In this paper we study the contribution of inflows and outflows to the dynamics of unemployment in three European countries, the United Kingdom, France and Spain. We compare performance in these three countries making use of both administrative and labor force survey data. We find that the impact of the 1980s reforms in Britain is evident in the contributions of the inflow and outflow rates. The inflow rate became a bigger contributor after the mid 1980s, although its significance subsided again in the late 1990s and 2000s. In France the dynamics of unemployment are driven virtually entirely by the outflow rate, which is consistent with a regime with strict employment protection legislation. In Spain, however, both rates contribute significantly to the dynamics, very likely as a consequence of the prominence of fixed-term contracts since the late 1980s.

Labor scholars have long advocated social movement unionism as a strategy to revitalize the American labor movement, but how is social movement unionism practiced? Cassandra Engeman exams union participation in the 2006 Los Angeles immigrant rights marches as a case of social movement unionism. She finds that unions allied with large community organizations, preferred reform goals, and advocated tactics perceived as effective. Such strategic decisions were informed by organizational considerations regarding member representation and the long-term capacity for mobilization.

This report presents evidence on whether the aim of moving people who are dependent on benefits into work has been achieved, and considers three important questions: Are welfare reforms encouraging tenants into work or to work more? What are the main barriers to work for out of work tenants or tenants who want to work more? Why are many social housing tenants not working?

The modern history of the Jharkhand region in India can be understood as a tale of incomplete pacification of ‘tribal’ communities by both the colonial and postcolonial regimes. Starting with the introduction of alien land tenure laws by the British, the increasing reach of inimical political and commercial interests, the tapping of huge mineral reserves as part of India’s development march have adversely affected adivasi communities through land alienation, displacement and declining access to common property resources. Adivasis have responded through issue-based people’s movements in various areas that oppose, for instance, reservoir dams, mining activity or forestry initiatives. Christians have historically played a leading role in the clamour for tribal autonomy even if they account for only four percent of the population. This paper attempts to chart what the intensely socialized generation of Christian political activists starting in the 1930s has transmuted into and how activists and the organised church respond to changed circumstances. Based on field visits to Ranchi district, plus a case study of the Koel Karo agitation, this study assesses the role of Christian social movement activists – the nature and efficacy of their involvement...

This paper is concerned with organisational responses of residents in one low-income urban community located in the Province of KwaZulu-Natal. The area concerned is Mpumalanga Township near Durban, and it is an area that has had a difficult history of political violence. This has meant that, despite a coterminous history of trade union militancy and high levels of community mobilisation, social networks have been severely fractured. Firstly, this paper explores the tenuous process of rebuilding community level trust and collective action in the wake of political transition. A process of democratic consolidation has been made more difficult by economic recession and workplace restructuring. The general lack of trust in politicians and popular representatives in the contemporary period has meant that people are retreating into families and kinship networks, a response reinforced by poverty. In contrast to previous modes of trade union organisation in the area, problems of poverty and efforts towards enhancing livelihood opportunities are treated as private issues. Thus poverty and suspicion undermine community engagement and limit collective action responses to widespread problems. Secondly, the family is seen as a site of stability...

Whilst much research has examined how to empower poor community members to identify the social roots of health problems and articulate demands for health-enabling living conditions, less is known about how to create receptive social environments where the powerful are likely to heed the voices of the poor. This paper seeks to characterise the social environments in which community-led health programmes are most likely to facilitate effective and sustainable health improvements, using three dimensions to characterise social contexts: material, symbolic and relational . We distinguish between technical communication (the transfer of health-related knowledge and skills from experts to communities) and transformative communication (a more politicised process, where marginalised groups develop critical understandings of the social roots of their ill-health, and the confidence and capacity to tackle these). Drawing on secondary sources, we compare two well-documented case studies of HIV/AIDS management projects. Both sought to use technical communication about HIV/AIDS as a springboard for developing transformative communication skills amongst marginalised women. The Entabeni Project in South Africa sought to empower impoverished women to deliver home-based nursing to people with AIDS. Whilst it performed a vital short-term welfare function...

During 1997, many Thai NGOs became involved in anti-government protests at local and national levels as an extension of their advocacy work. The latest and longest protest in Thai history took place from January to May 1997 with more than 30,000 protesters taking part. The main aim of this paper is to examine why public protest has increasingly become part of the advocacy work of these NGOs. It suggests that where social and economic tensions have reached a crisis point, (generated by Thailand’s highly uneven economic development of the past decade), there is a phenomenon of ‘cultural drift’ in which dominant values and norms are challenged and protest action by the poor breaks out. Some Thai NGOs have therefore taken on the role of ‘social movement organisations’ and in interventions have attempted to shift conflicts from local peripheries into the national arena. Drawing on ‘resource mobilisation theory’, this paper argues that NGOs have become involved in the protest movement as ‘resources’ rather than as full ‘actors’ by providing linkages and networks. The study suggests that the ‘social movement’ perspective as a conceptual framework for the analysis of the NGOs’ advocacy work is useful. It also argues that the NGOs which emphasise advocacy should be considered as ‘social movement organisations’. It concludes that more comparative research is needed on NGOs which perform advocacy work...

