State,institution building,and emerging stock markets in China

This article studies the institutional creation of Chinese stock exchanges and their regulations. It argues that institution creation was largely a function of market forces, local initiatives, path-dependence, and a learning curve. What characterized this institutional transformation was a process in which the central government was first led by various market forces fueled by local political and economic initiatives, then was forced to react by legislating various administrative ordinances to suppress the chaotic and lawless market, and finally resorted to creating a centralized regulatory institution to rein in the fledging stock market.     

Horror and hope: (re)presenting militarised children in global North-South relations

This article examines the (re)presentations of militarised children in contemporary global politics. In particular, it looks at the iconic image of the 21st century's child soldier, the subject of which is constructed as a menacing yet pitiable product of the so-called new wars of the global South. Yet this familiar image is a small, one-dimensional and selective (re)presentation of the issues facing children who are associated with conflict and militarism. In this sense it is a problematic focal point for analysing the insecurity and human rights of children in and around conflict. Instead, this article argues that the image of the child soldier asserts an important influence in its effect upon global North-South relations. It demonstrates how the image of the child soldier can assist in constructing knowledge about the global South, and the global North's obligations to it, either through programmes of humanitarianism, or through war.     

Capacity building and the (re)production of intellectual property rights

There is little settled or uncontested about the trips agreement and the global governance of intellectual property rights (iprs). This suggests that the provision of training and technical assistance to build capacity is itself part of the reproduction of the dominant (trips constituted) view of iprs and is therefore a political project rather than merely technical provision. On one side many developing countries' elites and governments are keen to join the international trading community and see the need to adopt the increasingly universalised rules of the system as part of this process. On the other hand, there are vocal constituencies less supportive of an unqualified adoption of trips‐related standards of legal protection for iprs. Given the continuing importance of legal structures to underpin and constitute markets (and this is most especially the case in markets for knowledge and information), the processes by which the trips solution to the question of knowledge ownership is being globalised through technical training needs to be understood and analysed.     

Consent behind the counter: aspiring citizens and labour control under precarious (im)migration schemes

‘Managed migration’ schemes promote mobility of labour across international borders, diversifying worksites and introducing new systems of enacting labour consent. This article examines how Canadian franchisees are recruiting Filipino migrants to staff their restaurants, facilitating employers’ access to new, flexible subjects. These workers covet their employment as pathways to Canadian citizenship. Some are unaware, however, that they are recruited under a precarious immigration scheme, one that neither directly denies nor facilitates access to legal incorporation. Instead, migrants are (transnationally) encouraged to compete in the worksite for employer-nominated citizenship, a highly productive system for engendering consent. This draws attention to new challenges ‘managed migration’ schemes pose for resisting downward pressures on work and employment conditions.     

Dominant discourses, debates and silences on child labour in Africa and Asia

Drawing on the relevant literature, this article explores key debates and controversies on child labour in the context of Africa and Asia. It first identifies and analyses three dominant discourses on child labour: 1) the work-free childhoods perspective; 2) the socio-cultural perspective; and 3) the political economy perspective. Against the backdrop of these discourses, the article goes on to critically examine aspects of child labour that are underrepresented in the literature and in international policy circles. It concludes by highlighting the importance of grounding children's gendered work within the complex material social practices of interconnected histories and geographies in which their livelihoods unfold.     

Corruption in social relations: Bribe-taking,corruptibility, and corruption risks

This inquiry aims to investigate how the relational dynamics are imprinted on two critical dimensions of bribe-taking: corruptibility and corruption risks. Two treatments were randomly administered to 1400 subjects: single versus repeated interactions and strangers versus weak ties. The findings suggest that repeated interactions induce bigger bribe sizes, but also increase risks from whistleblowing and internal auditing. Weak ties mitigate bribe-taking willingness. Nevertheless, when coupled with repeated interactions, weak ties suppress the risks from whistleblowing, testifying the bifurcated effects. The tensions between corruptibility and corruption risks suggest that bribe-taking decisions are fraught with internal tensions, with the overall effects likely being a priori determined only in specific contexts. Such tensions are more intensified among true bureaucrats as they tend to claim bigger bribes and report more risks from internal auditing.     

Organising around women and labour in China: uneasy shadows,uncomfortable alliances

This article explores the changes in organisation around labour and women's issues in China. It is argued that whilst the two fields of organisation share common features, they have also evolved in distinct ways, reflecting the relative salience of gender and labour issues and the approach of non-governmental women's and labour groups towards the Party-state. This focus on women's and labour groups provides more general insights into the emergence of civil societies, public spheres and corporatism in China. In particular, the contradictory implications of the divergent evolutionary paths of labour and women's groups underline the need to think in terms of increasingly complex and fluid processes of interest intermediation.     

Race relations,nationalism and the humanitarian Rohingya crisis in contemporary Myanmar

ABSTRACT

The recent ethnic tensions in Myanmar especially in the Rakhine state has once again placed the country onto the centre stage of global media attention. The aim of this paper is to look at race relations in contemporary Myanmar with a special focus on the Rohingya community. The paper argues that problematic race relations in the country today should be analysed within a certain historical context and should be seen as part of a historical continuum. This paper places a lot of importance on this historical continuum. In this connection, the British colonial policies of divide and conquer, politicians and their obsession with Buddhism and trying to make it the state religion shortly after independence in 1948, and the xenophobic policies followed by the military junta after 1962 deserve special mention. The paper further argues that the current state of affairs and escalation in violence has happened recently because of the convergence of the activities and ideologies of certain political groups like the military junta, the National League for Democracy, the Arakan League for Democracy, and the role played by certain Buddhist extremist groups like the MaBaTha in Burmese politics. To ease the existing tension in the Rakhine, the central government would need to take a more federally minded approach and introduce meaningful democracy and development in the frontier parts of the country where there is a strong ethnic minority presence.     

Technical Efficiency,Allocative Efficiency and Profitability in Hungarian Small and Medium-Sized Enterprises: A Model with Frontier Functions

By applying a simple model of frontier production functions, this article shows that Hungarian small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) produce far below their feasible level, given their input endowment. The SMEs' under-production is rooted in the allocative inefficiency of small and medium-sized firms: they use labour in excess while they lack a sufficient level of capital assets. As a consequence of large inefficiencies, Hungarian SMEs improve profitability by scaling down production rather than by expansion.     

History,memory and nation building in the post-Soviet colonial space

This is an article on Bolshevik nationalities policy and ethnic engineering, asking who, in fact, decided which populations belonged together as ethnic groups (narodnost') and thus had the right of national self-determination, and how the level of autonomy was determined for each ethnic unit. Scholars have dealt with Russian and Soviet nationalities issues for decades already, but they have turned their attention mainly to the larger nationalities (at the level of SSR, and to a lesser degree the levels of ASSR and autonomous oblast). I argue that the lower levels of national territorial autonomy in the Soviet Union (national okrug, raion, volost', and selsovet) are worthy of greater academic attention, at least from the ethnological point of view. Having this kind of low-level territorial autonomy has often been a question of to be or not to be for the small ethnic groups concerned, and hence the subject is connected with the question of preservation of cultural and linguistic diversity in Russia.