Political origin and persistence of industrial policy in Africa

ABSTRACT

The literature on industrial policy in Africa has generally explained its political origins in terms of ruling elites’ distribution of benefits to their supporters. However, in competitive political contexts in which policies are deeply political and designed to satisfy clients, such as policies that support party donors, the problem of policy discontinuity is bound to arise because a change in ruling party is bound to alter the direction of distributional policies. The current paper uses Nigeria’s backward integration policy (BIP), an industrial policy on cement production, to sharpen the analytical distinction between the origins and persistence. Although the ruling elites’ political quest for survival explains the origin of Nigeria’s industrial policy on cement (ruling elites were in search of re-election funds and teamed up with domestic capitalists for donations, who in turn influenced the political elites to create policies in their area of business), it does not explain the continuation.     

Latino Faces,Corporate Ties: Latino Advocacy Organizations and Their Board Membership

Although they have increased exponentially since the 1960s, social scientists know little about ethnic advocacy organizations. These nonprofits are important bridges between underresourced communities and mainstream funding organizations and their directors are established ethnic leaders. Sociologists study interlocking directorates—or shared board membership—to understand how organizations fit together within broader social networks. Network concepts, particularly the theory of institutional isomorphism, suggest that organizations are likely to be similar to the extent they are connected and operate within a common organizational field. We apply this logic to Latino advocacy organizations to examine the underlying source of cohesion across this ethnic field. We ask whether the organizations are tied by interlocking directorates of ethnic elites who sit on their boards of directors or if board members' common affiliation with other elite institutions creates the structural conditions that facilitate potential ideological or behavioral similarity. A social network analysis of five prominent Latino advocacy organizations reveals support for both hypotheses: Latino board members are both embedded in ethnic‐based networks and entrenched within elite organizational webs. This suggests that ethnic elites who sit on the boards of Latino advocacy organizations are also corporate elites, selected for the social capital they bring to these nonprofits.     

Why the paradigm of work–family conflict is no longer sustainable: Towards more empowering social imaginaries to understand women's identities

The paradigm of work–family conflict is challenged by the fluid realities of the actual world. Through an innovative phenomenographic study of women's understanding of their lives, we show that the social imaginary of work–family conflict assumes that vulnerability is a constitutive reality for women. Consequently, with respect to the perspectives through which women are invited to make sense of their lives, the metaphor of conflict enforces a worldview based on traditional gender roles. Organizational policies that rely heavily on a social imaginary of work–family conflict may prove ineffective. On the one hand, they ignore the diversity of morphologies and vocabularies used by women today to understand themselves in relation to their family and workplace. On the other, work–family conflict arises as a product of policy measures and bureaucratic practices rather than as an experiential reality. Policy statements on work–family conflict have a performative character: they communicate a message about women's social status and identity. Therefore, effective organizational policies should integrate vocabularies and assumptions that make women aware of themselves in a confident manner by relying on social imaginaries that encourage agency and empowered participation in the world.     

Negotiating Symbolic Boundaries in Conflict Resolution: Religion and Ethnicity in Turkey’s Kurdish Conflict

This article is an inquiry into understanding why supranational religious identity often fails to act as a conflict resolution tool in religiously homogenous ethnic conflicts. Narrowing its focus down to the role of religious elites as potential peacemakers in such conflict zones, it proposes the divergence in their conceptualizations of religious and ethnic identities as an explanatory factor. Building on 62 in-depth interviews conducted in Turkey with Sunni Muslim Kurdish and Turkish religious elites, it identifies a three-fold typology of religious and ethnic identities, as conceptualized by these elites: 1) religio-ethnic; 2) ethno-religious; 3) religious. After exemplifying each category with interview data it demonstrates the role these distinctions play in preventing the successful implementation of “Muslim fraternity” as a solution to the Kurdish conflict in Turkey. With these findings, the article contributes to both the literature on religion in conflict resolution and that on identity formation and boundary making. While it invites the former to turn its gaze from macro-level structural factors to meso- and micro-level cultural factors in analyzing religious elite involvement in conflict resolution, it invites the latter to stop employing “ethnicity” as an all-encompassing term (that covers a vast array of identity markers including religion) and focus, instead, on the gradations between religion and ethnicity as sources of identity.     

