life of Social Movements.' Pp. 91–115 in The Blackwell Companion to Social Movements, edited by David A. Snow, Sarah A. Soule, and Hanspeter Kriesi. Malden, MA: Blackwell Publishing.Topic: Political Elites and Social MovementsGamson, William 1988. 'Political Discourse and Collective Action.' Pp. 219–144 in International Social Movement Research, vol. 1, edited by Bert Klandermans, Hanspeter Kreisi, and Sidney Tarrow. Greenwich, CT: JAI.Kriesi, Hanspeter 2004. 'Political Context and Opportunity.' Pp. 67–90 in The Blackwell Companion to Social Movements, edited by David A. Snow, Sarah A. Soule, and Hanspeter Kriesi. Malden, MA: Blackwell Publishing.McCarthy, John D. and Mayer N. Zald 1977. 'Resource Mobilization and Social Movements: A Partial Theory.'American Journal of Sociology 82:1212–1241.Meyer, David S. 2002. 'Opportunities and Identities: Bridge‐Building in the Study of Social Movements.' Pp. 3–21 in Social Movements: Identity, Culture and the State, edited by David S. Meyer, Nancy Whittier, and Belinda Robnett. New York: Oxford University Press.Rucht, Dieter 2005. 'Movement Allies, Adversaries, and Third Parties.' Pp. 197–261 in The Blackwell Companion to Social Movements, edited by David A. Snow, Sarah A. Soule, and Hanspeter Kriesi. Malden, MA: Blackwell Publishing.Topic: Political Elites and the Culture of Social MovementsArmstrong, Elizabeth, and Mary Bernstein 2008. 'Culture, Power and Institutions: A Multi‐Institutional Politics Approach to Social Movements.'Sociological Theory 26(1): 74–99.Fantasia, Rick and Eric L. Hirsch 1995. 'Culture in Rebellion: The Appropriation and Transformation of the Veil in the Algerian Revolution.' Pp. 144‐ 159 in Social Movements and Culture, edited by Hank Johnston and Bert Klandermans. Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press.Irons, Jenny 2009. 'Political Elites and the Culture of Social Movements.'Sociology Compass 3/3: 459–74.McCammon, Holly J., Karen E. Campbell, Ellen M. Granberg, and Christine Mowery 2007. 'Movement Framing and Discursive Opportunity Structures: The Political Successes of the U.S. Women's Jury Movements.'American Sociological Review 72: 725–49.Polletta, Francesca 1998. 'Legacies and Liabilities of an Insurgent Past.'Social Science History 22(4): 479–512.Skrentny, John 2006. 'Policy‐Elite Perceptions and Social Movement Success: Understanding Variations in Group Inclusion in Affirmative Action.'American Journal of Sociology 111(6):1762–1815.Topic: Movement Culture, Political Elites, and RepressionBoudreau, Vincent 2002. 'State Repression and Democracy Protest in Three Southeast Asian Countries.' Pp. 28–46 in Social Movements: Identity, Culture and the State, edited by David S. Meyer, Nancy Whittier, and Belinda Robnett. New York: Oxford University Press.Cunningham, David 2004. There's Something Happening Here: The New Left, The Klan, and FBI Counterintelligence. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press.Cunningham, David and Barb Browing 2004. 'The Emergence of Worthy Targets: Official Frames and Deviance Narratives Within the FBI.'Sociological Forum 19(3):347–369.Davenport, Christian 2005. 'Understanding Covert Repressive Action: The Case of the U.S. Government against the Republic of New Africa.'Journal of Conflict Resolution 49 (1):120–140.Noonan, Rita K. 1995. 'Women Against the State: Political Opportunities and Collective Action Frames in Chile's Transition to Democracy.'Sociological Forum 10: 81–111.Focus questions
In what ways do political elites matter for the development of a social movement's culture—in terms of the development of movement frames, discourse, and collective identity? (You might focus on a particular movement to address this question) How do those same aspects of a movement's culture impact political elites? Can you think of examples in which we can see elites reflecting meaning produced by social movements? What do you think are the most effective ways that social movements can impact political elites on a cultural level? What factors shape the relationship between movement cultures and political elites? What do you think are the best ways to conceptualize "political elites" and "social movement culture"?
