THE INFORMATION TECHNOLOGY REVOLUTION AND THE UNSECURED CREDIT MARKET

The information technology (IT) revolution coincided with the transformation of the U.S. unsecured credit market. Households' borrowing increased rapidly and there was an even faster increase in bankruptcy filings. A risk of default model with asymmetric information and costly screening is introduced to study this period. When information costs are high, the design of contracts under private information prevents some households from borrowing with a risk of default. As information costs drop, households borrow more and bankruptcy filings increase. Quantitative exercises suggest that the IT revolution may have played an important role in the transformation of the unsecured credit market. (JEL E43, E44, G33)     

Neoliberal discourses and ethnonormative regime in post-recognition Peru: redefining hierarchies and identities

ABSTRACT

This article analyses the impact of ‘recognition’ of cultural and ethnic diversity in Peru. It proposes that the rise of a new global ‘ethnonormativity’ – a regime to define and administrate cultural and identity differences, to establish boundaries between those who ‘are’ ethnic and those who are not, and to set rights and duties derived from identities – has had meagre effects in Peru. While the past decades have witnessed the emergence of Latin American political actors who regard indigenousness as their basic political identity, there has been no ‘emergence of indigenous movements’ in Peru. The discourses that highlight the importance of diversity have gained terrain – unsettling, to a certain extent, the narratives of assimilation through ‘development’ and mestizaje – and the Peruvian state has officially embraced ‘recognition’, including it in its official rhetoric and creating institutions to design policies to guarantee the rights of the indigenous and Afroperuvian ‘peoples’ (itself a label part of the language of multiculturalism). The state has also crafted a definition of ‘indigenous peoples’ and introduced ethnic variables in censuses and official statistics, thus being active in the production and regulation of subjects. Some civil society actors have also incorporated ethnic labels into their rhetoric to adapt to the global turn to identity politics. Peru remains, however, a fertile terrain for neoliberal policies and discourses of a different kind. A discourse that exalts ‘emprendedurismo’ (entrepreneurship) and states that success depends entirely on personal effort has become a new common sense, obscuring the structural inequality that has historically affected indigenous and Afroperuvian people. Extractivism continues to damage the environment and the rights of indigenous people, while the expansion of agribusiness in the coastal valleys of Peru keeps people – regardless of their ‘ethnic’ self-identification – in poverty and without basic labour and social rights. The article suggests that the ambiguities of the ethnonormative regime in Peru may serve as a diversion from structural issues in a context of neoliberalism and may re-elaborate racial hierarchies, racism and the narratives of mestizaje it allegedly opposes.     

Participatory Art as a Social Practice of Commoning to Reinvent the Right to the City

The right to the city is a concept that helps rethink spatial–social dynamics, which has recently reinvigorated the field of organization studies. Following Lefebvre and considering the failure of both the market and the state, other scholars pinpoint the need to rethink social–spatial and geographical–historical relations. They do so by theorizing the city as a host for urban commons. Collective and non-commodified, these spatial–social experiences need to be constantly reproduced and preserved through commoning practices in the struggle against spatial injustice. A case study shows that a civil society organization (CSO) uses participatory art to (re)produce urban commons at the level of a local community and to redress partially spatial injustice. We theorize participatory art-making as a social practice of commoning, i.e., a process of organizing for the commons—collective art-based activities to serve a community—and of the common—to (re)produce a community while performing them. Such commoning practices are not only about sharing urban resources but also about using and experiencing differently urban spaces. By making participatory artworks in public spaces and co-designing street furniture with residents of poor areas, TDA helps to better cope with the tensions between residents and local authorities and between amateurs and professional artists. By negotiating the long-term implementation of these creative artworks in the public space with public authorities, TDA has fostered the empowerment of inhabitants as they have experienced citizens’ reappropriation of some public spaces in Marseille.     

