Caring for ethics and the politics of health care reform in the United States

It is increasingly recognized that the work of (unpaid) informal caregivers constitutes an important contribution to care delivery in the United States and in many other societies. Accounting for the range of social, economic and political circumstances in which this care is produced has become the focus of a number of academics and others theorizing the ‘third sector’, or the ‘social economy’. However, some scholars are concerned that the increasing attention paid to the role of informal economic activity will either legitimate neoliberal state withdrawal from social reproduction or facilitate continued invasive commodification of relationships that were formerly part of social life. While these are possible dangers, J.K. Gibson-Graham's diverse economy framework and theory of community economy allow us to understand the social and economic conditions that support, rather than undermine, a caregiver's fidelity to the process of caring. Given the size of the informal caregiving sector, it would remain an important aspect of the care economy even if the United States developed a national health care system. It is important to understand informal caregivers as economic subjects, with their desires, motivations, hopes and anxieties. What emerges from my qualitative research is an understanding of informal caregivers as ethical subjects who operate best in a network of collective recognition and support. Informal caregivers are neither self-interested economic actors nor (necessarily) victims of failed social support. Rather, they are, potentially, agents of change in a new politics of health care reform.     

Inclusive tourism development

ABSTRACT

In the light of growing inequality globally, it is important to consider how to make tourism, one of the world's largest industries, more inclusive. This concern is set in the context of, first, the growing use of tourism as a tool for social integration in Europe, not least in relation to making refugees welcome, and second, new expectations in the sustainable development goals (SDGs) that development should be inclusive and that the Global North and the private sector will take more responsibility for this. We provide a definition and suggest elements of an analytical framework for inclusive tourism, and note where inclusive tourism sits in relation to other terms that engage with the social and economic development potentials of tourism. Elements of inclusive tourism are illustrated with reference to a range of examples from around the world. This illustrates how marginalized people might be ethically and beneficially included in the production and consumption of tourism. However, it also demonstrates how formidable the challenges are to achieve substantial social change through inclusive tourism given constraints both within the sector and in the wider political economy.     

Social enterprise and inclusive tourism. Five cases in Siem Reap,Cambodia

ABSTRACT

In recent decades, social enterprise has emerged from a variety of traditions and contexts to occupy a prominent position in relation to social change. Proponents argue that people with a business orientation are uniquely equipped to identify social problems, develop solutions and to scale these up. Muhammad Yunus and the non-collateralized loans of the Grameen Bank are held to exemplify this potential. Meanwhile, mass tourism destinations are increasingly found in less developed countries, placing relatively wealthy tourists in close proximity to poor people. One response to this has been a proliferation of social enterprises within the tourism industry. This paper investigates the potentials and limitations of social entrepreneurship to achieve inclusive tourism through an analysis of five established and highly regarded social enterprises in Siem Reap. The enterprises have created worthwhile new opportunities for poor and marginalized people and contributed substantially to revitalizing elements of Cambodian culture. Beyond these significant successes, their capacity to generate broader inclusiveness in either the tourism sector or the Cambodian economy, generally, appears limited. Continued social benefits are, furthermore, contingent on the commercial success of the enterprises, in a sector which is highly competitive and volatile, with even successful, well-run businesses never entirely secure.     

Propositions on Trade Unions and Informal Employment in Times of Globalisation

The purpose of this contribution is to identify some of the issues which need to be addressed in order to advance the organisation of workers, and in particular women workers, in informal employment. The organisation of these workers, collectively described as the "informal sector", represents an existential challenge to the trade union movement: unless and until it puts itself in a position to effectively address this challenge, it cannot halt its decline, but in order to do so it has to undergo fundamental changes in its culture, its self-awareness and the way it relates to society. The issue of organising the informal sector is at the heart of the necessary transformations the trade union movement must undergo to recover its potential as a global social force.     

Crisis,Informalization and the Urban Informal Sector in Sub-Saharan Africa

Neo-liberal theories of informality have emphasized the potential of the informal sector for independent employment creation and growth. An alternative perspective is provided by the structuralist ‘informalization’ approach which regards the expansion of informal activity as part of the restructuring strategy of the formal sector in the face of economic recession. The informalization perspective challenges the traditional notions of the informal sector by focusing on such issues as differentiation, social networks, subcontracting and supply linkages with the formal sector, and the role of the state in informal sector expansion. Despite its First World and Latin American focus, the informalization approach offers important insights for the study of urban informal sectors in Africa.     

