Search results

One of the most outstanding initiatives that the African Union (AU) has taken that distinguishes it from its predecessor (the Organization of African Unity) is the adoption of the African diaspora as its sixth region. This article has two principal sections. First, by establishing the reasons for adopting the African diaspora as its sixth region from development perspectives, it explores how the African diaspora can engineer development processes in Africa and the challenges that the AU must address if the African diasporas are expected to play this role. In the second section, the article explores how Ghana provided a political base for Pan-Africanism and how Nkrumah laid an intellectual foundation for the movement. It also examines how Rawlings and Kufuor built on Nkrumah's Pan-Africanist legacy by creating incentives for the returnees/repatriates from the diaspora. While probing the character of the returnees/repatriates phenomenon and politics in Ghana, the second section also explores the controversies that center on dual citizenship, the right of return and abode, and voting rights of Ghanaians Living Abroad (GLA). Finally, the section investigates the receptivity of the traditional political system to the returnee/repatriate phenomenon in Ghana. The article concludes by making recommendations on how the Ghana-diaspora relations can be strengthened.

The main focus of the researcher's study was to examine the lived experiences of intimate partners of female rape victims within the first six months post rape. Yet, many publications describing longitudinal qualitative studies of sexual assault fail to provide a detailed report on the processes followed, the difficulties experienced, as well as the reasons for such difficulties. To fill theses gaps, in this paper, the researcher describes the strategies applied to recruit and retain the participants for the entire six-month period post rape. The lessons learned during recruitment and data collection are also described. The research question that guided the study was: what are the lived experiences of intimate partners of female rape victims during the six months following the rape? The selection of study participants involved purposeful sampling. After providing their informed consent, nine intimate partners of female rape victims living in Cape Town, South Africa, participated in four separate face-to-face, semi-structured interviews as follows: (a) within 14 days of, (b) a month after, (c) three months after and (d) six months after the rape. Recommendations were made for future researchers to make them aware of the difficulties encountered in accessing, recruiting, and retaining vulnerable populations in longitudinal studies, especially in the field of research into sexual violence.

AbstractIn this article, we consider an online retailer who sells two similar products (A and B) over a finite selling period. Any stock left at the end of the period has no value (like clothes going out of fashion at the end of a season). Aside from selling the products at regular prices, he may offer an additional option that sells a probabilistic good, "A or B," at a discounted price. Whenever a customer buys a probabilistic good, he needs to assign one of the products for the fulfillment. Considering the choice behavior of potential customers, we model the problem using continuous‐time, discrete‐state, finite‐horizon dynamic programming. We study the optimal admission decisions and devise two scenarios, whose value functions can be used as benchmarks to evaluate the demand induction effect and demand dilution effect of probabilistic selling (PS). We further investigate an extension of the base MDP (Markov Decision Process) model in which the fulfillment of probabilistic sales is uncontrollable by the retailer. A special case of the extended model can be used as a benchmark to quantify the potential inventory pooling effect of PS. Finally, numerical experiments are conducted to evaluate the overall profit improvement, and the effects from adopting the PS strategy. © 2014 Wiley Periodicals, Inc. Naval Research Logistics, 61: 604–620, 2014

AbstractThe Canadian farm share for five crop‐based products and seven livestock‐based products from 1997 to 2010 is calculated using a supply chain IO analysis. Significant differences exist in farm shares across food commodities with higher farm shares for livestock products and lower farm shares for grain‐based products. The decline in the Canadian farm share for food consumed at home is driven in large part by the food purchasing habits of consumers. This paper also addresses the hypothesis that the decline in the Canadian farm share could be partially driven by rising input costs in post‐farmgate processes or rising input costs that have greater impact on downstream sectors than primary agricultural producers. Three experiments were conducted to assess the impact of an increase in the cost of corn, energy, and farm labor would have on commodity output prices, farm returns, food expenditure, and farm share. In all three cases, the overall farm share increases, albeit by a small amount, suggesting that these shocks have a larger relative impact on the prices of agricultural commodities than the prices of marketing commodities used in post‐farmgate activities. A two‐period comparison of these simulations shows that energy (corn and farm labour) price shocks would have had a greater (lower) impact on the farm share in 2007 than 1997.

