Big Data for Development: A Review of Promises and Challenges

The article uses a conceptual framework to review empirical evidence and some 180 articles related to the opportunities and threats of Big Data Analytics for international development. The advent of Big Data delivers a cost‐effective prospect for improved decision‐making in critical development areas such as healthcare, economic productivity and security. At the same time, the well‐known caveats of the Big Data debate, such as privacy concerns and human resource scarcity, are aggravated in developing countries by long‐standing structural shortages in the areas of infrastructure, economic resources and institutions. The result is a new kind of digital divide: a divide in the use of data‐based knowledge to inform intelligent decision‐making. The article systematically reviews several available policy options in terms of fostering opportunities and minimising risks.     

Art in the Time of Frugality: Scarcity,Cooperation, and Change in American Art Museums

Funding for American art museums has undergone significant changes in the past 20 years. In particular, federal and corporate giving have substantially declined following the Great Recession. These changes impact museums’ ability to secure funding for exhibitions. This study addresses how funding scarcity affects American art museums, specifically with regard to staff’s ability to execute their own tasks and the strategies of action they use to compensate for these changes. Drawing from literature on resource scarcity, I explore how funding declines have prompted museum staff to use “strategic cooperation” as a means of diversifying limited financial resources. Moreover, using interviews with curators and development officers, I identify three cooperative strategies they may use: coordinating inter‐professional activities, pooling professional knowledge, and finding creative financial solutions. These findings add to work on resource scarcity by identifying inter‐group cooperation as a diversification strategy. More importantly, I add to this literature by specifically identifying multiple forms of strategic cooperation individuals may employ to combat resource scarcity. Finally, while literature on the arts has focused on museums’ propensity for inter‐professional conflict during times of duress, my work demonstrates that, despite this, cooperative action is a present and viable strategy in cultural organizations.     

Environment,Development, and Water in Academia: A Critical Network Perspective

The world is currently confronting two water crises, a developmental crisis concerning populations who lack access to water and an environmental crisis regarding water scarcity and freshwater resource depletion. Are we as academics addressing the complexity of these issues? Using network analysis of over 5,000 articles that address water development and water scarcity, I generate a co-citation network to identify the overlap between development and environmental water literatures in academic journals. The results suggest that the development literature only has a 6.28 percent overlap with the environmental literature and the environmental literature has a mere 1.92 percent overlap. Overall, this research suggests that there is an extreme lack of academic articles that address water scarcity and water development concurrently. Until we as an academic community become more nuanced in our studies of water, we will lack a full understanding of how to solve these seemingly contradictory problems. I conclude by drawing on critical Marxist and “Frankfurt School” perspectives to explain this apparent disconnect.     

A CONTRIBUTION TO THE THEORY OF DEPLETABLE RESOURCE SCARCITY AND ITS MEASURES

Economists commonly use rent and unit costs as measures of non-renewable resource scarcity and identify the types of scarcity as Malthusian or Ricardian. Malthus and Ricardo, however, concerned themselves mainly with renewable agricultural land; Mill and Jevons provided major insights into non-renewable resource scarcity. A simple model of mining brings out the contributions of major classical and other writers and shows that unit costs and rent are not necessarily useful indicators of scarcity. Exhaustibility of the deposit and choice of capital stock appear more pertinent to firms' intertemporal decisions than exhaustibility of world reserves.     

The hydropolitical challenges of domestic water conservation. Palestine and Tunisia case studies

Southern Mediterranean area, particularly the Middle East and North Africa (MENA), has been facing social, economic, environmental and political challenges related to the water scarcity and quality. Within the European SWMED project, a socio-economic survey was conducted in Palestine and Tunisia, in order to explore the water conditions, and the social and economic situations of local families. The article illustrates the research design and implementation, as well as the main results that were used to select the appropriate sustainable water management solutions to respond to the hydropolitical issues. Due to the huge use of water in agriculture and the difficulty of reducing the water consumption in this sector, fostering tools for domestic water saving may be a winning strategy for facing water scarcity in MENA region.     