青年社工工作模式探究

本研究从实践研究和理论探索两条路径出发,探究社区青少年社会支持工作模式。研究通过访谈法、问卷法、资料分析法研究了上海市社区青少年心理健康服务的工作现状,验证了从社会支持出发,开展社会工作的意义,并结合理论分析和研究结果,提出社会支持工作模式的建议。     

族群政治的制度逻辑——兼评菲利普·罗德的文章《苏维埃联邦政治与族群动员》

引论 前苏联解体是20世纪世界历史上最重大的事件之一.对这一事件之原因和性质的解释众说纷纭,而在西方主流理论中,归纳起来无外乎这样三种解释:市场经济对计划经济的胜利;民主体制对集权体制的胜利;民族主义的胜利. 这三种解释,其意识形态上的偏颇暂且不论,单就理论本身而言,都有不足之处.     

对外开放度与经济增长的实证研究——基于河北省数据的协整分析

本文运用协整检验、误差修正模型和格兰杰检验对河北省对外开放程度与经济增长之间的关系进行了实证研究。结果表明,长期来看,河北省经济增长与对外开放度存在长期稳定的协整关系,短期内对外开放对河北省经济增长的影响较小。对外开放和实际GDP增长之间具有互相的因果关系,但对外开放对经济增长的影响大于经济增长对对外开放的影响。     

周恩来民族地区民生思想研究

共和国第一任总理周恩来鞠躬尽瘁为人民,用一生践行"真正为人民谋福利"的信念。他为改善民族地区人民生活殚精竭虑,不仅提出了许多真知灼见,而且亲自领导了民族地区民生建设。本文从政治、经济、文化等几个方面,概括周恩来的民族地区民生思想。     

“载道”的乌鸟——辞赋中的乌意象论略

由于地区和时代风俗的不同,人们对乌鸦的喜恶或有差异。但乌鸟意象作为中国文学中较为复杂的意象之一,却一直为文人墨客所喜爱。此意象不仅涵义丰富,而且在辞赋中又和其在诗词中有显著的区别。唐前,辞赋中的乌鸟是作者借以表达"出"、"处"生存观念的寄托,乌意象亦随辞赋作者表情达意的需要"出""处"儒道两家,其中《神乌傅》正反映了作者在"出"、"处"间的徘徊和抉择。有唐一代,乌意象的灵异祥瑞成为辞赋书写的重要内容。宋以降,辞赋中的乌鸟渐渐摆脱了其作为祥瑞之兆的使命,而被赋予了更多的儒家道德品性。此时的乌意象集忠、孝、仁等儒家大加称扬的道德于一身,堪称"奉行"儒家伦理道德的典范。而明代《孝乌赋》,凸显乌鸟意象的"孝"德,是彰扬乌意象孝行的典型作品。     

Crying for Food: The Mexican Myths of ‘La Llorona’ and ‘The Hungry Woman’ in Cherríe L. Moraga

The Mexican legend of ‘La Llorona’ (‘The Weeping Woman’), who drowned her children out of revenge for being abandoned by her lover, and the Aztec creation myth of ‘The Hungry Woman’ — crying constantly for food, with mouths all around her body — have inspired Chicana writers in the symbolic representation of their own yearning, be it sexual, identity-building, or anti-patriarchal. This essay seeks to lay the mythical groundwork within this topic, as well as to illustrate with some particular examples the different reappropriations of these myths in Cherríe L. Moraga, mainly in her play The Hungry Woman: A Mexican Medea (2001). With a view to opening up a past ‘that can provide a kind of road map to our future’ (: ix), these examples of transgressive women will be deprived of the feminine colonial passivity imbued by the dominant male discourse, and analysed as a complex, active, polyvalent mythological female corpus that integrates both life and death, womb and grave. This hybrid approach is inherent to the Aztec mythology on which Moraga relies in order to transcend Manichaeistic resolutions and probe the social, political, and gender reasons leading a hungry mother to commit infanticide.     

高职院校优势专业及课程一体化培育

市场决定专业建设的方向,专业建设决定课程建设的内容,课程建设为市场服务。以建筑工程技术专业及课程一体化建设为例,结合地方建设市场的实际情况和需求,在培养方案、机制、校企合作、团队、课程、实训、保障措施等方面进行系列教学改革,培育优势专业,真正实现企业、学校、学生三赢的工学结合人才培养目标。