Conveying Mission Through Outcome Measurement: Services to the Homeless in New York City

This paper outlines the policy decision to implement a performance incentive program in a large social services agency. Specifically, it describes the evolution of services to homeless people in New York City, including the creation of the New York City Department of Homeless Services, the privatization of a majority of the shelter system, and the redefinition of the role of government in the provision of homeless services. It explains how performance measurement is an integral part of this evolution, and the numerous challenges that this initiative has presented to management of the Department.     

Understanding Social Performance: A ‘Practice Drift’ at the Frontline of Microfinance Institutions in Bangladesh

This article examines the role of microfinance staff and procedures in enabling microfinance's social mission. It does so primarily through studying institutional ruling relations and practices in rural Bangladesh. Attempting to move away from the linear and deterministic approaches of impact studies, it ethnographically scrutinizes the everyday practices of implementers. Findings point to the emergence of systemic practices that jeopardize microfinance institutions’ potential to perform their social mission. These include low client‐selection standards, hard selling of loans and forceful loan renewal, little follow‐up on loan use, and abusive and violent client‐retention and repayment‐collection strategies. This is conceptualized as a ‘practice drift’ as distinct from the commonly reported ‘mission drift’. Rather than stemming from planned, top‐down changes in institutional mission and strategy, practice drift emerges from a displacement of decision‐making processes to the branches. The article argues that observed changes in microfinance practice are enabled by decentralized structures and management systems that leave the choice of tactics used to achieve targets to the discretion of field staff.     

Ontologies of place,placelessness, and movement: queer quests for identity and their impacts on contemporary geographic thought

The rise of and reactions to identity politics and practice have precipitated renewed debates about ontology in geography. Actor‐network theory (ANT) and ‘non‐representational theory’ have much to offer these discussions. Their de‐centered notions of ‘agency’, topological (rather than Cartesian) spatial imaginations, and what I term ‘humble’ ontologies offer a way out of the seeming paradox presented by various binarisms underlying contemporary social theory and philosophy, such as structure/agency, essentialism/constructionism, subject/object, and theory/practice. The value of these approaches is very apparent when considering a particularly politicized form of identity practice: queer identity quests. They lead to (among other things) ontologies of place, placelessness and movement that are new, fresh, enriching and potentially empowering.     

A trip to the library: homelessness and social inclusion

This article explores homeless men's visits to a public library. It shows how homeless men identified the library as a space for safety and social participation, at a time when the regional newspaper published an item questioning the appropriateness of their presence in the library. The news report promotes universal narratives that would exclude homeless people, showing the intimate relationship between the symbolic space of news, the material space of the local library, and the lifeworlds of homeless men. We report fieldwork in which we interviewed homeless men, library staff and patrons. In addition, we worked with journalists on follow-up articles foregrounding the positive function of the library in homeless men's lives, and to challenge existing news narratives that advocate the exclusion of ‘the homeless’ from prime public spaces.     

Christological Foundations for Political Participation: Women in the Global South Building Agency as Risen Beings

This paper draws upon the theologies of Jon Sobrino and Engelbert Mveng to construct a social ethics of participation for those who have been marginalized by corrupt political and economic institutions, focusing on the agency of women in Sub-Sahara Africa. In light of the philosophy of political participation in developing countries, I examine Sobrino's insights that the victims of the evil of this world have to live as risen beings, I consider the African Theologian Engelbert Mveng's concept of anthropological pauperization, and argue that it makes a difference to consider historical events that influence the contexts in which we view the victims. I also argue that both Sobrino and Mveng provide foundations for political participation of the victims, but there is a need to reinforce the agency of the victims, and their own ability to come down from the cross and live as risen beings. Such agency suggests the need for reinforcing the political participation of the victims. Finally, I supplement Mveng's thoughts with the cultural features of the African philosophy of Ubuntu — related to African Humanism — to show that Ubuntu, as well as Mveng, reinforce Sobrino's claims.     

Methodologies for Examining Homelessness and Their Application to a Mandated Statewide Study

Using findings from a federally mandated statewide study of homelessness in the state of Iowa, this paper presents methodologies developed to address various aspects of homeless research, including enumeration of the population, screening for reporting duplications, estimating the annual number of incidents of homelessness, and exploring county-level estimates of homelessness. After implementing an algorithm to eliminate duplicate reporting, and using the baseline unduplicated reported number of homeless persons, a statewide estimate of the number of homeless individuals was derived. Following further adjustments for differences in agency reporting practices and after extrapolating for nonreported time periods, we estimated the number of Unique incidents of homelessness experienced in the state during the year of the study (1997). The policy implications of these findings are discussed.     

