Creating and Transforming Households


Book Description

A systematic and original approach to the intimate link between the micro-structures of households and the structures of the capitalist world-economy.




Transformations


Book Description

Bringing feminist and world-systems theories together, this analytic anthology examines the rise of intersecting, women-centered movements that contribute to alternative development and the rise of new societies. The authors consider feminist movements and humanistic transformations that create new work and market relations, promote democracy and equality, redefine gender and sexuality, regenerate the environment, and construct nonviolent and peaceful relations. At the end of each chapter, articles by feminist theorists and practitioners on these topics are included to illustrate the analysis. Using a global, historical framework, the book shows how diverse, multicultural, and international feminist ideas can be brought together to provide a comprehensive and differentiated understanding of change.




Working Hard and Making Do


Book Description

The economic recovery of the 1990s brought with it a surge of new jobs, but the prospects for most working Americans improved little. Family income rose only slightly and the period witnessed a significant degradation of the quality of work as well as in what people could expect from their waged employment. In this book, Margaret K. Nelson and Joan Smith take a look inside the households of working-class Americans to consider how they are coping with large-scale structural changes in the economy, specifically how the downgrading of jobs has affected survival strategies, gender dynamics, and political attitudes. Drawing on both randomly distributed telephone surveys and in-depth interviews, Nelson and Smith explore the differences in the survival strategies of two groups of working-class households in a rural county: those in which at least one family member has been able to hold on to good work (a year-round, full-time job that carries benefits) and those in which nobody has been able to secure or retain steady employment. They find that households with good jobs are able to effectively use all of their labor power—they rely on two workers; they engage in on-the-side businesses; and they barter with friends and neighbors. In contrast, those living in families without at least one good job find themselves considerably less capable of deploying a complex, multi-faceted survival strategy. The authors further demonstrate that this difference between the two sets of households is accompanied by differences in the gender division of labor within the household and the manner in which individuals make sense of, and respond to, their employment.




Just Schools


Book Description

Just Schools examines the challenges and possibilities for building more equitable forms of collaboration among non-dominant families, communities, and schools. The text explores how equitable collaboration entails ongoing processes that begin with families and communities, transform power, build reciprocity and agency, and foster collective capacity through collective inquiry. These processes offer promising possibilities for improving student learning, transforming educational systems, and developing robust partnerships that build on the resources, expertise, and cultural practices of non-dominant families. Based on empirical research and inquiry-driven practice, this book describes core concepts and provides multiple examples of effective practices. “This is the most compelling work to date on school and community engagement. It will be required reading for all my future classes.” —Muhammad Khalifa, University of Minnesota “Full of practical steps that educators and administrators can and must take to build strong collaborations with families.” —Mark R. Warren, University of Massachusetts Boston “This important publication provides a way forward for educators, families, students and community members to co-create “Just Schools” by honoring, validating, and celebrating each other’s knowledge, skills, power and resources.” —Karen Mapp, Harvard Graduate School of Education




Making Places In The Prehistoric World


Book Description

First published in 1999. This groundbreaking volume addresses issues central to the study of prehistoric settlement including group memory, the transmission of ideology and the impact of mobility and seasonality on the construction of social identity. Building on these themes, the contributors point to new ways of understanding the relationship between settlement and landscape by replacing Capitalist models of spatial relations with more intimate histories of place.




Family Values


Book Description

Why was the discourse of family values so pivotal to the conservative and free-market revolution of the 1980s and why has it continued to exert such a profound influence on American political life? Why have free-market neoliberals so often made common cause with social conservatives on the question of family, despite their differences on all other issues? In this book, Melinda Cooper challenges the idea that neoliberalism privileges atomized individualism over familial solidarities, and contractual freedom over inherited status. Delving into the history of the American poor laws, she shows how the liberal ethos of personal responsibility was always undergirded by a wider imperative of family responsibility and how this investment in kinship obligations recurrently facilitated the working relationship between free-market liberals and social conservatives. Neoliberalism, she argues, must be understood as an effort to revive and extend the poor law tradition in the contemporary idiom of household debt. As neoliberal policymakers imposed cuts to health, education, and welfare budgets, they simultaneously identified the family as a wholesale alternative to the twentieth-century welfare state. And as the responsibility for deficit spending shifted from the state to the household, the private debt obligations of family were defined as foundational to socio-economic order. Despite their differences, neoliberals and social conservatives were in agreement that the bonds of family needed to be encouraged — and at the limit enforced — as a necessary counterpart to market freedom. In a series of case studies ranging from Clinton’s welfare reform to the AIDS epidemic, and from same-sex marriage to the student loan crisis, Cooper explores the key policy contributions made by neoliberal economists and legal theorists. Only by restoring the question of family to its central place in the neoliberal project, she argues, can we make sense of the defining political alliance of our times, that between free-market economics and social conservatism.




