"It was hard to come to mutual understanding..." - Multidimensionality of social learning processes in natural resource use in India, Africa and Latin America

Sustainable natural resource use requires that multiple actors reassess their situation in a systemic perspective. This can be conceptualised as a social learning process between actors from rural communities and the experts from outside organisations. A specifically designed workshop oriented towards a systemic view of natural resource use and the enhancement of mutual learning between local and external actors, provided the background for evaluating the potentials and constraints of intensified social learning processes. Case studies in rural communities in India, Bolivia, Peru and Mali showed that changes in the narratives of the participants of the workshop followed a similar temporal sequence relatively independently from their specific contexts. Social learning processes were found to be more likely to be successful if they 1) opened new space for communicative action, allowing for an intersubjective re-definition of the present situation, 2) contributed to rebalance the relationships between social capital and social, emotional and cognitive competencies within and between local and external actors.

A Critical Response to Kevin Stenson’s Governing the Local: Sovereignty, Social Governance and Community Safety

In his compelling case study of local governance and community safety in the UK Thames Valley, Kevin Stenson makes several important contributions to the field of governmentality studies. While the paper’s merits are far-reaching, to this reader’s assessment they can be summarized in the following key areas: 1) Empirically, the article enhances our knowledge of the political economic transformation of a region otherwise overlooked in social science research ; 2) Conceptually, Stenson offers several theoretical and analytical refrains that, while becoming increasingly commonplace, are nonetheless still germane and rightly oriented to offer push back against otherwise totalizing, reified accounts of roll back/roll out neoliberalism. A welcomed new approach is offered as a corrective, The Realist Governmentality perspective, which emphasizes the interrelated and co-constitutive nature of politics, local culture, and habitus in processes related to the restructuring of social governance; 3) Methodologically, the paper makes a pitch for the ways in which finely grained, nuanced, mixed-method/ethnographic analyses have the potential to further problematize and recast a field of governmentality studies far too often dominated by discursive and textual approaches.

Governing the Local: Sovereignty, Social Governance and Community Safety

There has been much commentary about the re-ordering of the relations between nation state government, geographical territory, and populations in the advanced liberal democracies. This is seen as a product of: increasing demographic and cultural diversity due to legal and illegal migration; economic, cultural, and political global interdependence; footloose mobility of capital and the outsourcing of jobs to poorer countries; the growing power of international corporations and financial markets; and the growth of supra-national bodies like the European Union and The North Atlantic Free Trade Association, the World Trade Organisation, and (debatably), the UN. These developments are held to be associated with the gradual demise of the model of the increasingly secular nation state first crystallised by the Treaty of Westphalia in 1648. This conception provided a mutual, guarantee of states’ jurisdiction over territory and populations through their legitimated attempts to monopolise the use of force. Though, the relations between these states have always been asymmetrical and often challenged (Hunter 1998).

The Integration of Formal and Non-formal Education: The Dutch “brede school”

