‘Education for All’ in Cambodia: Democratic Educational and Children’s Empowerment Global Values Facing State Patronage

Among countries in Southeast Asia, Cambodia hosts the most NGOs per inhabitant and is particularly influenced by international education policies. To this extent, Cambodia constitutes a pertinent fieldwork location for reflection upon the role of global governance of education in the ‘global South’. Grounded in long-term fieldwork in a village and primary school, and multi-sited fieldwork with education technocrats and functionaries at the national and provincial levels, this article examines the cooperation between the state and the ‘global-politic’ in the way that it is polarised around the development of the policy ‘Education for All’ (EFA) in Cambodia. I argue that the global actors in education are promoting a kind of ‘moral economy’ of education and that their different programmes, however diverse they may be, are underpinned by common democratic and empowerment values. These values remain fairly ‘silent’, buried beneath technocratic demands, and clash with the informal economy of patronage grafted onto the Ministry of Education. This is an informal economy to which I give some empirical depth. I defend the fact that this moral confrontation is part of the context in which a paradoxical situation has emerged and that some light needs to be shed on this paradox in a country where the post-colonial state of education agrees, to a certain extent, to delegate part of its sovereignty for the benefit of the ‘global-politic’ of education.     

Italy is not a good place for men: narratives of places,marriage and masculinity among Malayali migrants

Abstract Immigration from South Asia to Italy is a recent phenomenon and novel in that the pioneer migrants are often married or single women rather than men. In this article I explore the relationship between a ‘feminization of migration’ and the construction of masculine identities among Malayali migrants from Kerala, South India, who experience migration directly or indirectly through marriages with Malayali women living and working in Rome. The interest in focusing on the relation between women's pioneer role as migrants and their husbands' experiences of migration is to show how men's identity is represented through their conjugal bond with migrant women working in the domestic sector and to understand how masculinity is constructed and contested within and with reference to different places.     

Organizational Restructuring and the Achievement of an Equal Opportunity Culture

The Opportunity 2000 Campaign has recognized that equal opportunity policy change has to be accompanied by a process of culture change in organizations. However, sustaining commitment to an equal opportunity culture may be a difficult task in times of rapid and varied organizational change. In particular, the volume and scope of ‘restructuring’ that follow mergers, acquisitions, divestment, the introduction of internal markets, and other changes in business strategy often lead to ‘downsizing’, ‘delayering’, and outsourcing of business functions. This can have very variable outcomes for the careers of women managers. For them the experience of organizational restructuring is akin to participation in a lottery in which they are occasionally winners, but usually losers. This is the main finding from in-depth case studies of three large organizations in the public sector, pharmaceuticals, and financial services, which have all experienced some form of ‘restructuring’ over the last five years. The main conclusion of this research is that unless restructuring involves an expansion of managerial positions it is likely to disadvantage women managers. The reasons for this are that it leads to job losses in functions where women are concentrated; highlights the disadvantages of poor line manager support; reinforces exclusion from the valuable informal organizational networks that provide access to career development opportunities; and renders formal equal opportunity policy monitoring ineffective. These findings have considerable implications for organizational and national policy initiatives to achieve an equal opportunity business culture.     

The Role and Effects of Efficacy in Socioeconomic Development and Foreign Direct Investment: A Comparative Study of South Korea and Singapore

Abstract

There is a sizable amount of research and explanation concerning the rapid and sustainable development of newly industrialised countries (NIC) in Asia. This article seeks to create a deeper understanding of the relationships between the governmental sector, the economic sector, and the social sector in the Asian political arena. As such, it will explain how policies pursued in selected countries could have impacted the economies of the so-called ‘tiger’ or ‘dragon’ countries. In addition, the study will show how governmental efficacy is connected with socioeconomic development by means of comparing, as exemplars, South Korea and Singapore, in the period 1960–2007. The investigated period experienced heightened socioeconomic development in South Korea and Singapore. Stressing the historical evolution of socioeconomic development, the researcher accordingly focused on social, political, and economic outcomes in their relationship with the factor of macroeconomic stability and the varying amounts of foreign direct investment in the two nations. This study looks to create a deeper understanding of the role of government efficacy and socioeconomic development in an Asian context in which government efficacy and political development and institutions have played important roles in creating stable and continuous social and economic development. This idea of government efficacy and political development has helped to strengthen the capacity of governments to adapt and adjust their political agency’s capability to achieve political goals and sustainable socioeconomic development. South Korea has created institutions that are simpler than complex organisations and may lack autonomy and coherence. In contrast, Singapore has created complex and autonomous institutions with strong coherence. The findings in the outcomes section explain the different historical developments of South Korea and Singapore.     

