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Capitalism in the countryside: work, migration, and moral economy in the agro-industrial hinterland of the South Lincolnshire fens
No full textThere are increasing calls for us to move beyond the rural-urban divide to better understand historical processes key to contemporary social life. In this thesis I tell new stories about capitalism in the countryside, through an investigation of work, migration, and agro-industrial economic life in the South Lincolnshire Fens. Through the pursuit of an ‘agrarian question of circulation’, I draw into relation the stories of migrant and citizen workers across the agri-food supply chain. I investigate how a shifting agrarian political economy not only reconfigured relations of production and distribution, but the social relations that comprised the system. Through in-depth interviewing and relational ethnography, I enter the ‘lifeworld of work’ to examine how change and continuity is lived and felt across the divergent livelihoods of this agro-industrial formation. Firstly, I examine the moral and cultural sentiments associated with histories of ‘council farm’ smallholders. I argue that ‘supermarket-isation’ was lived and felt as the disruption of a ‘moral economy’, grounded in the mutual obligations of kinship, as well as ideas of scale, graft, and freedom. While some vestigial smallholders persist, many others have entered the wider agri-industry. For the generation that grew up living and working in a world of small traders, I argue that a residual ‘structure of feeling’ from the historical form continues to animate their present. Secondly, I explore the ways in which supermarket circulation has remade forms of seasonal work, as historic gangmaster relationships have been reconfigured as ‘temporary labour agencies’ in factories and warehouses. I characterise the experience of temporariness as a state of indeterminacy. Finally, I analyse the relationship between labour process and personhood on the assembly line of the ‘just-in-time’ food factory and the ‘rhythm of the road’ with HGV drivers. In each case, I demonstrate how people’s historical trajectories and the sociohistorical circumstances by which people enter labour relations come to matter. I find a smallholder ‘generation’ drawing upon a residual structure of feeling through everyday metaphors of scale, temporality, and freedom. This thesis contributes to broader debates on the relationship between economy and culture. I develop the analytic concept of moral economy as way of bringing together structural properties and moral dispositions. Moreover, agro-industrial formations such as South Lincolnshire complicate our sociological understandings of both rural and post-industrial economic life and livelihoods. I move us beyond characterisations of the rural as ‘timeless and static’ or ‘overrun by migrants’. By bringing seemingly divergent stories into relation with one another, I argue we can build a fuller picture of the radical interdependence of life under contemporary capitalism in the countryside
Trustworthy decision making with sustainability
No full textArtificial intelligence (AI) has been advancing rapidly, demonstrating remarkable success in helping decision making in complicated scenarios. However, the black-box nature of machine learning (ML) models raises the important question of trustworthy decisions, while the significant cost in adopting ML-based new strategies could potentially influence the sustainability. In this thesis, we study problems related to sustainability and trustworthiness in decision making with AI. We begin with sustainability. In offline reinforcement learning (RL), there could be a significant policy switching cost whenever the concerned agent wants to adopt a new policy, which potentially makes the policy switching less sustainable. We initiate the systematic study of such problem setting with a mathematical framework and propose an actor-critic algorithm to find polices that better balance between the return and the cost. Then we extend such setting to online RL with a theoretical framework for cost-aware policy learning. We also tackle the state variable selection problem in RL, where we introduce the new definition of minimal sufficient state as the subset of state variables that affect the return, and propose a sequential variable selection method, SEEK, to efficiently select state variables. Such selection not only could help the interpretability of policies, making the decision more trustworthy, but also could reduce the training cost in downstream policy learning
What is procedural fairness in financing Universal Health Coverage?