Rude Accountability: Informal Pressures on Frontline Bureaucrats in Bangladesh

This article is about ‘rude’ forms of accountability — the informal pressures used by citizens to claim public services and to sanction service failures. Rude accountability is characterized by a lack of official rules or formal basis and a reliance on the power of social norms and rules to influence and sanction official performance. The article draws on evidence from Bangladesh, a state which has not reformed its social sector governance, to explore when and why poor citizens resort to ‘rude’ accountability, whether they have a comparative advantage in the use of informal mechanisms, and whether these work, in terms of gaining better service. It asks what informal accountability mechanisms imply for governance reform in social services, and discusses lessons for other ‘unreformed’ states like Bangladesh.     

‘Milking The Elephant’: Financial Markets as Real Markets in Kenya

Financial liberalization policies in the 1990s were intended to raise formal sector interest rates, enhance competition and expand access for users. This article investigates patterns of provision and use in a local financial market in Karatina, Kenya, at the end of the 1990s after a period of financial and economic liberalization. It takes a holistic approach, examining both formal and informal financial arrangements and microfinance interventions. This is because the role of the informal financial sector is particularly important for poor people and has received relatively little attention in the discussion of the consequences of reform. The author does this using a ‘real’ markets approach that sees markets as socially regulated and structured. Significant provision by the mutual sector (formal and informal), and poor lending performance by the banking sector is explained through an examination of the characteristics of the services on offer and their embeddedness in social relations, culture and politics.     

扎根理论视角下旅游非正式部门成长路径——以安徽西递古村为例

以安徽西递古村的旅游非正式部门为研究对象,运用扎根理论研究方法,通过聚焦编码、轴心编码、理论编码三步骤,分析案例地旅游非正式部门的成长路径。研究发现:1旅游非正式部门发展在符合生命周期基本理论基础上,具有新特色。随着阶段推进,主导影响因素由单一向多元转变,外部影响因素的作用力愈渐加强。2精英带动在旅游非正式部门发展起步阶段起主导作用并以粗放开发为特色;利益驱动下旅游非正式部门过度扩张使得同质竞争激烈化,经营边际收益减少;家庭结构与社区影响造成经营固化与惯性,社会政策带来经营萎缩,经营者试图通过寻租及名望身份赋加的形式改变困境,增强对经济之外的其他诉求(如名望、人际),促进了旅游非正式部门对自我身份重新审视与再定位。3社区力量在市场饱和后以隐性道德伦理手段维持既有市场结构平衡状态,成为市场竞争调控手段新补充。     

Marginalized for a lifetime: The everyday experiences of gulag survivors in post-Soviet Magadan

Over the past decade notions of social capital have become embedded in the social development lexicon, often presented as the ‘missing link’ within development theory. Much social capital‐based research takes Robert Putnam's theorization of the subject as its starting point. Putnam's work argues that social capital can be measured by a region's levels of trust and civic engagement. While its use, and conceptualization, has undergone much academic debate, often formal institutions still employ this very narrow, and arguably Western‐centric, reading of the subject. This paper argues that while at the micro‐level social capital has little to do with the civic engagement and trust theories posited by Putnam, it still has relevance to the lives of marginalized individuals and is an important factor in their continued survival. To explore this, drawing on extensive qualitative research conducted in Magadan, Moscow and St Petersburg, I critically examine the construction of everyday survival strategies among Gulag survivors living in Russia's far northeast city of Magadan. Denied a return to their ‘homeland’ upon their release, this group experienced considerable marginalization in the post‐Stalin period. This was exacerbated when the collapse of the Soviet Union saw pensions in the far northeast of Russia fall to below 50% of the state‐set subsistence minimum. The paper demonstrates the importance of social capital to this group by showing how their survival is based on far more than interactions with formal and informal organizations.     

Resource Accessibility and Vulnerability in Andhra Pradesh: Caste and Non‐Caste Influences

Coastal Andhra Pradesh in southern India is prone to tropical cyclones. Access to key resources can reduce the vulnerability of the local population to both large‐scale disasters, such as cyclones, and to the sort of small‐scale crises that affect their everyday lives. This article uses primary fieldwork to present a resource accessibility vulnerability index for over 300 respondents. The index indicates that caste is the key factor in determining who has assets, who can access public facilities, who has political connections and who has supportive social networks. The ‘lower’ castes (which tend to be the poorest) are marginalized to the extent that they lack access to assets, public facilities and opportunities to improve their plight. However, the research also indicates that the poor and powerless lower castes are able to utilize informal social networks to bolster their resilience, typically by women's participation with CBOs and NGOs. Nevertheless it is doubtful whether this extra social capital counterbalances the overall results which show that — despite decades of counteractions by government — caste remains a dominant variable affecting the vulnerability of the people of coastal Andhra Pradesh to the hazards that they face.     

