Toward a Grammar of Collaboration

Inspired by Susan Leigh Star’s work, we propose a conceptual grammar for analyzing and comparing culturally and historically different kinds of collaboration. Drawing on cultural-historical activity theory and Bakhtin’s theorizing, the grammar is tested and concretized with the help of the macroscale case of different types of social movements and the microscale case of different types of collaboration in home care encounters. There is no direct mapping across these scales, but the conceptual lens seems to work at both. This is seen as a first step toward a grammar of collaboration that allows some continuity of movement across the levels.     

Editorial

Ohne Zusammenfassung

---

Editorial

     

White man’s bedtime stories

Textual productions telling the encounters, perceptions, experiences in the field of international development practice can be defined as “developmental contact literature”; they co-shape the narrative of “development” as a hegemonic relationship between the global North and the global South. The article presents and discusses intertwinements between strategies of gendering, racializing, and modernizing in three selected text types: auto/biographical tales by technical assistants and development experts about the contact zone “development”; didactic case studies in training or teaching manuals for technical co-operation and development aid, with a focus on women and gender mainstreaming; and eventually in fiction, in literary texts both of the popular genre (Henning Mankell) and of so-called postcolonial fiction (Nuruddin Farah).     

Continuous training in Germany

Using data from the German Socio Economic Panel, I analyze the incidence, financing, and returns to workplace training in Germany for the years 1986 to 1989. Much of this training seems general, and is provided to workers by their employer at no direct cost. While workers typically report larger productivty gains from the training during work hours, such training has lower returns than training undertaken during leisure time. Workers with higher earnings growth seem more likely to participate in training. I deal with this selection problem by estimating models that allow for inidividual level heterogeneity in earnings growth rates. Received: 24 November 1997/Accepted: 27 March 2000     

Editorial

Ohne Zusammenfassung

---

Editorial

     

Vorwort

Ohne Zusammenfassung