Neoliberalising Education: New Geographies of Private Tuition,Class Privilege,and Minority Ethnic Advancement

Geographic research on neoliberalism has explored the restructuring of educational landscapes wrought through marketisation of preschool, school and higher-education provision and considered the responsibilisation of parents and children for educational outcomes. This study develops understanding of the contingent emergence of neoliberal educational reform, and its progressive and regressive impacts, through an examination of the burgeoning private tuition market in England and Wales. The paper outlines the contours of the previously hidden supplementary education industry, demonstrating that it reinforces regional and classed inequalities, while opening possibilities for ethnic minority advancement. Conceptually, the paper advances debate about socio-spatial specificity in neoliberal change, showing that the intersection of policy, free markets and consumer behaviour reshapes the educational landscape in ways that extend beyond state intention and control. Through these processes, contingent market forms are produced that offer social mobility for some, but ensure the social reproduction of enduring regimes of power.     

Truncated Decision Making and Deliberative Implementation: A Time-Based Policy Process Model for Transitional China

The time dimension has not attracted enough attention in policy process research in China, yet speed is the most distinctive feature of China’s recent development. This article, based on observations of China’s policy practices, proposes a new research perspective for understanding how the Chinese government has been able to address policy challenges in an era of rapid transition. The approach adopted by the government allows decision makers to respond quickly to serious problems with a truncated decision-making process, and then implement the decisions through a more gradual deliberative process. The article examines China’s coal-mining industry reform as an empirical case to illustrate how this governance approach has been used to achieve major policy reform, namely property rights reform for coal mines, while simultaneously maintaining stability, regulating production safety, and stimulating industrial development. The article concludes with a discussion of the broad implications of this pattern for improving the effectiveness of public policy both in and outside China.     

伪蒙疆政权的绵羊改良活动

日本树立伪蒙疆政权后,为了掠夺该地区丰富的畜产资源,实行畜产统制政策。羊毛统制是畜产统制的核心,即对绵羊的增产改良、羊毛的收购、对外输出等,实行强制性的政府指导、控制措施。其中,绵羊改良是羊毛统制政策的重点之一。为了获取重要战略资源羊毛,日本将该地域作为大陆绵羊改良的基地,通过伪蒙疆政府、日系企业、蒙古绵羊协会等组织对肉、皮兼用型的蒙古原种绵羊进行改良,实质是为日本的对外侵略扩张提供羊毛这一急需的战略资源。     

Beautiful Geography: The Pictorial Maps of Ruth Taylor White

This paper explores the career of Ruth Taylor White, an American cartographic illustrator who published a significant number of pictorial maps from the 1920s into the 1940s. Taylor White’s ‘cartographs’ (as she called them) were characterized by her signature bobble-headed cartoon characters who romped through colourful, attractive landscapes. These visually rich and highly narrative maps simultaneously strove for accuracy and engaged in profound stereotyping with regard to culture, race, gender and class. They reveal not only the aesthetic and conceptual preferences of their maker but also the cultural biases of their middle-class, white American audience.     

Credibility in Policy Expertise: The Function of Boundaries Between Research and Policy

As science becomes an increasingly crucial resource for addressing complex challenges in society, extensive demands are placed upon the researchers who produce it. Creating valuable expert knowledge that intervenes in policy or practice requires knowledge brokers to facilitate interactions at the boundary between research and policy. Yet, existing research lacks a compelling account of the ways in which brokerage is performed to gain credibility. Drawing on mixed‐method analysis of 12 policy research settings, I outline a novel set of strategies for attaining symbolic power, whereby policy experts position themselves and others via conceptual distances drawn between the “world of ideas” and the “world of policy and practice.” Disciplinary distance works to situate research as either disciplinary or undisciplinary, epistemic distance creates a boundary between complex specialist research and direct digestible outputs, temporal distance represents the separation of slow rigorous research and agile responsive analysis, and economic distance situates research as either pure and intrinsic or marketable and fundable. I develop a theoretical account that unpacks the boundaries between research communities and shows how these boundaries permit policy research actors to achieve various strategic aims.     

Where the violence happened matters. Geopolitical framing and assessments of collective responsibility for historical violence.

Mass violence always takes place in a particular geopolitical context, and how that context is understood influences perceptions of collective responsibility. As international borders shift, often in the wake of war, events that occurred within one geopolitical entity can be understood has having taken place in another. The influence of such geopolitical framing on judgments of collective responsibility remains understudied. Two studies examine how geopolitical frames lead to shifting assessments of collective responsibility for historical mass violence. By depicting historical violence within a particular geopolitical entity (e.g., a country), that entity was perceived as being more responsible for the violence. The studies are set within the contexts of German-occupied Poland and the British occupation of the Indian subcontinent. The ramifications of these findings are discussed for the teaching of history, the commemoration of historical victimhood, and for our understanding of assessments of collective responsibility and geopolitical framing more broadly.     

