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Towards a phenomenological approach: making sense of personal space in shared housing
Get PDFThe phenomenon of personal space has been marginalised in the social sciences and predominantly studied through neuroscientific and psychological lenses. This framing has rendered an oversimplistic account of personal space that fails to adequately capture how personal space is sensed, experienced and practiced in everyday life. In endeavouring to make a sociological intervention in the extant literature on personal space, this study argues for a phenomenological approach to make sense of the lived experience of personal space in shared housing. This builds upon scholarship on the sociology of personal life in order to provide important insight into what is sociological about personal space, and what people’s lived accounts of personal space may say about shared housing more generally. Here, while shared housing is used as a context for a fuller sociological account of personal space, the phenomenon of personal space is equally used as a vehicle for attending to the more elusive aspects of house-sharing that characterise this unique living experience. The research adopts a multi-method approach to explore how fifteen participants, who reside in a diverse range of shared living arrangements in the UK, narrate their experience. This includes home tour videos, semistructured interviews and home visits that together yield rich data on the complex relationship between the body and the shared home environment. The theoretical stance rests on the assumption that embodied practices are productive of a sense of personal space. The analytical task is therefore primarily concerned with exploring how the social, material, spatial and temporal orderings of shared households – and the embodied and tacit knowledges that these orderings require – shape the scope of personal space making at the individual level. This approach elucidates the entanglement of different elusive aspects of the phenomenon. The discussion concludes that a sense of personal space is not only bodily informed and relationally shaped, but also bound up with notions of power, control and ownership. As an ongoing, developmental and contingent process, practices of personal space making require work. While everyday meanings of personal space are underpinned by biological and neuroscientific definitions, lived experiences of personal space encompass a broad range of normative and ethical dimensions, and therefore challenge these tropes
A street called hope: urban masculinities and place-making in Benin’s age of revelation
No full textThis thesis analyses urban place-making in Benin through the lens of one street in AbomeyCalavi: Rue de l’Espoir. Taking the street as a starting place, I analyse the intertwining of the urban periphery of Abomey-Calavi with the practices of urban masculinities in Calavi and Benin. Drawing on ethnographic and archival data collected over 12 months in Benin, the thesis explains the processes by which urban place is produced in relation to social status, gender, ethnicity, and language observed around Rue de l’Espoir. It draws on the area’s rich linguistic landscape—especially Fon, Mahi and Bariba—to personify space, and to suggest that the urban in Abomey-Calavi is generated through “spatial awakening”. Spatial awakening reveals Calavi as a royal, colonial, postcolonial, and economic periphery. In relation to Rue de l’Espoir, two types of masculinities are analysed: one represented by a group of card players on the street, the other by Benin’s political elite. The first form of urban masculinity comes to fruition and contributes to place-making through convivial practices, despite the socio-economic diversity of its actors. While some card players are motivated by leisure, others are driven by the lived economic vulnerability they experience and refer to as garikobu sariru – meaning “not having anything to do”. This term not only captures the players’ condition but also resonates with the broader struggle of residents hustling to make ends meet in a local and global socioeconomic environment shaped by governmental policies. The second form is epitomized by Benin’s political elite in their implementation of the Bénin Révélé (BR) programme. Even if BR policies aim to address certain local aspirations, they root the country in a racialized development logic designed to meet Western development criteria, often at the expense of the lived realities of the majority. This observation leads me to conclude that the card players, through their practices, are more reflective of and connected to the Beninese population than the country’s political elite. This analysis contributes to a better understanding of place-making in urban Africa. It situates geographies like Abomey-Calavi within conversations on place-making in which linguistic elements are central to analysis. Likewise, this thesis contributes to our understanding of the urban condition in postcolonial countries more drawn toward Western-inspired development goals. It places the convivial logic of a place of leisure in dialogue with the transactions of the political elite. Both groups—predominantly male—demonstrate that urban space in African contexts is shaped by conviviality, but also by domination and power
Global public reason: too thick or too thin
No full textMost significant policy issues facing humanity reach across national borders. Consequential political decisions with cross-national effects are frequently made by states, non-state organisations, and corporations. Under these circumstances, it is widely acknowledged that it is important to conduct deliberation at the global level. Below this shallow agreement, however, lies deep disagreement about a crucial question: how, if at all, is it morally permissible for deliberation to result in a set of international laws and rules that are imposed on a world population which is deeply pluralistic in its moral and political attitudes? When the equivalent question is asked within the confines of a political community, one prominent answer is by reference to a standard of public reason. While there is a large literature about public reason at the domestic level, the literature on global public reason is comparatively underdeveloped. The paper addresses this lacuna in two ways. First, it motivates the global public reason project, and conceptualises the nature of the challenge that accounts of global public reason face. Second, it demonstrates that, by their own evaluative standards, existing accounts of global public reason are unable to satisfy both desiderata simultaneously, being either too ‘thick’ or too ‘thin’
Regularity of the minmax value and equilibria in multiplayer Blackwell games