‘I arranged my own marriage': arranged marriages and post-colonial feminism

This article looks at the practice of arranged marriage among women of Indian, Pakistani and Bangladeshi origin resident in Britain. It examines the conflation of arranged marriages with forced marriages and the assumption that arranged marriages are examples of cultural practices that thwart individual agency. Drawing upon original empirical data, this article will argue that in the practice of arranged marriage, some South Asian women are able to exercise agency while choosing their marriage partner. They adapt traditional arranged marriage practices to navigate their way around strict cultural expectations and to negotiate with their family members the choice of a match that is favourable for them. It provides a corrective account of arranged marriages by challenging the stereotype of the ‘oppressed third world women' and their experiences of such marriages. The article will do this by employing the idea of post-colonial feminism and by highlighting two long-standing issues in feminist debates: the idea of agency and the conception and role of power in the struggle for women's rights. It will make a case for a post-colonial approach to feminism as one way of reconciling feminism with the politics of multiculturalism.     

The Psychological Basis of Historical Explanation: Reenactment, Simulation, and the Fusion of Horizons

In this article I will challenge a received orthodoxy in the philosophy of social science by showing that Collingwood was right in insisting that reenactment is epistemically central for historical explanations of individual agency. Situating Collingwood within the context of the debate between simulation theory and what has come to be called "theory theory" in contemporary philosophy of mind and psychology, I will develop two systematic arguments that attempt to show the essential importance of reenactment for our understanding of rational agency. I will furthermore show that Gadamer's influential critique of the reenactment model distinguishes insufficiently between the interpretation of certain types of texts and the explanation of individual actions. In providing an account of individual agency, we are committed to a realistic understanding of our ordinary scheme of action-explanations and have thus to recognize the centrality of reenactment. Nevertheless, Collingwood's emphasis on reenactment is certainly one-sided. I will demonstrate its limitations even for accounting for individual agency, and show how it has to be supplemented by various theoretical considerations, by analyzing the different explanatory strategies that Christopher Browning and Daniel Goldhagen use to explain the behavior of the ordinary men in Reserve Battalion 101 during World War II.     

“It's not like your home”: Homeless Encampments,Housing Projects,and the Struggle over Domestic Space

Based on an analysis of housing projects and homeless encampments in Fresno, California, this paper argues that both anti‐homeless policing and housing provision mutually constrain homeless people's expressions of home, such that struggles over domestic space have become integral to the contemporary politics of US homelessness. In particular, this article asserts that contemporary homelessness policy is marked by a clash between competing visions of home. While housing projects in Fresno are based on a model of privatized and surveilled apartments, people who lived in local encampments often asserted alternative notions of home grounded in community rather than family, mutual care rather than institutional care, and appropriation rather than consumption. Meanwhile, local officials viewed such alternative domestic spaces as non‐homes worthy of destruction. Rather than valorizing domestic struggles above public or institutional struggles, this article seeks to move beyond geographic binaries to more holistically approach the politics of US homelessness.     

Judging,in Times of Panic

Summary

In his practice of intellectual history Ian Hunter has highlighted the productivity of a contextual approach to the institutions and discourses of philosophy, religion, law, and government. Deploying such an approach, his essay for this journal on the humanities in post-1960s Australia invites us to reconsider the terms in which the contemporary humanities have accounted for the world around us and in us. In drawing attention to some other examples of the way in which Hunter has applied this method, this paper explores the implications of a contextualisation of legal judgements that express ethical preferences which efface their historical conditioning. The paper suggests that such an approach might be productively applied in the work of understanding other kinds of legal judgements and policy settings that are commonly marked by a high degree of political agitation, such as contemporary immigration policy and border controls.     

