Structural Unemployment in the Western Balkans: Challenges for Skills Anticipation and Matching Policies

Rapid economic restructuring has led to the emergence of serious skill gaps in many transition economies. Such changes have been especially pronounced in the countries of the Western Balkans due to the break-up of the former Yugoslavia and the subsequent reorientation of previous patterns of economic activity. Structural unemployment has increased to high levels, yet the education and training systems have failed to adapt to the needs for new skills in service sectors and sectors subject to global technological change. This article investigates the use of various skills anticipation methods to inform education and training policy in the region. It argues that the information on skill gaps gathered through these methods are not being used effectively to address skill mismatch, and that existing supply-led matching policies have failed to meet the challenge of high levels of structural unemployment. An alternative demand-led approach is identified, which relies on more decentralized methods to place effective power and influence in the hands of users, whether employers, employees, job-seekers or discouraged workers. It is suggested that this would provide a more appropriate model for the improvement of workforce skills in the Western Balkan countries.     

The Sail of the Swedish Merchantman Jeanne‐Élisabeth,Wrecked off Montpellier,France, in 1755

A folded sail was found stowed in the hold of the Swedish‐registered merchantman Jeanne‐Élisabeth, which ran aground off Montpellier in a storm in 1755. Surviving sails from any period are rare. The structure of the recovered portion of sail and its associated cordage is described and discussed in the context of differing traditions and technological evolutions of the period. Recovery, recording and initial conservation techniques are discussed in an appendix . © 2011 The Authors     

Bad blood: poverty, psychopathy and the politics of transgression in Kenya Colony, 1939-59

This article examines the inter-relationship between psychiatry and sex, both fertile fields within the recent historiography of colonialism and empire. Using a series of case files pertaining to European patients admitted to the Mathari Mental Hospital in Nairobi during the 1940s and 1950s, this article shows how sexual transgression among colonial Europeans precipitated, and was combined with, mental distress. Considering psychiatric treatment as a form of social control, the article investigates a number of cases in which a European patient had been perceived to have transgressed the normative sexual behaviour codes of settler society in Kenya. What these files suggest is that transgressive sexuality in Kenya was itself framed by indices, as insistent as they were uncertain, of gender, race and class. While psychiatry as social control has some degree of purchase here, more valuable is an attempt to discern the particular ways in which certain forms of sexual behaviour were understood in diagnostic terms. Men who had sex with Africans, we see, tended to be diagnosed as 'depressed' on arrival at the hospital but were judged to be mentally normal consequently. Women, by contrast, were liable to be diagnosed as psychopathic, a diagnosis, I argue, that helped to explain the uniquely transgressive status of impoverished European women living alone in the margins of white society. Unlike white men, moreover, women did not have to have sex with non-Europeans to transgress sexual codes: this is because female poverty was a sexual problem in a way that male poverty decidedly was not. Poor white women were marked by uncertainty over their sexual behaviour—and dubious racial identity in its turn—and the problem of social contamination was described by reference both to the polluted racial ancestry of an individual and to the prospective contamination of healthy racial stocks. This article aims to address current historical debates around sex and empire, 'white subalternity' and the social history of psychiatry and mental health. All names have been changed to protect patient anonymity.     

Classifying electoral systems by input rules: Building on Blais and Rae through Australian experience

By revisiting the work of Blais and Rae, this article develops a new classification of electoral systems focused on input rules. An Unknown Winning Number family is distinguished from a Quota family with known winning numbers for most of the counting process. Branching family trees are developed and used to help explain some Australian experience with accentuated disproportionality in two electoral systems which have been omitted from otherwise path-breaking recent analysis (Taagepera, R. and Shugart, M.S. 1989. Seats and votes: The effects and determinants of electoral systems. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press). These omitted systems are identified as effectively giving electors as many votes as seats available in a district. The input-rule family trees remind us that number of votes is an important component of electoral systems, although elusive and somewhat forgotten in much recent analysis. More conventional groupings of electoral systems are identified as output peer groups.