In spite of all the good news about the economy and the swift confirmation of Sonia Sotomayor to the Supreme Court, the headlines this stormy week have been dominated by town hall brawls. As congressional representatives went home to their districts for their August recess, they were greeted by a volatile mixture of high temperatures, monsoon-like storms and furious mobs who stormed town hall meetings to protest against health reform. Several politicians, terrorized by the voters, suspended the meetings and ran past the mobs and into their getaway cars. They later announced they would take phone calls or meet voters individually in scheduled appointments. Journalists and TV talk show personalities were left wondering as to the origin of this new movement of storm troopers: were they real people, from the grassroots, fed up with the way Washington is dealing with health care reform, or was this manufactured, "Astroturf" mobilization, organized by the health insurance and drug companies, scared of losing a large share of their profits if a government-run plan is included on the final bill? Most likely it is a mixture of both. But whether fabricated or not, the tone of the debate and the images of scuffles and fist fights shocked the nation and left many asking what happened to American civility. More importantly, where was the President's leadership?Granted, it is difficult to defend a bill that is not even ready, and Obama has avoided giving bottom lines that may come back to haunt him: his larger political purpose is to pass some kind of health care reform, even if serious compromises have to be made. Having taken the 1994 Clinton-care defeat lesson to heart, President Obama decided from the beginning that he could not dictate to Congress and therefore stated the general principles of health care reform (universal coverage and cost control) and then gave Congress leeway in writing the detailed legislation. But from the beginning, there was a deep chasm between progressives, who insist that a public-plan option is the best way to meet both goals, and conservatives, who adamantly oppose the government-run plan claiming it would bankrupt private insurance companies, and see this and the mandate of universal coverage as "socialized medicine". The Blue Dog Democrats, fiscally conservative, have joined ranks with the opposition and effectively killed the public option in some versions of the bill, replacing it with a vague alternative of co-ops (mutual care).The result so far has been a confusion of bills and versions that no regular voter can understand. Indeed, not even those that are following the debate closely can tell with clarity what each version entails. But because health care is close and personal, it is easy to whip up a frenzy over it just by letting out a few misleading judgments, half truths and exaggerations, and hammering at them until they have the ring of truth. Corporate interest groups from the health insurance and pharmaceutical industries are fiercely organizing fringe elements on the right, mainly instructing them to be disruptive of town hall meetings and to interrupt any serious discourse. And most of the average, less-educated voters use "easy" sources of information such as radio talk commentators (read: Rush Limbaugh) or TV news shows which are anything but "fair and balanced", instead of hard sources (newspaper editorials, op-ed and factual news articles). In the end, when topics are complex and conflicting information saturates the media, people believe what they want to believe, what confirms their feelings and their ideological bent, what reassures them they are correct in their assumptions and emotions.It is this state of confusion that has allowed the crazy mobs, aided and abetted by the likes of Rush Limbaugh and Sarah Palin, to make the most outlandish claims, from accusing the government of Socialism and Nazism in one voice, to vociferously asserting the Democrats' plan includes euthanasia (of course it does not; it includes a voluntary option for terminal patients to get "counseling on end-of-life options"). But these are the same kind of people that kill abortion-clinic doctors and nurses in their crusade to "save innocent lives". And exactly of the same kind as the "birthers", those who do not believe President Obama was born in the United States, a fact very easily verifiable, since the White House has made his birth certificate available!The point is, extremists are taking over that national scene and are attacking a bill that is not yet ready, based on false claims and preposterous characterizations. The left is now mobilizing union representatives to counteract the right wing crazies. Perhaps it would be better to cancel all town hall meetings, since it is expected that a bill will be passed by the end of the month. It will be most likely be a watered down version of what Obama initially wanted, but it will allow him to claim yet another victory, another check mark on his campaign promises.The debate over health care has accomplished something that seemed unfathomable only a month ago: it has united Republicans. Economic conservatives, libertarians and extreme right social conservatives are all against the public plan option. However, even if they were successful in defeating this bill, as long as they continue on this course of adamant opposition, they will not be well-positioned for the 2010 elections. They will have no other policy initiatives or legislative accomplishments to boast of and they will still be easily characterized as the "party of no." Their political calculations made them oppose a highly qualified Supreme Court nominee in a futile exercise that has put them on the wrong side of history and set them back at least for a decade in getting electoral support from the Latino community, the largest and fastest- growing minority group in the country. The void of Republican political leadership has been filled by extremist groups and irresponsible radio talk commentators, reducing the party's appeal to moderates and independents.This dramatic realization is one incentive to get Republicans to work harder in passing health care reform in some bipartisan shape or form. But this is not likely, since their preference so far has been to deny Obama any chance of bipartisanship. Another motivation to bring them to the table should be the awareness that, if the rising cost curve of health care is not brought under control, the economic recovery that is starting to show will only be temporary, the deficit will continue to grow and other countries will not be so accommodating in holding US debt. But political expedience on their part may overtake even this fundamental concern about the future economic stability of the country.On his part, Obama will have the problem of dealing with the liberal wing of his party: the left will be furious if, with a majority in both Houses, their version of health care reform does not pass, and the President settles for a weaker, watered down version. Indeed, in general terms, the biggest and most immediate test for Obama will be how far he allows the left in Congress to go before he decides to rein them in. In order to regain control of the health care debate, the President held his own town hall meeting in New Hampshire this past Tuesday. His message was clearer and more focused as he answered genuine concerns and questions from the audience. But to what extent he was able to calm down the prevailing anxiety in the country at large still remains to be seen. Outside the town hall, two groups of irate citizens on the opposite ends of the political spectrum confronted each other, yelled and shook their fists, but the police were able to restrain them without much effort.In spite of the turbulent TV images that have inundated the airways this week, the majority of the electorate in this country is still moderate, rational and centrist. They want health care reform and they want it to include a government-run option, which they may or may not buy into, but which they see as an important way to spur competition, in the understanding that it is competition and not monopolies that help control costs. They also want reform of the way private insurance companies ration care, for example, by denying coverage to those with pre-existing conditions. They are appalled at the crazies on the right, with their false claims about a bill they have not read, and their outrageous claims of Socialism and Nazism, which they merge into one demonic ideology. They are tired of their pseudo-religious zeal and self-righteousness, their insistence on rejecting Darwin's theory of evolution along with global warming, climate change and stem cell research, their violent outbursts, and their tendency to speak in terms of Good (themselves) and Evil (the rest). And they are embarrassed at the subtext of racism that underlies most of the extremists' demented claims, and which becomes crystal clear in their assertion that President Obama is not an American citizen.On the other hand, most citizens are also wary of ultra-liberals on the left, who want to use the Democrats' prevalence to entrench new vast social programs, over-regulate the financial system and corporate pay, and raise taxes to levels that would choke growth and productivity; they are afraid they will forever bankrupt the government and the country.Six months into his presidency, Obama faces sinking approval numbers and the possibility of a major defeat. After a string of solid successes that included, among others, passing an 800 billion dollar economic stimulus plan, expanding children's health insurance, and rescuing the banking system, his agenda may get bogged down in the politics- as- usual Washington culture he promised to change. It will take all his will power and discipline to stay focused, get back on message and resist the blows. His ambition will have to be tempered by patience, caution and political skill. As his aura wears off, the coming battles will be the final test of his courage and determination to succeed. Senior Lecturer, Department of Political Science and Geography Director, ODU Model United Nations Program Old Dominion University, Norfolk, Virginia
This report concerns two streams of Technical Assistance provided by the World Bank Water and Sanitation Program (WSP) to the Government of Vietnam. They are: strengthening the enabling environment, capacity building systems and evidence-based learning and lesson sharing. Strengthening demand creation and supply chain development together these TAs make up a support program to assist the Government of Vietnam, particularly the Ministry of Health (MOH) in accelerating progress on sanitation under the third National Target Program on Rural Water Supply and Sanitation (NTP3). WSP has supported the government to improve the enabling environment for sanitation service delivery; strengthen rural sanitation supply chains; generate demand for improved sanitation; and inform service delivery models through knowledge and learning. The TAs began in Dec 2012 and are due to end in Jun 2016. This report documents the results and lessons learned from the TA, and makes recommendations for future activities in support of rural sanitation.
