‘The time of storms’: managing bourgeois girls’ puberty in France, 1800–1870

This article examines the medical literature published in France in the period 1800–1870 on the subject of puberty and menstruation to argue that, in conjunction with the extension of school life for bourgeois girls, the period saw the emergence of a distinctive conception of feminine adolescence that pre-dates the better-known concepts articulated in the late nineteenth century. It goes on to look beyond the scientific discourse to ask what impact this new medical understanding had on the management of girls’ puberty, examining first the way it affected school practice, before using a detailed case-study of the life of Solange Dudevant to highlight the ways in which medicalised understandings of puberty and menstruation co-existed with other forms of knowledge.     

Understanding Local Service Delivery Arrangements: Are the ICMA ASD Data Reliable?

The authors utilize the two latest ICMA Profile of Local Government Service Delivery Choices surveys to investigate whether the service provision and delivery arrangement information reported in the surveys accurately represents reality and, if not, what factors contribute to generating incorrect or unreliable survey responses. Interviews with practitioners are used to better understand both the accuracy of the survey responses and improvements that could be made to the survey instrument. Results suggest that the ICMA ASD survey data are highly erratic, with more than 70 percent of the cases (N = 70) investigated containing some inaccuracies. A qualitative analysis shows that the majority of the errors appear to be caused by the lack of a clear definition of service provision or by the service titles being too vague or too broad, both of which likely lead to discretion in interpreting survey questions and thus inconsistent answers by individual respondents over time.     

‘Just like working for the dole’: Rural households,export crops and state subsidies in Papua New Guinea

Globally national governments have been forced to devise means for dealing with a rising tide of unemployed and semi‐employed. One method used in industrial countries involves reducing the levels of welfare payments and attaching particular conditions for the receipt of unemployment benefits. Working for the dole is one such condition. In non‐industrial countries, with primarily rural populations and without previously established unemployment benefits, other forms of dealing with increased levels of the relative surplus population have been devised. When unemployed are associated with lawlessness, forming a threat to social order and capital accumulation, particularly in urban centres, particular efforts are made to keep people in the countryside. Although household production of export crops faces global surpluses and falling international prices, one means of pressing the relative surplus population to smallholdings has been to subsidise their growing of even greater volumes of the produce. The dressing of virtuous rhetoric, ‘honest toil’ and similar terms, should not disguise the fact that the nationally subsidised crop prices are a form of welfare payment. The payment is intended to resecure the subsumption of labour to capital in conditions where accumulation forces increasing numbers of people into pools of surplus labour. Here the case of rural households in Papua New Guinea is utilised for an argument which has a much wider application.     

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.     

Physical purity feminism and state medicine in late nineteenth-century england

Abstract

Late nineteenth-century England saw the development of a number of campaigns and social movements which were connected by both a hostility towards the medical profession and by the use of discourses of purity and sanitary reform. This article explores the involvement of women within these movements, analysing their activism as an aspect of social purity feminism. It argues that many of these movements drew on widespread female anxiety regarding male violence – both physical and sexual – towards women. The anti-medical feminists claimed that some pieces of ‘sanitary’ legislation represented a state-sanctioned violation of the bodies of women and children. Finally, this article analyses the use made, by some of these activists, of the discourses of sanitary reform to challenge the gender ordering associated with the reason/nature dualism in Victorian society.     

The Prefect and State Reform

The article intends to explain why although tremendous changes have occurred in the structure of government – especially the laws organizing decentralization since 1982 – the institution of the Prefect is still alive in the year 2000. Created in 1800, the institution of the Prefect derives from the will of the central authority to rely on its own representatives to ensure that public policies will be equally implemented over the whole territory. This objective remains but it has to be combined with the objectives of decentralization which are to transfer a number of responsibilities to elected bodies. Consequently, the task of the Prefect is to co-ordinate locally the action of the representatives of the ministers with the action of the elected body. To study the conditions under which the institution carries out this task the article focuses primarily on the limited capacity of the Prefect to mobilize the relevant actors. The second point concerns the difficulty of bringing together the information produced by field services. The third point considers the valuation of proximity and its impact on the action of the Prefect. The article concludes that the function of the Prefect is still the framing of local action but within the new context this can be done more often through the diffusion of information and less often through authority.     

Explaining differences in productive efficiency: An application to Belgian municipalities

The purpose of this paper is to measure and explain variations in productive efficiency of municipal governments in Belgium. Technical efficiency is evaluated using a non-parametric method based on the Free Disposal Hull (FDH) reference technology. We first calculate input, output, and graph Farrell efficiency measures for a cross-section of all 589 Belgian municipalities. In a second stage of the analysis we explain the calculated differences in efficiency in terms of variables related to the structural characteristics of municipalities and to the institutional environment.