本文通过重读布莱斯和雷的著作,提出了一种强调输入规则的选举制度的新分类,即未知获胜票数系,以区别于为大多数计票过程所知的获胜票数配额系。该系及其分支有助于解释澳大利亚所经历的两种选举体制的某种不均衡性。这种不均衡性被本来可能具有开创性的最新分析（塔格佩拉与舒噶特的《席位与投票：选举制度的效果和成因》）所忽略。被忽略的制度有效地给予就一个选区既定席位而言尽可能多的票数。输入规则系告诉我们投票数是选举制度的重要组成部分,只是在最新的分析中没被正视,甚至被忽视了。选举制度更传统的分类被定为输出同类组。     

Revisiting nineteenth-century U.S. interventionism in Central America: capitalism,intrigue, and the obliteration of Greytown

In October 2016 the Congressional Research Service published its latest version of “Instances of Use of United States Armed Forces Abroad.” One of the “instances” occurred in 1854, and the entry reads in its entirety: “Naval forces bombarded and burned San Juan del Norte (Greytown) to avenge an insult to the American Minister to Nicaragua.”¹1. Torreon, Instances of Use of United States Armed Forces Abroad, 1798–2016, 4.View all notes The following article posits that Greytown was not destroyed to avenge an insult to an American diplomat. Rather, two groups of prominent American businessmen used this and related events and their antecedents as pretexts to enlist the federal government in destroying Greytown. One group, representing a U.S.-owned isthmian steamboat company, sought to seize the port of Greytown as a private fiefdom; the other wanted it as the prospective capital of a new colony based on a huge, dubious land grant they owned.     

Drought is normal: the socio-technical evolution of drought and water demand in England and Wales, 1893–2006

Water stress is becoming a permanent feature of life in Britain and other developed societies, and attempts to change ‘consumer behaviour’ are at the forefront of strategies for sustainability. This paper combines historical, geographical and sociological perspectives on the evolution of drought and water demand in modern England and Wales. Droughts have natural properties but their course, size and distribution is also the result of an interplay between governance, social norms and everyday practices. Focusing on seven significant droughts between 1893 and 2006, this article traces changing understandings of ‘normal’ water consumption and ‘rational’ demand and relates them to the evolving socio-technical management of water and identities of ‘the consumer’. We challenge the idea of a watershed between private supply (associated with passive ‘customers’) and public ownership (associated with active ‘citizens’). While private systems facilitated self-organised civic action more easily than public supply, the ideal of a citizen-contract blinded systems of public provision to the problem of expanding water use. An interdisciplinary analysis of droughts in the past offers lessons for the debate about sustainable consumption today.     

Talk,technologies and teenagers: understanding the school journey using a mixed-methods approach

This paper focuses on the methods used in a project which set out to capture the movements and to consider the wellbeing of 30 teenagers on their journeys to and from school. A mobile phone linked to a GPS receiver was used to automatically log travel patterns whilst the respondents added ‘blog’ images and text about how they felt on the journey. Follow up interviews further explored the data. The paper shows that by using a range of methods the young people became involved in the project in different ways providing a rich picture of contingent and complex school journeys.     

Necrocapitalism in the Gig Economy: The Case of Platform Food Couriers in Australia

Although recent deaths of multiple couriers on the road have raised awareness of the dangers of on-demand food delivery, there remains limited government regulation of the industry in many jurisdictions. In this article, we argue that the labour conditions of platform couriers in Australia constitute a case of necrocapitalism (Banerjee), a contemporary form of accumulation through which organisational structures harness the power of debilitation and death for economic gain. After contextualising food delivery within the Australian gig economy, our analysis underscores how necropower operates through courier labour. We illustrate three dimensions: how this form of labour entails corporeal risks and harms; how these harms are heightened by platform infrastructures; and how strategic regulatory inaction maintains necropolitical orders. The article concludes with a reflection on how this contemporary example of necrocapitalism illuminates intersecting vectors of domination underpinning the logics and practices of platform governance.     

The politics of daily life in Australian income security administration

This paper is a discussion of the politics of every day administrative processes in one of the oldest and most highly institutionalised areas of Australian Commonwealth Government activity; income security. It begins at the bottom of administration with the encounters of service delivery. It identifies clients, welfare intermediaries and rank and file Department of Social Security (DSS) officials as the major participants in these encounters. Their interaction is highly constrained by the structures of rules and procedures surrounding service categories. But it is not without its politics. A number of systemic factors are identified which inevitably allow considerable room for strategic manoeuvre by the various actors. Though the odds favour the officials, clients and intermediaries are not entirely without strategic resources.

The latter part of the paper suggest how this highly structured politics of service delivery is empirically and conceptually linked to the larger moments of administrative decision‐making and the more recognisably ‘political’ processes surrounding income security administration; the mobilisation of groups and the articulation of arguments for or against changing existing commitments. It focuses on a number of examples of changes over time in the deployment of resources and the interpretation of the rules and procedures governing income security categories. It suggests the complex and constant nature of the interaction between activity at all levels of the social security system: from the most case specific to the most general, both within and outside the formal boundaries of the DSS.