Intellectualizing about the moon-ghetto metaphor: A study of the current malaise of rational analysis of social problems

The title refers to the widely held view that advanced western societies (particularly the United States) have been vastly more successful in meeting certain kinds of objectives, than others, and that rectifying this imbalance is a high priority social objective. The paper is concerned with three intellectual traditions that have purported to explain the reasons for the problem, and to provide guidance for helping with the lot of the ghetto. One of these traditions views the problems in terms of inadequate policy machinery, and the resolution in terms of better analysis feeding into the policymaking process. A second views the problem in terms of organizational structure, and searches for a solution in terms of institutional reform or redesign. Still a third tradition sees the problem as stemming from the past allocation of scientific and technical talent, and proposes a solution in terms of a significant reallocation of research and development activity. It is apparent that these traditions of analysis, neither separately nor together, have been very successful in resolving social problems. The purpose of the essay is, through examination of the intellectual traditions and their interaction with the policymaking process, to try to illuminate the nature of their weaknesses and, if possible, to see what lessons can be learned regarding how to make analysis more useful, and map out some potentially fruitful directions for intellectual exploration.The author is indebted to Graham Allison, Harvey Brooks, John Patrick Crecine, Lee Friedman, A. O. Hirschman, C. E. Lindblom, Keith Pavitt, Kenneth Warner, and Douglas Yates for helpful criticism and encouragement. The debt I owe to these intellectual colleagues goes far beyond their reactions to this paper. Many of my better ideas have been lifted from them. I could list here a number of other important influences but in a paper of this sort the author is faced with a Hobson's choice regarding footnote acknowledgements. On the one hand he could footnote all of the obvious sources and influences on particular points, in which case the footnotes would take up more space than the text. Or he can be parsimonious and be accused of stealing, without acknowledgement, other people's ideas. With apologies, and misgivings, I have opted for the second strategy both in this opening footnote and throughout the paper.     

WTO 2.0: Governance of 21st century trade

The cross-border flows of goods, investment, services, know-how and people associated with international production networks–call it ‘supply-chain trade’ for short–has transformed the world. The WTO has not kept pace. This paper argues that adapting world trade governance to the realities of supply-chain trade will require a new organization–a WTO 2.0 as it were. Reasoning on the optimal nature of the new organization is based on the nature of supply-chain trade, the nature of the disciplines that underpin it, and the nature of the gains from cooperation.     

Calavita's Invitation to Law & Society: Introduction to the Symposium

This essay introduces a Law & Social Inquiry symposium on Kitty Calavita's book Invitation to Law & Society: An Introduction to the Study of Real Law (2010) that features comments on the law and society enterprise by Jeannine Bell, Austin Sarat, and Christopher Tomlins. It briefly discusses the commentators' views of this enterprise as revealed in their essays and challenges points made by each of them. It goes on to discuss the book's suitability as a student‐oriented introduction to the field of law and society, filling a gap the commentators left open.     

The green and the cool: Hybridity,relationality and ethnographic-biographical responses to intervention

Policy debates on conflict research, which are mostly directly used to develop practices of soft intervention (including conflict resolution, peacebuilding and statebuilding), emanate from common epistemic and ontological frameworks. Most have been produced and perpetuated by key institutions in the global North through their encounter with historical direct and structural violence, both North and South. Power has followed Enlightenment knowledge, along with its various biases and exclusions. Its progressive normative, political, economic and social assumptions about a ‘good society’ and an ‘international community’ have been fed through social science into the building of international institutions, IFIs and the donor system. Using a method called ethnographic biography (in which biography is broadly defined to include the bibliography produced by the subject, as well as interviews and discussions), this article illustrates how peace thinking is mutually constructed as both positive and hybrid, confirming earlier critical work. However, the research methods deployed to engage with the contextual production of knowledge by local scholar-practitioners are sorely underdeveloped. This is illustrated through an analysis of the work of ‘local’ conflict scholars on their own peacebuilding and statebuilding processes in Cyprus, Kosovo and Timor Leste.     

Underdevelopment,Urban Squatting,and The State Bureaucracy: A Case Study of Tanzania

This article investigates a part of the “story of the story” of the 1924 revolution, the first popular anticolonial uprising in Sudan to be framed by a nationalist ideology. Considering that the process that turns a past event into history is neither linear nor predictable, I draw on Trouillot's “catalogue of silences” to compare two sets of sources that correspond to two moments in the making of 1924 as history: first, the judicial records produced by the Sudan government during 1924, and second the Ewart Report, written in 1925, to “seal” the revolution. A comparison of these two sources reveals radical discrepancies in the narrative, as well as the silences imposed on and well-concealed fine-tunings of the various voices of the revolution. Of these two sets of sources, it is the Ewart Report that provides the most influential interpretation of the 1924 revolution.     

Decentralizing supervision to attain higher productivity: the case of the ecuadorian health system

There is growing interest in developed and developing countries about how to best administer public programs in order to maximize the return on invested resources. This paper examines the extent to which decentralized supervision can help improve health worker productivity. Data on health workers in Ecuador are analyzed. The results suggest that local (or decentralized) supervision is conducive to higher productivity and more hours worked per day by Ecuador's health promoters. The implications for higher health status, and for improving health care in other developing countries are discussed.