The Dutch “brede school” (BS) development originates in the 1990s and has spread unevenly since: quicker in the primary than secondary educational sector. In 2007, there were about 1000 primary and 350 secondary BS schools and it is the intention of the government as well as the individual municipalities to extend that number and make the BS the dominant school form of the near future. In the primary sector, a BS cooperates with crèche and preschool facilities, besides possible other neighborhood partners. The main targets are, first, to enhance educational opportunities, particularly for children with little (western-) cultural capital, and secondly to increase women’s labor market participation by providing extra familial care for babies and small children. All primary schools are now obliged to provide such care. In the secondary sector, a BS is less neighborhood-orientated than a primary BS because those schools are bigger and more often located in different buildings. As in the primary sector, there are broad and more narrow BS, the first profile cooperating with many non-formal and other partners and facilities and the second with few. On the whole, there is a wide variety of BS schools, with different profiles and objectives, dependent on the needs and wishes of the initiators and the neighborhood. A BS is always the result of initiatives of the respective school and its partners: parents, other neighborhood associations, municipality etc. BS schools are not enforced by the government although the general trend will be that existing school organizations transform into BS. The integration of formal and non-formal education and learning is more advanced in primary than secondary schools. In secondary education, vocational as well as general, there is a clear dominance of formal education; the non-formal curriculum serves mainly two lines and objectives: first, provide attractive leisure activities and second provide compensatory courses and support for under-achievers who are often students with migrant background. In both sectors, primary and secondary, it is the formal school organization with its professionals which determines the character of a BS; there is no full integration of formal and non-formal education resulting in one non-disruptive learning trajectory, nor is there the intention to go in that direction. Non-formal pedagogues are partly professionals, like youth- and social workers, partly volunteers, like parents, partly non-educational partners, like school-police, psycho-medical help or commercial leisure providers. Besides that, the BS is regarded by government educational and social policy as a potential partner and anchor for community development. It is too early to make reliable statements about the effects of the BS movement in the Netherlands concerning the educational opportunities for disadvantaged children and their families, especially those with migrant background, and combat further segregation. Evaluation studies made so far are moderately positive but also point to problems of overly bureaucratized structures and layers, lack of sufficient financial resources and, again, are uncertain about long-term effects.

Three Shades of Embeddedness, State Capitalism as the Informal Economy, Emic Notions of the Anti-Market, and Counterfeit Garments in the Mauritian Export Processing Zone

Purpose This paper furthers the analysis of patterns regulating capitalist accumulation based on a historical anthropology of economic activities revolving around and within the Mauritian Export Processing Zone (EPZ). Design/methodology/approach This paper uses fieldwork in Mauritius to interrogate and critique two important concepts in contemporary social theory – “embeddedness” and “the informal economy.” These are viewed in the wider frame of social anthropology’s engagement with (neoliberal) capitalism. Findings A process-oriented revision of Polanyi’s work on embeddedness and the “double movement” is proposed to help us situate EPZs within ongoing power struggles found throughout the history of capitalism. This helps us to challenge the notion of economic informality as supplied by Hart and others. Social implications Scholars and policymakers have tended to see economic informality as a force from below, able to disrupt the legal-rational nature of capitalism as practiced from on high. Similarly, there is a view that a precapitalist embeddedness, a “human economy,” has many good things to offer. However, this paper shows that the practices of the state and multinational capitalism, in EPZs and elsewhere, exactly match the practices that are envisioned as the cure to the pitfalls of capitalism. Value of the paper Setting aside the formal-informal distinction in favor of a process-oriented analysis of embeddedness allows us better to understand the shifting struggles among the state, capital, and labor.

Teaching Time Preference and Human Impatience: The Billionaire Game

The Billionaire Game involves students in discussing time preference, or what Fisher (1930) calls human impatience. The game can facilitate the introduction of the material on present value and discounting or discussions on such issues as investment in human capital and the intertemporal consumption-saving decision. Thus, the game can facilitate discussions in a number of economics courses.

Online Format vs. Live Mode of Instruction: Do Human Capital Differences or Differences in Returns to Human Capital Explain the Differences in Outcomes?

Our paper asks the question: Does mode of instruction format (live or online format) effect test scores in the principles of macroeconomics classes? Our data are from several sections of principles of macroeconomics, some in live format, some in online format, and all taught by the same instructor. We find that test scores for the online format, when corrected for sample selection bias, are four points higher than for the live format, and the difference is statistically significant. One possible explanation for this is that there was slightly higher human capital in the classes that had the online format. A Oaxaca decomposition of this difference in grades was conducted to see how much was due to human capital and how much was due to the differences in the rates of return to human capital. This analysis reveals that 25% of the difference was due to the higher human capital with the remaining 75% due to differences in the returns to human capital. It is possible that for the relatively older student with the appropriate online learning skill set, and with schedule constrains created by family and job, the online format provides them with a more productive learning environment than does the alternative traditional live class format. Also, because our data are limited to the student s academic transcript, we recommend future research include data on learning style characteristics, and the constraints formed by family and job choices.

