Strategies of technical choice in the Peruvian sugar industry, 1955–74

Despite the rapidly growing literature on agricultural mechanisation in developing countries, there are few studies which examine the evolution of technical choice on large plantations over time. This article analyses the process of selective mechanisation in sugar cane harvesting on three Peruvian plantations over a 20‐year period. Decisions regarding the choice of technique and the control of field labour are intimately connected. The concept of a strategy of technical choice is introduced to emphasise this interdependence and to provide a framework of analysis.     

Theoretical practice and the sociology of knowledge a reply to Paul Q. Hirst: Recent tendencies in sociological theory

This article is a consideration of the viability of an aesthetically oriented social theory. After a discussion of some aspects of Michel Maffesoli's writings, the paper goes on to argue for three: 1. that we might take an interest in the aesthetic sphere not from the perspective of a critique of ideology or from that of critical philosophy but throguh a concern for something like Problematics of freedom: 2 that, against the understandable temptations of a sociological reduction of art, we need to treat aesthetic autonomy with a certain benign seriousness, that is to say, as a (moral, ethical, aesthetic) problem; and 3. That, in contrast to the aestheticizing tendencies of much of what goes by the name of cultural sociology, the question of the aestheticization of culture needs to be analysed in terms, above all, of its ascetic properties, aspirations and directions.     

Are We Civilized Yet?

The term “civilization” has been used in many contexts where accusations of Western imperialism, racism, and the like do not at all apply. Works on the history of science and technology in ancient cultures provide one such example, when they speak of Egyptian civilization or early Chinese civilization. It is also not true that works of the Enlightenment view the non-western world as less civilized and inferior. An entire genre of writing inspired by Jesuit accounts discovered in China a higher form of society that Europe should emulate. Two such works were Oliver Goldsmith’s Letters from a Citizen of the World and François Quesnay’s Le Despostisme de la chine, which offer, respectively, an extended satire and a sharp critique of European society.     

Coercive Leadership

We develop a model of leadership in which an informed leader has some degree of coercive influence over her followers (agents). Agents benefit from coordination but face two distinct challenges: dispersed information and heterogeneous preferences. The leader's coercive power facilitates coordination by weakening the effect presented by both of these challenges through “binding” agents to a strategically chosen policy. The leader's policy choice becomes more informative to the agents about the leader's privately held information as her coercive capacity increases. By adjusting her policy choice in response to available private and public information, the coercive leader achieves her preferred average of agents' actions, and in so doing, neutralizes the possibly deleterious coordinating influence of public information. We develop implications of our analysis for understanding autocratic leadership in different political and organizational contexts.