Ideas,Economics and 'the Sociology of Supply': Explanations for Fertility Decline in Bangladesh

The persistence of high rates of fertility in Bangladesh, despite the poverty of its population, has been given alternative, and apparently competing, explanations, including the absence of effective forms of family planning, the resilience of pro-natalist values and norms and the existence of material constraints which led to the reliance on children as economic assets. The recent and dramatic declines in fertility rates, in the absence of any apparent major economic changes in the decades prior to the onset of fertility decline, appears to contradict materialist explanations for fertility behaviour and to support explanations which stressed ideas about the acceptability of birth control and the availability of the means for doing so. This article argues that such an interpretation is based on an historical analysis of events in Bangladesh. It offers an alternative explanation which stresses socio-economic change as the primary motor for change in family size preferences, but which recognises the role of modern forms of family planning in facilitating the pace of the resulting fertility decline.     

Reconciling Expert Advice and Community Opinion in a Local Government Strategic Planning Process

This article proposes that the eventual outcomes of local government strategic policy deliberations can often reflect the interplay between “expert” administrative staff, democratically elected politicians, and the community they jointly serve. A multi-site case study approach, to examine the generation of local government strategy related to a niche economic activity concludes that broadly conceptualized opinion congruence can sometimes be threatened by substantial pockets of stakeholder vested interest. As such, “expert” and “political” opinion reflects a caution based on both historical experience and political expediency; while community opinion displays an optimism based on eager anticipation of an unknown future.     

Producing knowledge in productive spaces: ethnography and planning in early socialist Romania

Abstract

My paper explores the forms of knowledge which laid the ground for the first economic plans of Romanian socialism, between 1949 and 1955. Building on factory and local Party Committee documents from the city of Cluj archives, I focus on processes of knowledge production within the space of the factory, following industrial management as a fundamental dimension of the exercise of state power in socialism. Against James Scott's concept of ‘legibility’, my research shows that the Romanian Party officials were fully aware of the limitations imposed by standardized knowledge and statistics in their planning activity and tried to counteract these limitations by producing in-depth ethnographic knowledge about economic units, production and people. Narrative and interpretative accounts of factory life proved to be the most efficient tools for a state which managed not only populations and resources, but also social production processes. Investigating the fundamental ways in which knowing was inextricably tied to planning as a condition of possibility for the exercise of state power reveals how the project of transforming economy and society into a totalizing historical configuration depended upon essentially anti-totalizing forms of knowledge.     

Territorialising Sustainable Development: The Politics of Land-use Planning in Laos

Since the emergence of the sustainable development paradigm in the late 1980s, land-use planning has become a key arena for political debates over society-environment interactions and, in practice, an important means for territorialisation projects. The paper reviews the main planning approaches that have been employed over the past three decades in the Lao People's Democratic Republic, a country that has long been viewed as a valuable policy testing ground for the proponents of sustainable development. It highlights three concurrent territorialisation projects that have shaped the history of land-use planning and have fuelled tensions between central and subnational governments and local actors, national and foreign institutions, and land suitability and sustainability approaches. The paper argues that the latter tensions reflect an important dynamism and reactivity in the planning arena. It concludes that the capacity of land-use planners to adapt to specific contexts and evolving socio-environmental challenges should be harnessed in order to reconcile conflicting approaches to planning and, perhaps, to achieve sustainable development.     

Economies of scale in Danish municipalities: Expenditure effects versus quality effects

A change in the cost structure in the Danish municipalities seems to have occurred bringing in a larger fixed element in the cost function and making unit costs higher in small municipalities than in large. The paper examines the hypothesis that small municipalities in their reaction to their higher unit costs for management make a trade-off between raising expenditures and the tax level, on the one hand, and reducing the quality of the production, on the other. Using accounting data for 1980, 1990 and 2000 it is shown that the expenditure structure has shifted since 1980 so that small municipalities now exhibit higher unit expenditures than larger municipalities. However, there also seems to be a quality substituting effect in the small municipalities as a reaction to the higher unit costs. From data based on a questionnaire to the chief executives in all municipalities indications of weak political and administrative leadership in the small municipalities are demonstrated. We find that population size and administrative capacity explain significant differences in municipal understanding of the consequences of the central government regulation defining the conditions for the local production of services.     

论“失独者”权利的国家保护

"失独者"已然成了新的"特殊群体",其养老、返贫、疾病和心理是他们面临的主要问题,这些问题亟待政府从制度层面予以解决。但无论是国家层面还是地方层面,该问题的立法状况都不容乐观。"失独者"是因为国家义务而致,所以,作为一个人权主体,政府必须有相应的法律政策来保护他们。政府亦可将社会抚养费作为履行了计划生育义务的失独者养老费用。     

Planning helps: The impact of release planning on subsequent re-entry experiences of child sex offenders

Abstract

Recent research has demonstrated that poor release planning is associated with sex offender recidivism; however, whether release planning correlates with actual re-entry experiences has not been investigated systematically. Accordingly, in the present study release planning was rated for 16 child sex offenders, and semi-structured interviews about re-entry experiences were conducted at one, three and six months following their release from prison. As expected, significant positive correlations were found between release planning and re-entry experiences across the follow-up period, indicating that higher-quality release planning is associated with more positive re-entry experiences. Accordingly, it can be assumed that re-entry experiences differ between recidivists and non-recidivists, and hence positive re-entry experiences contribute to a reduction in sex offender recidivism. The implications for the management of offender release, policy makers and society as a whole are discussed.     

人力资源视角下的高校青年教师职业发展研究

青年教师的职业发展是高校健康发展和增强竞争力的保证。如何良好管理青年教师的职业发展是我国关注的重要问题。通过分析我国高校青年教师职业发展规划管理特点与理念较为落后、机制有待完善的现状和存在的问题,借鉴西方的人力资源管理方法,提出通过完善高校教师发展中心的青年教师职业发展管理机制、建立健全青年教师职业发展的配套措施的解决办法,对促进我国青年教师职业规划良好管理具有重要的现实与理论意义。     

Rethinking cross-border Euregionalism as self-organising system

Studies of cross-border regions in the European Union have struggled conceptually with an apparent ambiguity of Euregionalism: namely that cross-border regions seem to be the manifestations of reterritorialising state governance on the one hand, but have clearly failed to substantially challenge the Westphalian state territorial system on the other. The aim of the present paper is to develop a conceptual framework that helps us understand this paradoxical nature of cross-border regions. To this end, we draw on the systems theory of Niklas Luhmann and the semiotics of Charles Sanders Peirce, and propose to regard Euregionalism (and regionalisms more generally) as a self-organising system. Self-organisation entails the process in which self-referential communication, rather than a set of actors, employs spatial concepts, such as the region, to enable system-specific entanglements with physical space, either short-lived or enduring, and possibly – but not necessarily – involving governance.     

“Because I am who I am and my mother is Scottish”: neoliberal planning and entrepreneurial instincts at Trump International Golf Links Scotland

Focusing on the establishment of the first European Trump Golf development – on the Menie Estate along the Scottish North Sea coast – the paper contends that neoliberal planning, understood as state interventions to allow individual entrepreneurs to realise their visions, reshapes both planning practice and the socio-ecologies governed by planning in problematic ways. Neoliberal mindsets here cause politicians to depart from previously established practices. The paper analyses how governance becomes tied up in questions of entrepreneurial freedom and with beliefs in the capacity of an individual entrepreneur to steer the fate of the region.