The Impacts of Supermarket Procurement on Farming Communities in India: Evidence from Rural Karnataka

The rapid expansion of supermarket retailing, with its impact on farmer communities, represents a contentious part of India's recent economic development. This article reports on three districts of Karnataka, where a survey of 78 farmers supplying fruits and vegetables to Reliance Fresh, a leading supermarket chain, reveals low levels of vertical co‐ordination, a lack of written contracts, and highly competitive environments, with the quality parameters used by supermarkets specifying only a limited set of conditions. These findings suggest that supermarket‐led restructuring in India has not yet reached a stable institutional situation.     

Sen and Aristotle on Wellbeing

A significant body of research and analysis concerning wellbeing has emerged across a number of social research disciplines, yet the concept of wellbeing does not admit of any unified meaning. Philosophical accounts of wellbeing are traditionally divided into three categories: hedonistic, desire‐satisfaction and objective list theories, reflecting longstanding doctrinal divisions in normative ethics. Rejecting the foundational monism associated with these approaches, Amartya Sen has proposed a pluralist ‘capabilities’ approach to personal wellbeing based on freedom of choice and the Aristotelian notion of a ‘function’. Recent Australian wellbeing research also shows promising signs of moving beyond reductive income‐based metrics towards plural indicators of poverty and social disadvantage. This paper reprises Aristotle's distinctive account of perfect wellbeing (eudaimonia) in the Nicomachean Ethics and investigates Sen's approach in its light, suggesting that future Australian research in the spirit of Sen's pluralism may benefit from Aristotelian insights into the ‘thickness’ of freedom implicated in personal wellbeing.     

Youth homelessness and self identity: a view from Canada

ABSTRACT

This paper is based on the analysis of data collected from the National Canadian Homeless Youth Survey and addresses the question: why do some youth who received support from social service agencies that cater to the needs of homeless youth self-identify as being homeless while others do not? According to self-report survey data obtained from 1103 young people from over 50 youth homeless service centres from across Canada, findings show that youth who self-identified as being homeless shared several backgrounds and current situational characteristics not common among youth in the sample who did not consider themselves to be homeless. The findings illustrate the importance of past trauma and the intensity of day to day hardship in self-identifying as a homeless young person.     

基于会计信息的企业可持续增长速度的边界

企业的目标是价值最大化,而实现目标的前提是企业必需保持一种合理、持续的增长速度.企业可持续增长速度可帮助企业动态调整企业价值最大化.本文根据范霍恩和希金斯的静态可持续增长理论和迈克尔·詹森的有效现金流量假说,设置了三个可持续增长速度,构建了基于会计信息的企业可持续增长速度的边界,并用案例予以了佐证.     

The Constitution of Impairment: modernity and the aesthetic of oppression

Impairment has been set aside in debates about disability dominated by the social model. This paper seeks to go beyond the Cartesianism which produces this neglect. It suggests that radical disability studies can prosper from a critique of modernity which entails a shift from its singular epistemological origins in the critique of capitalism. The argument challenges the contention that the oppression of disabled people is reducible to social restrictions which are the outcome of a set of structural determinations. It suggests that the oppression of disabled people is also umbilically linked to the visual constitution of impairment in the scopic regime of modernity. The vision of modernity is impaired by the assumption that to see is to know, that is, by its ocularcentrism. In deconstructing the visual culture of modernity, it is possible to demonstrate that the non-disabled gaze is a product of this specific way of seeing which actually constructs the world that it claims to discover. Using the work of Sartre and, to a lesser extent, Foucault, this paper argues that impairment is constructed-not discovered-in the non-disabled gaze. The invalidation and disfigurement of impaired bodies is, therefore, not simply an economic and cultural response to them, but also arises in the mode of perception which visualises and articulates them as strangers.     

Community Practice Researchers as Reflective Learners

The article outlines a process for community practice researchas a reflective process. Through the interplay of key conceptsassociated with subjective research–personal engagement,experiential affinity and parallel struggles–and transcribedinterviews with community practitioners, the authors elaboratethe subjective community researcher posture. Subjectivity contributesto the researchers’ position as learners within the researchprocess. The research team plays a key role in reflecting onthe effects of the research on participants.     

Worker Exposure Standard for Phosphine Gas

The 1998 U.S. Environmental Protection Agency Office of Pesticide Programs (OPP) re-registration eligibility decision (RED) for phosphine fumigants has generated much interest in defining safe levels of exposure for workers and worker bystanders. This report summarizes the pertinent literature on phosphine toxicity, including animal inhalation studies and human epidemiology studies, and also describes a margin-of-exposure (MOE) analysis based on available worker exposure data. In addition, a safe occupational exposure limit is estimated using typical OPP assumptions, after determination of appropriate uncertainty factors, based on quality of data in the principal study and pharmacokinetic considerations. While a conservative 8-hour time-weighted average (TWA) of 0.1 ppm was calculated, the overall weight of evidence, from a risk-management perspective, supports a conclusion that an occupational TWA of 0.3 ppm provides adequate health protection. In addition, a 15-minute short-term exposure limit (STEL) of 3 ppm was estimated. Finally, in contrast to the MOE analysis described in the OPP's phosphine RED, the MOE analysis described herein does not indicate that fumigation workers are currently being exposed to unacceptable levels of phosphine. Collectively, these findings support the occupational exposure limits of 0.3 ppm (8-hour TWA) and 1 ppm (STEL) established in the updated applicator's manuals for phosphine-generating products, which recently received approval from OPP.     

Ageism and Age Categorization

Two approaches to defining ageism are discussed. The significance of chronological age, both for bureaucratic procedures and for research, is considered. This demonstrates how birthdays are associated not just with changing status regarding employment and retirement, but also cultural transformations. The relevance of research based on age categories is critically discussed. It is argued that, while such research provides essential evidence of ageism, it inevitably tends to homogenize, particularly when open-ended "oldest" categories are used. The article concludes with a discussion of four alternative frameworks.