Networks and labor market entry – a historical perspective

This paper discusses how recruitment practices have changed over time. Networks and contacts are more important today for labor market entry than was the case in the latter half of the twentieth century. There may be two explanations for this: the short-run explanation and the long-run explanation. The short-run explanation derives from fluctuations in unemployment. When unemployment is high, competition for every vacancy is tougher and networks become more important for the job seeker. This has been the case in Sweden since 1991, when unemployment increased to new levels not experienced since the 1930s. In the long run, there has been a change in recruitment practices due to institutional change. A clear pattern is that the importance of social networks has increased, while the significance of public institutions (i.e. the Public Employment Service) has decreased.     

Pacific men: how the feminist gap explains hostility

The gender gap in attitudes to foreign policy is well established in public opinion literature. Studies have repeatedly reported that women tend to be more peaceful and less militaristic than men. This article reexamines attitudes of individuals in relation to foreign policy and pits the gender gap against the largely forgotten feminist gap. We argue that the individual-level relationship between gender equality attitudes on the one hand, and tolerance and benevolence on the other, is under-researched, but also that key contributions about the effects of feminism have been mostly ignored in research on the gender gap in public opinion. We return to the notion of a causal relationship between gender equality attitudes, and peaceful attitudes, and of a feminist gap that also exists among men. In a series of novel empirical tests, we demonstrate that attitudes to gender equality, not biological sex, explain attitudes towards other nationalities and religious groups. Using individual-level survey data from five countries around the Pacific: China, Indonesia, Japan, South Korea, and the United States of America, we show that both men and women who reject gender equality are much more hostile both to other nations and to minorities in their own country.     

Cross-scalar Dynamics of the Resource Curse: Constraints on Local Participation in the Bolivian Gas Sector

Abstract

Contributing to debate on the contextual underpinnings and varieties of the resource curse, this article points to how political and economic dynamics of resource endowments operate in interrelated but potentially contradictory ways across spatial scales. Resource endowments insert a complex set of incentives and interests into the political arena in ways that both enable and constrain actors at different scales. Using a case study of gas governance in Bolivia, the article illustrates the interrelation of these dynamics across local, national and international scales, and in particular how they circumscribe the space for local participation.     

The “Will to Empower”: Managing the Complexity of the Others

Intersectionality is a concept that aims at handling the complexity of social life. It is often presented as a sensitive, and thus accountable, approach to the complexity of life lived in an age of globalization, migration, and displacements of identities, individuals, and groups. This notion of intersectionality presupposes that approaching complexity requires more than the mere adding up of categories like race, class, and gender; it requires an approach presupposing that these categories intersect in mutually constitutive ways in and through socio‐cultural hierarchies and power dimensions that produce complex relations of inclusion, exclusion, domination, and subordination. For feminists, this constructivist approach to identity categories seems promising; on the one hand, intersectionality rejects essentialism and reductionism, on the other hand, the complexity sensitivity of intersectionality maintains the possibility of feminist politics in a complex world, because politics no longer amounts to essentialist identity politics. In this article we want to ask, however, if the complexity sensitivity of intersectionality really is the solution to the problem of potential essentialism and reductionism in feminism. Or does intersectionality rather reproduce the problem of reductionism and the logic of identity in new, more sophisticated forms? Can feminism at all avoid essentialism and processes of othering? Is it possible to come to terms with the “will to power” inherent in all research by demonstrating a “will to empower”? The purpose of this article is not to evaluate whether different intersectionality studies are capable of accounting for complexity and thereby making it possible to avoid essentialism, reductionism, and othering. The purpose is, rather, to highlight and discuss some implications of the constructionism of intersectionality. As we will try to show, the constructionism that is claimed to form the basis of intersectionality, in opposition to additive approaches to social differences, is sometimes compromised for the sake of accountability.     

The “Crisis” of Gender Equality: The Norwegian Newspaper Debate on Female Genital Cutting

This article examines how tensions between feminism and multiculturalism conflate in a media debate on female genital cutting. The following questions are addressed: how is gender equality problematized, in what ways is the gender equality approach challenged, and what are the main solutions to prevent female genital cutting. The empirical analysis is based on the newspaper debate that followed the Norwegian Broadcasting Company's (NRK) documentary on female genital cutting in June 2007. The findings of our study do not support a claim that gender equality would be challenged by accommodations to multiculturalism. Our conclusion is that it is difficult to disconnect policy-making aimed at combating female genital cutting from the processes of stigmatization. Rather, by advocating the type of measure that is the most contested by the actors of ethnic minority organizations, the proponents for adopting routines of genital examination ultimately contribute to a problematic pattern, where the political debate about the situation within ethnic minority groups is run and dominated by the majority.     

‘Western Balkans’ as the New Balkans: Regional Names as Tools for Stigmatisation and Exclusion

The word ‘Balkans’ often functions as a stigma. Several authors have discussed the bloodbath during the wars in the former Yugoslavia with references to an alleged Balkan culture. Towards the end of the 1990s the term ‘Balkans’ entered the official vocabulary of the European Union, now with the prefix ‘Western’. ‘The Western Balkans’ became a common denominator for non-member states in south eastern Europe. A survey in 2011 in the ‘Western Balkans’ showed that those who live there to a large extent share this view: membership in Western organisations like the EU determines whether a country is ‘European’ or ‘Balkan’.     

Politics of responsibility: governing distant populations through civil society in Mozambique,Rwanda and South Africa

This article presents and analyses the findings of a research project on power relations in the context of development partnerships with civil society on HIV/AIDS in Mozambique, Rwanda and South Africa, and engages in a critical dialogue with governmentality analysis. It argues that contemporary neoliberal government needs to be understood as context-specific articulations of three forms of power discussed by Foucault – sovereignty, discipline and biopower – and, in the global domain, a fourth form of power – (new) imperialism. Further, the analysis demonstrates how the introduction of a ‘package of (de-)responsibilisation’ shapes CSOs’ activities so that they become competitive service providers, use evidence-based methods and produce measurable results. Addressing the issue of resistance, it shows how the transfer of responsibilities may involve tension and struggle – a politics of responsibility.