No full textEnsuring Universal Health Coverage (UHC)—that everyone around the world has access to an adequate package of needed health services of sufficient quality at bearable cost—is one of the UN’s Sustainable Development Goals and is an aim of health policy in many countries. But UHC is costly, and consequently, countries face difficult decisions on how to fund it. How can such decisions be made in an equitable manner? In this blog post, Alex Voorhoeve answers this question
A bar of all, for all? social class, practice area and professional life at the self-employed Bar of England and Wales
No full textApplying a Bourdieusian lens, this thesis examines how social class origins shape careers at the self-employed Bar of England and Wales, a storied professional field which traditionally recruited from the upper echelons of the social class structure and which continues to be regarded as “elite”. I investigate the relationship between earnings and social class proxied by the type of secondary school attended using an administrative data set for the entire profession. Analysis shows that state educated barristers earn on average 75% that of their privately educated colleagues, with a substantial part of this gap being explained by barristers sorting into different areas of legal practice. Privately educated barristers have higher probabilities of working in Commercial and Chancery, which are, on average, highly paid. Less wellremunerated areas requiring barristers to undertake regular courtroom advocacy, which include Crime and Family, appear more open to state educated barristers. This quantifies for the first time the extent of the homology between practice area and social space at the self-employed Bar. Interviews with 62 barristers suggest a cultural schema which polarises and classes practice areas according to complexity or to engagement with human mess. Commercial barristers’ work is constructed as engaging with abstract knowledge requiring symbolic mastery evidenced by credentials from elite universities. Criminal barristers regard themselves as not quite “proper” lawyers, framing their work as orientated around performance and practical mastery. This thesis contends that the configuration of work across practice areas clarifies why some are more homogeneous than others in terms of barristers’ social class backgrounds. The uncertainty diffused throughout Commercial practice, with its drawn-out litigation and complicated legal teams, heightens the importance of middle-class dispositions and embodied cultural capital in confirming expertise and the knowledge intensity of work. This uncertainty differs from the predictable uncertainty of the Criminal and Family courtrooms, where performance and ability are proximate to one another. Identity, image and credentials do not have uniform salience as proxies for ability or acumen across this professional field. Mutually re-enforcing material, cultural and symbolic axes are shown to perpetuate and entrench social class inequality at the self-employed Ba
Safety frameworks and standards: a comparative analysis to advance risk management of frontier AI
No full textThis document systematically compares Frontier Safety Frameworks (FSFs) with international risk management standards, identifying areas of convergence, divergence, and opportunities for mutual reinforcement. FSFs have emerged rapidly in response to pressing governance needs, introducing concrete mechanisms such as capability thresholds, predefined frontier risks, evaluation triggers, and, in some cases, incident reporting channels and external assessments. While FSFs are agile and provide pragmatic, frontier-specific features, they often leave implicit fundamental considerations, including the definition of risk, the rationale for threshold selection, and the mapping of evaluation outcomes to risk severity and likelihood, to cite a few. By contrast, international risk management standards offer a mature vocabulary and structure, refined through consensus and validated through decades of application in high-stakes sectors. They emphasize assessing the adequacy of the overall risk management system, the justification of risk criteria, systematic and comprehensive processes, including for risk identification and analysis, clarity in linking assessment results to risk, and evaluation of the effectiveness of specific techniques, among others. However, these standards frequently remain abstract, were not designed with frontier AI in mind, and are not updated at a pace commensurate with its rapid development. The analysis concludes that integrating the systematic rigor of international standards with the frontier-specific innovations of FSFs offers a promising path toward more coherent, effective, and internationally harmonized practices. The document provides recommendations for the development of future standards for frontier AI risk management
Ethnographing mental troubles in Mayotte without access to the psychiatric hospital: the case of Amina
