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Paper I Focus (paper + i_focus)

Distribution by Scientific Domains
Humanities and Social Sciences75%

Selected Abstracts

The Paradoxes of Environmental Policy and Resource Management in Reform-Era China,

ECONOMIC GEOGRAPHY, Issue 3 2000
Joshua Muldavin
Abstract: Over the last 5,000 years serious environmental problems,deforestation, desertification, erosion, and widespread pollution of air, land, and water,have prevailed throughout most of China, brought about by a diverse set of social and political contexts. In this paper I focus on an enduring contradiction associated with the post-1978 reforms, namely accelerated environmental resource degradation in rural areas amid unprecedented national economic growth. Declining entitlements to assets and social capital in China's rural village populations are a crucial aspect of altered state-peasant relations, as these are increasingly mediated by the market during China's transition to a hybrid economy. This has resulted in changing patterns of resource use, impacting both the environment and peasant livelihoods. A brief assessment of China's postrevolutionary environmental policy and management practices provides the context for detailed case studies in Henan Province. These examples highlight the relationship between political-economic changes and environmental policy and management. Contrary to reform rhetoric, rural peasants' embracing of reform policies does not necessarily optimize their welfare or promote sustainable use of resources. The case studies reveal alternative pathways for villages, ones that ought to be brought into the policy debate spotlight. [source]

Geographic Scale and Grass-Roots Internationalism: The Liverpool Dock Dispute, 1995,1998,

ECONOMIC GEOGRAPHY, Issue 3 2000
Noel Castree
Abstract: In the context of ongoing debates over the effects of "globalization" on organized labor and, specifically, recent experiments in labor internationalism, this paper examines the geography of the Liverpool dock dispute, 1995,98. The dispute has rarely been subject to a serious analysis of its causes and trajectory. This is surprising since it was not only the most protracted industrial dispute in recent British history but also the hub of a relatively novel form of transnational labor organizing: namely, a form of grass-roots internationalism organized largely outside the formal apparatuses of national and international unionism. In the paper I focus on the nature and dynamics of this "grass-roots internationalism" with a view to making two claims that have a wider thematic and theoretical relevance to the study of labor geographies. First, contrary to an emerging new orthodoxy in labor geography (and labor studies more generally), the Liverpool case in fact suggests that the necessity for labor to "up-scale" solidarity and struggle in the 1990s is much overstated. Second, the Liverpool case suggests that international labor organizing is only efficacious when considered in relation to two scales of struggle often thought increasingly irrelevant or ineffectual in a globalizing world: the local and the national. Thus, while those few analysts who have cited the Liverpool dispute, basing their assessments on secondhand knowledge, have held the dockers up as exemplars of a new form of labor internationalism, in this paper I suggest the need for a more complex and contingent appreciation of the multiscalar dynamics of labor struggles. In short, we have not yet reached the stage, even in a globalizing world, where labor's "spatial fixes" must be preeminently supranational. [source]

Principle of organization: a dynamic-systems view of the archetype-as-such

THE JOURNAL OF ANALYTICAL PSYCHOLOGY, Issue 4 2001
Maxson J. McDowell
The personality is a dynamic system. Like all other dynamic systems, it must be self-organized. In this paper I focus upon the archetype-as-such, that is, upon the essential core around which both an archetypal image and a complex are organized. I argue that an archetype-as-such is a pre-existing principle of organization. Within the personality that principle manifests itself as a psychological vortex (a complex) into which we are drawn. The vortex is impersonal. We mediate it through myths and rituals or through consciousness. In this paper I show that Jung's intuition about the archetype-as-such is supported by recent science. I evaluate other concepts of the archetype. My concept is different from that proposed recently by Saunders and Skar. My concept allows each archetype-as-such to be defined precisely in mathematical terms. It suggests a new interpretation of mythology. It also addresses our spiritual experience of an archetype. Because the archetypes-as-such are fundamental to the personality, the better we understand them the better we understand our patients. The paper is grounded with clinical examples. [source]

The Neoliberalisation of the Local State in Durban, South Africa

ANTIPODE, Issue 2 2010
Sagie Narsiah
Abstract:, There exists a growing literature on the geographical aspects of neoliberalism and neoliberalisation. In this paper I focus on how the neoliberalisation process is articulated at the scale of the local state in Durban, South Africa. I examine the neoliberalisation process through the lens of the water sector. This paper contributes to the body of literature showing how private sector governance techniques are being used in the public sector effecting its neoliberalisation. I show how pricing structures are neoliberal and in turn how they are deployed and contribute to the neoliberalisation of the local state in Durban. I show that accounting strategies, tariff structures, and cost recovery measures are central to the neoliberalisation process in Durban. [source]