Family Structure and Obesity Among U.S. Children

Child obesity in the U.S. is a significant public health issue, particularly among children from disadvantaged backgrounds. Thus, the roles of parents’ human and financial capital and racial and ethnic background have become important topics of social science and public health research on child obesity. Less often discussed, however, is the role of family structure, which is an important predictor of child well-being and indicator of family socioeconomic status. The goal of this study, therefore, is to investigate how preschool aged children’s risk of obesity varies across a diverse set of family structures and whether these differences in obesity are moderated by family poverty status and the mothers’ education. Using a large nationally representative sample of children from the Early Childhood Longitudinal Study – Birth Cohort, we find that preschoolers raised by two biological cohabiting parents or a relative caregiver (generally the grandparent) have greater odds of being obese than children raised by married biological parents. Also, poor children in married biological parent households and non-poor children in married step parent households have greater obesity risks, while poor children in father only, unmarried step, and married step parent families actually have lower odds of obesity than children in non-poor intact households. The implications of these findings for policy and future research linking family structure to children’s weight status are discussed.

Impacto de la afirmación del nuevo modo de acumulación y reproducción del capital en la ciudad de Catriel

En el presente artículo intentaremos mostrar cómo las políticas aplicadas en la Argentina desde 1976, han influído sobre las ciudades/pueblos del país. Específicamente, se intentará ilustrar por medio de un caso concreto, la Ciudad de Catriel, Río Negro, la dinámica de la desconexión de los pueblos-fantasmas de sus circuitos productivos. Así, intentaremos demostrar cómo los cambios estructurales que generaron el nuevo régimen de acumulación y reproducción del capital y su reafirmación, principalmente a través del proceso privatizador de principios de los años ´90, produjeron la polarización de los distintos agentes productivos involucrados en la actividad petrolera.

Jóvenes y políticas públicas de terminalidad educativa : un estudio sobre capital social y estrategias de vida

Desde una perspectiva teórica centrada en el relacionismo, el presente artículo tiene como objetivo abordar las relaciones entre capital social y estrategias de vida. Específicamente, nos preguntamos por la construcción de redes sociales en el trabajo y en la educación y las formas de intervención en las estrategias de vida de jóvenes que se encuentran estudiando en el Plan FinEs2. Retomamos una perspectiva metodológica cualitativa y realizamos entrevistas en profundidad a jóvenes estudiantes y trabajadores de un barrio del Gran La Plata durante el periodo 2012-2013. Finalmente, sostenemos que la experiencia del Plan FinEs2 posibilita la construcción de nuevas redes sociales -colectivas e individuales desplegadas en las estrategias de vida que los jóvenes estudiantes desarrollan.

El cooperativismo agropecuario argentino en la actualidad : Presentación y análisis de tres casos desde la perspectiva del capital social

En este trabajo, presentamos una caracterización sobre el cooperativismo agropecuario en la Argentina de los últimos tiempos desde una lente en particular: la capacidad de estas organizaciones para generar capital social, traducida en la presentación de algunos casos concretos. De este modo, el trabajo -que forma parte de una investigación mayor- se divide en dos apartados y conclusiones. En el primero de ellos destacamos los aspectos teóricos en torno al capital social y las organizaciones cooperativas. En el segundo, mostramos, desde la clave teórica anterior, tres casos de cooperativas, de distinto tipo, de larga data en nuestro país: FeCoVita, AFA y SanCor. En cuanto a la metodología utilizada, se consideró una exhaustiva revisión de bibliografía vinculada al tema del capital social y, para la preparación de los casos, se tuvieron en cuenta información institucional provista por cada organización, estudios especializados y entrevistas en profundidad.

