Travel Blending: Whither Regulation?

Travel blending, as a form of travel demand management, has in recent times been celebrated by transport planners as a means of shaping travel behaviour without regulation. Accordingly, travel blending is said to overcome the problems of the state bureaucracy imposing its will upon the individual’s travel choices. In this paper we introduce a Foucauldian analysis to the field of transport in order to examine the assertions made by proponents of travel blending that they are not exercising power in the course of shaping travel behaviour. In particular, we use recent elaborations of Foucault’s work on governmentality to explore the ways in which the sites, subjects and objects of travel are discursively constituted within travel blending thereby enabling new ways of intervening upon the travelling subject. We suggest that a governmentality approach not only provides a fertile means of investigating transport but also reveals travel blending as a regulatory practice serving to structure the individual’s field of action.     

Gendered livelihoods and social change in post-apartheid South Africa

This article employs gendered livelihoods analysis and participatory methods to examine the politics of development among small-scale rooibos tea farmers in a rural coloured area of southwestern South Africa. Differentiating between sources of conflict and cohesion, I discuss how communities navigated resource scarcity, unstable markets, and shifting relations. While patriarchal dynamics informed livelihoods, with males and elders enjoying greater access than females and young adults, women took advantage of relatively fluid female roles to enter into agriculture and commerce. In contrast, rigid male roles and unattainable expectations of manhood isolated men, engendering destructive behaviors among young men in particular. Communities maintained social cohesion through democratic arrangements, and a politics of identification enabled research participants to relate to differential interests. In addition to providing situated and relational insight into the identitarian aspects of rural development, participatory gendered livelihoods analysis offers a critical means for deconstructing power and decolonizing knowledge.     

Managment of Beached Shipwreck Archaeological Sites: Defining Stability

The archaeological remains of ships in the beach zone are part of a complex and dynamic system. Being periodically exposed and reburied, they vary between being both visible and frequently forgotten features of the physical and cultural coastal landscape. These limited and non-renewable resources are highly susceptible to instability within the landscape. Challenges to stability result in these resources being damaged, ignored, or forgotten, leading to a potential loss of pertinent social, economic, and physical information. Although little can be done to prevent certain physical actions, a better understanding of physical and cultural processes allows for their mitigation and better management practices for the beached shipwreck resource. This paper looks at how stability is defined in relation to beached shipwreck sites and how these definitions impact the management of the resource of two case study sites in Maine and North Carolina.     

Racial,Gender, and Professional Diversification in the Forest Service from 1983 to 1992

The United States Department of Agriculture Forest Service traditionally has been dominated by white, male for esters, particularly in its professional and leadership ranks. Beginning in the mid-1970s, however, civil rights legislation, lawsuits, and statutes that mandated interdisciplinary planning collectively impelled the agency to begin diversifying by race, gender, and profession. This study attempts to quantify the progress the agency has made in workforce diversification since the early 1980s by grouping Forest Service job series into categories and tracking changes in these categories over time. The study reveals that the numbers of employees in “nontraditional” Forest Service fields (e.g., the social and biological sciences) increased markedly, but that these employees remain vastly outnumbered by employees in traditional fields such as forestry. The number of women in the agency also increased greatly, but women made much greater gains in administrative support positions than in jobs that put them in the pipeline for leadership positions. They remain vastly overrepresented in clerical and administrative positions and highly under rep resented in professional and technical positions. People of color made gains in nearly all job categories, but, like women, remain significantly overrepresented in jobs that will not lead to leadership positions. Thus, while aggregate numbers show greater diversity in the Forest Service workforce, a more detailed analysis reveals that the leadership ranks are still the domain of white, male foresters.