Creating a niche,building a community: a case study of young small-scale creative workers in Daegu,South Korea

The global trend of garnering the innovative potential of creative economy has also accelerated in South Korea where ‘creativity’ has recently become a nationwide buzz word. While economic instrumentality underpins the global proliferation of creativity discourse, it has been argued that the contemporary cultural sector is affected by neoliberal norms and hyper-competitive individualism. Notwithstanding such disciplining of creativity, this paper attempts to look into the complexity of cultural work which cannot be solely explained by the ascendant neoliberal ethos. To this end, the paper draws upon interviews carried out in 2016 with youth cultural workers, particularly who commit to independent, small scale creative work, in the city of Daegu. Based on an exploration of their locally oriented moral motivations and how they describe and practice their own work, the paper aims to discuss the ways in which they contribute to local cultural ecologies through their socially engaged creative work.     

MEASURING CONTRIBUTING FACTORS TO INTERREGIONAL AGRICULTURAL LABOR PRODUCTIVITY DIFFERENTIALS: A JOINT PROFIT FORMULATION*

ABSTRACT Using Taylor series approximations of joint profit functions, a methodology is outlined to quantify interregional differentials in the Canadian agriculture sector by region and to quantify the contributing factors to regional labor productivity differences. These contributing factors are output price differentials–both crop and livestock, differentials in “land and buildings” capital deepening, “other” capital deepening, energy prices, other material prices, and efficiency. The joint profit formulation permits the analysis of effects of regional specific output price and output mix differentials.     

Folklore without a folk: questions in the preservation of the Marinduque Moriones heritage

Since the 1870s, the Moriones festival has been part of the Lenten celebrations in Marinduque, located at the heart of the Philippines. Inventoried by the Philippine government, the National Commission for Culture and Arts (NCCA) and the Intangible Cultural Heritage in the Asia-Pacific Region (ICHCAP) as one of the Philippines’ intangible cultural heritage, the Moriones festival has exhibited various problems regarding a decreasing historical value, political intervention and increasing detachment from the Marinduque community. This study raises questions on regional inventorying of ICH, especially in light of what needs to be tackled before, during and after the incorporation of traditions and practices as ICH.     

Two systems in one country: the origin,functions, and mechanisms of the rural-urban dual system in China

ABSTRACT

This paper takes an interdisciplinary perspective to focus on the role played by the rural-urban dual system in China’s urbanization and migration. We explain its establishment in China in the 1950s and its genealogy in the industrialization strategy adopted in the USSR in the late 1920s and early 1930s. In the reform era, the system has been refashioned to suit a new set of demands of the state industrialization strategy to cater for the global economy. We analyze the mechanisms of the dual system, and how it has helped generate low-cost migrant labor for urban employers and siphon off revenues for urban governments by expropriating rural land. We also argue that there are fundamental differences between the dual system and the common “dualism,” based on the Lewis dual-sector model, as observed in many developing countries. The plight of children of migrants is used to illustrate the main points made in the paper. Our research challenges the prevailing perspectives in Chinese geography and urban studies, many of which are based on market-driven neoclassical economics or global neoliberalism, often ignoring China’s historical and institutional contexts.