The Pune Slum Census: creating a socio-economic and spatial information base on a GIS for integrated and inclusive city development

Urban planning systems rarely include the poor. Cities are growing and so is the urban population. Pune is a large city in Western Maharashtra. According to the National Census, 2001, the population of the Pune urban agglomeration is 3.5 million and it is (in some estimates) to reach nearly 6 million by 2021.¹ Out of this, the city of Pune has a 2.5 million people living in it. Forty percent and above of the population live in slums. One of the biggest shortfalls of Pune's urban planning is that it still fails to include the poor in mainstream policies. The reason is that the poor are hardly known about, in fact, even government authorities are unaware about how many poor people there are in Pune. This attitude, and the fact that Shelter Associates (SA) work is closely connected with the poor regarding basic services and housing, started the development of a slum database by SA. Finally, the Pune Municipal Corporation asked us to make a complete census of the slum dwellers in the year 2000. That gave rise to a detailed survey of Pune's slum dwellers, to become, amongst other things, the first ever spatial and socio-economic census processed and analysed on a geographical information system (GIS). The Pune Slum Census has built upon this experience and expanded the communities’ information base, and has created a methodology which the city can use to work on detailed urban planning using a GIS and with the slum database as the base. This article focuses on the Pune Slum Census in progress.     

‘Say no to the ATO’: the cultural politics of protest against the Australian Tax Office

Researching a broad array of protest forms offers valuable insights into social change. One such unusual form includes protests against tax law rulings made by the Australian Tax Office (ATO). Across Australia thousands of taxpayers invested in ‘tax effective schemes’ in the late 1990s. However, by 2000 each owed on average AUS$75,000 as a result of these schemes being ruled illegal. Rather than pay the money owed many have refused, publicly protesting through formal administrative and political mechanisms, and through public debate. At first glance, this appears an issue of individual economic self‐interest. However, qualitative research methods provide a more detailed and contextual picture of why protestors feel justified in their actions. Focusing on the hard‐hit Goldfields region of Western Australia, protests are argued as being about real and imagined identities; concerns over roles and status in Australian society; and the failings of institutional and political frameworks that should support, not penalize, citizens. The offence and ‘moral shock’ of being publicly labelled as ‘tax cheats’ facilitated protestors' view of themselves as workers trying to do the ‘right thing’ by their families and country. And as such, the normally private issue of individual tax affairs became a public debate and a site of cultural politics wherein the ATO's official discourse of rationality and regulation compliance is received by protestors as symbolic of their beleaguered position in Australian society. Here, citizenship struggles have not been eclipsed by post‐material or ‘new social movement’ concerns. Rather, sites of cultural politics, such as struggles over tax and identity, are constantly redrawn in light of new social practices and relations.     

CEO Age and Top Executive Pay: A UK Empirical Study

This study examines the implications that CEO age has onexecutive pay regarding data collected in a UK setting. Whereprior research has typically focused on total pay (salary plusbonus), this study offers a more complete conceptual model bysplitting pay into salary, annual bonus, and share options. Indoing so, we found that the relationship between CEO salaries andage are significantly related with this association weakeningover time. Another interesting finding not captured by priorresearch was that the relationship between CEO age and bonusappears to be non-linear in nature. Figures 2 which depicts thisnon-linear function suggest at about age 53, the proportion ofbonus as a percentage of salary begins to decrease at anincreasing rate. As a whole, these findings suggest corporate paycommittees should consider family and the financial circumstancesof the executive when designing remuneration schemes.     

Animals and anomalies: an analysis of the UK veterinary profession and the relative lack of state reform

The sociology of professions literature would predict that the contemporary state would not allow groups to continue unregulated or unreformed. However, this is indeed the case with the UK veterinary profession, with legislation dating back to 1966. Using an interdisciplinary analysis of published literature and reports, this paper assesses whether wider social, political and ethical dynamics can better explain this intriguing anomaly. We conclude with critical implications for the sociology of the professions. Furthermore, we argue that continuing to ignore the veterinary profession, and animals more generally, in sociological research will result in an impoverished and partial understanding of contemporary healthcare and occupations.     

Collective identities,women's power resources,and the making of welfare states

Theory and Society -     

A social indicator based on time allocation

The authors have developed a social indicator, called Lambda, that has as its base the manner in which individuals allocate their time among various life activities. This indicator does not suffer from the usual demand characteristics and experimenter bias associated with most subjective social indicators, i.e., those based on question-naires. It is not a single rate indicator in the sense of suicide rate. Lambda is a weighted sum social indicator with both subjective and objective aspects. The weights are decided by the population under consideration and not by the investigators or some other outside agents. The elements to be summed are the frequency functions for the discrepancies that arise when individuals state the amount of time they would like to spend in an activitiy versus the amount of time they actually spend at the activity. There are frequency functions for each activity. The properties of this indicator are discussed in detail. A pilot study comparing Lambda to another social indicator and some demographic variables was conducted with 1012 undergraduate students. The results of the pilot study show a high correlation between Lambda and the other social indicator. The results are presented. Lambda is currently being used by the Gallup organization.