Purpose– The purpose of this paper is to investigate the relationship between status-leveling symbols (i.e. the symbols used by organizations to remove, blur, or downplay hierarchical distinctions) and employees' work attitudes, as mediated through perceptions of trust, justice, and leader-member exchange. The study intends to provide some empirical support relative to the role of symbolic-leveling symbols as a social influence process in the workplace.Design/methodology/approach– In this study, the authors developed a measure of organizational status leveling by focussing on three symbols – physical space, dress, and forms of address. Data were collected from 147 employees who were enrolled in a part-time MBA program. The paper used path analysis to test the hypotheses.Findings– Results fully supported the theoretical model except the mediating role of justice perceptions in the relationship between status-leveling symbols and affective commitment.Practical implications– The results of the study provide guidance for design of physical workspaces and setting or reinforcing norms regarding forms of address and dress codes. Such practices need to be integrated with other high-involvement HR practices so as to create and sustain the culture desired by the organization.Originality/value– The paper is the first to measure status-leveling symbols in organizations, and the first to investigate the linkages between symbolic-leveling symbols and relevant work-related outcomes.

This essay is a slightly modified excerpt of the introduction to Trevor Schoonmaker, Wangechi Mutu: A Fantastic Journey (Durham, NC: Nasher Museum of Art, Duke University, 2013), a catalogue published on the occasion of the exhibition of the same name. The exhibition is Mutu's first survey in the United States, the most comprehensive and innovative show yet for this internationally renowned, multidisciplinary artist. Wangechi Mutu: A Fantastic Journey presented more than fifty works from the mid-1990s to the present, including collage, drawing, sculpture, installation, and video. The exhibition featured many of the artist's most iconic collages drawn from major international collections; rarely seen early works, and new creations. The exhibition also unveiled the artist's sketchbooks of intimate drawings that reveal her creative process and inspirations, on public view for the first time. Other highlights included Mutu's first-ever animated video, created in collaboration with Santigold, commissioned by the Nasher Museum. The Nasher Museum was the first venue for the touring exhibition, which was on view there from March 21 through July 21, 2013. It traveled to the Brooklyn Museum, where it was on view through March 9, 2014, and continued to the Museum of Contemporary Art, North Miami, in April 2014 and the Mary and Leigh Block Museum of Art at Northwestern University in Evanston, Illinois in September 2014.

The increasing cultural diversity and legal pluralism prevailing in the global South should not always be seen as a threat to a universal concept of human rights, but as an enriching input for it. The progressive recognition of indigenous peoples' rights in the last decades is forging, sometimes with difficulties, a more open and dynamic conception of human rights. By opening the door to the indigenous conceptions of law, justice, and dignity, both the Colombian Constitutional Court and the Inter-American Court of Human Rights are decisively contributing with their progressive jurisprudence to an increasingly more multicultural approach to human rights. The culmination of this complex and somewhat contradictory process took place with the adoption of the United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples in September 2007, a clear example of an attempt to balance indigenous conceptions of dignity with the very basics of international human rights law. The aim of this work is to analyze how the Colombian Constitutional Court and the Inter-American Court of Human Rights conceive the problematic but also challenging relationship between indigenous legal pluralism and the protection and promotion of human dignity. The so-called multicultural jurisprudence is paving the way for a more inclusive conception of human rights, a conception enriched by local ways of framing and understanding human dignity.