Reflexiones en torno a la génesis del campo religioso y su pertinencia heurística en los albores de la sistematización estatal en el Antiguo Egipto : Una relectura de la sociología de la religión en Pierre Bourdieu

El presente trabajo intenta mostrar de que manera una creencia pre-estatal, reflejo directo "no codificado" de imaginarios sociales indiferenciados, fue reutilizada, reproducida y resignificada por una ideología devenida en dominante y coincidente con el progresivo afianzamiento de la práctica estatal en Egipto. La pretensión es, en tanto y en cuanto esto no implique una artificiosidad forzada como improductiva, rastrear la etiología de la religión de estado en el Egipto faraónico y la relación directa entre la institucionalización de un culto global y la estructuración de lo que pertinentemente llamaremos campo religioso, entendido como una constelación de actores sociales en permanente interacción. La riqueza y amplitud teóricas de los análisis bourdianos, así como una relectura de sus presupuestos sobre la sociología de la religión -campo religioso, capital simbólico, habitus, etc...-, bien pueden contribuir a repensar, desde nuevas perspectivas, el punto de inflexión que supone el comienzo de la interacción entre la naciente práctica estatal y las estructuras de parentesco depositarias de un bagaje de creencias no mediatizadas

Capital extranjero y agroindustria : Notas para una discusión sobre los cambios en la burguesía vitivinícola de Argentina a partir de la década del '90

Se propone problematizar cómo afectan a la burguesía vitivinícola de Argentina los cambios producidos en la actividad a partir de la década de los '90, en el marco de los procesos de globalización. Una de las conclusiones principales es que, aunque el ingreso de capitales extranjeros a la actividad vitivinícola ha sido importante, la burguesía cuyos capitales son nacionales y/o locales logra conservar posiciones no desventajosas en la estructura económica de esta agroindustria. Se trabajó principalmente con fuentes estadísticas de organismos oficiales; y con datos obtenidos de páginas web de las empresas, de consultoras especializadas y de entrevistas a informantes calificados. Asimismo, se realizó una exhaustiva revisión bibliográfica sobre la temática

El cooperativismo agropecuario argentino en la actualidad : Presentación y análisis de tres casos desde la perspectiva del capital social

En este trabajo, presentamos una caracterización sobre el cooperativismo agropecuario en la Argentina de los últimos tiempos desde una lente en particular: la capacidad de estas organizaciones para generar capital social, traducida en la presentación de algunos casos concretos. De este modo, el trabajo -que forma parte de una investigación mayor- se divide en dos apartados y conclusiones. En el primero de ellos destacamos los aspectos teóricos en torno al capital social y las organizaciones cooperativas. En el segundo, mostramos, desde la clave teórica anterior, tres casos de cooperativas, de distinto tipo, de larga data en nuestro país: FeCoVita, AFA y SanCor. En cuanto a la metodología utilizada, se consideró una exhaustiva revisión de bibliografía vinculada al tema del capital social y, para la preparación de los casos, se tuvieron en cuenta información institucional provista por cada organización, estudios especializados y entrevistas en profundidad.

Reflexiones en torno a la génesis del campo religioso y su pertinencia heurística en los albores de la sistematización estatal en el Antiguo Egipto : Una relectura de la sociología de la religión en Pierre Bourdieu

El presente trabajo intenta mostrar de que manera una creencia pre-estatal, reflejo directo "no codificado" de imaginarios sociales indiferenciados, fue reutilizada, reproducida y resignificada por una ideología devenida en dominante y coincidente con el progresivo afianzamiento de la práctica estatal en Egipto. La pretensión es, en tanto y en cuanto esto no implique una artificiosidad forzada como improductiva, rastrear la etiología de la religión de estado en el Egipto faraónico y la relación directa entre la institucionalización de un culto global y la estructuración de lo que pertinentemente llamaremos campo religioso, entendido como una constelación de actores sociales en permanente interacción. La riqueza y amplitud teóricas de los análisis bourdianos, así como una relectura de sus presupuestos sobre la sociología de la religión -campo religioso, capital simbólico, habitus, etc...-, bien pueden contribuir a repensar, desde nuevas perspectivas, el punto de inflexión que supone el comienzo de la interacción entre la naciente práctica estatal y las estructuras de parentesco depositarias de un bagaje de creencias no mediatizadas