Responses to Scarcity

Studies of pre-industrial societies suggest that in response to protracted scarcity, individuals experience a decline in social relations, return to traditional practices and values, and become more subordinate to those in authority. In this paper, we examine the extent to which these same responses are found in an industrialized area. Evidence from survey data suggests that scarcity and economic decline do decrease social relations and cause some individuals (those with less formal education) to use more traditional means to solve problems, but they do not cause people to become more passive in respect to community leaders. Factors that may account for the different responses to scarcity in industrial and pre-industrial societies are discussed.     

Radical Social Movements in Western Europe: A Configurational Analysis

There has been little comparative research on the differences across radical social movements in the context of consolidated democracies. This paper analyses the squatting movement, as an exemplary case of contemporary radical movement. This study aims to identify the causal contexts that explain the differences of strengths within these movements across 52 large cities in Western Europe. It examines three main hypotheses drawn from the literature on social movements concerning the characteristics of political systems, the availability of resources and the presence of economic grievances. We use fuzzy sets qualitative comparative analysis (fsQCA) to identify configurations of causal conditions. The findings show that diverse contexts (multi-causation) lead to strong movements. A first causal context combines grievances, resources and closed or unresponsive institutions, and is typically found in Southern European cities. A second context highlights the presence of robust far-right parties in combination with less severe grievances and relative scarcity of resources, and is typically found in Northern European cities. These findings demonstrate that resources and grievances are quasi-necessary conditions for strong radical movements, although polarization can lead to a similar outcome where these characteristics are not present.     

The Geopolitics of Formosa

The authors outline an innovative activity that helps teachers make the abstract concepts of scarcity and allocation concrete in the K-12 classroom. Students evaluate the scarcity of chocolate and often determine, incorrectly, that the candy is not scarce because there is enough for each student to have one piece. After students reveal their preferences for the candy, they compare the total number of candies desired with the number of candies available. Because it is almost always the case that preferences cannot be met, students can easily see that candy is scarce. As with any scare resource, an allocation method is required. Students explore different alternatives for allocating the scarce good among competing consumers. The authors share results from three implementations of this activity.     

Minority sub-state institutional completeness

The institutional completeness model holds that minority groups best ensure their vitality through their own institutions. In this case study of Acadians in Greater Moncton, we explore the difference between institutions belonging to minority groups (e.g. churches, cultural associations) and those belonging to the state (e.g. schools, hospitals). Our focus on local sub-state institutions – institutions established and funded by the state but managed by citizens at the local level (e.g. school boards, health authorities, municipal councils) – shows that sub-state institutions have become more important than civil institutions in ensuring minority vitality. It also shows that while all sub-state institutions can contribute to minority vitality, some state functions and the sub-state institutions that wield these functions can contribute more than others. The model should be revised to give as much importance to sub-state institutions as civil institutions in its attempt to describe, explain, and predict conflicts between minority and majority groups.     

Crisis of Natural Building Materials and Institutionalised Self-Help Housing: The Case of Grameen Bank in Bangladesh

Traditional rural housing is largely based on the use of locally available natural resources as prime building materials, usually in a process of self-help building undertaken by the community. Such housing is well adapted to a natural environment with widely available resources, and supports people's direct involvement in the construction of their dwellings. However, the advent of a cash economy and current scarcity of natural resources has greatly affected the self-help building process. In rural Bangladesh, affluent households are shifting to manufactured materials and skilled builders, and the quality of housing of low-income households is declining. For the latter, self-help is the only option, and recognition of this fact and of the increasing decline in the quality of their housing has prompted institutional intervention. This paper discusses the Grameen Bank's rural housing programme in Bangladesh which provides loans for manufactured building components for low-income rural households to build houses on a self-help basis. A review of this programme indicates some of its strengths and shortcomings in the context of scarcity of natural building materials and widespread poverty.     

