Gender Equality as Smart Economics? A critique of the 2012 World Development Report

Business now plays an increasingly prominent role in development. While the implicit links between private actors and international development institutions have been widely debated, the explicit role of financial corporations in shaping official development policy has been less well documented. We employ a feminist Marxian analysis to examine the material and discursive landscape of the 2012 World Development Report: Gender Equality and Development. Its exclusive focus on gender equality as ‘smart economics’, and the central role accorded to leading financial corporations like Goldman Sachs in the formulation of the key World Bank recommendations enable us to explore the changing landscape of the neoliberal corporatisation of development. We argue, first, that the apolitical and ahistorical representation of gender and gender equality in the wdr serves to normalise spaces of informality and insecurity, thereby expunging neoliberal-led capitalist relations of exploitation and domination, which characterise the social context in which many women in the global South live. Second, the wdr represents the interest of corporations in transforming the formerly excluded segments of the South (women) into consumers and entrepreneurs. The wdr thus represents an attempt by the World Bank and its ‘partners’ to deepen and consolidate the fundamental values and tenets of capitalist interests.     

German reunification

The Unification Process in Germany. From Dictatorship to Democracy. By Gert‐Joachim Glaessner. London: Pinter, 1992. Pp.viii + 248, index. £37.50. ISBN 1–85567–015–1.

German Unification. Process and Outcomes. Edited by M. Donald Hancock and Helga A. Walsh. Boulder, San Francisco, Oxford: Westview Press, 1994. Pp.x + 393, biblio, index. £11.95 (paperback). ISBN 0–8133–1965‐X.

Die Gestaltung der Deutschen Einheit. Edited by Eckhard Jesse and Armin Mitter. Bonn: Bouvier Verlag, 1992. Pp.447, chronology, biblio. DM 30. ISBN 3–416–02364–1.

United Germany and the New Europe. Edited by Heinz D. Hurz. Aldershot: Edward Elgar, 1993. Pp.xviii + 333, index. £49.95. ISBN 1–85278–584–5.

German Reunification. A Reference Guide and Commentary By Jonathan Osmond et al. Harlow: Longman, 1992. Pp.xiii + 311, 3 maps, chronologies, biblio, index. £55. ISBN 0–582–09650–2.

The Diplomacy of German Unification. By Stephen F. Szabo. New York: St Martin's Press, 1992. Pp.xiv + 162, chronology, biblio, index. £22.95. ISBN 0–312–08057–3.

Handworterbuch zur deutschen Einheit. Edited by Werner Weidenfeld and Karl‐Rudolf Korte. Frankfurt, New York: Campus Verlag, 1992. Pp.800, index. DM. 8 (paperback). ISBN 3–593–34583–8.     

Parliaments in Disguise? How German Councillors perceive Local Councils

Dominant narratives of neighbourhood working in the United Kingdom accentuate the diversity and ‘messiness’ of practices across local authorities. This paper questions such narratives. Drawing upon a study of 15 local authorities, we first argue that neighbourhood working is increasingly oriented towards neighbourhood management, privileging the ‘joining up’ of mainstream service delivery over the enhanced community engagement and political accountability more associated with the practices of neighbourhood governance. Deploying Lowndes and Sullivan's four rationales of neighbourhood working (2008), in combination with Mintzberg's metaphor of organisation as ‘structure in fives’ (1983), we suggest that the practices of neighbourhood working are currently best understood in terms of Mintzberg's decentralised divisional authority as a form of constrained decentralisation in which semi-autonomous divisions are brought together under a central administration and given limited control over service delivery in order to address the social and economic rationales for neighbourhood working. We then draw upon recent neo-liberal critiques of local governance to offer a critical evaluation of both the appeal for local officers and politicians of neighbourhood management and the potential tensions and contradictions of such a move for future policy and practice. We conclude that neighbourhood management as a neo-liberal ‘roll-out’ strategy may be self-defeating, surfacing the incapacity of local authorities to respond to local community expectations and grievances, whilst exposing the organisational constraints of partnership working, managerialism and outsourcing.     

The First World War as Catalyst and Epiphany: The Case of Henry P. Davison

The experience of the First World War was central to the emergence of a trans-Atlantic elite committed to close collaboration and an international alliance, either formal or de facto, between Great Britain and the United States. The reactions to the conflict of Henry P. Davison, dominant partner in J. P. Morgan and Company, illustrate the manner in which the First World War was catalytic in the creation of an Atlanticist elite. Davison, moreover, experienced something like a personal epiphany during the war, metamorphosing from a hard-driving businessman into an international philanthropist who developed ambitious schemes to remake the world. For seven years, Davison energetically sought to affect the course, outcome, and consequences of the First World War. Fundamental to Davison's worldview were the desirability and necessity of Anglo–American collaboration, on which all his other plans were predicated. When the war ended, Davison proposed almost visionary schemes, on the one hand to provide massive American governmental and private economic assistance to finance European postwar relief and reconstruction efforts and, on the other, to establish an international Red Cross organization that would mount a massive campaign to eradicate global public health problems. Although abortive in the short term, in the longer run his plans proved prophetic, anticipating the post–Second World War Marshall Plan and World Health Organization.     

A Comparison of the Effectiveness of Swabbing and Flossing as a Means of Recovering Spermatozoa from the Oral Cavity

This study examined whether flossing the teeth is a more effective collection method in recovering spermatozoa than conventional swabbing techniques. It was hypothesized that inclusion of flossing as a collection method would extend the recovery of spermatozoa to longer postcoital intervals (PCIs). Eighteen individuals provided 174 oral cavity samples. Successful recovery of spermatozoa was assessed with respect to the collection method and reported activity in the oral cavity during the PCI. Samples were subjected to a differential extraction procedure prior to microscopic evaluation of the extracted pellet. The results indicate that swabbing is more effective than flossing when the PCI falls within 1.5–12 h. However, spermatozoa were recovered from seven floss samples where the corresponding swabs gave negative results. When combining the results from the two collection methods, the percentage of subjects from whom spermatozoa are recovered increases for each PCI beyond the 0‐h interval.