The Reversal of Fortune Thesis Reconsidered

Acemoglu, Johnson, and Robinson have claimed that the world income distribution underwent a ‘Reversal of Fortune’ from 1500 to the present, whereby formerly rich countries in what is now the developing world became poor while poor ones grew rich. We question their analysis with regard to both of their proxies for pre-modern income, namely urbanisation and population density. More specifically, an alternative measure of urbanisation with more observations generates a positive (but not significant) correlation between pre-modern and contemporary income, while a better measure of population density on arable land no longer produces a robust relationship.     

Participation Denied: the Global Environment Facility,its universal blueprint,and the Mexico–Mesoamerican Biological Corridor in Chiapas

This article examines the implementation of the Global Environment Facility's (GEF) Mexico–Mesoamerican Biological Corridor in Chiapas, Mexico, in order to explore how stakeholder participation is increasingly employed as a tool of conservation's neoliberalisation. This requires an understanding of participation via the corridor as productive, in that it facilitates the production of new, albeit fictitious, kinds of biodiversity in the commodity form, and of new modes of social reproduction increasingly mediated by market relations, as access to common property resources and the necessities of life are progressively restricted to one's ability to pay. In this way the corridor produces the conditions under which a ‘market citizenship’ can flourish, with participation re-imagined as a means through which this end is achieved.     

Occupational stress among professional local government managers: introspections and a prognosis

The area of stress research is broad and not well understood. Little is known about the ways in which workers cope with job related stress .This article explores this element of stress related behavior for local government managers. Among the most important findings are that local managers perceive their stress levels to be equal to or greater than many other professions often associated with high demand. It appears that local managers see other professional managers as facing increased levels of stress over the past decade. Managers also see their stress levels as equal to or greater than that of previous occupations or occupations they might wish to hold in th future. While age and length of experience appear to have little association with percieved levels of stress, increased education does appear to reduce such perceptions.     

“We weren't the sort that wanted intimacy every night”: Birth control and abstinence in England,c.1930–60

This article presents an exploration of qualitative evidence on the relationship between birth control and abstinence from an oral history project, which interviewed middle and working-class English men and women, who had married between the late 1920s and the early 1950s. Among the working classes the assumption that men were responsible for birth control choices and the disadvantages that contraceptive methods of all types posed, combined with the fear of pregnancy, acted as a disincentive to have sex and resulted in forms of partial abstinence. Among the middle classes, women had much more access to birth control information and as a consequence a greater range of methods was used, including more female methods. However, the reluctance of couples to discuss sexual matters, and some continued preference for male methods meant that while condoms were the most regularly used middle-class male method, both withdrawal and abstinence were also in evidence. Moreover, although partners were more likely to discuss birth control at the start of their marriages, they were less likely to agree that contraception was a male responsibility and there was greater potential for conflict over contraceptive methods, not infrequently resulting in abstinence. The evidence suggests that sexual and contraceptive practices in marriages in England at the end of the secular fertility decline do not present a picture which straightforwardly correlates with the assumptions represented by the popular thesis that this period of increased fertility control was closely associated with the rise of companionate marriage.     

Anatomy of a massacre: the roots of heightened labour militancy in South Africa’s platinum belt

Abstract

On 16 August 2012, a protracted strike at a platinum mine in Marikana, South Africa, culminated in the killing of 34 mineworkers by local security forces. Some viewed this tragedy through the lens of South Africa’s apartheid past, recalling such events as the Sharpeville massacre of 1960. Others saw this episode as the latest cycle of angry protest and violent repression stemming from heightened inequality and poverty under global capitalism. This paper explores a set of institutional factors that occupy the middle ground between these two narratives about the massacre at Marikana. At the national level, despite progressive labour regulations and a long-standing alliance between the leading trade union (COSATU) and the ruling African National Congress, institutional channels for social dialogue and collective bargaining were less effective than expected given COSATU's inability to criticize policies focused on business-led growth at the expense of the social protection of workers. At the sectoral level, gigantic platinum companies faced with falling commodity prices sought to limit losses by planning retrenchments and limiting wage increases, triggering repeated and sometimes violent wildcat strikes, especially when workers’ grievances were set aside by local representatives of the COSATU-affiliated National Union of Mineworkers. The argument may be seen as a labour-focused variant of Huntington’s ‘gap hypothesis’: workers’ militancy has grown as existing institutional frameworks for ensuring labour peace have failed to effectively channel the frustrations of workers most in need of social protection.     

The unintended consequences of campaigns designed to challenge stigmatising representations of mental illness in the media

The media is widely recognised as contributing to stigma associated with mental illness by portraying it in connection with violence and/or undesirable traits. In response, campaigns directed at policing language use, imagery and story content in the media have been implemented. But these interventions can themselves perpetuate stereotypes and assumptions that ultimately run counter to the original intent of challenging stigma. By way of illustration this paper analyses an Australian campaign that I argue invites people to see stigma in innocuous uses of ordinary language and imagery, effectively associating mental illness with that which it seeks to challenge. The grounds for its criticism and praise of stories about mental illness are also often tenuous and based on a limited approach to determining the impact of story content. The pitfalls of this type of campaign can be avoided by taking heed of the shifts in thinking advocated by postpsychiatry and the deconstructionist strategies employed by activists in the mental health field.     

Collection of Delinquent Fines: An Adaptive Randomized Trial to Assess the Effectiveness of Alternative Text Messages

The collection of delinquent fines is a vast and ongoing public administration challenge. In the United Kingdom, unpaid fines amount to more than 500 million pounds. Managing noncompliant accounts and dispatching bailiffs to collect fines in person is costly. This paper reports the results of a large randomized controlled trial, led by the UK Cabinet Office's Behavioural Insights Team, which was designed to test the effectiveness of mobile phone text messaging as an alternative method of inducing people to pay their outstanding fines. An adaptive trial design was used, first to test the effectiveness of text messaging against no treatment and then to test the relative effectiveness of alternative messages. Text messages, which are relatively inexpensive, are found to significantly increase average payment of delinquent fines. We found text messages to be especially effective when they address the recipient by name.     

Why social partnership matters: Irish policies for work – life balance

Since 1987 the Republic of Ireland has experimented with new forms of policy consultation and formulation that have been credited with turning the country into the ‘Celtic Tiger’ economy of the 1990s. One of the most important of these new forms is a series of social partnership agreements that have become increasingly broad in scope over the past decade and a half. This article illustrates how the process of social partnership pact-making is able to assist in steering a new policy direction, and investigates what makes these social partnership agreements able to be reproduced over time, by focusing on the development of policies for reconciling family and working life in Ireland. This is an important and pressing issue for many post-industrial economies, and, without claiming too much for the partnership process since problems of reconciling family and working life are far from ‘solved’ in Ireland, social partnership has helped turn this from being a marginal to a key issue in Irish politics.