Formalizing the Informal Sector: Barriers and Costs

This article uses material from a series of case studies conducted in Latin America to analyse various aspects of the formalization of the informal sector. In particular, it examines the legal and bureaucratic barriers confronting informal sector micro-enterprises which seek to become part of the formal, legal circuit, and assesses the costs in time and money which are involved in the formalization process. The process itself is seen as consisting of two elements — achieving legality and retaining that status over time — each of which involves certain bureaucratic and financial demands. While recognizing that the requirements for formalization can represent a burden in some cases, the main finding of the article is that the procedures and related costs vary between countries to such a degree that it is impossible to claim, as some earlier studies have done, that disproportionate regulation and bureaucracy constitute an insurmountable obstacle to the legalization of informal sector enterprises.     

The Dynamics of Real Markets: Cattle in Southern Zimbabwe following Land Reform

Since 2000 there have been major changes in the agrarian economy in Zimbabwe. Extensive land redistribution and severe macro‐economic instability have resulted in significant shifts in agricultural production and the functioning of markets, opening opportunities for some and closing options for others. This article focuses on cattle in Masvingo Province, identifying current patterns and dynamics and future challenges. Key to the analysis is an understanding of the social and political embeddedness of real markets and the relationship between the state and an increasingly informal, sometimes illegal, economy. The article traces the transformation of a formalized beef production and marketing system, organized around a relatively narrow group of players, to a more fragmented, diverse and complex system with a different — and potentially wider — scope and reach. It highlights a series of phases, from the technocratic order of the colonial era, and its replication in the period following Independence, to a new situation following land reform. Although there have recently been attempts to reinstate a particular order through price controls and other measures, this has had little impact. The result is a radically reshaped production and market system, which suggests very new political and social relationships for the livestock sector.     

The Informal Financial Sector in Bangladesh: An Appraisal of its Role in Development

Informal financial markets in developing countries, and their role in the development process itself, form a relatively neglected area when it comes to research and policy planning. It seems, however, that this may be due to inaccurate perceptions of the value and effectiveness of this sector, and of its relationship to formal sector financial institutions. This paper uses data from an extensive research project on informal financial markets in Bangladesh to examine the size of the informal market, its relationship to the formal financial sector and the part it plays in the process of development. The paper concludes that, in all these aspects, the informal financial markets are more important, more efficient and more equitable than is generally supposed.     

The Global Flea Market: Migration,Remittances and the Informal Economy in Tonga

Some common assumptions about the form and use of migrants' remittances in the South Pacific are examined and questioned in the light of information from a micro-economic study of one group of remittance recipients in the flea market of Nuku'alofa, the capital of the Kingdom of Tonga. The findings of this study suggest that economic analysis and policy recommendations based on the existing macro-economic data on recorded remittances and other economic aggregates should be treated with caution. The unrecorded inflows of remittances in kind and the associated spread of the domestic informal sector have had some important implications for the functioning of Tonga's economy. There is some evidence to suggest that the growth of informal, international trade is fostering other significant changes in the domestic economy. The functioning of remittance-dependent economies such as Tonga is much more complex than existing economic analysis suggests, and involves substantial investment – not just consumption – with the emergence of entrepreneurs and the manipulation of dependence, rather than merely passive receipt of cash and expenditure focused on consumption.     