Xinjiang under China: reflections on the multiple dimensions of the 2009 Urumqi uprising

In 2009, a demonstration in Urumqi deteriorated into one of the bloodiest riots in contemporary Chinese history. Some scholars and media groups have responded to the event by focusing public attention on the bottom-up, ethnic, and social aspects of Xinjiang’s conflict phenomenon. This article raises questions and concerns about framing the 2009 event from an ethnic and social standpoint. The authors combine conflict studies with a longue durée historical analysis to argue that multiple dimensions and the intersections of these dimensions constitute the 2009 Urumqi uprising. Present conflict is placed against a backdrop of unequal Chinese state policies with Xinjiang. The authors then forward a Uyghur perspective underpinned by peace and conflict studies concepts. The conclusion recommends conflict prevention strategies by urging the Government of the People’s Republic of China to take ownership of the consequences of its policies and the broken contracts with Uyghur minorities in Xinjiang.     

“The Politics of the HealthCare Reform Debate: Public Support of Including Undocumented Immigrants and Their Children in Reform Efforts in the U.S.”

Although U.S. immigration and health care policies appear to be highly correlated, scholarship has yet to gauge the public's views toward providing undocumented immigrants with health coverage at the state level. We analyze support for including undocumented immigrants in health care reform in New Mexico. Utilizing an original public opinion survey of New Mexico adults, we find that individuals are more supportive of the state providing health care to the children of undocumented immigrant than to their parents. Multivariate logistic regression analyses suggest that factors such as liberal ideology and perceptions of commonalities with Latinos increase support levels. Despite a lack of support among a majority of respondents, the influence of perceived commonalities with immigrants suggests that reform advocates and political elites who mobilize along ethnic or human solidarity may be successful in creating conditions for the inclusion of undocumented immigrants in the public provision of health care at the state level.     

Political Economy of Standing against a Stand-By

What explains the actual and rhetorical defections of political elites in developing countries from the IMF programs even at times of severe economic difficulties? Scholars have focused on “domestic audience costs” of participating in IMF programs. This paper, on the other hand, suggests that as commitments to IMF programs require governments to make changes generating institutional, social and political consequences, governments choose to delay an agreement with the Fund, whenever the program is likely to antagonize key business groups that support the government. In the light of the Malaysian and the recent Turkish experiences, the paper will demonstrate that defection from an IMF program is likely to occur when the new Stand-By Agreement can jeopardize particular business interests backing the ruling political elites either through institutional reforms or economic policies.     

Ethnic conflict without ethnic groups: a study in pure sociology1

Despite growing awareness of the limitations of group‐level analyses in ethnic studies, research on ethnic conflict has paid virtually no systematic attention to variation at the individual or micro level. Addressing that gap, the present paper draws upon data from interviews conducted with members of two broadly‐defined categories recently arrived in the Republic of Ireland, Muslims and Nigerians. Results indicate that while members of both immigrant categories experience a good deal of ethnic conflict or hostility, such conflict is rarely collective and invariably varies across individuals. The research data are consistent with Donald Black's theory of moralism. Black's theory, based on his theoretical system known as pure sociology, predicts that ethnic hostility increases with the social inferiority and cultural distance of the immigrant, and that higher status immigrants are more assertive in responding to hostility, though they experience less of it (the status paradox).     

Synthesising Gellner,Smith, and Barth: building a preliminary analytical framework for exploring the relationships between ethnic groups,nations, and nationalism

This review article synthesises Gellner's, Smith's, and Barth's ideas about ethnic groups and nations. It redefines the concepts of the ethnic group, nation, and nationalism. An ethnic group can be defined as a group of people who are self-differentiated from other groups. A nation can be defined as an ethnic group or groups politically mobilised by elite-made nationalism. Furthermore, nationalism can be defined as an ideology which demands that an ethnic group or groups should have their own state. In effect, a conceptual framework is formulated, although how useful the framework can be is subject to further empirical research.     

