Constituting Corporate Europe: A Study of Elite Social Organization

Abstract: This article explores the emerging shape and form of the European corporate community since 1996. We examine the cohesion of corporate Europe through the network of interlocking corporate directorates and memberships in the European Round Table of Industrialists. We focus on the unequal structure of representation; the interplay of national and transnational aspects of the network; the role of finance capitalists as a signpost of a regime of internationalized finance capital; and the embeddedness of corporate Europe in the global corporate network. Although the transnational European network gained in strength while national networks eroded, expansion of the European network did not negate a structure of representation favoring the northwest. Bankers became less dominant, yet industrialists with financial connections formed the core of the European corporate community, signaling a departure from national corporate communities centered upon banks. At the threshold of the current economic crisis, corporate Europe comprised the most integrated segment of the global corporate elite.     

Community-based development, non-governmental organizations and social capital in post-apartheid South Africa

Community-based development strategies are gaining in credibility and acceptance in development circles internationally and notably in post-apartheid South Africa. In parallel, the concept of social capital and the role of supportive nongovernmental organizations are receiving attention as key catalytic elements in encouraging and assisting community-based initiatives. In this paper, a well-documented initiative, the Hertzog Agricultural Co-operative in Eastern Cape province, is re-examined after the passage of several years to assess the impact of social capital and the involvement of a particular non-governmental organization in ensuring the sustainability and economic survival of the project. While both elements have proved critical to the project's life-cycle, particularly in recent years, concerns over possible dependency and project sustainability exist.     

Intergenerational Inequality? Labour,Capital, and Housing Through the Ages

This article examines the relevance of generational relations to emerging patterns of inequality in advanced capitalist societies, with a particular focus on inequalities related to housing wealth. At its heart is a critique of the increasingly prevalent argument that generational difference is a crucial axis of inequality today. It argues that while contemporary capitalist societies are certainly characterized by marked inequalities between generations and that the latter are manifested inter alia in housing ownership, understanding such inequalities principally in generational terms is problematic because they reflect deeper, more fundamental, structural inequalities and should therefore be conceptualized as such. The article suggests that the principal significance of generational relations to contemporary inequality dynamics actually concerns economic transfers rather than differences between generations. Within‐family transfers of wealth, especially housing‐related wealth, from older generations to younger ones tend to reproduce pronounced, structurally generated existing patterns of intra‐generational inequality.     

Fixing a Swamp of Cobras: The Clash between Capital and Water in Shaping Urban Vulnerabilities

This paper addresses how capital can refashion landscapes and patterns of risk and vulnerability. Drawing on the emblematic case of the conversion of Thailand’s Cobra Swamp into Suvarnabhumi International Airport we argue that there is a fundamental clash between the internal logic of capital accumulation and the ecology of water that occurs in places in which land is under water for much of the year. Counterintuitively investment in public infrastructure such as airports targets locations that are exposed to flood risks. While the literature on capital fixes tends to treat “land” writ large, this paper adds a dimension that has been overlooked in the theoretical work, by highlighting the significance of the ecology of the land in which such fixes occur as a means of understanding patterns of investment, land use change and vulnerability. Our analysis draws on three separate but related concepts of capital “fixes”—spatial, technological and high/low road fixes. We argue the importance of recognising the specific ecological characteristics of land that capital “fixes”. This perspective has global significance in providing critical insight into the ways in which capital creates and accommodates the kinds of vulnerabilities and risks associated with climate change.     

At home in the city: everyday practices and distinction in international student mobility

International students have been overlooked in geographies of ‘home’, yet this paper demonstrates how international student mobility offers unique insights that can advance our understanding of ‘home’ and belonging in the city. Drawing on photo-elicitation and mid-point and return interviews with Canadian students, this paper explores the everyday home-making practices of exchange students in urban centres in the Global South. It focuses on the ways in which international students create a sense of ‘home’ and belonging in their host city and how insider knowledge gained through local everyday practices is converted into cultural capital. It contributes to the literature by considering how home-making practices are implicated in spatial and scalar boundary-making processes for distinction. By illustrating through participants’ photographs how students articulate ‘home’ using spatial and scalar markers, I examine how students tighten the spatial boundaries of ‘home’ to focalise and localise symbolic capital within the city. The findings further add to debates on im/mobility by demonstrating that students’ distinguish their relative immobility during the sojourn from the mobility of travellers and tourists to legitimise claims of belonging as ‘insiders’ and of place-specific capital. The paper then concludes by considering how students are ‘collecting homes’ for distinction.     

Sámi Citizenship: Marginalisation or Integration?