This report concerns two streams of Technical Assistance provided by the World Bank Water and Sanitation Program (WSP) to the Government of Vietnam. They are: strengthening the enabling environment, capacity building systems and evidence-based learning and lesson sharing. Strengthening demand creation and supply chain development together these TAs make up a support program to assist the Government of Vietnam, particularly the Ministry of Health (MOH) in accelerating progress on sanitation under the third National Target Program on Rural Water Supply and Sanitation (NTP3). WSP has supported the government to improve the enabling environment for sanitation service delivery; strengthen rural sanitation supply chains; generate demand for improved sanitation; and inform service delivery models through knowledge and learning. The TAs began in Dec 2012 and are due to end in Jun 2016. This report documents the results and lessons learned from the TA, and makes recommendations for future activities in support of rural sanitation.
The main objectives of this report are to: (a) provide a synthesized analysis of financial reporting and auditing standards and practices across the countries in which the Institute of Chartered Accountants of the Caribbean (ICAC) is active and (b) provide a basis for recommendations to ICAC and respective national institutes for a regional strategy to enhance the accounting profession and the accounting and auditing practices in the public and private sectors. This report's focus on reforms and identification of areas and means to strengthen the accounting profession have at their root the conviction that systemic enhancements to the standards and practices of the profession can materially improve the lives of the region's populace, particularly its less prosperous citizens, through greater transparency, strengthened economic growth and its attendant employment and tax revenue prospects, and greater access to financing for and formalization of the region's dominant sector-micro, small, and medium-sized enterprises (MSMEs). The report finds that a constraint limiting both investment across the region, particularly to MSMEs that characterize the respective national economies, and the efficient use of public resources is the accounting and auditing practices and the financial reporting regimes that prevail in both the public and private sectors. This finding emerges from: (i) a review of Reports on the Observance of Standards and Codes for Accounting and Auditing (ROSC AA) conducted by the World Bank for Jamaica, Trinidad and Tobago, Suriname, and the countries of the Organisation of Eastern Caribbean States, and (ii) Bank missions to those countries updating the ROSC findings as well as missions to countries that have not yet had ROSC AA reviews (during which the Bank team met the national accountancy body, regulators of entities that fall within the financial reporting chain, supreme audit institutions, central banks, and so forth so as to secure information that would typically be found in formal ROSC AA reports).
Community‐managed irrigation systems are commonly faced with problems of low system‐level performance. These issues became the subject of constant researches, debates and controversies, given the significant investments and successive reforms undertaken to improve the management of irrigation systems. The lack of relevance and effectiveness of the current interventions to improve the water management can be explained, in part, by the complexity of the managing irrigation systems. Indeed, the evolution of these systems (context, history, use trends), the complexity of interaction's processes between different system levels and the interdependencies between itsvarious actors (managers or users) are evidences proving the urge to strengthen links between evaluation and improvement approaches of the management of irrigation systems. In order to do so, we have come to face the dilemma of evaluation approaches, which bring out undeniably negative tones in terms of the performance of these systems, without tackling the root causes of the problems or guiding improvement interventions. On the other hand, the weak mobilization of water actors around these interventions and the failure of active involvement of local actors (farmers and GDAs) in the processes of formulating their needs and solving their problems, have hindered severalinterventions for the amelioration of water management and called into question their legitimacy and effectiveness. The involvement of local actors in solving their own problems and improving their adaptive capacity does not guarantee the success of these interventions but can at least improve their results. This thesis aims to evaluate the management of an irrigation system with perennial citrus orchards in northern Tunisia, particularly in the irrigation system of Zaouiet Jedidi, and to support the local actors in the co-construction and the implementation of an intervention for the improvement of irrigation water management. We are interested in the study of a system that highlights the complexity of the management problems of collective irrigation systems. It is a multi-level, multi-actor system that is limited in its ability of adaptation to a situation of water scarcity that has been undergoing for several years. Instead of limiting ourselves to judging the effectiveness of the current management of the irrigated systems, we have focused on a causal analysis that links symptoms and causes of malfunction. We have based our analysis on a systemic and global approach of different levels of the system and the interactions between them, and we have chosen to study how different actors may react to a physical constraint in terms of management rules and coordination mechanisms that they created, shaped or rejected.We have used the results of this evaluation in planning and assisting in the improvement of irrigation management as a part of an action-research project. Finally, we have analyzed the extent to which such intervention based on stakeholders' participation and strengthening of coordination mechanisms, may allow these stakeholders to interact during a process of collective learning and to improve their ability to adapt to constraints of the system. The analysis of the water resources situation of this system shows that there is a situation of water scarcity. This scarcity is linked to the use of the groundwater and surface water resources and the distribution policies between different users. In order to manage the uncertainty that characterized this system's water supply, managers are often opting for compromises and changes to the collective rules. These compromises have been in some cases successful in alleviating the impacts of the scarcity, and in others, they have worsen the malfunction of this system and increased the vulnerability of some users. We have highlighted the weaknesses of the coordination mechanisms between most stakeholders' interfaces. Next, we have analyzed the logics and the factors that explain these