Vertical Mosaic among the Elites: The New Imagery Revisited*

La parution de Vertical Mosaic (1965) par J. Porter, Canadian Corporate Elite (1975) par W, Clement et State Elite (1980) par D. Olsen a provoqué dans les milieux universitaires un vif débat sur la surreprésentation des ethnies britanniques et la sous-représentation des ethnies française et “autres” au sein des élites canadiennes. Cependant, dans une série d'articles récemment parus, R. Ogmundson et J. McLaughlin ont mis en doute la thèse très répandue selon laquelle il existe dans la société canadienne un lien étroit entre l'origine ethnique et 1'appartenance à une élite. L'auteur de cet article examine les données avancées par Ogmundson et McLaughlin (1992) et démontre, en faisant une corrélation avec la composition ethnique de la population canadienne, que leur nouvelle interpretation peut induire en erreur. L'analyse fait valoir en effet une predominance stable des ethnies britanniques de 1935 à 1987 et ce, pour chaque catégorie des élites. Elle met aussi en évidence le fait que, conformément aux théses de Porter, Clement et Olsen, les ethnies française et “autres” ont augmenté leur représentation au sein des elites, mais n'ont pas atteint un niveau de representation proportionnel à leur nombre. The over-representation of British and the under-representation of French and “other” ethnic groups amongst the Canadian elites has been a part of the Canadian academic consciousness since the publication of Porter's Vertical Mosaic (1965), Clement's Canadian Corporate Elite (1975) and Olsen's State Elite (1980). Recently, a series of articles by Ogmundson and Ogmundson/McLaughlin has raised doubts about the vertical ethnic distribution of power among elites, suggesting that conventional wisdom should be abandoned. This paper uses the data provided by Ogmundson and McLaughlin (1992), standardizes them to the ethnic composition of the Canadian population, and shows that the new imagery provided by these authors is misleading. The analysis demonstrates a stable pattern of British dominance from 1935 to 1987 for each category of elites. It also reveals that, consistent with Porter, Clement and Olsen, the French and “other” ethnic groups have improved their participation at the elite levels but remain under-represented in relation to their populations.     

How Watershed Immigration Policies Affect American Public Opinion Over a Lifetime

Important political events are known to influence political socialization and development (Green, Palmquist, and Schickler 2002 ). It is also possible that such events impact political socialization within particular age cohorts, and also across important social groups who may be impacted differently by landmark events. This paper examines whether landmark immigration events can leave a permanent mark on an individual's views toward immigrants and immigration, and whether that impact varies across different ethnic/racial groups in the United States Specifically, we examine the cohort of individuals who were in their formative years during the passage of major US immigration bills that were proposed or enacted from 1965 to 2010. Altogether, we focus on four pieces of landmark immigration legislation. The findings reveal variations on the effect of these events depending on the group in question; a relationship also emerges between these landmark legislative events and attitudes on immigration policies. The analysis contributes to an ongoing debate regarding the ways in which political elites influence attitudes, and we discuss how the findings may apply to other contexts outside the US.     

Elite positionings towards Hindi: Language policies,political stances and language competence in India1

In India, Hindi is imagined and institutionalized as the national language which weds together India's pluralistic population under the banner of a shared Indian identity. Approaching language competence as embedded in and performed through language practices and ideologies, I explore how a New Delhi elite community positions themselves towards Hindi vis‐à‐vis national language policies and political movements. Contrasting with traditional unified elite portrayals, e.g. ‘elite closure’ ( Myers‐Scotton 1990 ), India has multiple sociolinguistically discordant elite groups, and these liberal elites ideologically construct their Hindi (in)competency in an alternative framework attending to the history (and failure) of Hindi‐based nationalism, their disalignment with modern right‐wing movements, and their continued affiliation with English. This perspective of some elites as negotiating and disagreeing with contemporary political movements and language policy legislature illuminates language competencies as socially constructed and locally grounded, and challenges past interpretations of postcolonial elites as unified actors controlling the dominant linguistic marketplace.     

