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Diverse Actors (diverse + actor)

Distribution by Scientific Domains
Humanities and Social Sciences83%

Selected Abstracts

Recombinant History: Transnational Practices of Memory and Knowledge Production in Contemporary Vietnam

CULTURAL ANTHROPOLOGY, Issue 1 2006
Christina Schwenkel
Recent years have seen the diversification of knowledge, memory, and meaning at former battlefields and other social spaces that invoke the history of the "American War" in Vietnam. Popular icons of the war have been recycled, reproduced, and consumed in a rapidly growing international tourism industry. The commodification of sites, objects, and imaginaries associated with the war has engendered certain rearticulations of the past in the public sphere as the terrain of memory making becomes increasingly transnational. Diverse actors,including tourism authorities, returning U.S. veterans, international tourists, domestic visitors, and guides,engage in divergent practices of memory that complicate, expand, and often transcend dominant modes of historical representation in new and distinct ways. [source]

Challenging Orthodoxies: Understanding Poverty in Pastoral Areas of East Africa

DEVELOPMENT AND CHANGE, Issue 4 2008
Peter D. Little
ABSTRACT Understanding and alleviating poverty in Africa continues to receive considerable attention from a range of diverse actors, including politicians, international celebrities, academics, activists and practitioners. Despite the onslaught of interest, there is surprisingly little agreement on what constitutes poverty in rural Africa, how it should be assessed, and what should be done to alleviate it. Based on data from an interdisciplinary study of pastoralism in northern Kenya, this article examines issues of poverty among one of the continent's most vulnerable groups, pastoralists, and challenges the application of such orthodox proxies as incomes/expenditures, geographic remoteness, and market integration. It argues that current poverty debates ,homogenize' the concept of ,pastoralist' by failing to acknowledge the diverse livelihoods and wealth differentiation that fall under the term. The article concludes that what is not needed is another development label (stereotype) that equates pastoralism with poverty, thereby empowering outside interests to transform rather than strengthen pastoral livelihoods. [source]

Politics of Scale and the Globalization of the South Korean Automobile Industry

ECONOMIC GEOGRAPHY, Issue 2 2003
Bae-Gyoon Park
Abstract: This article explains the liberalization and globalization of the South Korean automobile industry, with an emphasis on the multiscalar processes of globalization. In particular, it explores the processes by which the South Korean government shifted its policy for the automobile industry, from a nationalist and protectionist orientation toward liberalization in the late 1990s, which, in turn, attracted inward investments from foreign automakers and facilitated the globalization of the nation's automobile market. While exploring the roles of diverse actors and forces,operating at various geographic scales,in these processes, I placed more analytical weight on examining the ways in which contestation between national and local forces contributed to the government's liberalization policy. I argue that the globalization of the South Korean automobile industry in recent years was not only an outcome of the globalizing strategies of foreign automakers, but also was facilitated by an institutional fix by the nation-state (particularly the liberalization of policy) to a regulatory deficit, which stemmed from the national-local tension with respect to a state-led economic restructuring project. [source]

Development, the state, and transnational political connections: state and subject formations in Latin America

GLOBAL NETWORKS, Issue 1 2001
Sarah A. Radcliffe
Focusing on the processes of making and sustaining transnational political ties between actors, international actors and states, this paper reviews recent work from a number of disciplines on globalization and politics, and outlines an agenda for future research. Rather than seeing transnational political linkages merely as forerunners to the loss of local sovereignty, the paper argues for a wider conceptualization of transnational connections, embedded within processes of state formation in Latin America. Using a variety of examples, it is argued that transnational networks are associated with a wide range of meanings and a variety of responses by diverse actors. Drawing on recent work in political science, post-structuralism and anthropology, it is suggested that geographical concepts - related to scale, process and networks - offer a means through which to analyze and ,map out' these transnational political processes. [source]

Gay Organizations, NGOs, and the Globalization of Sexual Identity: The Case of Bolivia

JOURNAL OF LATIN AMERICAN & CARIBBEAN ANTHROPOLOGY, Issue 2 2000
Timothy Wright
This paper combines an ethnography of sexual activities, personal identities and social relations of men-who-have-sex-with-men in Bolivia with an analysis of attempts by government and international development agencies to create a demographically identifiable population of "gay" Bolivians. A first person account of attempts to establish gay identity through a gay community center in Santa Cruz reveals failure to attract all but a select group of the broadly diverse actors potentially involved. In short, men-who-have-sex-with-men who were too rich or too poor or too masculine or too effeminate were unlikely to be attracted to the gay center or welcomed as members of the emerging "gay community." [source]

Strength in Networks: Employment Rights Organizations and the Problem of Co-Ordination

BRITISH JOURNAL OF INDUSTRIAL RELATIONS, Issue 4 2006
Charles Heckscher
In recent decades, alternative organizations and movements ,,quasi-unions', have emerged to fill gaps in the US system of representation caused by union decline. We examine the record of quasi-unions and find that although they have sometimes helped workers who lack other means of representation, they have significant limitations and are unlikely to replace unions as the primary means of representation. But networks, consisting of sets of diverse actors including unions and quasi-unions, are more promising. They have already shown power in specific campaigns, but they have yet to do so for more sustained strategies. By looking at analogous cases, we identify institutional bases for sustained networks, including shared information platforms, behavioural norms, common mission and governance mechanisms that go well beyond what now exists in labour alliances and campaigns. There are substantial resistances to these network institutions because of the history of fragmentation and autonomy among both unions and quasi-unions; yet we also identify positive potential for network formation. [source]