failures. By analyzing how farmers respond to this water shortage, we have highlighted a wide variety of individual strategies and practices that tend to maximize access to the surface and groundwater resources with different capacities. However, these practices, which may have individual gains for some farmers, obviously have negative implications for the collective performance of the system. Finally, supporting the implementation of a process of participatory improvement in this irrigated perimeter and the evaluation of its effects enabled us to validate the role of learning by changing the perception of actors. This change had facilitated the problem-solving process in some stages of the intervention, but hindered it in others. The analytical framework developed in this thesis helps to move forward reflection on improvement interventions through a better understanding of individual and collective rationality models that actually govern the management of irrigated systems. Decrypting these models allows the development of guidelines for irrigation management improvement adapted to the context of these systems. In the case of irrigated public systems, where the collective management of water is marked by conflicts of interest and power games, the reinforcement of interaction between different actors open opportunities for improvement to consider in the processes of development of management policies of irrigated systems. Assessing effects of local stakeholders' participation in these processes helps to analyze the limitations of theoretical frameworks and to report practical difficulties of conducting improvement actions in such a complex situation of collective management of water resources. ; Les problèmes posés par la gestion des systèmes collectifs d'irrigation et leurs faibles performances continuent de faire constamment l'objet de recherches, de débats et de controverses, compte tenu des investissements importants et des réformes successives engagés pour améliorer la gestion de ces systèmes. Les objectifs en matière de productivité et de rentabilité de ces systèmes ainsi que les attentes en termes de transfert de leur gestion aux associations d'irrigants ne sont pas atteints. Le manque de pertinence et d'efficacité des interventions actuelles d'amélioration peut être expliqué, en partie, par la complexité des problèmes de gestion des systèmes irrigués. En effet, l'évolution de ces systèmes (contexte, historique, usage…), les interactions qui existent entre leurs différentes composantes et les indépendances entre les différents acteurs gestionnaires ou usagers, sont autant d'éléments qui plaident en faveur du développement du renforcement du lien entre l'évaluation et les démarches d'amélioration de la gestion des systèmes irrigués. Ce développement nécessite d'aller au-devant du dilemme des démarches d'évaluation qui font émerger des tonalités indiscutablement négatives quant aux performances de ces systèmes, sans pour autant déboucher sur des articulations à même de remonter aux causes des problèmes et d'orienter les interventions d'amélioration. D'autre part, la faible mobilisation des acteurs de l'eau autour de ces interventions et l'échec d'une implication active des acteurs locaux (agriculteurs et des association des usagers de l'eau) dans les processus de formulation de leurs besoins et de résolution des problèmes, ont freiné les avancées de plusieurs interventions et ont mis en question leur légitimité et efficacité.L'implication des acteurs locaux dans la résolution de leurs propres problèmes et l'amélioration de leur capacité d'adaptation ne garantissent pas le succès de ces interventions, mais peuvent améliorer leurs résultats. En ce sens, produire des directives pour mieux orienter ces interventions semble être nécessaire.Cette thèse se propose d'évaluer les modes de gestion des systèmes irrigués des agrumes dans la région du Cap Bon, en Tunisie (Périmètre public irrigué de Zaouiet Jedidi) et d'accompagner lesacteurs locaux en vue de co-construire et de mettre en œuvre une intervention d'amélioration. Nous nous sommes intéressés à l'étude d'un système qui met en relief la complexité des problèmes de gestion des systèmes collectifs d'irrigation. Il s'agit d'un système multi-ressources (eaux de surface et eaux souterraines utilisées de façon conjointe), multi-niveaux (différentes échelles, différentes institutions impliquées dans la gestion), multi-usages compétitifs (urbain, agricole, industriel,.) et multi-acteurs (administration, association d'irrigants, agriculteurs, …). En plus, ce système est limité dans sa capacité d'adaptation par une pénurie d'eau à laquelle il est soumis depuis plusieurs années.Au lieu de nous limiter à juger l'efficacité de la gestion actuelle des systèmes irrigués, nous avons privilégié une analyse causale qui permet de relier les symptômes et les causes de dysfonctionnement. Nous avons fondé notre analyse sur une approche systémique et globale des différents niveaux du système et des interactions entre eux et nous avons privilégié d'étudier comment les différents acteurs réagissent à une telle contrainte physique en termes de règles de gestion et de mécanismes de coordination qu'ils ont créés, qu'ils ont façonnés ou qu'ils ont parfois rejetés. Nous avons employé par la suite les résultats de cette évaluation dans la planification et l'accompagnement de la mise en œuvre d'une intervention d'amélioration de la gestion de l'irrigation dans le cadre d'un projet de recherche action. Nous avons enfin analysé dans quelle mesure la mise en œuvre d'une intervention d'amélioration, basée sur la participation des parties prenantes et le renforcement des mécanismes de coordination, permet aux acteurs de l'eau d'interagir dans un processus d'apprentissage collectif et d'améliorer leur capacité d'adaptation aux3 contraintes du système. L'analyse de la situation de la pénurie d'eau dans ce système met en évidence qu'il s'agit d'une pénurie physique induite par les modes d'usage des ressources en eau souterraine et de surface et des politiques de répartition de l'eau entre différents usagers. Afin de gérer l'incertitude qui marquait ainsi l'approvisionnement en eau de ce système, les gestionnaires ont souvent opté pour des compromis et des changements des règles collectives qui ont réussi dans certains cas à alléger les impacts de la pénurie et dans d'autres cas à aggraver le dysfonctionnement du système et à accroitre la vulnérabilité de certains usagers. Nous avons mis en évidence les faiblesses des mécanismes de coordination au niveau des interfaces entre acteurs et nous avons examiné les logiques et les facteurs qui expliquent ces défaillances. En analysant comment les agriculteurs à leur tour réagissent à cette pénurie d'eau, nous avons mis en évidence une grande diversité de stratégies et de pratiques individuelles qui tendent à maximiser l'accès aux ressources en eau de surface et souterraine selon les différentes capacités. Cependant, ces pratiques qui peuvent avoir des gains individuels pour quelques agriculteurs ont évidemment des implications