Birth,blood and belonging: identity claims in post‐devolution Scotland1

Scotland is often seen as a good example of a civic/territorial rather than an ethnic/cultural form of nationalism. From the 1970s the campaign for a Scottish parliament stressed an inclusive, residence based, civic sense of being Scottish, and more recently, Scotland's political elites have seen the new parliament as an endorsement of territorial belonging. How valid are these assumptions? To what extent is political ideology at odds with people's sense of their national identity? Using a qualitative approach, we explore different identity claims currently being made in post‐devolution Scotland – those based on blood, birth and belonging. We argue that these are better conceptual tools for the purpose of unravelling the complexities of identity politics in this context than the contrast between civic and ethnic. Our data come from the Scottish part of a study in England and Scotland, and focus on three sets of respondents: English migrants to Scotland making blood or birth claims to Englishness and/or Britishness; English migrants making belonging claims to Scottishness; and Scottish nationals making claims for themselves as well as assessing migrants’ claims. We also explore the significance of constitutional change in the context of respondents’ identity negotiations, and examine whether it has affected their understandings of Scottishness.     

“Such Trivial Matters:” How staff account for restrictions of residents' influence in nursing homes

National policies emphasize older people's right to autonomy, yet nursing home residents often have restricted opportunities to make decisions about everyday matters. We use qualitative interview data to analyze staff members' explanations of actions that conflict with both social norms and national policies. Two types of problematic actions are discussed: restrictions of elderly residents' influence in decision making and neglect of residents' complaints. While staff members describe residents' influence as desirable, they simultaneously formulate accounts that justify their inability to live up to this ideal. Further, we demonstrate how certain complaints are “made trivial” when they are described and treated in specific ways by the staff. We argue that the accounts offered by staff members draw on an implicit folk logic, a logic in which residents are allowed to exercise influence only as long as it does not conflict with the efficient running of the institution as a whole.     

Of Enlightenment and Alaska Early Moderns

This article examines transformations of status-capital in the modern history of the Alaska Native Alutiiq. I redevelop Pierre Bourdieu's forms of capital and habitus to analyze how Alutiiq elites stay on course during massive changes in their social structure. By drawing attention to citizenship statuses of the nineteenth century Russian and American colonial periods, I explore how local structural inequalities emerge in Alaska, yet with leaders of the same Alaska Native kin groups moving into the new privileged positions as Russian Imperial citizen, then later as American citizen. The study identifies citizenship as a key technology of group identification in Alaska and, in particular, how civilizing processes associated with citizenship create marked objective differences among the Alutiiq. Alaska Native society's articulation with the Russian and, later, American cultural-political orders creates new kinds of local structural inequalities. By possessing the requisite cultural capital to comprehend structural shifts in politics and the economy, Alaska Native elites strategically fit into new legal and ideological regimes of belonging. What develops is an example of the durability of an Alaska Native ruling elite by means of the transformation of prestige.     

Nation/Representation: Ethnic Classification and Mapping Nationhood in Contemporary Laos

In this article, I analyse ethnic classifications in contemporary Laos, starting with a brief review of previous policies. I first look at the ideologies that have influenced the Lao ethnic classification, namely those of the former Soviet Union, China and Vietnam. Through an analysis of the construction of the latest official census (August 2000), I suggest a close relationship between ethnic categorisation and the government's nationalist discourse, still strongly influenced by guidelines on the concept of the nation disseminated by Kaysone Phomvihane--the first President of the Lao PDR, now deceased but celebrated at present in Laos as the inspirational figure of the regime. My intention is thus to demonstrate how one technology of power in particular--the Lao population census based on ethnic criteria--attempts to map the nation's 'invisible' ethnicity through a dual process, namely the objectification of the Other ethnic groups' arbitrarily defined cultural features on the one hand, and the erasure of the dominant ethnic group's ethnicity (the ethnicity of the ethnic Lao) on the other. But this technology of power is limited, as the names and the lists of ethnic groups have remained subject to alteration every few years. Twenty years after Kaysone Phomvihane urged for a change in ethnic terminology and classification, the regime has yet to legitimise definitively the total number of ethnic groups in the Lao PDR.     