This article examines three hand-painted colour maps that accompanied the annual report of the Calcutta Botanic Garden for 1846 to illustrate how the Garden’s layout, uses and functions had changed over the previous 30 years. The evolution of the Calcutta Botanic Garden in the first half of the nineteenth-century reflects a wider shift in attitudes regarding the relationship between science, empire and the natural world. On a more human level the maps result from, and illustrate, the development of a vicious personal feud between the two eminent colonial botanists charged with superintending the garden in the 1840s.

"Oral History off the Record: Toward an Ethnography of Practice." Anna Sheftel and Stacey Zembrzycki (eds.). Palgrave Macmillan. October 2013. --- Most discussions of oral history method are rooted in abstract ideas about what interviewing should be and should achieve. However, interviews are ultimately personal interactions between human beings, and rarely conform to a methodological ideal. The struggles interviewers face while conducting interviews mostly go unacknowledged, and this collection aims to show that a full account of oral history methodology must include honest and rigorous analyses of actual practice, allowing us to embrace the uncertainties that define a human-centered methodology. Nafiseh Sharifi is impressed with this collection and recommends it to students and practitioners of oral history.

"The Lives of the Novel: A History." Thomas G. Pavel. Princeton University Press. September 2013. --- This book is a history of the novel from ancient Greece to the vibrant world of contemporary fiction. Thomas Pavel argues that the driving force behind the novel’s evolution has been a rivalry between stories that idealize human behavior and those that ridicule and condemn it. Impelled by this conflict, the novel moved from depicting strong souls to sensitive hearts and, finally, to enigmatic psyches. Pavel makes his case by analyzing more than a hundred novels from Europe, North and South America, Asia, and beyond. Sophie Franklin writes that this text presents a cohesive lineage that moves effortlessly from one point to another.

We demonstrate that the introduction of social protection systems as well as their generosity and coverage have significant impacts on health. Who receives the benefits within the household affects the health outcomes for the family. The eligibility for and administration of benefits matters. We examine the growth of means testing in the UK and its recent modifications. We find serious difficulties facing those with long term medical conditions who are on the margins of the labour force. Collaboration between the health and social protection systems is poor. We give particular attention to gender and health and the implications this has for the social protection system. We also consider the fate of groups like asylum seekers who are excluded from its normal working.

President Obama’s signature health care reform, the Affordable Care Act (ACA), or Obamacare, recently reached its five year-anniversary, with little end yet in sight to the controversy its implementation has caused, especially among conservatives. But how can we explain such widespread opposition to the ACA? In new research which looks at attitudes across the U.S., Benjamin Knoll and Jordan Shewmaker find that those who support the protection of American culture and way of life – ‘nativists’ – are much more likely to be against the ACA. For many Americans, they explain, reforms such as Obamacare are increasingly becoming associated with “foreign” political values and practices, especially for strong Republicans. They also comment that for those with stronger nativist attitudes, President Obama’s perceived foreignness likely played a role in shaping their opposition toward the ACA.

In the second of two posts investigating racial segregation in U.S. metropolitan areas, Richard Rothstein looks at the history of residential segregation in the 20 th century. He writes that in the mid-twentieth century federal housing policy was suffused with segregationist intent, and the effects of these policies still endure. He argues that the vast present-day disparity between black and white household wealth is almost entirely attributable to 20th century government policies which excluded African-Americans from suburban homeownership, and that with this in mind, policymakers should understand that they have a constitutional obligation to pursue aggressive policies to desegregate metropolitan areas.

Disability rolls have escalated in developed nations over the last 40 years. The UK, however, stands out because the numbers on these benefits stopped rising when a welfare reform was introduced that integrated disability benefits with unemployment insurance (UI). This policy reform improved job information and sharpened bureaucratic incentives to find jobs for the disabled (relative to those on UI). We exploit the fact that policy was rolled-out a quasi-random across geographical areas. In the long-run the policy improved the outflows from disability benefits by 6% and had an (insignificant) 1% increase in unemployment outflows. This is consistent with a model where information helps both groups, but bureaucrats were given incentives to shift effort towards helping the disabled find jobs and away from helping the unemployed. Interestingly, in the short-run the policy had a negative impact for both groups suggesting important disruption effects. The policy passes a dynamic cost-benefit calculation, but the costs of the organizational disruption implies that benefits take about six years to exceed the one-off set-up costs making it unattractive for (myopic) policy-makers.

In May 2008, at the High Court of Bangladesh, a ‘community’ that has been ‘stateless’ for over thirty five years were finally granted citizenship. Empirical research with this ‘community’ as it negotiates the lines drawn between legal status and statelessness captures an important historical moment. It represents a critical evaluation of the way ‘political space’ is contested at the local level and what this reveals about the nature and boundaries of citizenship. The thesis argues that in certain transition states the construction and contestation of citizenship is more complicated than often discussed. The ‘crafting’ of citizenship since the colonial period has left an indelible mark, and in the specificity of Bangladesh’s historical imagination, access to, and understandings of, citizenship are socially and spatially produced. While much has changed since Partition, particular discursive registers have lost little of their value. Today, religious discourses of ‘pollution’ and ‘purity’ fold into colonial and post-colonial narratives of ‘primitivity’ and ‘progress’ and the camp draws a line in contemporary nationalist space. Unpicking Agamben’s (1998; 2005) binary between ‘political beings’ and ‘bare life’...