Passive Conformism in Academia: Saudi Organization,Education, and Technology

Academia is expected to act as a cognitive arena in which members intellectually challenge one another, problematize social structures, and destabilize dominant ideologies. It is, supposedly, a cognitively unstable environment wherein intellectualism pushes social boundaries and acts as an agent for social change. It is a training camp wherein people come to be trained in the practice of critical thinking. Hence, one would imagine that academia would be the last place to find passive conformism. However, does this image reflect reality? Having interviewed four groups of 50 students, 47 academics, and 28 support staff in three Saudi universities, passive conformism (be it unethical, managerial, or in the form of logistical conformism) appears to be a necessity in Saudi academia. This suggests that, although academia acts as an authority in regard to critical thinking, it may not internalize this philosophy or expose its own organizational activities to such thinking. Passive conformism in Saudi academic organizations is enhanced by wider Saudi culture which promotes conformism among its citizens and directs every aspect of public and private lives, including the lives of its academic organizations. A theoretical proposition could be therefore that passive conformism in a society could be transmitted to its organizations.     

Evidence of early tobacco in Northeastern North America?

While tobacco use was a widespread and important social practice among Native Americans during the Historic Period, the prehistoric origins of the practice are poorly understood. Smoking pipes significantly predate botanical evidence of tobacco in Eastern North America. A promising technique for addressing this problem is gas chromatography/mass spectroscopy (GC/MS) analysis to identify nicotine or related compounds in smoking pipe residues. GC/MS analysis of a smoking pipe dating to approximately 300 B.C. from the Boucher Site, a Middlesex-complex site from Vermont, has produced evidence of nicotine decay products. This is interpreted as evidence for an Early Woodland Period origin for tobacco use in Eastern North America. The cultural and chronological implications of this finding are discussed.     

Intersections between philosophy and art: expressions of immanence in the seventeenth century — Spinoza and Vermeer*

ABSTRACT

Spinoza's philosophy of immanence represents a turning point that radically changed our conception of human agency and its relation to infinity. Hans Blumenberg rightly called the principle of immanence “a general hypothesis of the epoch”, a principle that applies to philosophy no less than to the sciences and arts in the seventeenth century. This article looks at Dutch paintings by drawing parallels between Spinoza's philosophy and Vermeer's work. Spinoza and Vermeer both deny a dualistic conception of the world and a hierarchical structure between inner and outer spheres. With the example of Vermeer's painting the Milkmaid, this article shows how an analysis of light and colour, time and space, reveal a vision of immanent infinity, with the human agent at its centre.     

Discursive Agency: (Re‐)Conceptualizing Actors and Practices in the Analysis of Discursive Policymaking

Interpretive discourse analysis commonly claims to address the interrelation between actors and discourses. However, the analytical focus of most approaches is on structures (discourses) while much less attention is paid to agency. This paper explicitly addresses discursive agency in two steps. First, we systematically review theoretical and analytical dimensions of agency in existing interpretive discourse analysis approaches. This review reveals a set of shared assumptions; most notably a concept of “trialectic” agency emphasizing the constitution of agency among the individual, the (discursive) structures, and the researcher's interpretation. Second, we propose an analytical heuristic, the Discursive Agency Approach, which is developed on the basis of the review and own empirical data. The proposed approach consists of four elements: (1) policy discourses, (2) political institutions, (3) agents defined via a set of characteristics, and (4) strategic practices. This approach is meant to facilitate a systematic exploration of agency under a discourse perspective, tackling the question of how a policy is constituted through the agency ascribed to its proponents in dynamic discursive processes, and how actors acquire political relevance through discursive means. To enable this goal, we propose distinct research steps and associated methods that link the approach to existing means of analysis.     

Beyond Punitive Regulation? New Zealand Local Governments' Responses to Homelessness

Abstract: This article investigates the ways in which New Zealand local authorities respond to homelessness. It finds that while some punitive bylaws targeting homeless people exist, they are not widespread, and in three case study cities are accompanied by efforts to support social service providers. This indicates that New Zealand local authorities are prepared to look at alternatives to address homelessness, as opposed solely to following trends towards the increasing persecution of homeless people. However, cities' attitudes are subject to political whim, and on occasion they articulate an exclusive vision of public space linked to concerns for public safety and city image. Such thinking has led, for example, to homeless people being served with trespass notices by local authorities asserting “ownership” of public space. Nevertheless, the actions of New Zealand cities depart significantly from the dominant approaches seen elsewhere. This may be explained in part by the relative invisibility of homelessness in New Zealand, and by a popular distinction between “good” and “bad” homeless individuals. The net result is a generally positive approach to reducing homelessness by providing appropriate housing and support to those on the streets, complicating any direct application of the critical geographical literature on this issue to the New Zealand context.     