Abstract

In accordance with international conventions the Sámi is an indigenous group belonging to two populations and two overlapping civil societies within one nation state. This situation not only influences Sámi political interests and activities in general, but it also affects the individual Sámi's political orientation and decisions. Nevertheless, no thorough study has been conducted, on the individual level, of Sámi political participation and involvement. We know neither how political attitudes and participation vary within this group, nor how it varies in relation to the Norwegian population in general. Thus we know practically nothing about how recent institutional developments have influenced Sámi citizenship.

This article looks closely at variations in political involvement and participation amongst Sámi and non-Sámi living in Norway's Sámi language management area, and compares this with political involvement and participation amongst the Norwegian population in general. The Citizenship Survey shows that in terms of political interest and participation, the Sámi living in the Sámi language management area are on par with others living there, and with Norwegians in general. In several important political areas the Sámi actually show significantly more interest and involvement than Norwegians in general. Furthermore, Sámi political trust and self-confidence are as high as in the general population, and we have not uncovered any particular marginalisation with respect to women and young people's interest and participation.

There is much to suggest that our findings measure not only the Sámi's combined political interest and participation, but also their degree of participation and interest in the Norwegian political system. We do not find a picture of Sámi political segregation, nor of an extensive marginalisation. The findings point towards strong integration in the Norwegian political system, with Norwegian and Sámi public space and civil societies overlapping rather than being competitive or even antagonistic.     

‘The fieldworker not in the head's office’: an empirical exploration of the role of an English rural primary school within its village

This paper presents the findings of a project exploring the role of an English primary school inside its rural village. The fieldwork discovered that the school had lacked a full-time head teacher for a number of years and the paper explicates three dynamics to unravel why: (1) interpersonal issues (high staff turnover and the legacy of a former head); (2) the political–economic development of the village and its shifting local ‘squirearchy’; and finally (3) the construction of the spatial environment of the village (post-war expansion and the situation of amenities). These three dynamics possessed a synergy and this was key in seeing the complexities of this rural environment and its bearing upon social relations such as the absent head. It therefore supports recent theorising positioning interpersonal power alongside the temporal and spatial character of a local environment. The paper concludes by using this insight to consider what problems the school—and any new head teacher—might face in the immediate future. The research is based on ethnographic fieldwork conducted in 2009–2011.Using a multi-strategy research approach, the paper draws upon participant observation, interview, documentary, visual and historical material in support of its analysis.     

Six theses on waste,value, and commons

The origins of capitalist value theory lie in transformations of property through enclosure of ‘commons-as-waste’ and practices of ‘commoning’ that supported these. These processes, repeated with difference, remain with us. Capitalist value production becomes a structure of necessity in societies that are profit seeking rather than needs oriented; the history of capitalist value is one of the unrelenting attempts to subordinate needs-oriented forms of value production to its accumulative logic. In the process, it continuously casts certain people, places, and conducts as wasteful, superfluous, or residual. In short, capitalist value constantly battles to assert its normative superiority over and autonomy from other forms of value production that interweaves with it. Waste, immanent to capital's becoming-being, poses a jeopardy to capital accumulation: it is, on the one hand, capitalist value-in-waiting and on the other hand, it is an omnipresent logic of dissipation that evades or exceeds capital's dialectic, threatening its legitimacy and existence.     

Population replacement,social mobility and development in Italy in the twentieth century

Abstract

Many scholars have expressed alarm at the low fertility and sustained immigration that have characterized Italy in the last decade (1.3 children per woman and an increase of more than 200,000 immigrants per year). This article takes a different approach, showing how low fertility and strong migratory balances (involving migration both between Italian regions and from abroad) have enhanced the formation of human capital, facilitating family strategies of upward social mobility, the construction of a more balanced labor market, increases in income and a decline in the graying of the population. The combination of low fertility and sustained immigration, therefore, has been and still is a fundamental resource for development of the population and of Italian society, especially in central and northern Italy. The article also discusses modifications in family and immigration policies suggested by these findings.     

IMAGINED DIVERSITY

The period that takes in the first term of New Labour in Britain also spans the empowerment of a new elected National Assembly for Wales and the designation of Objective One European structural funds to parts of Wales. Analysis of cultural policy documents from those years finds that the endorsement of an eclectic cultural style as a collective identity for a diverse citizenry is compromised by the implication that it is the Welsh language, rather than diversity itself, that signifies diversity. Scrutiny of proposals for, or assertions about, a “branded” cultural identity reveals inconsistencies between the cultural practices of place‐based communities and the opportunistic affiliations that are deployed in the interests of social and economic development in a “new” information economy.