négatives sur les performances collectives du système. Enfin, l'accompagnement de la mise en œuvre d'un processus d'amélioration participatif dans ce périmètre irrigué et l'évaluation de ses effets, nous a permis de valider le rôle de l'apprentissage dans le changement de la perception des acteurs qui a accéléré, au cours de certaines étapes de l'intervention le processus de résolution des problèmes, mais l'a freiné dans d'autres. Le cadre d'analyse développé dans cette thèse permet de faire avancer la réflexion autour des interventions d'amélioration vers une meilleure compréhension des logiques individuelles et collectives qui gouvernent la gestion des systèmes irrigués. Décrypter ces logiques permet de développer des directives d'actions d'accompagnement adaptées au contexte de gestion de ces systèmes. Dans le cas des périmètres publics irrigués, où la gestion collective de l'eau est marquée par les conflits d'intérêts et les jeux de pouvoir, le renforcement des processus d'interaction et de coordination entre les acteurs ouvre des pistes d'amélioration à intégrer dans les processus de développement des politiques de gestion des systèmes irrigués. Evaluer les effets de la participation des acteurs locaux dans ces processus d'amélioration permet d'analyser les insuffisances des cadres théoriques et de rendre compte des difficultés pratiques à déployer certains objectifs et logiques d'intervention dans un contexte assez compliqué tel que celui de la gestion collective des ressources en eau.
Author's introductionThis review of recent feminist analyses and theorizing of labor markets uses a global lens to reveal the forces shaping gender inequality. The first section introduces the key words of globalization, gender and work organization. Next, I examine gender as embodied labor activity in globalized worksites, and the effects of globalization on gendered patterns of work and life. Putting gender at the center of globalization discourses highlights the historical and cultural variability of gender relations intersecting with class, race and nationality, and highlights the impact of restructuring on workers, organizations and institutions at the local, national and regional as well as transnational levels. Then I turn to look at labor market restructuring through commodification of care, outsourcing of household tasks and informalization of employment to show how these processes shape the complexity of relationships between and the interconnectedness of social inequalities transnationally and in global cities. Place matters when analyzing how service employment alters divisions of labor and how these labor market changes are gendered. Global restructuring not only poses new challenges but also creates new opportunities for mobilization around a more robust notion of equality. The final section explores the development of spaces for collective action and the rise of new women's and feminist movements (e.g., transnational networks, non‐governmental agencies). The study of globalization, gender and employment has broad importance for understanding not only the social causes but also the social consequences of the shift to a post‐industrial society.Author recommendsAcker, Joan 2004. 'Gender, Capitalism and Globalization.'Critical Sociology 30, 1: 17–41.Feminist scholarship both critiques gender‐blind globalization discourses and an older generation of women and development theories. By tracing the lineage of current feminist literature on globalization to women and development research, Joan Acker shows both the continuities and distance traveled from the previous terrain of debate. New feminist scholarship on globalization owes a debt to these important, albeit limited, studies of women at work in Latin America, Africa and Asia, but acknowledges the need to go beyond the category of women to analyze specific forms and cultural expressions of gendered power in relationship to class and other hierarchies. One of the major advances in feminist theory comes under the microscope of Acker's keen analysis when she excavates how gender is both embodied and embedded in the logic and structuring of globalizing capitalism. This extends the case she made in her earlier pioneering research on gender relations being embedded in the organization of major institutions. For the study of globalization, Acker posits that the gendered construction (and cultural coding) of capitalist production separated from human reproduction has resulted in subordination of women in both domains. Acker uncovers the historical legacy of a masculine‐form of dominance associated with production in the money economy that was exported to and embedded in colonialist installation of large‐scale institutions. By the late 20th Century large‐scale institutions promoted images and emotions that expressed economic and political power in terms of new articulations of hegemonic masculinity. As an article outlining debates on the nature of globalization and of gender, it serves as a good introduction to the topic.Chow, Esther Ngan‐Ling 2003. 'Gender Matters: Studying Globalization and Social Change in the 21st Century.'International Sociology 18, 3: 443–460.Chow's introduction to the special issue on 'Gender, Globalization and Social Change in the 21st Century' in International Sociology (2003) reviews the literature on gender and globalization and provides an excellent overview of 'gender matters.' Her definition of globalization captures salient features of the current era. This definition encompasses the economic, political cultural and social dimensions of globalization. Further, she offers a framework for studying the 'dialectics of globalization', as 'results of conflicting interaction between the global and local political economies and socio‐cultural conditions…' A dialectics of globalization is a fruitful approach for studying transformative possibilities. This article could serve as background reading or as part of an introductory section.Arlie Russell Hochschild, Arlie Russell. 2003. 'Love and Gold.' Pp. 15–30 in Global Women: Nannies, Maids and Sex Workers in the New Economy, edited by Barbara Ehrenreich and Arlie Russell Hochschild. Metropolitan Books.Hochschild's chapter in Global Women examines the transfer of traditional women's work to migrant women. Women in rich countries are turning over care work (nannies, maids, elder care) to female migrant workers who can be paid lower wages with few or no benefits and minimal legal protections. This global transfer of services associated with a wife's traditional role extracts a different kind of labor than in prior migrations based on agricultural and industrial production. Emotional, sexual as well as physical labor is extracted in this current phase of globalization; in particular, emotional labor and 'love is the new gold'. Women migrate not only to escape poverty, but also to escape patriarchy in their home countries by earning an independent income and by physical autonomy from patriarchal obligations and expectations. Many female migrants who leave poor countries can earn more money as nannies and maids in the First World than in occupations (nurses, teachers, clerical workers) if they remained in their own country. Thus, migration can be seen as having contradictory effects on women's well‐being and autonomy. This chapter can be used in a section dealing with the specific topic of globalization and care work or in a section introducing the topic of gendered labor activities.McDowell, Linda, Diane Perrons, Colette Fagan, Kath Ray and Kevin Ward. 2005. 