The Everyday Geography of the Homeless in Kansas City

Homelessness in the United States is a multifaceted problem that appears to be growing. However, very little is known about the geography of homelessness. This paper will document the daily lives of the homeless in Kansas City, Missouri, within the milieu of the emergency shelter. The purpose of this study continues in the humanistic tradition, which is attempting to restore human subjectivity to a field considered to have been dominated for too long by scientific objectivism. Fieldwork took place in Kansas City from 1988 to 1993. Two types of shelters were identified: street and transitional. The street shelters primarily served individual men and were best characterized by the rescue mission. Transitional shelters, on the other hand, catered for men and the more recent additions to the homeless population, single women and families with children. The spatial activity of the homeless was constrained as a result of living in a shelter. One typical response to homelessness was apathy and depression. After approximately 30 days in a shelter, a homeless person often underwent a change in physical appearance and activity. This shelterization meant that homeless men and women became increasingly isolated and conformed to the view of themselves imposed by their fellow homeless, the caretakers, and society at large. Homelessness is more than simply lacking a roof over one's head; it is a process of institutionalization into the milieu of the emergency shelter. Shelter facilities in the US are transforming into long-term caretaking institutions.     

Canadian Philosophy: A Dialectical Exploration

This article inquires into the difference between philosophy as a universal practice and philosophy as a cultural product; its aim is to establish a case for there being Canadian philosophy. Philosophy as a practice can exhibit a dialectical framework. The practice can pursue both universal truths and cultural variations in expressions of those truths. Each philosophical endeavor requires the other to be meaningful. No matter how abstract a “truth” may be, an example always creates cultural relevance. The article introduces the example of an early Canadian philosopher, whose work is documented in the book by Leslie Armour and Elizabeth Trott, The Faces of Reason: An Essay on Philosophy and Culture in English Canada, 1850-1950. John Watson (1847–1939) was the most prolific and well-known contributor to philosophy in early Canada, pursuing universal questions and yet responding to the circumstances of his new home in developing Canada and, in doing so, contributing to Canadian cultural interpretations of philosophical questions. This article uses his example to conclude that the study of philosophy in Canada must include Canadian philosophy.     

Situated Payments for Ecosystem Services: Local Agencies in the Implementation of the Sloping Land Conversion Programme in Southwest China

Payments for Ecosystem Services (PES) is an innovative initiative to use market instruments for conservation that has spread across the world since the late 1990s. In assessing the efficiency and effectiveness of PES initiatives, global scholarship has focused on an outcome-oriented approach. This has led to debate on PES programmes’ contributions to, and the trade-offs between, conservation and development. Taking the Sloping Land Conversion Programme (SLCP) in China as an example, this article uses a process-oriented analytical approach to provide novel understandings of PES as a specific type of development practice. The article shows how notions of equity and justice, local knowledge and local institutions have played a role in shaping the processes and outcomes of the SLCP. The actions of local stakeholders in an interplay with the state created a space for negotiating, adapting and adjusting PES implementation, which eventually contributed to a local development pathway for meeting both national conservation interests and local economic development needs. This indicates that attention to situated agency can help illuminate how PES can be smoothly implemented and effectively negotiated in developing countries.     

Reconciling Economic and Cultural Explanations for Participation in Alternative Consumption Spaces

ABSTRACT With the cultural turn in economic geography, the emphasis on economic necessity when explaining participation in alternative consumption spaces (i.e. informal and/or second‐hand retail channels) has been contested by an agency‐orientated cultural reading that views engagement in such spaces as about the search for fun, sociality, distinction, discernment, the spectacular and so forth, and more recently by a geographically sensitive approach that ascribes agency to affluent populations and economic rationales to deprived populations. Drawing upon evidence collected during 120 face‐to‐face interviews in the English city of Leicester, however, this paper finds that people's reasons for engaging in such practices cannot be reduced simply to either economic necessity or agency. Instead, it reveals that such either/or thinking obfuscates how both co‐exist in people's explanations for engagement and combine in contrasting ways in different neighbourhood types, modes of goods acquisition and according to the type of good sought. The outcome of this paper is thus to transcend and reconcile previous reductive explanations using a both/and approach that recognises the varying ways in which economic necessity and choice are entangled in rationales for participation in alternative consumption spaces.