Politics of quantifying people and 2017’s census of Pakistan

Pakistan is a postcolonial multilingual, multicultural, and multireligious state. Different cultural collectivities struggle for the preservation of their social identity and procurement of their fair share in the economic and political resources of the state. Numbers provide these ethnic groups the knowledge about their own strength relative to other ethnic groups and accordingly to make demands. In Pakistan, a decennial is conducted to know the exact number and nature of its demography and accordingly make policies. Pakistan since 1947 till date has conducted six censuses in total and all are mired in controversy concerning the counting of competing ethnicities. This article using case study method and taking 2017's census as a case investigates two fundamental questions: why does the state of Pakistan keep an uncertainty around the numbers, and why do competing ethnic groups never trust the process of counting numbers and call it a manipulated process?     

We Did Not Realize about the Gender Issues. So,We Thought It Was a Good Idea

This article explores the link between nationalism, as expressed by the Burman state and ethnic and student opposition movements, and the emergence of a multiethnic women's movement engaged in resistance activities. In focusing on women's involvement in oppositional nation-making projects, this article aims to broaden our understanding of gender and conflict by highlighting women's agency in war. Drawing on interviews carried out with founding members of the women's movement, non-state armed groups and others active in civil society, the article investigates how a gendered political consciousness arose out of dissatisfaction with women's secondary position in armed opposition groups, leading to women forming a movement, not in opposition to conflict per se but in opposition to the rejection of their militarism, in the process redefining notions of political involvement and agency. By invoking solidarity based on a gendered positioning, rather than on an ethnic identity, the women's movement resisted the dominant nation-making projects, and created a nationalism inclusive of multiethnic differences. Burmese women's multiple wartime roles thus serve to upset supposed dichotomies between militancy and peace and victim and combatant, in the process redefining the relationship between gender, nationalism and militancy.     

Uncrossed Asianisms: How Singaporeans and Japanese sojourners in Singapore are not “Asian”

This paper questions to what extent the category “Asia” is effective as a cultural or ethnic identifier in late modernity. It elucidates the category's plurality and individual customization, as well as the limitations of Asian solidarity, by analyzing the narratives of two groups in Singapore: Chinese Singaporeans and Japanese sojourners. The Singaporean government's national-identity building owes much to Asianist discourses. For Chinese Singaporeans, however, Asia is a void concept; they tend to deny their “Asianness” while emphasizing the hybridity of their identification. For Japanese sojourners, conversely, Singapore awakens their Asian identification and solidarity, albeit temporarily. This paper argues that the foremost concern of people in both groups is not their affiliation with an ethnic group, a state, or “Asia,” but how to navigate their individual lives; moreover, their acceptance of Asianness depends on whether they find the category meaningful in specific situations in the course of their lives.     

The hotnot syndrome: Myth‐making in South African school textbooks

Cultural myths are important for the maintenance of political control in a hierarchial multi‐ethnic society. History is often manipulated by the ruling elite at the expense of other segments of the society. South Africa is no exception. The maintenance of these myths is supported by the educational system from a very young age. Disenfranchised people are usually at the bottom of the social ladder and have so little input into the myth‐making process that they reject their aboriginal heritage. The study offered here of South African history textbooks written from the beginning of the First World War to the 1980's shows that they are a reflection of the controlling elite's perception of history which is not consistent with current archaeological and anthropological studies by reputable scholars. The exposure of these myths now permits an acceptance by the descendants of the aboriginal inhabitants of the Cape of their indigenous cultural heritage.