The gender politics of economic competitiveness in Malaysia's transition to a knowledge economy

Abstract

Many academic commentators have pointed to how the widening and deepening of a neoliberal reform agenda in Southeast Asia has brought about the end of developmental forms of state governance and the emergence of less directly market interventionist states pursuing economic ‘competitiveness’. In this paper, I note how notions of competitiveness are increasingly fused with ideas regarding the contribution of gender equity and women's empowerment to national economic success. However, drawing upon a case study of Malaysia, this paper highlights how government policies stressing both the marketisation of social reproduction and the need to expand women's productive roles are constantly brought into tension with embedded social structures. Such an emphasis is essential to any understanding of the role of the Malaysian state in economic development – a role that has been fundamentally shaped by a localised politics of ethnicity. The paper draws upon examples from government policy-making that conceptualise women as key workers in the emerging knowledge-driven economy and as microentrepreneurs driving pro-poor economic growth and illustrates how such policies are brought into tension with traditionalist discourses concerning the appropriate role of women in society.     

Advancing Human Rights Policy: Does Grassroots Mobilization and Community Dispute Resolution Matter? Insights from Chiapas,Mexico

This research examines the impact of grassroots organizing at the community level in Chiapas, Mexico, to address problems associated with human rights advocacy and implementation. Traditionally, the nation‐state has had the primary responsibility to address issues pertaining to human rights violations and the enforcement of international human rights principles and treaties. Local political struggles and acts of resistance by disenfranchised groups in Mexico offer insight to understand the impact of indigenous and other social movements in furthering human rights. Indigenous populations in the state of Chiapas use local community dispute resolution to contest the inadequacy of the state in responding to the problems that give rise to poverty, lack of human dignity, educational access, racial and ethnic discrimination, lack of political participation in government and the right to equality in economic, social, and political sectors. Drawing from research based on participant observations in Chiapas, Mexico, there is some evidence to suggest that since the 1994 EZLN (Zapatista National Liberation Army) uprising several micro‐level political and social movements have contested the power of the state through symbolic and pragmatic organizing efforts. These groups include, but are not limited to, nongovernmental organizations (NGOs), women's groups, and indigenous groups. After the Zapatista uprising, these groups were instrumental in making claims against the state through numerous activities: protests to end the war, the development of NGOs to observe human rights violations, civilian‐based Zapatista support groups (base de apoyo), peace camps, and open dialogue with the EZLN. I argue that collective mobilization in local communities serves both symbolic and pragmatic efforts in helping disenfranchised groups empower themselves to address economic, social, and political inequality. Local‐level activism has fueled a sense of self‐empowerment to change state institutional responses and to involve sectors of civil society domestically and internationally to initiate a proper resolution of issues that are fundamentally related to human rights.     

Unintended consequences: social policy,state institutions and the ‘stalling’ of the Malaysian industrialization project

Abstract

This paper examines the relation of particular forms of social and labour market policy to economic development. Taking the history of Malaysian industrialization as its empirical case, the paper assesses the unintended consequences of redistribution policy, on the one hand, and migration policy, on the other, for the limited upgrading of the country's electronics industry. It argues that, while the former has been central to social harmony in Malaysia's multi-racial society, it has contributed to the underdevelopment of small and medium-sized firms capable of linking with the TNCs on the basis of knowledge-intensive and higher value-added operations. Migration policy, on the other hand, has allowed manufacturers to have continued access to supplies of low-cost, lower-skilled labour that have released the pressures that would otherwise have been there for technological and skill upgrading in the electronics industry. Only in Penang, where regional state institutions have intervened to encourage SME upgrading, has the national picture been moderated. Malaysia's industrialization project emerged at time when export competition in manufactured commodities was less intense than it is now. Largely as a result of federal government priorities and for other reasons explored in the paper, advantage was not taken of this ‘window of opportunity’. As a consequence, the country's industrialization project – exemplified by its electronics industry – is now ‘stalling’ in the sense that it remains locked into low- to medium-technology operations. With the rise of China as a manufacturing exporter, this is a dangerous situation for a country's principal industry to be in.     

