Institutional Change and Embeddedness: Caste and Gender in Financial Cooperatives in Rural India

ABSTRACT

This article examines the interaction between institutional change and caste and gender embeddedness. It develops a framework for understanding how this interaction takes place. The article presents data on the results of an effort by a non-profit development organization, the Cooperative Development Foundation (CDF), to promote women's cooperatives, grounded in the ideas of mutual self-help and equitable access to services, in rural Andhra Pradesh in India. Using a simple theoretical framework that highlights the multi-level nature of institutional change, and the potential for interactions with embeddedness at one level to affect interactions at other levels, the article presents data showing how particular institutional rules of the cooperatives interacted with caste and gender to shape the overall governance and service delivery practices of these new organizations. In particular, after failed attempts to integrate existing, male-dominated cooperatives with women, the CDF created gender-segregated cooperatives. Data from the women's cooperatives show the creation of mixed-caste organizations, with boards of directors that were fairly representative of their membership, but with presidents that were more likely to be from the higher-castes. Access to financial services shows little caste bias, though lending is through caste-based peer groups. The data suggest that the interaction of embeddedness and institutional change is a process contingent on: a) the strategy taken by the development organization towards embeddedness; b) the nature of the institutional change itself relative to the existing social structure; and c) the effects the interactions between institutional change and embeddedness at different levels have on each other.     

People With HIV Now Live a Better Life

As a Un Volunteer,working with UnaiDS China,i have the opportunity to get involved in a wide range of areas.From working with community-based organizations,set up by people living with hiV to interacting with the mediaon topics related to hiV/aiDS to sup-porting campaigns to fight HIV/AIDS-related discrimination in the workplace,i get to do it all.     

Socialism,Economic Development and Planning in Mali, 1960–1968

This article looks at practices of pilferage and bribery among African migrant dock workers in Durban in the 1950s. Many of Durban's dockers regularly engaged in small-scale theft, usually food for personal consumption, but sometimes they also got their hands on bigger and more expensive items or sold the pilfered goods. Many also relied on their social networks to find jobs and did not shy away from bribing izinduna to make sure that they were hired on ships that contained the right goods. Such crimes, which were often not recognised as such by the workers, have often been seen as forms of primitive and individual resistance to proletarianisation. This article, however, argues that these were not just reactive and opportunistic acts, but part of a conscious strategy to combine dock labour with a small business, which allowed several workers to withdraw from the wage labour market altogether.     

A. Reviews: general

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Computerized craniofacial reconstruction using CT-derived implicit surface representations

In forensic craniofacial reconstruction, facial features of an unknown individual are estimated from an unidentified skull, based on a mixture of experimentally obtained guidelines on the relationship between soft tissues and the underlying skeleton. In this paper, we investigate the possibility of using full 3D cross-sectional CT images for establishing a reference database of densely sampled distances between the external surfaces of the skull and head for automated craniofacial reconstruction. For each CT image in the reference database, the hard tissue (skull) and soft tissue (head) volumes are automatically segmented and transformed into signed distance transform (sDT) images, representing for each voxel in this image the Euclidean distance to the closest point on the skull and head surface, respectively, distances being positive (negative) for voxels inside (outside) the skull/head. Multiple craniofacial reconstructions are obtained by first warping each reference skull sDT maps to the target skull sDT using a B-spline based free form deformation algorithm and subsequently applying these warps to the reference head sDT maps. A single reconstruction of the target head surface is defined as the zero level set of the arithmetic average of all warped reference head sDT maps, but other reconstructions are possible, biasing the result to subject specific attributes (age, BMI, gender). Both qualitative and quantitative tests (measuring the similarity between the 3D reconstructed and corresponding original head surface) on a small (N = 20) database are presented to proof the validity of the concept.     

The human ear: its role in forensic practice

The human ear has much to offer investigators in relation to many areas of forensic practice including forensic pathology, anthropology, identification and facial reconstruction and yet its full potential is often overlooked. This review paper explores current knowledge related to the human ear drawing attention to those situations where the ear could play a valuable role in a forensic investigation.     

Negotiation: The Chinese Concept

It is no understatement to say that negotiation activity has skyrocketed in China in recent years; however, these negotiations are frequently unsatisfactory. Part of the reason for this lack of success is that Chinese people have a conception of negotiation that is fundamentally different from that of people in the West. Based on extensive interviews with Chinese and non-Chinese negotiators over a period of five years, the author explains the Chinese approach by using two metaphors: mobile warfare and the joint quest. Understanding this approach has significant implications for negotiation practice.     

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Cyprus from 1960 to EU Accession: The Case for Non-Territorial Autonomy

The political history of Cyprus illustrates the difficulty of instituting political power-sharing and cultural autonomy in states where multiple ethnic groups are present, particularly where they are territorially intermixed. Contemporary political realities relating to the accession of the island to the European Union demonstrate that old and new approaches to these issues are still in need of evaluation. This article seeks to explore an "old" method for reconciling the needs of Cyprus' two ethnic groups —"non-territorial autonomy" as embodied in the island's failed 1960 Constitution. It also examines the potential relevance of this concept for a fully European Cyprus, in which the right to free movement of Greeks and Turks throughout the island may recreate an environment of intermixed heterogeneity, and thus stimulate the need for appropriate political institutions.     

FEDERAL LEGISLATION AND INTEREST FORMATION: THE CASE OF IMPUTED INTEREST GROUPS

This paper examines an impact of federal legislation on the formation of political interests; it identifies and defines a phenomenon we have labeled imputed interest groups . The interest groups can be seen when federal legislation makes benefit packages that serve as incentives to interest formation and ties interest groups to the maintenance of these benefit packages. Identification of imputed interest groups necessitates a re-examination of subgovernments, service deliverer-recipient relationships, and policymaking in a federal system.