Proponents of global market expansion claim that economic growth brings prosperity and creates a more equitable global society, yet these efforts may result in the exacerbation of economic disparities that translates into significant disparities in health. These trends underscore the importance of research examining the social determinants of health in an increasingly unequal world. This article brings together concepts from biocultural anthropology, developmental origins of health and disease, and research examining the long‐term effects of early environments on social capital to formulate the notion of biosocial inheritance. Biosocial inheritance is the process whereby social adversity in one generation is transmitted to the next through reinforcing biological and social mechanisms that impair health, exacerbating social and health disparities. Such a theoretical framework considers contemporary and historic political‐economic forces that shape inequalities in human health, across generations. We examine the biosocial determinants of growth in the Andes as a case study of biosocial inheritance, developing a model that will illuminate the contemporary and historic sources of persistent poverty in low‐income communities around the world. By highlighting the biosocial mechanisms underpinning the intergenerational transmission of poverty, this model allows for the formulation of interventions aimed at breaking the cycle of poverty and a reconsideration of the way we think about poverty and social mobility.

Nonstate transnational actors have long played a central role in Sahelian economic structures and geopolitical arrangements because of their capacity to constitute sources of authority and sustenance outside and across state structures. Recently, subversive battalions (qatiba) have resorted to kidnapping, raiding, and ransoming as a means to social justice with a redistributive dimension. Parallels can be drawn with authority structures associated with nineteenth-century privateers and buccaneers, and more recently with pirates operating in the Indian Ocean. The parallel economy of ransoming emerges in a context of critical disruptions of traditional economic and mobility frameworks in the Sahel, the aggressive scramble for resources, and the displacement of the global war on terror in the Sahel. This article examines the legitimation processes used by subversive groups, both ideological and religious; the ethics of ransoming as a form of prosperity endeavor without morality; and an oscillation between cooperation and subversion in the parallel economy of smuggling understood as two aspects of the same strategy of engagement between formal authorities and insubordinate groups in a context of scarcity. It argues that nonconventional forms of ransoming and criminal predation in the Sahel have similarities with practices of states and multinational corporations insofar as these divest ordinary citizens of their ability to become subjects outside the colluding forces of capital, state power, and external interventions.

ABSTRACTOver the last decade, the global value chain (GVC) approach, with its associated notions of chain governance and firm upgrading, has proliferated as a mode of analysis and of intervention amongst development institutions. This article examines the adoption and adaptation of GVCs at four multilateral agencies in order to understand the purchase of value chain approaches within the development field. Mixing GVC perspectives with other theoretical influences and applied practices, these institutions deploy value chain frameworks to signal a new generation of policies that promise both to consolidate, and to advance beyond, the market fundamentalism of the Washington Consensus. To achieve this, value chain development frameworks craft interventions directed toward various constellations of firm and non‐firm actors as a 'third way' between state‐minimalist and state‐coordinated approaches. The authors identify key adaptations of the GVC framework including an emphasis on value chain governance as an instrument to correct market failure in partnership with state and development agencies, and upgrading as a de facto tool for poverty reduction. They find that efforts are ongoing to construct a 'post' to the Washington Consensus and that the global value chain is enabling this process by providing a new language and new object of development intervention: 'the chain' and the local–global linkages that comprise it.

The focus of this article is the ideological formation of so called 'New-Swedish Socialism', an indigenous form of fascist thought formulated by the Swedish ideologue Per Engdahl (1909–1994) in the early 1930s. New-Swedish Socialism should not be equated with either Italian-styled Fascism or National Socialism, but must be seen as an original form of fascist thought. This fascist variant can be described as comparatively flexible, low-key and intellectual. The present analysis of the formation of New-Swedish Socialism follows the model for ideological analysis suggested by the British political scientist Michael Freeden. Freeden's analytical mode defines an ideology in terms of a core cluster of interrelated and ineliminable political concepts which are essentially contestable. Starting from a definition of generic fascism and using the core concepts that can be identified from this definition, the presence, de-contestation and interrelatedness of these core concepts within New-Swedish Socialism is studied and analyzed. This article addresses whether New-Swedish Socialism can correctly be labelled fascist as well as capturing its special character as a fascist variant in its own right. The study has been limited to the ideological formation process in the early and mid-1930s but Engdahl remained an important influence on Swedish as well as European fascism throughout his life.

