The economy and the educational system in capitalistic societies

The purpose of this article is to analyse the relations between the educational system and economy in capitalist societies. The economy is conceived here in terms of its technical as well as its social relations. The analysis here is centered around the capitalist labour market rather than capitalist technical relations of production as is usual in the literature on the relations between the educational system and the economy. This article is a preliminary attempt to break out of both economistic and sociologistic conceptions which dominate the literature on education.     

Land reforms in Pakistan: A reconsideration

Abstract

Before the introduction of the high yielding varieties of food grain in the late 1960s the argument for land reform was a simple one. It was observed that small farms had a higher yield per acre than large farms, so it was argued that a re-distribution of owned land in favor of the smaller farmers would improve average yields in agriculture. Hence land reforms were considered advisable both on grounds that they would reduce the degree of inequality of rural incomes, as well as on grounds of efficiency. The efficiency argument for land reforms in Pakistan gathered momentum in the 1950s when agricultural stagnation began to fetter the growth of industry. Agriculture provided not only food grains for the rising urban population but also provided most of the foreign exchange with which industrial machinery and raw materials were imported. Accordingly, slow agricultural growth generated both a crisis in the balance of payments as well as food shortages in the urban sector. In such a situation even the technocrats who were merely interested in the growth of GNP joined the cry of the social reformers for a land reform. It began to be seen as a necessary instrument for accelerating agricultural growth and thereby releasing the constraint on industrial growth.     

Determination of methadone in urine using ion trap GC/MS in positive ion chemical ionization mode

Methadone is a potent analgesic and sedative. It is widely used in the treatment of heroin addiction and is often encountered in forensic specimens. In electron impact (EI) gas chromatography/mass spectrometry (GC/MS) mode, methadone produces predominantly a m/z 72 ion, which is not sufficiently characteristic for identification. Determination of the molecular ion, which can be achieved using chemical ionization (CI) provides diagnostic information and better identification of the drug. This paper describes the development of a positive ion CI GC/MS procedure, using a liquid reagent gas and ion trap instrumentation, for the determination of methadone and its metabolites in urine. CI generally produces a single molecular ion spectrum, but optimization of the reagent gas parameters increases the fragmentation of the molecule, allowing determination of ion ratios if required. The procedure is sensitive, diagnostic and is currently in routine use in our laboratory.     

Why should we care about competition?

Abstract

Most people believe that competitive institutions are morally acceptable, but that there are limits: a friendly competition is one thing; a life or death struggle is another. How should we think about the moral limits on competition? I argue that the limits stem from the value of human sociability, and in particular from the noninstrumental value of a form of social connectedness that I call ‘mutual affirmation.’ I contrast this idea with Rawls’s account of social union and stability. Finally, I show how these ideas provide the basis for a powerful argument in favour of social provisions for public goods: for example, a strong public health care system moderates the stakes in labour market competition, preventing the competition from descending into a life or death struggle.     

Religion and modernity: Gender and identity politics in Bangladesh

In Bangladesh as in other Muslim majority societies, Islamist forces have emphasized the importance of women adopting traditional religious practices, such as wearing “the veil”, as a cultural symbol and a weapon in the movement of Islamization against Western Modernization. On the question of modernity although some Islamic groups hold extreme attitudes of imagining it as ‘immoral’ and ‘dangerous’, there are other activists who negotiate to engage modernity by controlling its negative impacts through reinventing Islamic tradition. The discursive shift is mainly towards establishing modern civil society based, middle class led and urban organizations. In reaction to the image of commodification of the woman's body in Western modernity, they construct women wearing hijab in the public space as an image of “Modern Muslim Women”. This article explores how women negotiate modernist and Islamist discourses and thereby engage in the politics of everyday living. It argues that woman's agency moves beyond analysis of women as mere victims of ideological constructions.     

A property rights view of multi-unit franchising

This study develops a property rights explanation of the multi-unit (MU) ownership strategy of the franchise firm. According to the property rights theory, the allocation of residual rights of control (decision and ownership rights) in franchise firms depends on the contractibility of system-specific and local market assets (LMA). We develop and test the following hypotheses: Multi-unit franchising (MUF) is positively related to the franchisor’s intangible system-specific assets and negatively to the franchisee’s intangible LMA. In addition, we argue that impact of financial assets on the tendency toward MUF depends on the contractibility of LMA. Empirical results from the German franchise sector provide partial support of the hypotheses. Compared to the agency theory, which focuses on (complete) incentive contracts that specify residual income rights between the franchisor and franchisee, property rights theory focuses on incomplete contracts that allocate residual control rights between the franchisor and network partners. Furthermore, compared to the resource scarcity theory, property rights theory explains the impact of contractibility of resources/assets on the ownership strategy of the franchise firm.     

Tackling unemployment in China: state capacity and governance issues

Abstract

This paper considers China's state capacity and changing governance as revealed through its policies to tackle unemployment. Despite high levels of growth, economic restructuring has resulted in rising unemployment over the last decade. The Chinese state has been able to manage job losses from state enterprises, demonstrating some state capacity in relation to this sector and some persistent command economy governance mechanisms. However both design and implementation of policies to compensate and assist particular groups among the unemployed have been shaped by weak state capacity in several other areas. First, capacity to gather accurate employment data is limited, meaning local and central governments do not have a good understanding of the extent and nature of unemployment. Second, the sustainability of supposedly mandatory unemployment insurance schemes is threatened by poor capacity to enforce participation. Third, poor central state capacity to ensure local governments implement policies effectively leads to poor unemployment insurance fund capacity, resulting in provision for only a narrow segment of the unemployed and low quality employment services. Although the adoption of unemployment insurance (and its extension to employers and employees in the private sector), the introduction of a Labour Contract Law in 2007, and the delivery of employment services by private businesses indicate a shift towards the use of new governance mechanisms based on entitlement, contract and private sector delivery of public-sector goods, that shift is undermined by poor state capacity in relation to some of these new mechanisms.     

Cytochrome b based genetic differentiation of Indian wild pig (Sus scrofa cristatus) and domestic pig (Sus scrofa domestica) and its use in wildlife forensics

The Indian wild pig (Sus scrofa cristatus) is a protected species and listed in the Indian Wildlife (Protection) Act, 1972. The wild pig is often hunted illegally and sold in market as meat warranting punishment under law. To avoid confusion in identification of these two subspecies during wildlife forensic examinations, we describe genetic differentiation of Indian wild and domestic pigs using a molecular technique. Analysis of sequence generated from the partial fragment (421 bp) of mitochondrial DNA (mtDNA) cytochrome b (Cyt b) gene exhibited unambiguous (> 3%) genetic variation between Indian wild and domestic pigs. We observed nine forensically informative nucleotide sequence (FINS) variations between Indian wild and domestic pigs. The overall genetic variation described in this study is helpful in forensic identification of the biological samples of wild and domestic pigs. It also helped in differentiating the Indian wild pig from other wild pig races. This study indicates that domestic pigs in India are not descendent of the Indian wild pig, however; they are closer to the other wild pig races found in Asia and Europe.