No full textA real-valued function φ that is defined over all Borel sets of a topological space is regular if for every Borel set W, φ(W) is the supremum of φ(C), over all closed sets C that are contained in W, and the infimum of φ(O), over all open sets O that contain W. We study Blackwell games with finitely many players. We show that when each player has a countable set of actions and the objective of a certain player is represented by a Borel winning set, that player’s minmax value is regular. We then use the regularity of the minmax value to establish the existence of ε-equilibria in two distinct classes of Blackwell games. One is the class of n-player Blackwell games where each player has a finite action space and an analytic winning set, and the sum of the minmax values over the players exceeds n − 1. The other class is that of Blackwell games with bounded upper semi-analytic payoff functions, history-independent finite action spaces, and history-independent minmax values. For the latter class, we obtain a characterization of the set of equilibrium payoffs
Inclusive innovation in cities: from buzzword to policy
No full text‘Inclusive innovation’ has become an increasingly important subnational policy agenda. This paper reviews this agenda, critiques its current usage and presents a new framework for how the concept can be applied by city government. Efforts to shape the direction, improve participation in and share the benefits of innovation should be an important part of place-based innovation policy. Yet, inclusive innovation strategies face three related problems: neophilia, a tendency for technological fixes and the lack of local powers. The paper concludes with a framework for how the concept could be used by policymakers to link innovation with better distributional outcomes
The limits of lordly production: the management of working horses on the Manor of Barnhorn, 1325-1494
Get PDFThis aim of this paper is to examine how a single English demesne (the personal farm of a seigniorial lord, as opposed to the land of their peasant tenants) managed its stock of working horses over a period of almost 170 years. It leverages the exceptionally rich body of surviving manorial accounts from the Battle Abbey manor of Barnhorn to look very closely, not only at how the demesne managed its horses, but how it operated within the context of the larger Battle Abbey estate
Realizing expectations? High-impact entrepreneurship across countries
No full textComparative international entrepreneurship research has often used measures of high-growth expectations entrepreneurship to proxy for the construct of high-impact entrepreneurship. We revisit this practice by assessing the cross-country association between high-growth expectations and realized high-impact entrepreneurship to speak to construct measurement fit. We find that expectations are not a good proxy for realizations; they are associated with different determinants and outcomes, respectively. We go on to introduce the notion of entrepreneurial projection bias to gauge the misfit between expectations and realizations. Conditioning on entrepreneurial projection bias partially restores the association between realized high-impact entrepreneurship and its determinants (or outcomes) when realizations are proxied using expectations. Furthermore, we show that opportunity-motivated entrepreneurship also does not proxy well for high-impact entrepreneurship. Our analysis brings into question current survey-based approaches to measuring high-impact entrepreneurship and existing rankings of countries’ entrepreneurial performance, with important implications for entrepreneurship theory and policy
Pairwise stochastic approximation for confirmatory factor analysis of categorical data
No full textPairwise likelihood is a limited-information method widely used to estimate latent variable models, including factor analysis of categorical data. It can often avoid evaluating high-dimensional integrals and, thus, is computationally more efficient than relying on the full likelihood. Despite its computational advantage, the pairwise likelihood approach can still be demanding for large-scale problems that involve many observed variables. We tackle this challenge by employing an approximation of the pairwise likelihood estimator, which is derived from an optimization procedure relying on stochastic gradients. The stochastic gradients are constructed by subsampling the pairwise log-likelihood contributions, for which the subsampling scheme controls the per-iteration computational complexity. The stochastic estimator is shown to be asymptotically equivalent to the pairwise likelihood one. However, finite-sample performance can be improved by compounding the sampling variability of the data with the uncertainty introduced by the subsampling scheme. We demonstrate the performance of the proposed method using simulation studies and two real data applications
Prudential net zero transition plans: the potential of a new regulatory instrument
No full textNet zero transition plans are a promising additional instrument for prudential supervisors to assess, address and bring distant financial risks into the present. To date, transition plans have primarily emerged as non-financial disclosure requirement and as such, their prudential application has been limited. In this article, we discuss the role that transition plans can play as a new regulatory tool in banking supervision. The article outlines steps towards incorporating transition plans into prudential policy, thereby enabling supervisors to effectively use transition plans as a forward-looking instrument to better manage and overcome some of the challenges associated with climate transition risks
A meta-evaluative synthesis of the effects of custodial and community-based offender rehabilitation
No full textWe synthesize 53 meta-analyses on the effectiveness of correctional treatment applied to a wide variety of offender groups delivered in either custodial or community-based settings. Those meta-analyses revealed positive overall effects on reoffending of correctional treatment delivered in both settings. However, the treatment setting is also associated with complex moderator effects. With respect to effect size, for most groups, community-based correctional treatment is associated with statistically significant larger reductions in reoffending than treatments delivered in custodial settings. With respect to effect precision, custodial treatments report more consistent effects on reoffending than community-based treatments. The findings extend and develop the insight that treatment flexibility, such as is found among community-based treatments, can optimize program effectiveness. Likewise, the opportunities for monitoring and treatment fidelity that custodial settings enable can homogenize outcomes. Nonetheless, the promising results observed among treatments delivered both inside and outside institutional settings implicate a complex policy tradeoff between prioritizing strong performance and consistent effects