流动商贩的分布特征及营业空间界面影响分析——以广州中山大道西路段为例

流动商贩的空间分布有较大的临时性和变化性,但在各种不同因素的影响下,也具有一定的特征性。研究其分布特征和影响因素对从空间上引导该非正规经济的发展具有积极意义,而已有从空间角度出发的非正规经济研究成果较少。本文主要采用实证研究的方法,选取广州中山大道西路段的流动商贩为典型案例,从空间的角度对流动商贩这种非正规经济来进行研究。研究发现,流动商贩的空间分布具有时间、空间和类型构成三个特征。影响其分布特征的空间界面因素包括界面用地性质、权属以及界面空间特征等,揭示流动摊贩空间集聚的根源,为城市的规划管理和建设提供一定参考。     

广州城市不同行业女性非正规就业者行为空间差异及其影响

女性内部差异性已成为西方女性主义地理学的重要研究领域。本文以广州市下渡村餐饮业和芳村茶叶市场茶艺表演业两个典型行业为例,研究不同行业女性非正规就业者的行为空间差异性及其产生的不同影响。研究发现,餐饮业和茶艺表演业女性非正规就业者具有总体上相类似的行为空间结构,但由于其所从事的工作性质和经济收入不同,该结构在尺度构成、出行活动的距离分布和出行频率等方面存在明显差异。这种差异性进一步对上述两类女性非正规就业者的职业发展分别产生了限制和促进的不同作用。女性非正规就业者所属行业特征、行为空间与职业发展处于一种相互作用的关系。     

城市大型开发项目中非正规小市场的形成机制——以武汉“楚河汉街”武重小市场为例

近年来以空间视角对非正规经济的研究不断得到城市研究者的关注,同时中国现阶段的高速城市化过程又引发了新的非正规经济现象。以全国闻名的大型城市开发项目——武汉"楚河汉街"中伴生的武重非正规小市场为例,对大型城市开发项目中存在的非正规经济现象进行了深入研究。研究发现,该非正规小市场有着特殊的存在状态,表现为经营空间固定、经营场所临时、消费群体广泛、经济活动事关生存、城市景观反差强烈。其存在动因主要是大型城市开发项目自身正常运转的需要、待迁居民维持正常生活秩序的需要、大项目建设中商业服务供给的空白、有关城市管理部门的默许。     

Neoliberalism,Authoritarian Politics and Social Policy in China

This article explores the relationships among neoliberalism, social policy expansion and authoritarian politics in contemporary China. It argues that in the era of neoliberalism, rising new right and authoritarian governments, the Chinese Communist Party has sought to retain power by shifting politically to the right and promoting neoliberal-looking economic policies. These policies have raised average living standards but also increased insecurity for most of the Chinese population, while new social policies have facilitated marketization. Social policy expansion includes minimal cash transfers as well as social old-age and health insurance for hitherto excluded sections of the population. These policies have begun to erode long-standing urban–rural segregation, but they have added new, underfunded, social programmes rather than widening participation in existing ones, re-segregating provision so that urban elites and formal sector workers enjoy much more generous provisions than many people working informally and those without work. These social policies’ most significant dark sides thus include compounded income inequalities and the segmentation and stigmatization of the poorest. Authoritarian controls have enabled the Communist Party to avoid redistributive policies that would undermine its urban support, so that politics in China differ from the right-wing populism of new, anti-establishment authoritarian regimes.     

Epistemological Ignorances and Fighting for the Disappeared: Lessons from Mexico

Social justice struggles across the Americas have, over the last half century, transformed the urban areas of this region into international staging grounds for protesting the global devastation wrought by capitalist exploitation, state terror and social hatred. This paper maintains that there is much to learn for struggles against this triangulation in other parts of the world. In particular, through a discussion of how contemporary activism in Mexico against feminicidio, drug wars and brutal repression draws from a long legacy of protest across the Americas, I seek to illustrate the relevance for other places as people fight a cruel modernity that evolves through terror, profit and hatred. Critical geography has long contributed to exposing these connections and can still deepen its commitments to mapping the landscapes of the growing populations of disappeared and marginalized peoples in Mexico and elsewhere.     

Informal strategies of unemployment relief in Greek cities: The relevance of family,locality and housing

Unemployment in Greece hit the cities following the deindustrialization process of the 1970s. Despite governmental centralization, a thin institutional apparatus shifted the emphasis for unemployment relief and social integration to local agents and the family. This, along with difficulties of measuring a large hidden economy, makes the analysis of national trends and policies inadequate for understanding structural aspects. Case studies of two poor localities on the periphery of Athens (Perama) and Salonica (Sykies) reveal the importance of housing and urban renewal initiatives besides employment‐, skill‐ and production‐oriented policies. Housing (usually self‐built and often illegal) is crucial in the production circuit (as well as reproduction). It is related to both family strategies for unemployment relief, based on the home, and with the informal economy. The house and community infrastructure become forces of production in areas where putting‐out, subcontracting and home‐working are prevalent. The neglect of the housing sector in European social policy is therefore criticized here.