How federalism influences welfare spending: Belgium federalism reform through the perspective of the synthetic control method

The question of whether and how federalism influences a country's welfare state has been a longstanding concern of political scientists. However, no agreement exists on exactly how, and under what conditions, federal structures impact the welfare state. This article examines this controversy. It concludes theoretically that the specific constellation of federal structures and distribution of powers need to be considered when theorising the effects of federalism on the welfare state. Using the case of Belgium and applying the synthetic control method, it is shown in the article that without the federalism reform of 1993, the country would have had further decreases in social spending rather than a consolidation of this spending in the years after 1993. In the case of Belgium, the combination of increased subnational spending autonomy in a still national financing system provided ideal conditions for a positive federalism effect on social spending to occur.     

‘Rehabilitating Charity’ in China: The Case of Project Hope and the Rise of Non-Profit Organizations

Beginning in the 1990s, the People's Republic of China has experienced explosive growth in the number of non-governmental organizations. This article examines one of the earliest and most influential Chinese NGOs, Project Hope, a charitable organization which solicits donations to help poor rural children stay in school. The success of Project Hope and the subsequent growth of the non-profit sector are surprising given that China arguably has no history of an organizational form like the Western donative-style charity. As such, this case offers a rare opportunity to examine the rise of a new organizational form. New institutionalist and social capital theoretical approaches will be used to analyse the social mechanisms underlying practice of donative-style charity. Chinese cultural practices of giving to the needy in the premodern era and under Mao Zedong's socialist state (1949–1978) will be explicated to reveal the resources and constraints emerging Chinese charities faced in the post-socialist era. This article focuses on one problem that China's first Western-style charities had to address: how to establish the practice of voluntary giving to non-governmental organizations. It examines two of Project Hope's strategies and their consequences: (1) blurring the distinction between charitable organizations and the state and (2) building personal relationships between donors and recipients.     

Overlapping publics and the negotiation of legitimacy in South African and Namibian sexual politics

ABSTRACT

This article explores how and why social movement organizations negotiate their presence in, and demands on, multiple public spheres. We analyse the strategies of two social movement organizations, Free Gender in Cape Town, South Africa, and Sister Namibia in Windhoek, Namibia. Free Gender elected to withdraw participation from a governmental task team convened to address the issue of homophobic violence, despite the opportunity this offered the organization to participate in national politics. Sister Namibia, by contrast, decided to maintain its public presence despite experiencing political homophobia from the ruling party, the South West African People’s Organisation. We contribute to the literature on public spheres and social movements by demonstrating the need to consider the overlapping nature of public spheres in South Africa and Namibia at the local, national, and transnational levels to account for activists’ strategic decisions.     

Revolution 2.0 in Egypt: Pushing for Change,Foreign Influences on a Popular Revolt

This article presents a case study of a movement for democratic change in Egypt. In particular, it reviews the uses of social media that helped to facilitate the revolution that led to the overthrow of Hosni Mubarak's regime in February 2011. It looks at the movement in Egypt and the uses of social media from the perspective of public diplomacy, particularly in the context of U.S. efforts to drive public opinion in the Middle East. It reviews how the groups and individuals considered instrumental in the events that led to Mubarak's resignation are connected to the actors in U.S. “democracy promotion.” The article further discusses how social media, by dint of its characteristics, conveniently lends itself to democracy promotion. It highlights the risks involved in an instrumental approach to democracy promotion that treats the tools of social media as means to effect immediate policy gains country by country.     

Neo-liberalism's New Gendered Market Citizens: The 'Civilizing' Dimension of Social Programmes in Chile

This article explores the reconfiguration of social citizenship, or 'market citizenship', underway in Chile, as one crucial dimension of the refashioning of state institutions along neo-liberal lines in Latin America. It focuses on the 'civilizing' dimension of social citizenship, as an instance of the state's involvement in the regulation of subordinate populations. Specifically, the article studies the case of new social policy aimed at poverty alleviation. Inspired by Michel Foucault's late work but moving beyond it, it examines institutional transformation as on-the-ground practices through which policies take effect and sees 'market citizenship' as emerging from the rearticulation of the efforts of myriad individuals located at different levels of government, 'civil society', and poor and working-class communities. In this process, state agents are translators on the one hand of official documents into instances of participatory learning and empowerment, and on the other of people's realities into instances of documentary categories of poverty. This cultural-political transformation of neo-liberal modernization in Chile and beyond is potentially radical, and we need to ask: to what extent will the new market terms of belonging in the national community, which increasingly permeate private and public actions and discourse, change the very material and cultural contexts in which people's lives and struggles are framed?     