'The Contradictions and Intersections of Class and Gender in a Global City: Placing Working Women's Lives on the Research Agenda.'Environment and Planning A 37, 441–461.This group of prominent social geographers from the UK collaborates to great effect in a welcome addition to the literature theorizing the complex articulations of gender and class in global cities. Their detailed research comparing three localities in Greater London is a corrective to the oft‐cited multi‐site study of global cities by Saskia Sassen. They find that Sassen underestimates gains and losses for both men and women in the 'new' economy. Place makes a difference when assessing the impact of women's increased rates of labor market participation on income inequality and patterns of childcare. The article outlines a new research agenda by 'placing' working women's lives at the center of analysis.Parrenas, Rhacel Salazar 2008. The Force of Domesticity: Filipina Migrants and Globalization. New York: New York University Press.Rhacel Salazar Parrenas brings together her influential research on Filipina migrants and extends her path‐breaking ethnographic analysis to include Filipina domestic workers in Rome and Los Angeles and entertainers in Tokyo. David Eng incisively captures the importance of Parrenas's analysis when he states, 'Extracted from home and homeland only to be reinserted into the domestic spaces of the global north, these servants of globalization exemplify an ever‐increasing international gendered division of labor, one compelling us to reexamine the neo‐liberal coupling of freedom and opportunity with mobility and migration'. The book is well suited to illuminate discussions of domesticity and migration, transnational migrant families, the impact of migration laws in 'home' and 'host' countries, and transnational movements among migrant women.Walby, Sylvia. 2009. Globalization and Inequalities: Complexity and Contested Modernities. London: Sage.This book introduces new theoretical concepts and tests alternative hypotheses to explain variation in trajectories of gender relations cross‐nationally. It synthesizes and reviews a vast literature, ranging from the social sciences to the natural sciences to construct a new approach to theorizing the development of gender regimes in comparative perspective. Sylvia Walby seeks to explain the different patterns of inequalities across a large number of countries. The analysis differentiates between neo‐liberal and social democratic varieties of political economy, and makes explicit the gender component of institutions and their consequences. The project builds on Walby's pioneering work on comparative gender regimes, and extends the research by operationalizing empirical indicators for a range of key concepts, and by analyzing links between a wide set of institutions (including economy, polity, education and violence) and how these are gendered in specific ways. As in the past, Walby is not afraid to tackle big questions and to offer new answers. Throughout the book, like in her previous body of research, Walby takes on the question of social inclusion/exclusion and critically interrogates concepts of democracy, political participation, equality and rights. Walby uses a comparative lens to examine the democratic 'deficit' in liberal and social democratic countries, and how migration restructures patterns of inequality and the consequent reconstitution of national and ethnic relations within countries. There is more to the book than abstract theoretical debates. Walby poses and assesses alternative political projects for achieving equality. The book is an original contribution that will likely influence sociology in general and theories of social change in particular.Online resourcesStatus of women in the world: United Nations Development Fund for Women (UNIFEM) http://www.unifem.orgUNIFEM was established at the United Nations in order to foster women's empowerment through innovative programs and strategies. Its mission statement summarizes UNIFEM's goals as follows: 'Placing the advancement of women's human rights at the center of all of its efforts, UNIFEM focuses on reducing feminized poverty, ending violence against women; reversing the spread of HIV/AIDS among women and girls; and achieving gender equality in democratic governance in times of peace as well as war'. The website includes information on global initiatives such as zero tolerance of violence against women, the impact of the economic crisis on women migrant workers, and strategizing for gender proportionate representation in Nigeria. Primary documents relevant to women's advancement appear on the website; these include the Convention on the Elimination of all Forms of Discrimination Against Women (CEDAW) and the UN Security Council Resolution 1325 on Women, Peace and Security. UNIFEM publishes monographs assessing the progress of women around the world. One notable example is the 2005 publication on Women, Work & Poverty by Martha Chen, Joann Vanek, Francie Lund, James Heintz with Renana Jhabvala and Christine Bonner. http://www.unifem.org/attachments/products/PoWW2005_eng.pdf Gender equity index http://www.socialwatch.org/en/avancesyRetrocesos/IEG_2008/tablas/valoresdelIEG2008.htm Social Watch produces an up‐to‐date gender equity index composed of three dimensions and indicators: empowerment (% of women in technical positions, % of women in management and government positions, % of women in parliaments, % of women in ministerial posts); economic activity (income gap, activity rate gap); and education (literacy rate gap, primary school enrollment rate gap, secondary school enrollment gap, and tertiary education enrollment gap). These separate indicators in addition to the gender equity index are arrayed by country. There are 157 countries, representing 94% of the world's population, in the sample. Mapping these indicators across countries presents a comparative picture of the absolute and relative standing of women and gender equity in the world.Focus QuestionsKey words: Globalization1. What is meant by globalization?
a. To what extent is globalization new? Or is globalization another phase of a long historical process? b. Can we differentiate inter‐national (connections between) from the global (inter‐penetrations)?
Feminism and globalization
How do feminist interventions challenge globalization theories (for example the presumed relationship between globalization and homogenization and individualization)? How do different feminisms frame and assess the conditions of globalization around the world?