Networking across borders: the South Asian Research Network on Gender,Law and Governance

In this article I focus on a subaltern approach to knowledge networks by examining the process of setting up such a network, the South Asia Research Network (SARN) on Gender, Law and Governance. I reflect on the construction of discourses about ‘knowledge’ and ‘knowledge–makers’ and the issues of access that emerge as a result of these discourses and practices. I outline three aspects of a ‘politics of network(s)–ing’: the politics of process; the politics of outcome; and the politics of framing. I conclude that the borders of which we need to be aware are not just national borders but also borders of power. Knowledge networks are politically heterogeneous and for subaltern networks to have sustainable organizations as well as critical politics they need to be self–reflective and deliberative.     

The restructuring of career paths in large service sector organizations:'delayering', upskilling and polarisation1

Drawing on detailed case studies of four large service sector organizations this paper finds little evidence of training provision that links skills development with incremental career progression. Past policies of ‘delayering’ have opened up a ‘gap’ in the job ladder and this has both increased the organizational costs of formal training and reduced the likelihood of informal on‐the‐job training being seen as the basis for promotion to the next level. Managers are thus faced with the challenge of how to establish a new set of premises upon which to strengthen the workforce's loyalty and commitment to the organization, in the context of problems of high staff turnover and low job satisfaction. What we find is a greater emphasis on certificated training provision. However, in the absence of a transparent career path employers rely on more intensive techniques of appraisal and selection of workers for a ‘winner‐takes‐all’ career path. Given the importance of skills acquisition as an important building block of the ‘learning society’, our findings suggest that policymakers in Britain cannot rely solely upon the employer to bridge the skill gap evident in large service sector organizations.     

Assessing international organizations’ support to social enterprise

This article takes stock of a sample of interventions and programmes across different countries and regions supported by international organizations to foster the development of social enterprise. The primary objective of the article is to generate a compilation of such interventions and draw some lessons about their potential contribution to the growth and sustainability of the sector. The results indicate that international organizations’ support to social enterprise has focused primarily on the provision of financial resources, notably loans and grants. While programmes remain largely unassessed, the few available rigorous evaluations show that social enterprise has the potential to be a cost‐effective mechanism to deliver basic social services to the poor. The article proposes a set of policy recommendations directed primarily to international organizations and the public administration to improve and enhance their support to the sector.     

Sexualizing the Organization,Lesbianizing the Women: Gender,Sexuality and ‘Flat’ Organizations

This article draws upon research with men and women workers in ‘flat’ organizations, namely mixed-sex and all-women's worker co-operatives and collectives in the voluntary sector. It argues that the denial of sales, contracts and grants to women's co-operatives and collectives in particular, can be connected to discourses of sexuality generally and to the assumptions surrounding lesbianism and separatism in particular. Such discourses are often used to marginalize women workers and their co-operatives and collectives, irrespective of whether the women in such organizations are lesbians or not. It is argued that when women workers organize in ways which challenge male-dominated hierarchy, their marginalization necessarily takes a sexualized form because organizations, whether hierarchical or less/non-hierarchical, are not only gendered but are also sexualized. This analysis thus offers an important additional dimension to the view that the marginalization of co-operatives and collectives is due to their small size, lack of capital, location in certain sectors of the economy, or assumptions concerning the ‘alternative’ or ‘fringe’ nature of employment in such settings. This article also argues that sexuality can attach at the level of the organization, and not simply at the level of individual bodies or life-styles, an argument often unacknowledged both in the literature on lesbians in the workplace, and in the literature on co-operative businesses and less or non-hierarchical voluntary sector organizations generally.     