The Canadian residential school system, which operated from the 1880s until the 1970s, was a church-state enterprise designed to assimilate Aboriginal children into Euro-Canadian culture and was characterized by poor sanitation and widespread abuse. Recently, it has been the object of the most significant and most successful struggle for redress in Canadian history. However, for most of its long history, the many failings of the residential school system went unacknowledged by the organizations formerly involved in its operation. In this thesis, I seek to explain why. In doing so, I provide a framework for further study on the residential schools and on comparable cases. To resolve my question, I conduct a comparative historical analysis of the Anglican Church of Canada, which was formerly an important partner in the operation of the residential schools. My data is drawn from a wide range of archival material. My analysis is framed by a meaningcentred approach to social behaviour referred to as the Strong Program. In sum, I argue that the initial meaning of the school system as a sacred enterprise hindered acknowledgement of its failings. For the church to acknowledge the failings of the residential schools...

This thesis consists of three essays on intragenerational and intergenerational inequality. It focuses on the largest developing country, China, and examines historically and currently under-represented groups. The first chapter, “Does Adversity Affect Long-term Consumption and Financial Behaviour? Evidence from China’s Rustication Programme”, investigates the longterm effects of early experiences on economic behaviour, by referring to the largest forced migration experiment in history. Focusing on the historically under-represented group of people who were sent from urban to rural areas to do manual farm work during their adolescence, I demonstrate that they behave conservatively over the long term. They spend less on housing, accumulate more savings and insurance, and invest less in risky assets. One mechanism for the conservative behaviour lies in the habits formed during adversity. My study sheds light on how a policy, experienced especially in the early stage of life, influences a generation over the long term. In addition to inequality, the second and the third chapters examine intergenerational mobility. The second chapter, “The Great Gatsby Curve in China: Cross-Sectional Inequality and Intergenerational Mobility”...

This thesis consists of a brief introduction, which situates the work within in the intellectual history of development theory, and three papers that address important gaps in our understanding about the dynamics of urbanisation and urban development in sub-Saharan Africa. The first provides an interdisciplinary, historical perspective on the dynamics of urbanisation and urban growth in the region from the colonial era to the present day. I argue that these processes are fundamentally driven by mortality decline set in motion by improvements in disease control and food security. Viewed through this lens, the widely noted phenomena of ‘urbanisation without growth’ and very rapid urban population growth in the late 20th century are not as unusual as they have often been portrayed by development economists and policymakers. The second addresses the question of why sub-Saharan Africa has the highest rate of slum incidence of any major world region. I argue that slums can be interpreted as a consequence of ‘disjointed modernization’ in which urban population growth outpaces economic and institutional development. I trace the origins of disjointed modernization in sub-Saharan Africa back to the colonial period and show that colonial era investments and institutions are reflected in contemporary variation in slum incidence. I argue that ‘status quo interests’ and the rise of an anti-urbanisation bias in development discourse have inhibited investment and reform in the post-colonial era. The final paper presents and tests an empirical model designed to account for variation in urban protest activity across countries in the region. The model is comprised of basic demographic...

This thesis demonstrates the day-to-day experiences of victimisation and opinions about crime as they were encountered by a group of pupils in a rural school at one particular point in time. A number of key themes are addressed, the first being the notion of the adolescent as a victim of crime. This thesis considers what 'crime' means to the pupils at this school and documents their views of crime in the wider community. The next area addressed is the victimisation of adolescents by fellow adolescents; here the focus is on incidents of bullying that occurred on and off the school premises. Thirdly, boys as victims is an under-researched subject matter. this is regarded and the question of masculine identities is included. Furthermore, the roles the female students play are investigated, paying particular attention to their involvement in acts of violence and bullying. The fourth area explore the limits of moral conduct and how this particular age group makes decisions about the unwritten moral codes and boundaries affecting the display of violence. This in tum invites the question of how teenagers made sense of larger moral problems and problems of living inside a school interpreted as a form of institution with a distinctive 'underlife'. These themes are addressed within an analysis of the larger social organisation of childhood and adolescence. Criminologists have long recognised the importance of peer group influence in the development of offending behaviour...

The aim of my thesis is to investigate the reason for why and how the language and concept of civil society was used to enhance positions of power by reformists in Iran. In particular, this thesis examines how reformist public intellectuals used civil society to craft their vision of Iran’s sociopolitical future. Special focus is placed upon reformist public intellectuals as agents of change, due to their particular role in introducing new ideas to a wider public audience. Their role as critical thinkers and figures affiliated with a political movement for reform provided them with a unique position on the boundaries between civil and political society. In contrast to reformists, this thesis also examines how conservative figures with different underlying values appropriated the language and concept of civil society for their own ends. Ultimately, it is argued that although civil society is a politically charged concept that can be employed to serve different objectives, it leaves behind a residue of pluralism and an opening up of the public sphere.