Pursuing Ideology with Statecraft

Utilizing a web-based simulation Statecraft, we explore the relative influence of ideology (realism and idealism) on student behavior and learning. By placing students into ideologically cohesive groups, we are able to demonstrate the effect of their ideology on the goals they pursue and identify the constraints imposed on the system by the behavior of groups as well.     

Forms of production in practice: Fresh approaches to simple commodity production

Jaques M. Chevalier, Civilization and the Stolen Gift: Capital, Kin and Cult in Eastern Peru, Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1982.

In an important new book, Jacques Chevalier advances the concept ‘form of production’ by giving it explicit theoretical treatment. In doing so he reveals a number of significant differences in the way various scholars have used the concept, especially on the central question — the relationship between capitalist and non‐capitalist forms of production in peripheral social formations. This is an old problem, but one that refuses quietly to die. It thus deserves continued discussion. What makes Chevalier's book worthy of extended discussion, however, is that it provides an anthropological treatment of the cultural elements involved in creating and sustaining distinctive forms of production. It does so by elaborating some of Pierre Bourdieu's notions about social practice in creating cultural as well as material life. The two sets of issues are not as far apart as one might think, since both consider actual social practice within particular material and cultural contexts, giving agency to both economic practice and to the environment containing it in determining the resulting social dynamic. In this way the scholars working on these two traditions hope to avoid many of the deterministic assumptions embedded in most analysis of production ‐ a problem that has long bedevilled marxists (as well as anthropologists). In this review essay I reflect on both sets of issues and the advantages to be gained by considering them as interrelated.     

‘This Spider Web of Woman's Life’: Private Space and Community Life in Peter Abelard

This essay explores such complex and ambiguous presentation of convent life in Helen Waddell's novel Peter Abelard (1933), considering Heloise's fear of women's communities as expression of concerns central to women's writing published in Britain during the 1920s and 1930s. Waddell uses Peter Abelard to intervene in these contemporary debates about private and public spaces. The dislike which her Heloise expresses for women's communities may, given the text's feminist ideology, seem surprising, but, as discussed, similar anxieties are voiced in texts by several of Waddell's contemporaries, and the novel is shaped by this tension between private, autonomous individual and shared public space. Peter Abelard is read in relation to selected journalism of Vera Brittain and Winifred Holtby (late 1920s), Virginia Woolf's A Room of One's Own (1928) and Dorothy Sayers' Gaudy Night (1935).     

Social Service Provision in the US and Germany: Convergence or Path Dependency?

With a special focus on social services, the article discusses the topic of convergence versus path dependency of state welfare arrangements in the US and Germany. In both countries, social services cover a broad spectrum of activities. In the US as well as in Germany, these services are to a large extent provided by non-profit organisations, although the two countries belong to very different welfare regimes. With a special eye on social services, the article provides an overview of the history of the two welfare states; it refers to current developments, of which the shift towards private commercial social service provision is most prominent. Against this background, the article comes to the conclusion that there is no simple answer to the question of path-dependency versus convergence. Indeed, in both countries commercial provision of social services is on the increase; however, current developments in Germany and the US do not reflect thoroughly the path-dependent or the convergence approach of depicting change.