Alleviating poverty or reinforcing inequality? Interpreting micro‐finance in practice,with illustrations from rural China

Academic and political discussions about micro‐finance have been found lacking in predictive power, because they are based on orthodox economic theory, which does not properly comprehend the social components of credit. I take a better approach, utilizing credit theory – specifically, Ingham's explication of how the nature of money as credit leads to social inequality. I also expound the perspective that morality is not separate from considerations borrowers make in micro‐finance programmes on the micro level. I draw upon illustrations from my fieldwork in rural China, where a group‐lending micro‐finance programme was administered as part of a larger government‐initiated effort across the country.     

Rebellion or riot?: black Loyalist food laws in Sierra Leone

In 1800 black Loyalists in Sierra Leone participated in an event that historians have called a rebellion. Reinterpreting the 1800 rebellion as a food riot reveals more extensive black Loyalist political activity in the 1790s, greater cooperation between black Loyalists and white councilmen, and increased animosity between black Loyalists and Africans. Black Loyalists created food legislation with the approval of the Sierra Leone Council, but those laws fostered disagreements with Africans. When the Sierra Leone Council revoked the black Loyalists’ law-making abilities, colonists rioted to reclaim the political and legal rights that they developed through their food legislation.     

Women’s welfare and livelihoods outside of marriage: evidence from rural Tanzania

Review of Economics of the Household - This paper explores the welfare and livelihood strategies of women in rural Tanzania after they exit marriage. We draw from a three-wave individual-level...     

The restructuring of rural Spain?

This paper explores the utility of ideas derived from the rural restructuring literature for understanding contemporary trends in rural Spain. It concludes that the processes that analysts associate with rural restructuring are of little help in understanding the Spanish context. As regards capitalist markets, the Spanish countryside is not characterised by economic diversification, professionalism, environmentalism and consumerism on a scale that resembles anticipations derived from the restructuring literature. For state processes, lethargy is a more appropriate adjective than restructuring. Likewise, social and cultural change in civil society are subdued versions of trends that beset Spanish society.     

Measuring the Quality of Peer-Reviewed Publications in Social Work: Impact Factors—Liberation or Liability?

Systems for measuring the quality of publications in peer-reviewed academic journals have achieved importance in the ‘audit culture’ to which academia worldwide has become increasingly subjected. In the United Kingdom this debate has focused on government proposals to give greater emphasis to bibliometrics (counts of journal articles and their citations) as a measurement of research quality, in respect of publications in the emergent Research Excellence Framework (REF) which is set to replace the Research Assessment Exercise (RAE). This approach impacts on social work educators who are the main producers of papers published in peer-reviewed academic journals. It affects their publishing behaviour by pressurising them to publish their work in journals that are regarded as being prestigious, for which ‘high impact factor’ journals as determined by Thomson Reuters—a private commercial information management enterprise with headquarters in the United States—has become a proxy for quality. In this paper the authors describe and critique the Thomson Reuters system as it applies to social work and propose an alternate fair, inclusive and transparent system for assessing the quality of publications based on peer evaluation and incorporating an ethical approach consistent with the discipline's professional values.     

Making Sense of “Quality?” — Toward a Review and Critique of Quality Initiatives in Financial Services

This article provides a broad classification and critique of the theoretical and empirical approaches toward quality initiatives. These are the technical managerialist, social managerialist, and critical nonmanagerialist approaches. The technical managerialist approach is based upon the flawed assumption that practice follows policy almost like night follows day. By contrast, focusing on intraorganizational politics and the tensions of hierarchy, social managerialists recognize that outcomes are always a negotiated compromise. A majority of these authors are concerned with rendering quality initiatives more effective for management. In contrast, critical nonmanagerialists refuse to take on uncritically the assumptions and attitudes of management, and are concerned with understanding the forms and content of quality initiatives. The article provides a conceptual framework for guiding and advancing research on quality initiatives, and it offers themes and issues which warrant exploring.     

Continuity or rupture? Roma/Gypsy communities in rural and urban environments under post-socialism

The aim of the article is to contribute to existing research and debates on social change associated with the post-socialist transformation in Eastern and Central Europe. It does so by drawing attention to and examining the diversity of ways in which such change has been lived through and reflected upon by members of Roma (Gypsy) communities living in urban and rural environments. Drawing on ethnographic research amongst excluded and segregated Roma in the ‘ghettos’ of Czech cities and in rural ‘Gypsy settlements’ in the Slovak countryside, the author notes a striking difference between how members of these communities, belonging to the same extended families, lived through and reflect upon the post-socialist transformation. While the members of the Roma communities living in Czech cities perceive the post-socialist transformation as one of the most dramatic ruptures in their life trajectories, the rural Roma do not seem to have been affected as deeply and dramatically, and their life trajectories seem to be framed by different events than those directly associated with the market transition. The paper analyses and explains the social and historical conditions that (co)produce the sense of rupture or continuity in the life trajectories of members of Roma communities exposed to urban and rural environments.     

Rural roots,rural routes: discourses of rural self and travelling other in debates about the future of Appleby New Fair, 1945–1969

The notion that Gypsies, in an idealised form, have a place in the rural idyll has been sufficiently influential within Geography that it currently features in our undergraduate texts concerned with the meaning of place. The position of real Gypsy-Travellers in the countryside is of course more complex, and this paper seeks to move the debate forward by examining how the group, who are still marginalised in geographical research, were portrayed by rural residents in the post-War period, and what these representations of a travelling other reveal about the nature of the rural self. The route in is through local print media reports about Appleby New Fair, a horse fair in Northern England which is one of the largest Gypsy-Traveller gatherings in Europe and a major tourist attraction. Analysis of this source highlights the contested position of Gypsy-Travellers in the country, and the lines of differentiation in rural society that these challenges to their position reveals. In so doing, the paper not only adds crucial texture to our appreciation of spatialised understandings of difference but also highlights the possibilities of radical openness in rural society, which contrasts with more common reactionary attempts to bound rural space.     

