Debt,Uneven Development and Capitalist Crisis in South Africa: from Moody’s macroeconomic monitoring to Marikana microfinance mashonisas

The power, vulnerability and destructiveness of financial markets are out of control in South Africa, now among the most unequal, economically volatile and protest-intensive countries worldwide. While debt made itself felt in many sites, of interest in both criticising and promoting solutions is the ‘scale jumping’ required from South Africa’s national insertion into the world financial system, entailing the Reserve Bank setting very high interest rates, in turn leading to unpayable levels of consumer debt, and at a time when microfinance is suddenly discredited as a development strategy. Macro- and micro-financial problems fused in the course of the Marikana Massacre of August 2012, reflecting the local and global powers of the Moody’s rating agency and ‘mashonisa’ loan sharks. The over-indebted Marikana mineworkers, who led a strike which catalysed many wildcat strikes elsewhere, confronted the local crisis by displacing it into the national economy. This only heightened the contradictions that Moody’s punished with its September 2012 credit-rating downgrade. Without a genuine ‘debt relief’ solution at both scales, society will continue to unravel, as financialisation reaches its limits within one of the world’s most extreme cases of uneven and combined development.     

Participatory Development and Reconstruction: a literature review

In the past decade researchers and development experts have been preoccupied by participatory development and reconstruction. Despite criticisms of its potential, it has been at the centre of development practices. This review of both published and unpublished literature aims to assess the importance of participatory development and reconstruction, especially its positive and negative characteristics. The paper shows that, despite its potentially transformative role, its main drawback rests in the power relations between elites and non-elites and that creating comprehensible ways through which non-elites can deal with these relations is one issue that needs additional research. Other issues that need more research are related to how to sustain the participatory development and reconstruction outcomes by increasing local ownership, and how to better involve existing structures and institutions (both state and non-state actors) in development and reconstruction efforts for poverty alleviation.     

Class Dealignment in Britain Revisited

Recent tranformations in voting patterns have made Britain one of the best known examples of electoral dealignment in Western Europe. But recently Heath, Jowell and Curtice have defended older accounts of class voting by questioning whether there has been any change at all in relative class voting, as measured by a particular index, the odds ratio. This article first outlines the innovative elements in Heath el al.’s argument. Second, it demonstrates that the odds ratio is a highly volatile and hard‐to‐interpret statistic. Third, it shows that other elements of Heath el al.’s empirical analysis do not substantiate their case. Fourth, it disputes the strategy of focusing only upon ‘relative class voting’, and argues that the growth of third‐party voting is a symptom of class dealignment, rather than a factor which must be discounted in advance before assessing trends in class voting.     

From permanent employment to massive lay-offs: the political economy of ‘transitional unemployment’ in urban China (1993–8)

Abstract

The idea that economic activities may be described and studied as ‘embedded’ in social relations has been central to much debate in recent economic sociology. The present paper analyses legal struggles over the status of begging in US law and argues that conflicting rhetorical accounts of begging illustrate social actors’ efforts to articulate the interconnectedness of their social world, including the ways in which economic practices are embedded in their social and institutional contexts. The paper thus suggests that embeddedness is not just something identified by social researchers, but also a problem faced by social actors as they try to understand the socio-economic order in which they live and act. By arguing for or against the claim that begging is simultaneously an economic action and the exercise of the right to freedom of expression, the voices in this debate attempted to affect the future of this marginal economic activity.     

Liar,Liar, Pants on Fire: How Fact-Checking Influences Citizens’ Reactions to Negative Advertising

Electoral campaigns are dynamic and an important change in recent elections is the growth of fact-checking; the assessment of the truthfulness of political advertisements by news media organizations and watchdog groups. In this article, we examine the role that fact-checks play in shaping citizens’ views of negative commercials and political candidates. We rely on an Internet survey experiment where we vary people’s exposure to negative advertisements and a follow-up fact-check article (i.e., no fact-check, accurate fact-check, inaccurate fact-check). The results of our experiment show that fact-checks influence people’s assessments of the accuracy, usefulness, and tone of negative political ads. Furthermore, sophisticated citizens and citizens with low tolerance for negative campaigning are most responsive to fact-checks. The fact-checks also sway citizens’ likelihood of accepting the claims made in the advertisements. Finally, negative fact-checks (e.g., fact-checks challenging the truthfulness of the claims of the negative commercial) are more powerful than positive fact-checks.     

Oiling the Machinery: The Lord Chancellor's Office and the County Court Bench, 1927–44

This article makes extensive use of recently opened documents in the PRO to explore the appointment and management of the county court judiciary between the wars, with particular emphasis on the role of the permanent officials in the Lord Chancellor's Office. It concludes that during this period the selection process, having already been largely de-politicised, became bureaucratised, ensuring the officials a dominant role. As a result the county bench became more homogeneous. The officials are also shown to have engaged in more systematic and ambitious attempts to manipulate vacancies so as to fit judges to districts both in terms of aptitude and other attributes.     

Developing Management Practices to Support Joined‐Up Governance

Various forms of ‘boundary‐crossing’ practices continue to proliferate in public management and public service provision (i.e. activities that require engagement and collaboration across sectors, institutions, and organisations). Yet the dynamic nature of this type of joined‐up working is proving to be a major management challenge. In this paper, we bring a number of concepts to bear on the management of joined‐up and cross‐boundary working in public management of complex social issues. Firstly, we present the concept of ‘adaptive management’, which we draw from field of environmental policy and planning (and human ecology). Secondly, we introduce a rethinking of the role of ‘policy targets’ using a complexity lens. These concepts are integrated into a practice heuristic (or framework) designed to assist cross‐boundary policy implementation in real‐world settings. We argue that adaptive management approaches may have significant utility for ensuring effective governance in uncertain environments.     

Deconstructing Dayton: Ethnic Politics and the Legacy of War in Bosnia and Herzegovina

Twenty years after the signing of the Dayton Peace Agreement (DPA) which brought the conflict in Bosnia and Herzegovina (BiH) to an end, the dysfunctional nature of the Bosnian state means that the question of how political actors in BiH engage with the DPA as a response to the war remains vitally important. This article argues that moving beyond the ethnicization of politics in BiH enacted by the DPA can be achieved by challenging the understandings of the war which inform the DPA while simultaneously challenging the effects of these understandings in the present. By advancing what I term a ‘deconstructive conclusion’ of the DPA, this article demonstrates the practical utility of Jacques Derrida’s thought for engaging with the legacy of war in BiH.