Gender and globalization
What role do women, and different women, play in the global economy? Are patriarchal arrangements changing as a result of greater economic integration at the world level?
Migration and mobilities
What does Parrenas mean by partial citizenship?
How does it relate to the case of Philippine migrant workers? What is the relationship between 'home' and 'host' nations? How important is a vehicle like the Tinig Filipino in forging 'imagined communities' and new realities?
What is the mix of choice and compulsion in the different migrations mobilities of men and women?
Globalization and politics
Are women subject to the same kinds of legal protections (and regulations) that evolved in earlier periods? Do new flexible production processes and flexible work arrangements undercut such legal protections?
Globalization and collective mobilization
Does globalization open spaces for new women's movements, new solidarities, new subjectivities and new forms of organizing?
Sample syllabusCourse outline and reading assignments Conceptualizing the 'Global' and 'Globalization' Dicken, Peter, Jamie Peck and Adam Tickell. 1997. 'Unpacking the Global.' Pp. 158–166 in Geographies of Economies, edited by Roger Lee and Jane Willis. London: Arnold.Amin, Ash and Nigel Thrift. 1996. 'Holding Down the Global.' Pp. 257–260 in Globalization, Institutions, and Regional Development in Europe, edited by Ash Amin and Nigel Thrift. Oxford: Oxford University Press.Acker, Joan. 2004. 'Feminism, Gender and Globalization.'Critical Sociology 30: 17–42.Background Reading:Gottfried, Heidi. 2006. 'Feminist Theories of Work.' Pp. 121–154 in Social Theory at Work, edited by Marek Korczynski, Randy Hodson, Paul Edwards. Oxford: Oxford University Press.Peterson, V. Spike. 2008. 'Intersectional Analytics in Global Political Economy.' in UberKeruszungen, edited Cornelia Klinger and Gudrun‐Axeli Knapp. Munster: Wesfalisches Dmpfboot.Chow, Esther Ngan‐Ling. 2003. 'Gender Matters: Studying Globalization and Social change in the 21st Century.'International Sociology 18 (3): 443–460.Walby, Sylvia. 2009. Globalization and Inequalities: Complexity and Contested Modemities. London: Sage. Gender and Globalization Gottfried, Heidi. Forthcoming. 'Gender and Employment: A Global Lens on Feminist Analyses and Theorizing of Labor Markets.'Sociology CompassFernandez‐Kelly, Patricia and Diane Wolf. 2001. 'Dialogue on Globalization.'Signs 26: 1243–1249.Bergeron, Suzanne. 2001. 'Political Economy Discourses of Globalization and Feminist Politics.'Signs 26: 983–1006.Freeman, Carla. 2001. 'Is Local: Global as Feminine: Masculine? Rethinking the Gender of Globalization.'Signs 26:1007–1037. Theorizing Politics and Globalization Sassen, Saskia. 1996. 'Toward a Feminist Analytics of the Global Economy.'Indiana Journal of Global Legal Studies 4: 7–41.Parrenas, Rhacel Salazer. 2001. 'Transgressing the Nation‐State: The Partial Citizenship and 'Imagined (Global) Community' of Migrant Filipina Domestic Workers.'Signs 26:1129–1154.Bosniak, Linda. 2009. 'Citizenship, Noncitizenship, and the Transnationalization of Domestic Work.' Pp. 127–156 in Migrations and Mobilities: Citizenship, Borders, and Gender, edited by Seyla Benhabib and Judith Resnik. New York: New York University Press.Background Reading:Benhabib, Seyla and Judith Resnik. 2009. 'Introduction: Citizenship and Migration Theory Engendered.' Pp. 1–46 in Migrations and Mobilities: Citizenship, Borders, and Gender, edited by Seyla Benhabib and Judith Resnik. New York: New York University Press. Migrations, Mobilities and Care Hochschild, Arlie Russell. 2003. 'Love and Gold.' Pp. 15–30 in Global Women: Nannies, Maids and Sex Workers in the New Economy, edited by Barbara Ehrenreich and Arlie Russell Hochschild. Metropolitan Books.Hondagneu‐Sotelo, Pierrette. 2001. Domestica: Immigrant Workers Cleaning and Caring the Shadows of Affluence. Berkeley: University of California Press.Parrenas, Richard Salazar. 2008. The Force of Domesticity: Filipina Migrants and Globalization. New York: New York University Press.Pyle, Jean 2006. 'Globalizations, Transnational Migration, and Gendered Care Work.'Globalizations 3(3): 283–295.Qayum, Seemin and Raka Ray. 2003. 'Grappling with Modernity: India's Respectable Classes and the Culture of Domestic Servitude.'Ethnography 4: 520–555. Restructuring and Gender Inequality in Global Cities McDowell, Linda, Diane Perrons, Colette Fagan, Kath Ray and Kevin Ward. 2005. 'The Contradictions and Intersections of Class and Gender in a Global City: Placing Working Women's Lives on the Research Agenda.'Environment and Planning A 37: 441–461.McDowell, Linda. 1997. 'A Tale of Two Cities? Embedded Organizations and Embodied Workers in the City of London.' Pp. 118–129 in Geographies of Economies, edited by Roger Lee and Jane Willis. London: Arnold.Bruegel, Irene. 1999. 'Globalization, Feminization and Pay Inequalities in London and the UK.' Pp. 73–93 in Women, Work and Inequality, edited by Jeanne Gregory, Rosemary Sales and Ariane Hegewisch. New York: St. Martin's Press. Embodiment and Restructuring Halford, Susan and Mike Savage. 1997. 'Rethinking Restructuring: Embodiment, Agency and Identity in Organizational Change.' Pp. 108–117 in Geographies of Economies, edited by Roger Lee and Jane Willis. London: Arnold.Gottfried, Heidi. 2003 'Temp(t)ing Bodies: Shaping Bodies at Work in Japan.'Sociology 37: 257–276. Gender in the Global Economy: Post‐Socialist and Emerging Economies Salzinger, Leslie. 2004. 'Trope Chasing: Engendering Global Labor Markets.'Critical Sociology 30: 43–62.Kathryn Ward, Fahmida Rahman, AKM Saiful Islam, Rifat Akhter and Nashid Kama. 2004. 