The ‘Feminization’ of Management? Issues of ‘Sameness’ and ‘Difference’ in the Roles and Experiences of Female and Male Retail Managers

Explanations of women’s poor representation in senior management usually emphasize differences between women and men managers’ experiences, circumstances and aspirations, and the gendered character of organizational structures and processes. Whilst these may all disadvantage women, some writers have suggested recently that women managers may differ in style and orientation in ways particularly appropriate for today’s developing organizations. This paper explores issues of ‘sameness’ and ‘difference’ between women and men managers in retailing. Whilst both male and female store managers wanted to downplay gender differences and adopt a ‘gender neutral’ approach, they also associated a number of advantages and disadvantages with being a woman manager in certain contexts. Rapid sectoral change had caused companies to reassess the desired attributes and competences of managers; associated both with an enhanced valuing of ‘feminine’ qualities and with a more ‘objective’ and ‘clinical’ approach to assessment. Despite their equal numbers at entry points women remained poorly represented at senior levels, suggesting that subjective and informal processes were important determinants of women and men’s progress. Given management is inherently a process enacted by individual managers within a social context the extent to which it can be conceived in gender neutral terms is questioned since individuals are inevitably discussed and identified in terms of their gender.     

Heading South: Time to Abandon the ‘Parallel Worlds’ of International Non-Governmental Organization (NGO) and Domestic Third Sector Scholarship?

Since third sector research emerged as a full-fledged interdisciplinary academic field during the late 1980s, a separation has usually been maintained—in common with many other social science disciplines—between communities of researchers who are primarily concerned with the study of the third sector in rich Western countries and those who work on the third sector in the so-called developing world. Whilst internationally focused researchers tend to use the language of ‘non-governmental organizations’, those in domestic settings usually prefer the terms ‘non-profit organization’ or ‘voluntary organization’, even though both subsectors share common principles and are equally internally diverse in terms of organisations and activities. Whilst there has long been common-sense logic to distinguishing between wealthier and poorer regions of the world based on differences in the scale of human need, the ‘developed’ versus ‘developing’ category can also be criticised as being rather simplistic and unhelpfully ideological. As the categories of ‘developing’ and ‘developed’ countries become less clear-cut, and global interconnectedness between third sectors and their ideas grows, this paper argues that we need to reconsider the value of maintaining these parallel worlds of research, and instead develop a more unified approach.     

Transnational social protection infrastructures: African migrants in Mexico

In the past years, increasingly restrictive migration policies have pushed many migrants to seek new and more risky migration routes. Many studies have investigated aspects of social protection for migrants from the Global South in industrialized countries of the Global North, with powerful welfare states. Yet, such focus has failed to understand the complexities during the migration process, where people often spend uncertain periods of time in transit countries and the state is frequently absent. In these contexts, social protection is predominantly provided by the third sector (TS) and informal networks both nationally and transnationally. Based on ethnographic fieldwork conducted with African migrants and TS organizations in Mexico, this paper explores the different and often semi-formal relationships between the TS, the state, and the migrants that result in complex transnational social protection infrastructures to cover the migrants' basic social protection needs.     

Introduction

Empirical studies of occupational structure in South Africa have tended to be unsatisfactory, detailed work on small sectors of the economy coexisting with across‐the‐board studies too crudely aggregated to allow for a precise assessment of a changing situation. This study presents the results of an analysis by ‘race’ into 14 occupational groups of South African employment outside agriculture, domestic service and the informal sector over the period 1969 to 1977. It argues that over the period there has been a definite increase in the share of owner I manager and, more particularly, petty bourgeois occupations, with a corresponding decline in the proportion of unskilled workers. It also suggests that changes in the ‘racial’ division of labour are more complex than has sometimes been supposed.     

The Third Sex: Women Leaders in Australian Agriculture

This article uses data from interviews with 20 women involved in decision‐making positions in Australian farm organizations to explore the ways in which women actively create a subject position which locates them as both ‘agricultural leader’ and ‘woman’. This is a subject position one participant describes as ‘a third sex’. In negotiating their outsider status, the participants describe being engaged in a constant process of self‐monitoring and movement between and across different discourses of managerial masculinity and normative femininity. They describe no such difficult identity work being undertaken by the male leaders with whom they work. Based on a range of gender comparisons, the article concludes that women's entry to positions of agricultural leadership does not necessarily suggest that a more inclusive or equitable Australian farming sector is emerging.     