Local press is defined as a press that serves to introduce and train the public and to provide the public opinion. Local press gives information about the cases happen around the region that it is published and it forms public opinion about the problems of that region. New communication technologies havehave an important role in the forming and enhancing the news contents in the media. Changeovers have occurred in the production, process and distributiondistribution of the news by developing the new media. On the other hand, Internet journalism used by many press institutions is occurredoccurred as a new concept in mass communication. National and local newspapers do not remain insensitive to this new mass communication and it attempts the Internet journalism. Firstly, pressed newspaper had been turned into Web sites as similar but later new application about the transferring the news to the reader have occurred when we look at this application about the transferring of the pressed newspaper to the Internet environment. In this study, the Internet websites if Adanaher from Adana, Olay from Bursa and Ege'nin Sesi from Izmir have been compared with each other. The form, content and interaction of these three newspapers have been discussed and the usage of social media and importance given to the local news have been analyzed.

The process of globalization has created multiple channels of inter-country migrations, making all the societies of the world pluricultural. This phenomenon, which is rather recent for the countries of the North, has necessitated the development of multi-cultural ethos. The countries of the North, such as the UK and France, are now becoming homes for theDiasporacommunities. They are now attempting to cope with this trend of ever-rising Diasporic presence, particularly represented by the people of their former colonies, particularly from Asian, African and Caribbean subcontinents. Already studies are being undertaken to investigate this new phenomenon of migration as it affects the economy – both locally and globally. But very little has been done to see how these 'Outsiders-turned-Insiders' are participating in the democratic functioning of the polity. Britain offers a good research site to investigate this relatively unexplored phenomenon in view of having significant numbers of settlers from her colonies. The growing electoral participation of ethnic groups appears to have affected the nature and scope of British polity over the years. In view of their growing participation and increasing representation, multi-ethnic Britain is in the phase of transforming 'ethnic colonization' (Ballard 1994) to 'political colonization'. This paper is a modest attempt to study the role of Indian Diaspora in the political transformation of contemporary Britain.

While it has become easier to find statistics of incest and child sexual abuse and other such 'data' from countries of the Global South such as Turkey and India, academic analyses of the issue from the perspective of organisations fighting against it and supporting survivors remain scarce. The purpose of this article is to lay out the existing discourses on gender, family, childhood, innocence and virtue alongside the social and media explosion on the issue, in order to locate the contradictions in social commentary within and against which three feminist organisations function: Mor Çatı Kadın Sığınağı Vakfı [Purple Roof Women's Shelter Foundation] (Mor Çatı) and KA-MER (Kadın Merkezi) Vakfı [Women's Center Foundation] (KAMER) in Turkey and Recovering And Healing from Incest (RAHI) in India. Based on interviews with psychologists, lawyers and activists, this article looks at how these organisations challenge the prejudices that allow such abuses to thrive, creating new methods of resistance against incest in the process. In spite of Mor Çatı and KAMER being more involved in developing a feminist critique of the public discourse on incest and challenging existing laws on the issue and RAHI focusing more on mental healing of survivors, all three organisations provide support for survivors and criticise patriarchal structures in similar ways in their attempts to break the silence surrounding incest.

Up to the present the efforts to raise the quality of the Albanian educational system have been focused mostly in the direction of the content of the school curriculum, delivery of knowledge through the standards, as well as in the direction of instructional plans and programs. These achievements have been insufficient for raising the quality of the contemporary education, a fact that was also noticed by the Program for International Student Assessment (PISA). 60% of students in Albania did not complete the second level of PISA. The curriculum compilers 2014 using the best international research and practice data in educational field raised the problem of the preceding curriculum, which they characterized as a curriculum traditional in essence. The aim of this work is to argue the proposals of the curriculum compilers for "a curriculum which creates conditions and supports the competence development" through competence mastering, focusing on the students, needs and demands for education, learning in situations and knowledge building from the students, against a curriculum centered in instructional objectives and focused on the subject content acquirement.Considering the fast rhythm of knowledge explosion in the society of technology and knowledge, the new developments in the work market, changes in conceptions in the learning process, the necessity of reformation of a curriculum "after the competence-based approach" will be argued.