'The Nari Jibon Project: Effects on Global Structuring on University Women's Work and Empowerment In Bangladesh.'Critical Sociology 30: 63–102Otis, Eileen. 2007. 'Virtual Personalism in Beijing: Learning Deference and Femininity at a Global Luxury Hotel. Pp. 101–123 in Working in China: Ethnographies of Labor and Workplace Transformation, edited by Ching Kwan Lee. Routledge.Background Reading:Ferguson and Monique Mironesco (eds.). 2008. Gender and Globalization in Asia and the Pactific: Method, Practice, Theory. Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press. Globalization and Policy Developments Lenz, Ilse. 2004. 'Globalization, Gender and Work: Perspectives on Global Regulation.' Pp. 29–52 in Equity in the Workplace: Gendering Workplace Policy Analysis, edited by Heidi Gottfried and Laura Reese. Lexington Press.Woodward, Alison. 2004. 'European Gender Mainstreaming: Promises and Pitfalls of Transformative Policy.' Pp. 77–100 in Equity in the Workplace: Gendering Workplace Policy Analysis, edited by Heidi Gottfried and Laura Reese, Lexington Press.Fraser, Nancy. 2007. 'Reframing Justice in a Globalizing World.' in Global Inequality, edited by David Held and Ayse Kaya. Polity. Gender and the New Economy Walby, Sylvia, Heidi Gottfried, Karin Gottschall and Mari Osawa. 2006. Gendering and the Knowledge Economy: Comparative Perspectives, Palgrave, See chapters by Sylvia Walby, Mari Osawa, and Diane Perrons.Ng, Cecelia. 2004. 'Globalization and Regulation: The New Economy, Gender and Labor Regimes.'Critical Sociology 30: 103–108. Globalization and Transnational Organizing Ferree, Myra Marx. 2006. 'Globalization and Feminism: Opportunities and Obstacles for Activism in the Global Area.' Pp. 3–23 in Global Feminism: Transnational Women's Activism, Organizing, and Human Rights, edited by Myra Marx Ferree and Aili Mari Tripp. New York: New York University Press.Yuval‐Davis, Nira. 2006. 'Human/Women's Rights and Feminist Transversal Politics.' Pp. 275–295 in Global Feminism: Transnational Women's Activism, Organizing, and Human Rights, Myra Marx Ferree and Aili Mari Tripp. New York: New York University Press.Mohanty, Chandra Talpade. 2006. "Under Western Eyes" Revisited: Feminist Solidarity Through Anti‐Capitalist Struggles.' Pp. 17–42 in Feminism without Borders: Decolonizing Theory, Practicing Solidarity, edited by Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press.
GFDRR was established in September 2006 as a global partnership of the World Bank, UN agencies and bilateral donors, located in World Bank headquarters in Washington, DC. Its missions are (a) to mainstream disaster reduction and climate change adaptation (CCA) in country development strategies, and (b) to foster and strengthen global and regional cooperation among various stakeholders under the International Strategy for Disaster Reduction (ISDR) system. GFDRR supports the implementation of the UN 2005-2015 Hyogo Framework for Action (HFA). This international agreement in relation to disaster risk reduction (DRR) arose from a 168-nation UN conference held in Kyoto, Japan, in 2005. The key player for coordinating the implementation of HFA is the UNISDR bureau with headquarters in Geneva and eight regional offices worldwide. Another UN agency with operational responsibility for UN disaster related work is the UNDP-BCPR. These two UN agencies and GFDRR have complementary goals, creating potential for collaboration among the three organizations, but also calling for care in monitoring the risk of overlapping work among them and other DRR actors. UNISDR was a founding partner of GFDRR and UNDP-BCPR became a permanent observer to GFDRR in 2008.
These economic updates analyze the trends and constraints in Cameroon's economic development. Each issue, produced bi-annually, provides an update of recent economic developments as well as a special focus on a selected topical issue. The economic updates aim to share knowledge and stimulate debate among those interested in improving the economic management of Cameroon and unleashing its enormous potential. The notes thereby offer another voice on economic issues in Cameroon, and an additional platform for engagement, learning and change. The latest information confirms the expected recovery in economic activity in Cameroon. The upturn in the global economy and measures taken by the authorities to stimulate domestic production, real gross domestic product (GDP) growth in 2010 is estimated to have reached 3.2 percent (compared to 2 percent in 2009). As expected, most of this recovery was driven by the tertiary sector, which accounted for more than half of the estimated growth. The sector benefitted from a pick-up in timber-related transport and continued strong activities in mobile telephony stemming from a greater use of fiber optic, promotional campaigns during the Soccer World Cup, and the roll-out of new products. The recovery in the primary sector, with an estimated growth rate of about 4 percent in 2010, was led by a strong expansion in the timber sector, as well as in food crops. The non-oil secondary sector, meanwhile, is also estimated to have grown by about 4 percent, driven by a continued pick-up in construction activities and a rebound in food processing. Cameroon is a relatively small and mature oil producer, where oil production is declining. Depleting reserves, aging equipment, and more recently postponements of some development projects and investments because of the financial crisis explain this profile. The contribution of this sector to GDP growth has been mostly negative in recent years and oil production is estimated to have contracted by a further 12 percent in 2010 (to 23.2 million barrels).