Participation in cross-national learning assessments and impact on capacity development: Programmes,practice, structures and teacher competency. Case study of Kenya,Tanzania and South Africa

This research is one of the few attempts to employ the conceptual framework of "technology transfer" to analyze the extent that participation in cross-national learning assessments has had on capacity development, particularly in the development of official public structures, by equipping educationists and influencing teachers’ competency in Kenya, Tanzania and South Africa. The researchers conducted semi-structured interviews with key informants drawn from the Ministries of Basic Education, national examinations councils, civil society organizations and curriculum development institutions in the three countries. The in-depth interviews were complemented by relevant literature on this topic. The study established improved technical capacities in the public education sector in South Africa and Kenya to design and conduct independent large-scale learning assessments. This important research demonstrates a certain level of commitment by African countries to establish official structures necessary to design/implement and sustain a culture of monitoring learning outcomes through public funded large-scale learning assessments. The research potentially contributes to the body of knowledge as far as ‘summative’ evaluation and analysis of the theory of change underpinning the participation in cross-national learning assessments espoused under the Education for All (EFA) Framework of Action     

Commercially arranged marriage and the negotiation of citizenship rights among Vietnamese marriage migrants in multiracial Singapore

Globalization and increased mobilities have multiplied cross-border transactions not only in the economic sphere but have also a major impact on human relationships of intimacy. This can be seen in the increased volume of differently mediated forms of international marriage, not just straddling ‘east’ and ‘west’, but within Asia and across different ethnicities and nationalities. International marriage raises a host of social issues for countries of origin and destination, including challenges relating to the citizenship status and rights of the marriage migrant. This paper examines the negotiation of citizenship rights in the case of commercially matched marriage migrants – namely Vietnamese women who marry Singaporean men and migrate to Singapore as ‘foreign brides’. While they are folded into the ‘family’ – what is often thought of as the basic building block of the nation in Asian societies – they are not necessarily accorded full incorporation into the ‘nation’ despite Singapore's claims to multiculturalism. This is particularly salient at a point when cross-nationality, cross-ethnicity marriages between Singapore citizens and non-citizens are on the increase, accounting for over a third of marriages registered in Singapore in recent years. Vietnamese women who marry Singaporeans are positioned within the nation-state's citizenship regime as dependents of Singaporean men, having to rely on the legitimacy of the marriage relationship as well as the whims of their husbands in negotiating their rights vis-à-vis the Singapore state. Drawing on interviews and ethnographic work with 20 Vietnamese women who are commercially matched marriage migrants, the paper first focuses on the vulnerable positions these women find themselves, particularly given difficulties in forging their own support networks as well as weaknesses of the civil society sector in what has been called an ‘illiberal democracy’ characterized by a political culture of ‘non-resistance’. The paper then goes on to examine the way they negotiate rights to residency/citizenship, work and children within webs of asymmetrical power relations within the family and the nation-state. We draw on our findings to show that citizenship is ‘a terrain of struggle’ within a multicultural nation-state shaped by social ideologies of gender, race and class and negotiated on an everyday basis within spheres of family intimacy.     

Respectable Femininity and Career Agency: Exploring Paradoxical Imperatives

This paper places respectable femininity at the very centre of career enactment. In the accounts of 24 Sri Lankan women, notions of being a ‘respectable’ woman recurred as respondents described how important it was to adhere to the powerful behavioural norms for women in their organizations and society. However while such respectability was vital for women's career progression, it ultimately restricted their agency and conflicted with other requirements for advancement. Based on our empirical findings, we propose that being a respectable woman was experienced as paradox, where at times it was seen as impossible to be both a good woman and a successful careerist. We highlight the implications of our findings for women's careers in South Asia and more widely.     