Beijing and the Myanmar problem

Abstract

The re-emergence of China as a major economic and political power has drawn attention to the role it might play in solving regional problems. Prominent among many Asian issues on Beijing's agenda is its southwestern neighbour, Myanmar, and in particular the military machine that has long ruled the country with an iron fist. The junta in place today is both acknowledged as problematic by policymakers in Beijing, and seen by the wider world as a regional challenge on which China should take the lead. However, there is little agreement on ways forward. To determine how Beijing might handle the Myanmar problem, this article first examines the concept of intervention, reviewing the manifold modes found in the contemporary world and drawing up a typology. Then it surveys arguments about intervention, focusing on perspectives that are relevant in this context. Next it presents arguments about intervention in Myanmar, and follows up by looking in some detail at China's current low-level engagement. Finally it considers where Beijing might go from here in dealing with Myanmar. The argument pulled together in the conclusion is that while nobody has a full solution to the Myanmar problem, a case for enhancement of China's role can be grounded not only in its global obligations, but also in precepts found deep in its national tradition. It is here that efforts to boost Beijing's engagement should be directed.     

Conceptualizing economic security and governance: China confronts globalization

Abstract

With the expansion and deepening of globalization, as well as China's entry into the World Trade Organization, the nexus between economic growth and national security has gained prominence in China since the mid-1990s. How to ensure socio-economic security while maintaining its robust economic growth is now the most serious concern of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) and the Chinese government. This paper addresses three questions: first, it explores why and how the transformation of economic growth and national security as two separate logics to a single domain evolved conceptually over the past two decades in China; second, what kinds of insecurities are generated by China's robust economic growth coupled with the expansion and deepening of globalization, and in which way and to what extent do they challenge China's government; third, what kinds of mechanisms or policy instruments have been adopted by China's government to address emerging economic insecurities while maintaining robust economic growth. The paper concludes that in the case of China, globalization has posed new challenges to economic security, but given that economic insecurity has its particular salience in individual countries, national institutional adjustment or adaptation becomes increasingly important for each country to govern in the interests of economic security while maintaining economic growth.     

Is the state social or the computer inhuman? Claims for state support and citizenship in post-socialist Georgia

In the discussions of citizenship in post-socialist Georgia, the topic of social entitlements predominates. Soviet social citizenship, which granted the full range of social rights, significantly shaped the people's current expectations of social rights in Georgia. In order to address the external and internal pressure for poverty alleviation, the Georgian government started reforming the social support system of the country. The cornerstone of Georgia's current social policy is a new social assistance programme, the main principle of which is to provide social benefits to the poorest families as identified by an evaluation system. This paper explores the enactment of the ‘targeted social assistance’ (TSA) programme in a village in north-western Georgia. By participating in the TSA programme, Georgian citizens exercise social citizenship as a practice of bargaining for universal social rights that at present are not achievable for all as the state provides social security only to extremely needy families. The category of social citizenship described by T.H. Marshall helps us to understand the claims of Georgian citizens for state support. The discrepancy between social security and social citizenship causes people to misunderstand the goals of the TSA programme and this ultimately leads to dissatisfaction among Georgia's citizenry.     

The impact of the Second World War on postwar social spending

The huge quantitative literature on postwar social spending almost entirely neglected war as a possible explanatory factor of social spending dynamics. Given the mass carnage and the enormous social needs caused by the Second World War, this is quite astonishing. This article examines for the first time, whether, and in what ways, the Second World War affected cross‐national differences in public social spending of 18 Western welfare states over the course of the Golden Age. Using panel regressions, it is found that the war strongly affected social spending until the late 1960s. The evidence demonstrates that the Second World War is not simply a temporal watershed structuring different phases of welfare state development, but rather a crucial factor for understanding cross‐national differences in welfare efforts and social expenditure dynamics in the postwar period.     