The Making of Citizens


Book Description

Originally published as 'Cities of Peasants', this highly-acclaimed account of the expansion of capitalism in the developing world has now been extensively rewritten and updated. Focusing on Latin America, Bryan Roberts traces the evolution of developing societies and their economies to the present. Taking account of the move towards more 'open' economies, a shrinking of the state and various transitions towards democracies, he shows how urban growth has produced new patterns of social stratification, creating opportunities for social mobility, but doing little to decrease income inequality or political and social pressures. Underlying social changes have broadened the practice of citizenship in developing countries, limiting authoritarian rule but within a context of entrenched social inequalities and persisting political instability. This book conveys both the flavour of life in the cities of the third world and the immediacy of their problems.




Transforming Agribusiness in Nigeria for Inclusive Recovery, Jobs Creation, and Poverty Reduction


Book Description

Nigeria has for decades placed enormous emphasis on diversifying its economy beyond oil and into sectors such as agribusiness and manufacturing. Lack of progress on the diversification agenda could be blamed on weak implementation and misalignment of public spending, but it also reflects more profound underlying issues. For example, declarations that any particular sector should drive diversification without offering clarity on specific investment priorities and expected outcomes will not persuade budget holders to allocate development resources. The lack of clarity also deprives policy makers and practitioners of the information, inspiration, and conviction to develop and execute sector plans that could operationalize diversification. Transforming Agribusiness in Nigeria for Inclusive Recovery, Jobs Creation, and Poverty Reduction: Policy Reforms and Investment Priorities aims to provide that clarity by illustrating the potential of the agribusiness sector to accelerate inclusive growth, create jobs, and reduce poverty. Building on an early finding that this sector provides the best prospects for inclusive growth and more and better jobs, the book identifies the specific agricultural value chains with the highest potential to create jobs, reduce poverty, and improve nutrition outcomes. The findings demonstrate, however, that the value chains with the most potential to pursue one policy objective are not necessarily as effective for other objectives, clearly calling for selectivity of value chains, depending on policy objectives. The book also estimates the level of growth required to meet specific jobs targets and finds that the growth burden is lower when on-farm and off-farm segments of agribusiness grow in tandem and higher if either segment stagnates. It concludes that a whole-of-agribusiness approach that emphasizes coordinated investments between on-farm and off-farm segments is needed to enable the sector to meet its potential in creating jobs and generating inclusive growth.




Agricultural Reform and Rural Transformation in China since 1949


Book Description

Since its founding, the government of the People's Republic of China has strived to transform rural production, the theme of this volume of History of Contemporary China. Fourteen articles translated from the Chinese journal Contemporary History (Dangdai Zhongguo shi yanjiu) offer both empirical account and theoretical analysis of a broad range of historical events and issues, such as the guiding policy framework of the “three rural issues,” the causes and consequences of the deep plowing movement and the development of public canteens during the Great Leap Forward, child care, enterprises and collectives, and private lending in the post-Mao era, and the changing dynamics of interregional flows of goods and people throughout the second half of the 20th century. These studies shed light on the historical origins of some of the agricultural and rural problems in China today.




Using household consumption and expenditure surveys to make inferences about food consumption, nutrient intakes and nutrition status


Book Description

Household consumption and expenditure surveys (HCES) are multipurpose surveys that are routinely conducted to collect data on household food consumption and availability in more than 120 countries. HCES are increasingly being used to calculate proxy estimates of food consumption, nutrient intakes, and nutrition status, often at the individual level. Rarely, however, do they collect information on meal participation, despite growing evidence that it is an increasingly important and variable component of the quantity of food consumed or available in a household. This paper explores the significance of adjusting for meal participation in making inferences about apparent food consumption and nutrient intakes. It focuses on two distinct sets of additional information requirements for enhancing the reliability and precision of measures of food consumption: (1) individual household members’ and household guests’ meal-eating behaviors, and (2) the number and apparent nutritional significance of meals. While the most comprehensive and precise accounting of intakes of individual food consumption and nutrients requires both types of information, the magnitude of the changes required in HCES questionnaires to capture them is likely to be prohibitive. Consequently, for many HCES, a “second best” approach may be the most effective method, at least in the short term. The paper empirically explores some of the relatively few HCES that currently attempt to capture some of these information requirements. In addition, it assesses their value-added to prioritize the global agenda for strengthening HCES measurement of food consumption in support of more evidence-based nutrition policy making.