Housing in the face of crisis: The influence of Israel's 2011 protest on housing policy

Do social protests affect government housing-related decisions? If so, in what way? To answer this question this study examines the influence of Israel's 2011 social protest on the government's housing policy, using an empirical cumulative-aggregative analysis of housing-related decisions over the past two decades. The empirical analysis is based on two generic classifications of government interventions commonly used in housing literature: first, decisions aimed at increasing the housing stock (supply-side), as opposed to policies aimed at augmenting consumers' financial capacity to obtain adequate housing (demand-side); and second, decisions that encourage homeownership as opposed to those that promote rental housing. The research findings show that the 2011 social protest definitely affected Israel's housing policy, because it prompted the government to engage in housing. However, the interventions introduced focused largely on increasing the inventory of housing units (supply-side) for homeownership and benefited mainly members of the middle class who qualify for mortgages and investors. Thus, despite the increase in government involvement in the post-protest period, Israel's housing policy has remained neoliberal, though in an advanced form of neoliberalism that combines market-oriented policies with centralized tendencies, which we call “centralized neoliberalism.” The study discusses the findings and their implications for various population groups. Given the current global affordable-housing crisis, the findings are relevant to many countries whose existing neoliberal housing policy is failing to address housing-market problems and challenges.     

Cattle Slaughter Industry in Qing China: State Ban,Muslim Dominance,and the Western Diet

Cattle slaughter and beef consumption are barely mentioned in the literature on Chinese economic, food, or animal history. This is possibly due to the widely held popular and scholarly assumption that beef was avoided and even considered taboo in the daily diet of Chinese people in premodern times. This article investigates the tangible regulation and practice of cattle slaughter in Qing China—the period when the beef taboo was argued to be formally subsumed into Chinese morality. I ask the following questions: To what extent did the Qing state ban cattle slaughter? How was the ban enforced in the localities? Did Chinese people slaughter cattle for consumption? Were there lawful beef markets in Qing China proper? How did increasing beef-eating Western sojourners since the mid-19th century impact this sector? Accordingly, I demonstrate that with the leeway provided by the state, the cattle slaughter industry developed in many regions of China proper, especially large cities. In this sector, Chinese Muslim merchants played a dominant role, even though the Han merchants could outnumber them. Their efforts have prepared the state and Chinese merchants to better cope with new circumstances since the mid-19th century. Broadly, this paper sheds light on how different religious, ethnic, and national groups affected the economy and the practice of law in the Qing dynasty.     

乡村振兴背景下农村基本公共服务与多维贫困的时空耦合特征研究

村级尺度上探索农村基本公共服务与区域贫困之间的关联特征以及二者耦合作用机理,是实现精准扶贫与乡村振兴战略有机结合的重要一环。本文分别建立农村基本公共服务和多维贫困综合发展监测模型,结合时空探索性分析和耦合协调分析方法,综合揭示两者的时空发展分布特征及其耦合关联关系。2015—2018年研究区内58个行政村的实证结果表明：①研究区内农村基本公共服务的发展呈中段高、南北段低的空间非均衡性分布,整体发展差异呈缩小趋势;②研究区内贫困村的多维贫困状况在空间分布上呈现出中北段地区贫困程度较轻、南段贫困程度较深的格局;③农村基本公共服务与多维贫困存在空间负相关性关联与明显耦合,且自实施乡村振兴战略以来,贫困村多转为同步型发展。研究结果可为现阶段乡村振兴战略的实施提供科学的决策依据和参考。     

Information transparency,monitoring, and incentives under decentralization: Evidence from China's fiscal reform of “province managing county”

Monitoring is deemed crucial for the incentivization of a decentralized organization, but its function relies on information transparency between the central authority and the delegated individuals. We test this hypothesis by considering changes in the fiscal behavior of Chinese county governments following an exogenous fiscal reform in 2004/2005 that removed information obstacles between provinces and counties. Employing data on 590 Chinese counties from 2000 to 2009, we find that counties in the reform provinces adopt a more proactive fiscal policy after the reform, suggesting that they become more incentivized in the political competition for economic growth. Such effects are stronger in counties with fewer competing peers and counties with either high or low ranks in the records of economic growth among peers. The increase in counties' productive spending leads to higher economic growth in later years.