The critique of language and its economy

Abstract

This paper draws upon and develops Paul Rabinow's concept of biosociality to analyse how the field of gambling research, the facts about gambling addiction and the politics of gambling regulation are in the process of transforming one another as the US gambling industry has begun to provide large amounts of funding for scientists and clinicians working on gambling problems. In particular, the paper focuses on the political economy of research that suggests that the negative consequences associated with gambling are not just social problems, but neurobiological ones. The paper introduces the notion of ‘biopolitical capital’ in order to describe how the gambling industry invests in particular kinds of research which are more likely to yield results that can be mobilized to support particular kinds of approaches to dealing with the social and personal problems associated with gambling.     

Hard times for citizenship: Women's movements in Chile and Mexico

This article comparatively analyses the cases of Mexico and Chile to understand how women's movements contest the meaning of citizenship in various national contexts. We also assess the consequences that different movement strategies, such as ‘autonomy’ versus ‘double militancy’, have for movements' citizenship goals. To explain the different outcomes in the two cases, we focus on the nature of the democratic transition, the internal coherence of women's movements, the nature of alliances with other civil society actors, the ideological orientation of the newly democratized state, the form of women's agency within the state, and the nature of the neoliberal economic reforms. We argue that a serious problem for women in both Chile and Mexico is the fact that governments themselves are deploying the concept of citizenship as a way to legitimate their social and economic policies. While women's movements seek to broaden the meaning of citizenship to include social rights, neoliberal governments employ the rhetoric of citizen activism to encourage society to provide its own solutions to economic hardship and poverty. While this trend is occurring in both Chile and Mexico, there are some features of the political opportunity structure in Chile that enable organized women to contest the state's more narrow vision of democratic citizenship. In Mexico, on the other hand, the neoliberal economic discourse of the current government is matched by a profoundly conservative ideological rhetoric, thereby reducing the political opportunities for women to forward a gender equality agenda.     

How domestic contexts shape international private governance: The case of the European Accord and American Alliance in Bangladesh

The international nature of supply chains has led to the rise of private authority in regulating the environmental and social impacts of production, which companies frequently address through corporate social responsibility (CSR) in the form of private governance (PG). Despite its claim to establish “global” rules, PG usually has national origins, and multiple efforts to address the same issue from different national perspectives frequently coexist. Numerous studies have explored the impact of national business systems on companies' domestic CSR practices, yet little is known about what factors shape CSR practices like PG internationally. Therefore, this study seeks to understand how differing domestic contexts shape approaches to CSR in the form of PG in host countries. I explore this empirically through the comparative case study of competing PG initiatives in the post-Rana Plaza Bangladesh garment industry, uniquely conceived to govern companies' practices rather than certify products. It combines empirical findings with the comparative CSR literature to hypothesize about ideal types of PG organizing in US and European contexts. It extends the analysis to also account for other influential factors, such as stakeholder pressure, thus demonstrating how institutional and agentic factors amalgamate to shape firms' choices. By explicating linkages between international PG and its domestic context, as well as between the comparative CSR and PG literature studies, this study extends our understanding of how and why international PG practices and preferences vary for firms originating from different environments.     

Conceptual art and language: introducing a logico-semantic analysis

This article suggests a logico-semantic analysis of Keith Arnatt's Trouser-Word Piece and Victor Burgin's Room, based on Ludwig Wittgenstein's examination of the logical relationship between propositions and the world and M.A.K. Halliday's discussion of social semiotics. It reconsiders the use of language in conceptual art practices from a wider sociological and interdisciplinary perspective, and aims to show how their juxtaposition of different voices within a public context negotiates the space of art as a social space. Focusing on how artworks communicate in context, the following discussion presents the historical as well as the discursive environment in which Arnatt's and Burgin's works are situated and received; moreover, it examines how these works critically manipulate viewing and reading regimes, frameworks of evaluation and patterns of communication in order to create a situation of particular tension between perceptual and conceptual apprehension. In wider terms, this article demonstrates how critically engaged artworks manipulate the conditions of communication by utilizing loan rhetoric (a rhetoric external to the art context) and displace associate meaning in order to challenge the institutionalization of art's production and function. In doing so, they critically stage and contest the power structures that support corresponding hierarchies across producer, audience and mediator, and bring art's social modality into focus. Investigating the manipulation of language in conceptual art, this article proposes a method of analysis that becomes fundamental in studying contemporary multi-modal art production, and in understanding the dialectics of art'But the difficulty is to remove the prejudices communication and critical potential.     