Flawed Policy,Failed Politics? Challenging the Sexual Politics of Managing Diversity in Engineering Organizations

In Australia, as in most other developed countries, women constitute less than 10 per cent of engineers and they are leaving the profession faster than men. Engineering organizations have taken up managing diversity as a key policy to improve the recruitment and retention rates of women engineers. This article contributes to the developing literature of critical approaches to diversity by drawing on data from three large engineering companies to argue that this policy fails to challenge the prevailing sexual politics in engineering. We propose the concept of ‘sexual politics’ in order to stress that gender is relational, contested and always political. In failing to engage with the sexual politics in engineering organizations, managing diversity obscures the systematic nature of women's disadvantage and men's advantage in the workplace. Only when these politics are recognized, confronted and transformed will engineering careers be more equitable.     

Variations of the same? A sectoral analysis of the gender pay gap in Germany and Austria

Germany and Austria are two countries with a comparably and persistently high gender pay gap. Further, both countries are classified as conservative welfare states where the male breadwinner model has been only partly modernized and strong corporatist structures shape working conditions. At the same time, welfare policy and provision are not only based on but also shape gender‐related norms, beliefs and assumptions that are virulent for job valuation and collective bargaining. Against this background the article analyses similarities and differences regarding the gender pay gap in Germany and Austria. While both countries show significant similarities regarding the causes for the gender pay gap, there are some differences regarding legislation and further policies with which the gender pay gap could be reduced. Arguing that the institutional framework strongly influences income opportunities for women and men, the article provides a sectoral analysis of the financial and insurance sector and the human health sector in both countries. Using qualitative data from a recent research project, it is argued that in the classification of a sector as ‘female’, the sectoral income level combined with different wage‐setting mechanisms have a crucial impact on wage inequalities between women and men.     

中东非政府人权组织的特征与挑战

20世纪七十年代末以来,中东地区人权语境逐渐宽松,颁布了各种伊斯兰特色的《人权宣言》,不同层次的人权组织在伊斯兰国家开展活动,这都为中东非政府人权组织的产生提供了理论和组织上的准备。非政府人权组织推动了中东人权观念和人权批判精神的成长,提升了中东各国政府对人权关注程度,并成为国际人权标准内化的重要媒介,缓解了社会内部的对立。"人权依赖综合症"影响到非政府人权组织的特征,人权组织多为社会精英阶层所领导,其活动多限于特定群体和地区。在现代社会,人权组织虽面临诸多挑战,但无疑已成为推动中东政治民主化和人权发展的潜在力量。     

Gendered,Invisible Work in Non‐profit Social Service Organizations: Implications for Worker Health and Safety

Nonprofit organizations (NPOs) play an important role in the provision of health and social services. In Canada the nonprofit sector includes 7.5 million volunteers and employs over 1.6 million paid workers. The sector is overwhelmingly female‐dominated — women make up over 80 per cent of workers in these nonprofit services. Work performed by women has traditionally been undervalued and invisible. It has often been considered safe by researchers, employers, policymakers and sometimes even workers themselves. Although there is some indication that jobs in the restructuring social services sector can be characterized by constant demand, high stress and violence, research into the working conditions and health hazards of these types of jobs has not been a priority. Using data from a qualitative study examining work in NPOs, we trace the ways that work performed in these workplaces is both gendered and invisible. We identify three types of invisible labour. ‘Background work’ facilitates and supports more visible and recognized organizational activities. Certain organizational language obscures the full spectrum of work that takes place in the organizations and the risks it may involve. ‘Empathy work’ includes the relationship building, counselling and crisis intervention that comprise key components of social service delivery. ‘Emotional labour’ involves the management of client emotions and workers' own emotions in the process of working with clients and delivering care under conditions of scarcity and contraction. The invisibility of these activities means that much of the day‐to‐day work done in the organizations, while particularly important in the context of social service restructuring, is taken‐for‐granted and undervalued by organizational outsiders. As a result, many of the hazards present in the jobs are hidden from view and workers' health may be compromised. We argue that the invisibility and taken‐for‐grantedness of certain types of work in NPOs is reflected in, and constitutive of, particular exclusions and shortcomings of current occupational health and safety systems designed to protect the health of workers.