Working Relationally with Youth in Child Protection Institutions: A Milieu‐Therapy Perspective

Children and youth who have shown serious difficulties or if it is surmised that parents over time will not be able to care for the child or youth, could be placed in a child protection institution. The therapeutic work in such institutions is often described as milieu therapy. There has been little focus on the milieu therapist's relational work in child protection institutions. The research question for this study was: What factors are described by milieu therapists as significant for relational work with youth placed in institutions? To answer this question, we collected data from qualitative semi‐structured interviews with four milieu therapists working in child protection institutions. Interpretative phenomenological analysis helped us identify three overarching categories: (1) structural and personal factors as a basis for relational work; (2) various forms of communication in relational work; and (3) relational work with a starting point in everyday events.     

Scarcity,Income Advantage,and Mobility: More Evidence on the Functional Theory of Stratification*

Two testable propositions suggested in the Davis and Moore functional theory of stratification are examined: the effect of scarcity on rewards and the effect of higher rewards on mobility. Data on the occupation of public school teaching for the period 1930 to 1971 were analyzed and compared with other wage and salary workers during those years. The proposition that scarcity increases rewards is rejected by these data, because higher incomes occur during periods (1) when there was less scarcity of teachers and (2) when employers discriminated against qualified married females in their hiring practices. The proposition that an increase in income advantage increases the movement of more qualified personnel into those positions found support, but for reasons more consistent with a conflict than a functional explanation. This research demonstrates the importance of economic incentives in attracting personnel but more importantly it documents how “political” groupings can regulate market forces.     

Groundwork for community-based conservation: Strategies for social research

Diane Russell and Camilla Harshbarger have tried to understandthe constraints and opportunities for local partners in conservation.They see this as the first step for social actors and conservationistswho want to understand and work with institutions that are significantfor local people. They have prepared this book based on theirhard-won field experiences in rural regions of the tropics.They have also read case studies from across the globe, as wellas sharing in dialogue with local partners living at conservationsites, colleagues from universities, associations, and institutions,as well as with working groups. The authors worked     

Inhabited Institutions: Social Interactions and Organizational Forms in Gouldner’s Patterns of Industrial Bureaucracy

Organizational sociologists often treat institutions as macro cultural logics, representations, and schemata, with less consideration for how institutions are ”inhabited“ (Scully and Creed, 1997) by people doing things together. As such, this article uses a symbolic interactionist rereading of Gouldner’s classic study Patterns of Industrial Bureaucracy as a lever to expand the boundaries of institutionalism to encompass a richer understanding of action, interaction, and meaning. Fifty years after its publication, Gouldner’s study still speaks to us, though in ways we (and he) may not have anticipated five decades ago. The rich field observations in Patterns remind us that institutions such as bureaucracy are inhabited by people and their interactions, and the book provides an opportunity for intellectual renewal. Instead of treating contemporary institutionalism and symbolic interaction as antagonistic, we treat them as complementary components of an “inhabited institutions approach” that focuses on local and extra–local embeddedness, local and extra-local meaning, and a skeptical, inquiring attitude. This approach yields a doubly constructed view: On the one hand, institutions provide the raw materials and guidelines for social interactions (“construct interactions”), and on the other hand, the meanings of institutions are constructed and propelled forward by social interactions. Institutions are not inert categories of meaning; rather they are populated with people whose social interactions suffuse institutions with local force and significance.     

The Limits of Self-Management: Community and Health Care System Barriers Among Latinos With Diabetes

Although numerous studies examine diabetes self-care, few regard ecological framework correlates such as community and institutional level factors as fundamental for understanding diabetes management for Latinos. This article addresses the dearth of research that exists regarding social contextual forces and diabetes management for Latinos. Given the scarcity of research on this topic, studies of non-Latino groups were reviewed to illustrate the importance of community and institutional influences on diabetes care. Consideration of fundamental correlates within the ecological framework may better discern the underlying rationale for inadequate diabetes self-management for individuals who live in impoverished communities.     