Ambiguous revival: a study of some ‘new civic movements’ in Japan

Japanese democracy and the traditional systems and values of governing Japan are in crisis. Nevertheless, this article argues that this context has also witnessed the consolidation of new democratic practices and new civic movements which prove the vitality of the Japanese citizenry as a political actor. This article examines the reinvigoration of citizens' movements and the impact upon them of the images and concepts of 'alternative' groups and self-managed coops, and various problems associated with them. The third and fourth part shows how alternative ideology also permeates traditional movements in Osaka and Hokkaido, but also how these civic groups have been exploited for inner power struggles by elites in Fukuoka and Kobe. Finally, the last part of the article examines how alternative groups have found their way into the political platform of national political parties, and ponders the future of new civic movements in Japan.     

Feeding finance: a critical account of the shifting relationships between finance,food and farming

Abstract

Whether in the form of commodity index funds, farmland investment funds or commodities trading by agri-food companies, there is evidence of an increasingly close relationship between finance, food and agriculture. While these developments have received some critical attention of late, existing accounts of the ‘financialization of food’ are limited to the extent that they view finance as an external force with emphasis placed on the unnaturalness of its relationship with agriculture and its distortive effects on agricultural markets. Recognizing that finance and agriculture have a long history, this paper offers a more nuanced account of the place of financialization in the agricultural sector. Specifically, it examines how agriculture's emergence as an investment opportunity has reconfigured the terrain of agricultural interests and logics while creating new knowledge demands and agricultural visibilities. These dynamics are explored through a case study of the role of finance and processes of financialization in the recent demise of the Canadian Wheat Board as a state marketing agency. Through this discussion, the paper offers valuable insights into not only the reworking of agriculture as a particular type of financial space, but also the nature and limits of financialization itself as a way of engaging with the world beyond urban financial centres.     

The five capabilities of socially responsible companies

This paper develops and tests a model that integrates processes of public affairs management with stakeholder engagement and dialogue, business ethics and social reporting to explain social responsibility capabilities in organisations. The model, called Corporate Social Responsibility Management Capacity, describes social responsiveness as arising from a firm's social responsibility orientation and its public relations orientation. The paper shows how the model can be used by managers to measure, manage and improve their company's ability to be socially responsible. Copyright © 2004 Henry Stewart Publications     

Political change,urban services and social movements: Political participation and grass-roots politics in Metro Manila

Rapid urbanization in the Third World has become one of the most pressing developmental problems of today. Metro Manila, capital of the Philippines, for instance, grew from 300,000 inhabitants in 1903 to more than 8 million in 1980. The authorities were unable to cope with the gigantic socio-economic problems of such an explosive growth. As a consequence, the urban poor gradually developed their own strategies for improving their adverse living conditions. Social movements emerged, in order to press the government for a more responsive policy towards the needs of the poor. Although the activities of these social movements culminated in the late 60s and early 70s, the imposition of martial law on the Philippines in 1972 had highly negative repercussions on citizen'S participation and community organizing efforts. Since authoritarian regimes have been established in the majority of Third World countries, the article examines the following questions by elaborating on the Philippine experience: how urban social movements are able to exist under authoritarian regimes, whether they are able to contribute to an upgrading of urban services and to what extent they are able to be starting points for a democratization from the grass roots’ level. The findings are that, without a minimum of constitutional liberties and pluralism, urban social movements remain rather short-lived phenomena and that the improvement of services through urban social movements is bound to fail under a political climate of severe repression. Moreover, the suppression of reformist and participatory movements fuels political polarization.