Welfare Recipients or Workers? Contesting the Workfare State in New York City

This paper addresses how New York City's workfare program has structured opportunities for collective action by welfare recipients. As workfare blurs the distinction between wage workers and welfare recipients, it calls into question accepted understandings of the rights and obligations of welfare recipients and fosters new claims on the state. The concept of "cultural opportunity structures" can help to explain the political mobilization of workfare participants if it is linked to a Durkheimian tradition of cultural analysis attentive to symbolic classification. The dramaturgic approach to culture exemplified in the work of Erving Goffman can usefully complement this structural approach if a narrow focus on frames and framing processes is broadened to include interaction rituals and ceremonial profanation.     

Vocational or academic track? Study and career plans among Swedish students living in rural areas

This ethnographic study explores how rural lower secondary school students reflect on study and career choices, focusing on the choice between vocational and academic upper secondary programs. Applying a spatial perspective, we analyze individual students’ reflections about study and career choices within a variety of rural regions, and compare patterns in the regions. The results indicate complex interactions between structural factors and individual dispositions. In places where education levels were low and the local labor market predominantly offered unskilled manual and service work, there was a stronger tendency to choose vocational programs than in places with higher education levels and access to a more varied labor market. Likewise, there was an association between strongly gendered labor markets and gender-typical choices. However, individual students positioned themselves actively in relation to the local place, its local labor market and social relations; their choices were place-bound to varying degrees, and chose upper secondary programs and presented ideas about prospective careers that were harmonious with the local labor market in some cases, but discordant in other cases. The results are discussed in the framework of individuals’ horizon for actions.     

Seasonal work and aboriginal employment in two rural areas of New South Wales, 1921–78

This paper has several areas of focus. It chronicles the history of Aboriginal employment in Australia in two contrasting areas; it identifies the characteristics of that employment and traces the nature of its change over time; it outlines the attitude of Aborigines towards their work, and the impact of that work on Aboriginal society; it also considers the attitudes of white Australians towards Aborigines and their employment. Finally, it draws some conclusions concerning the responses of the Aborigines to pressures put on them by the economy and society of the white man.     

New Zealand children in the 1990s: beneficiaries of New Right economic policy?

This paper questions the extent to which New Zealand children have benefited from New Right economic policies and argues that the invisibility of children, the role of public concern about children and the social construction of childhood are factors which have facilitated implementation of these changes. Attention is drawn to the ways in which the personal and the political spheres intersect in children's lives. Rather than focusing on either the micro level of intervention in the lives of individual children or the macro level of societal change it is argued that the dualism itself must be transcended in order to move forward from the current position. Copyright © 1999 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Linda Milbourne,Voluntary Sector in Transition: Hard Times or New Opportunities?

VOLUNTAS: International Journal of Voluntary and Nonprofit Organizations -     

New Technology in Home Help Services — A Tool for Support or an Instrument of Subordination?

The implementation of information and communication technologies (ICT) is in line with a general transformation of the work of home help services in Sweden. One strong motivation behind the introduction of new technology was to change the ways of working towards greater efficiency in order to reduce costs and at the same time raise the value of care‐giving work. This article discusses the introduction of ICT in home help services as a part of the increasing rationalization of care‐giving work and its consequences for the workers. The results of an ethnographic study of the introduction of hand‐held computers in a working team in home help services in Sweden shows that the motives for the implementation of ICT run counter to the basic norms that are supposed to govern care‐giving work. The technology participates in reproducing the subordinate position of care‐giving work as well as that of the front‐line workers. The workers act according to personal decision‐making ability and show a form of limited resistance to the technology while, at the same time, taking part in their own subordination.     

Networks — a new paradigm of rural development?

The network concept has become widely utilised in socioeconomic studies of economic life. Following the debates around exogenous and endogenous development, networks may also have particular utility in understanding diverse forms of rural development. This paper assesses whether networks provide a new paradigm of rural development. It seeks to capture a series of differing perspectives on economic networks — including political economy, actor-network theory and theories of innovation and learning — and attempts to show how these perspectives might be applied to different types of rural areas. The paper demarcates two main “bundles” of networks: “vertical” networks — that is, networks that link rural spaces into the agro-food sector — and “horizontal” networks — that is, distributed network forms that link rural spaces into more general and non-agricultural processes of economic change. It is argued that rural development strategies must take heed of network forms in both domains and that rural policy should be recast in network terms.     

Advocating rurality? The repositioning of rural local government

Since 1979 the local state in Britain has experienced a period of considerable restructuring in which the power of elected local government has been severely diminished. As a new system of local governance, characterized by self-organising networks transcending the state, private and voluntary sectors, has emerged, so elected local government has had to re-imagine its role. This paper suggests that one strategy that has been adopted has been to re-position local councils as ‘pressure groups’, lobbying external actors on behalf of local interests. Furthermore, it is argued that in rural areas the restructuring of the local state has coincided with a wider social and economic restructuring and hence an intensified contesting of rurality. As such, it is argued that rural local government has become concerned not only with advocating local interests, but with advocating particular discourses of rurality. These assertions are discussed in the context of a case study concerning strategic planning for housing development in the district of Taunton Deane in Somerset.