AIDS funding and the rhetoric of scarcity

This article describes the “rhetoric of scarcity,” a viewpoint that focuses on the inadequate past support for and the uncertain future of AIDS funding. This view is at variance with the consistent rise in financial support for AIDS and with the criticism from some quarters that AIDS is being overfunded relative to other diseases. The rhetoric of scarcity expressed by members of the AIDS community is distinctive but not unique to HIV/AIDS and can be traced to qualities of the epidemic and the ways in which nonprofit organizations obtain their funds.     

The Limits of Self-Management: Community and Health Care System Barriers Among Latinos With Diabetes

Although numerous studies examine diabetes self-care, few regard ecological framework correlates such as community and institutional level factors as fundamental for understanding diabetes management for Latinos. This article addresses the dearth of research that exists regarding social contextual forces and diabetes management for Latinos. Given the scarcity of research on this topic, studies of non-Latino groups were reviewed to illustrate the importance of community and institutional influences on diabetes care. Consideration of fundamental correlates within the ecological framework may better discern the underlying rationale for inadequate diabetes self-management for individuals who live in impoverished communities.     

The Canadian agricultural frontier

Selon les formulations classiques de la théorie de la rente foncière, les concepts de manque et de monopole sont essentiellement requis pour l'émergence de cette rente. Tel a été le cas dans les prairies canadiennes malgré la disponibilité de millions d'acres de terre agricole vierge. Cette étude explique pourquoi, en appliquant les théories ricardienne et marxiste de la rente foncière au contexte canadien. L'étude soutient que les contraintes techniques ont contribuéà ce manque de terre qu'on aurait pu diriger vers la production commerciale, mais qu'elles n'ont cependant pas été la seule cause de l'émergence de la rente foncière. De plus, l'étude appuie la théorie marxiste en démontrant que l'émergence de la rente foncière était due à la position structurelle des propriétaires de la terre qui leur a permis d'empêcher cette terre viable de produire. It argues that technical constraints produced a scarcity of land that could be brought into commercial production. Yet, it demonstrates that scarcity was not a sufficient condition for the emergence of ground-rent. Furthermore, it supports Marx's theory by demonstrating that the emergence of ground-rent rested upon the structural position of the landholders, which permitted them to withhold viable land from production. Classical formulations of the theory of ground-rent focus on the concepts of scarcity and monopoly as essential pre-conditions for the emergence of ground-rent. With millions of acres of free homestead land available on the Canadian Prairies, how could there have been either scarcity or monopoly? Yet, ground-rent clearly emerged on this agricultural frontier. By specifically applying the Ricardian and Marxist theories of ground-rent to the Canadian frontier, this study proposes an explanation.     

SCARCITY AND RICARDIAN RENTS FOR CRUDE OIL*

This paper estimates scarcity rent/user cost and Ricardian rent for crude oil in Oklahoma. A model of firm behavior is proposed incorporating both development and production decisions considering crude oil as a nonrenewable natural resource. Profit maximization conditions derived from the model are applied to take into account cost differentials associated with oil found at varying depths. It is shown that oil with the highest cost is the marginal unit and it is the marginal output that determines Ricardian rent. Time series data is used to estimate equations derived from the necessary conditions. It is found that scarcity rent is a significant proportion of the price of crude oil and has increased in the past decade.     

Continuity and change in the regional stereotypes of southern college students, 1970–1987

This article examines the effects of the race and Hall of Fame membership of professional football players on the value of their “rookie” football cards. Several studies have examined the impact of race on the value of baseball cards, but only one paper has examined this topic among football card collectors. Data were derived from 177 black and white football players who are members of the NFL Hall of Fame or who have been on the final voting ballot for the Hall. All of the players in the sample started their careers after professional football became racially integrated. Data for each player's race, value of their rookie card, card availability (scarcity), performance, Hall membership, and position were obtained from secondary sources. The principle finding of the study is that when controlling for factors such as position, performance, and card scarcity, race applies an independent effect on the value of the rookie cards of NFL Hall of Fame members, but not among non-Hall of Fame cards. Speculation on why “race matters” and suggestions for future research are offered.