No full textThrough the case study of Amina, a woman afflicted by disorders interpreted by those around her as being caused by masera spirits, this article analyses the obstacles to access psychiatric care and the mistrust of biomedical institutions in Mayotte. It aims to understand how mental disorders could be better accompagnied by examining the institutional and social process that currently hinder their care. Indeed, as the most recently established French department, Mayotte presents a postcolonial context in which French norms intersect with local social organisation and aetiologies. The study in which the data of this case are included is based on twenty-two months of ethnography conducted between 2017 and 2024, combining participant observation of ritual experts and medical and social professionals, interviews about life stories, and ethnography of the everyday life of young people in affliction. This case study is unusual in that it is based not on direct interviews with Amina, but on observations about her and on the accounts of her family, mainly those of her sister. According to local conceptions of mental disorders, questioning Amina directly about her experiences could aggravate her condition. Amina, whom I met in 2017, was living with her husband and their three children at her mother-in-law's house when she suddenly began to experience physical and psychological disorders as her “ grand mariage ” (manzaraka) approached. This ritual was made to mark the entry of her husband and children at her home in her village, according to uxorilocal principles. These symptoms were attributed to masera spirits sent, according to her sister, by her mother-in-law – who did not want her grandchildren to leave her home – or her husband's ex-wife – jealous of the children Amina had with him. According to a neighbour, they were sent by a jealous neighbour who wanted to take over the land where Amina's house was built. Thus, the ‘social use’ of Amina's individual affliction links her to social tensions surrounding uxorilocal residence, undifferentiated inheritance, recent land pressure and the reproduction of the uterine group (women from the same maternal line, their children and husbands). The uterine group is very important in everyday life in Mayotte: due to uxorilocality, it is the fundamental unit of organisation for care and protection, in which women take care of daily tasks, while men finance rituals. After months of rituals and care, when Amina's behaviour deteriorated, the idea of psychiatric hospitalisation was raised and then abandoned. This refusal stemmed, on the one hand, from the conviction shared by her maternal aunts (members of her uterine group) that biomedical treatment would aggravate an affliction caused by spirits (the masera) and, on the other hand, from her husband's fear that hospitalisation would lead to place their children. This fear reflects the mistrust of the state's social and medical institutions, which are perceived as wielding excessive power over families. It underscores the link between psychiatry and state control, seen as a means of regulating behaviour. This ambivalence has its roots in Mayotte's colonial and postcolonial history, where health institutions introduced since the 1980s imposed norms often at odds with local values, leading to the 2001 Mental Health Centre being seen as representing Foucauldian ‘biopolitical’ power that acts on bodies and behaviours. However, in 2024, several years after I met Amina, she was said by her sister to be ‘cured’ but has lost custody of her children, who have been entrusted to their father and paternal grandmother. The intervention of social services demonstrated how they enforced state authority in a conflict between uterine groups, favouring the paternal line despite the local norms which favour the maternal line in such situations. This article concludes by stating that the main obstacles to psychiatric hospitalisation for people suffering from mental disorders in Mayotte are the failure to take into account three phenomena specific to the overseas department of Mayotte. Firstly, local aetiologies, as these mental disorders are frequently attributed to harmful spirits called masera, but also to the evil eye (matso ya peu) or to objects with harmful agentivity (masairi) made by jealous or envious rivals. These people with mental disorders must therefore be protected from contact with people who are not members of their family, conceived as potential rivals. Secondly, the role of the uterine group in the care and protection of these people from potential ill-intentioned rivals. Finally, the fact that medical and psychological practices are part of the biopolitical control exercised by the State in this former colony, which became a French overseas department in 2011. This article concludes by suggesting ways in which these ethnographic observations and anthropological analyses can be applied to adapt psychiatric practices in Mayotte in a concrete and precise way: take into account local aetiological explanations as cumulative explanations rather than competing with psychiatric explanations, allow the uterine group to be involved in care and encourage participation of their members in decision-making
Government formation in the shadow of an uncertain future election
No full textChronic bargaining failure over government formation in parliamentary systems may result in new elections. Even when we do not actually observe new elections, their possibility in the event of bargaining failure is part of the context of government formation. We propose a simple approach to analysing this, using a tractable, elegant and canonical measure of a party's bargaining expectations, its Shapley value. We show that, even if future elections involve only unbiased shocks to parties’ seat shares, such shocks may have different implications for the current expectations of different parties. Simulating effects of unbiased electoral shocks to parties’ bargaining expectations in empirical cases of government formation, we better explain allocations of cabinet portfolios between government parties
