Search results for "Economic Geography"
showing 10 items of 682 documents
Brokerage from within: A conceptual framework
2021
Situated between various social worlds, brokers are highly mobile figures, in a physical and an ideational sense; they channel scarce information and resources, translate different languages and jargons, and mediate and facilitate between individuals and/or organisations, the local and the global, in a wide range of settings. Taking an in-depth ethnographic look at the actual work of brokers and their particular life stories, contributions to this special issue examine brokers’ successes and failures, their vulnerabilities and limitations, (changing) interests and motivations within the cultural contexts that these brokers are part of. By adopting a comparative perspective in a thematic an…
Brokers in the tea trade between China and West Africa
2021
Brokers have played important roles in the trade of green tea between China and Mali, from the 19th century when tea first came to Mali up to the present. They mediate between tea buyers and sellers, work on their own account, use soft skills, knowledge and networks and make a living from the commission they gain. This article examines the work of brokers in the tea trade, the social constellations in which they are active and the scope of their activity. Based on extensive field research in Mali and China, this article shows how brokers create their own jobs in a dynamic business landscape, which is often delimited by governmental policies, competing entrepreneurial activities and social …
A Folklorist in the Soviet Spotlight
2019
Abstract The article seeks to illuminate the ideologically motivated circumstances of Latvian folklore studies during the period of unconditional Soviet totalitarianism. With the strengthening of the Soviet occupation regime in Latvia in the late 1940s, many interwar folklorists became victims of ideologically motivated disdain and subsequent career limitation. ‘Bourgeois’ scholarship and the methods applied in folklore studies during the interwar period were denounced and recognised as harmful to the new Soviet order. The central part of the article presents a case study of one individual folklorist of the time, Anna Bērzkalne (1891–1956). Both increasing criticism of Bērzkalne’s folklore …
Care facilities for Germans in Thailand and Poland: making old age care abroad legitimate
2019
This article looks at old age care facilities abroad that target people who live in Germany. Such facilities have been established in Southeast Asia (mainly Thailand) and in Eastern Europe (mainly Poland). Given that they challenge central guiding orientations for old age care in Germany, considerable criticisms are levelled at them, and their use is viewed with distinct scepticism. Nevertheless, some of these facilities succeed in sustaining considerable demand from Germany over quite a few years. In this article, we therefore ask what strategies and arguments they use to make them a legitimate option for people in Germany and to be established on the German market. Based on two case studi…
Guest editorial
2007
In a number of western countries we are now seeing a ‘new second generation’ – the children of the migrants who came to Europe and North America in the second half of the 20th century and who are now completing their education and entering the labour market. Many of these migrants came from less-developed countries such as Pakistan, Turkey, North Africa or Mexico as migrant workers. How this new second generation has fared within western educational systems may well prove crucial for the eventual integration and cohesion of western countries. Pessimists have been concerned that this new second generation may be much harder to integrate than the older migrants of European ancestry: cultural …
Is culture-led redevelopment relevant for rural planners? The risk of adopting urban theories in rural settings
2016
In the paper, the author argues that cultural strategies and theories about urban planning may be irrelevant or even counterproductive outside urban and suburban contexts. In many rural settings the problem is not the destruction of the cultural heritage or how to counterbalance the influence from corporate interests, but rather the absence of such interests in the first place. From a study of two rural municipalities in southern Norway, the author demonstrates that culture-led strategies may be more of a distraction than an instrument for creating economic growth. Measured by the common goals for rural development in Norway, the cultural strategy has only been a success in one of the cases…
Analysing social networks in rural development: a gender approach
2016
Gender issues are of growing importance in the European and Spanish rural areas. The literature reflects that women have traditionally been linked to marginal positions in economic life, social activities and even political representation at the local level. Local development programs that have been implemented in Europe’s rural areas have had among its objectives the improvement of the articulation of local communities. To reach them, it has been fostered, among others, a gender perspective, promoting both productive activities led by women and their participation as stakeholders in the management and decision-making structures of such programmes. In this paper, we addressed this latter is…
Chances and challenges of African entrepreneurial activity in times of crisis
2020
This special issue looks in new ways at the relationship between small-scale entrepreneurship, economic (and political) crisis, and the outcomes of neoliberal market economy in African countries. I...
Pirates or entrepreneurs? Informal music distributors and the Nigerian recording industry crisis
2020
This paper is based on field research in Lagos and seeks to examine a group of actors that is often neglected in the literature as well as in local discourses. I refer to these actors as informal m...
Heritage and Cultural Policy in France under the Fifth Republic
2003
International audience; In the French historical tradition, four approaches at least have been heavily exploited. One seminal study defines the concept longitudinally in terms of religion, the monarchy, the family, the nation, the administration and science. Another essay uses allegory in an attempt to penetrate the proclaimed, avowed or unspoken motives underlying the notion of heritage. Another work uses the criterion of restoration to determine when a historical monument falls into the category of heritage. Fourth, a recent ground-breaking treatise considers heritage in historical and archaeological practice as reflecting representations of citizenship and the nation. Our angle of attack…