Taking as Giving, Appropriation as Access: Transfers of Land Development Rights and China’s Recent Experiments

Economic development at both the domestic and global levels is associated with increasing tensions which are inextricably linked to the meaning and allocation of property rights, which has a great impact on appropriation of resources and may lead to different paths of development. “Taking”-- the appropriation of private land for public needs -- is a typical example that exhibits those tensions, posing a challenge to the conventional conception of property as individualistic and exclusive rights of possession, use, and disposition and to the associated neoliberal model of development. Should the individual landowner be left to bear the cost of a regulatory intervention which endures to the wider benefit of the whole community? How to mitigate the tensions between private ownership and public regulation? If we take the liberal concept of property, then private property seems to be in constant conflict with public interests and wider social concerns. Meanwhile, community, situating between the state and the individuals, and community’s relationship to development rights, have not provoked enough discussion. The paper explores the different ways land development rights might be seen both in Western, essentially common law systems, and in China, especially now and in view of two case studies. An empirical example in Wugang, China reveals the importance of integrating the “community lens” proposed by Roger Cotterrell into studies of the transfer of land development rights. Reading through the community lens, taking could be giving and appropriation could also be access. This approach provides a new perspective to re-evaluate the relationship between legal appropriation and development.

A qualitative enquiry into the appropriation of mobile telephony at the bottom of the pyramid

Purpose: The paper aims to analyse Bottom of the Pyramid (BoP) customers’ (e.g. Bangladeshi farmers) use and appropriation of mobile telephony and to critically identify a suitable research strategy for such investigation.

Design/methodology/approach: Concentrated ethnographic immersion was combined with both methodological and investigator triangulation during a four-month period of fieldwork conducted in Bangladeshi villages to obtain more robust findings. Concentrated immersion was required to achieve relatively speedier engagement owing to the difficulty in engaging with respondents on a long-term basis.

Findings: The farmers’ use of mobile telephony went beyond the initial adoption, as they appropriated it through social and institutional support, inventive means and/or changes in their own lifestyle. The paper argues that technology appropriation, being a result of the mutual shaping of technology, human skills and abilities and macro-environmental factors, enables users to achieve desired outcomes which may not always be the ones envisaged by the original designers.

Research limitations/implications: The paper contributes to two major areas: first, it identifies technology appropriation as an important and emerging concept in international marketing research; second, it suggests a concentrated form of ethnographic engagement for studying technology appropriation in a developing country context.

Practical implications: A good understanding of the dynamic interplay between users’ skills and abilities, social contexts and technological artefacts/applications is required in order for businesses to serve BoP customers profitably.

Originality/value: The paper presents a dynamic model of technology appropriation based on findings collected through a pragmatic approach by combining concentrated ethnographic immersion with methodological and investigator triangulation

Updating Addison: Culture, Appropriation and The Connoisseur

This article explores The Connoisseur's combined engagement with its most important literary precursor and the society of its day. With its satire on the fashionable leisure culture of the mid-eighteenth century, Bonnell Thornton and George Colman's periodical, published from 1754 to 1756, followed self-consciously in the footsteps of Addison. Yet adopting the Addisonian model at mid-century was no straightforward task. Not only had the cultural landscape shifted during the forty years since The Spectator, but emulating this modern classic raised thorny issues regarding the originality and value of The Connoisseur itself. In appropriating the Addisonian essay, the challenge for Colman and Thornton was thus to update Addison: to adapt their model to changing times. This article examines how Colman and Thornton sought to validate their particular contribution to the polite periodical tradition, along with the difficulties they encountered in maintaining a Spectatorial detachment from the fashionable milieu that was their primary theme.