Improving regulated information about new cancer drugs
No full textMany new cancer drugs are approved based on limited clinical evidence. To make informed and evidence-based decisions about treatment, clinicians, patients, and the public need comprehensive information about the benefits, risks, and uncertainties of these drugs. Regulatory agencies have a legal requirement to communicate this information. The objective of this thesis was to examine the adequacy of information provision about uncertainties with the clinical evidence supporting new cancer drugs in regulated information sources, and to develop and evaluate strategies to improve the communication of uncertainties. This research focused on cancer drugs because expectations about new cancer drugs are often misaligned with the existing evidence. The first empirical chapter systematically examined regulatory documents and clinical information sources to evaluate whether uncertainties identified by US regulators with new cancer drugs were communicated to clinicians. Less than half of important uncertainties with new cancer drugs were reported in the drug label; an even smaller proportion were reported in journal publications and clinical guidelines. The second and third empirical chapters report the results of randomized survey experiments conducted with nationally representative samples of adults. The second chapter evaluated the effect of using brief statements to communicate common sources of uncertainties with new cancer drugs. There was a marked reduction in participants’ willingness to take a new cancer drug after learning about common uncertainties with the drug’s clinical evidence, with similar reductions in perceived effectiveness and trust. The third chapter evaluated the effect of including a key information section in European patient leaflets on the accuracy of participants’ expectations about a new cancer drug. Providing qualitative and quantitative information about uncertainties associated with the drug’s benefits and harms significantly improved the accuracy of participants’ expectations compared to the standard patient leaflet and the key information section proposed by European regulators. Confirmation of these findings in studies with patients and physicians is needed. This research demonstrates that changes to the provision of regulated information about new cancer drugs are needed and can lead to more informed and evidence-based decisions
Exiting after Brexit: public perceptions of future European Union member state departures
No full textPublic opinion scholarship suggests that Europeans broadly interpret Brexit as a cautionary fable rather than an encouraging blueprint to follow. Yet, Brexit singularly demonstrates the possibility of European disintegration, and is but one of multiple recent crises that have brought the potential for member state departures into focus. Drawing on new survey data from 16 countries and using logistic regressions, this article charts Europeans’ perceptions of the likelihood future EU exits over the next decade. It finds evidence of asymmetric motivated reasoning: Euroscepticism and pro-Brexit views strongly associate with perceiving exits likely, while among Europhiles this association is only ameliorated, not reversed. This reveals two gaps with repercussions for understanding EU public opinion dynamics. First, between Eurosceptic policy elites’ softened policy stances on exit and their supporters’ steadfast sense that further departures remain likely. Second, between Europhiles’ scepticism of Brexit and a residual lack of confidence in EU cohesion
Respectable standards of living: the alternative lens of maintenance costs, Britain 1270-1860
No full textThis paper argues that in all societies there is considerable agreement about what goods and services are needed to provide a decent living, and that this standard can be measured by the expense involved in maintaining people of good standing. Maintenance costs include two components of living costs that are neglected in conventional approaches. First, in contrast to the usual focus on a fixed basket of commodities, maintenance costs capture changes in the composition and quality of the goods required for a respectable lifestyle. Second, unlike conventional accounting, they include the costs of the household services required to turn the basket commodities into livings. Ignored in the conventional methodology, the inclusion of these costs represents a core innovation. More than 4600 observations, drawn mainly from primary sources, trace levels and trends in maintenance costs for Britain from 1270 to 1860. These can be compared with established cost of living indicators to offer a complementary perspective on real consumption that accommodates aspirational goods and the input of household labour. The struggle to support families at respectable standards emerges as driving industriousness and motivating prudence among a class that played a major role in economic development