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Embodied acting, belonging and gender inequalities in service work
No full textThis article proposes the concept of ‘embodied acting’ to understand workers’ transformations of their appearances (clothes, makeup) and related behaviours (English speaking, eating out, dating) to create belonging in new service work in Global South contexts characterised by continuing social inequalities amid rapid socio-economic change. The concepts aesthetic labour, emotion work and acting at work, theorised from the Global North, do not account for the aspirational and contested nature of these transformations. Through ethnographic research with young women and men in Delhi, India, the article highlights the role of peer disciplining in translating embodied acting into belonging. While men have patriarchal peer support to realise body rules of service work, women’s embodied acting is intensely scrutinised, rendered hyper visible and delegitimised. This peer disciplining reproduces gender inequalities, negatively impacting women’s belonging at work. Through ethnographic insights into service work in the Global South, the article advances global sociologies of work
‘Levelling up’ access to private tutoring in England: problem representation in government policy
No full textGovernments across the world have responded in different ways, and with different types of policy reforms, to the phenomenon of rising private spending on supplementary tutoring. Underlying such differences are diverse discourses surrounding the tutoring industry, giving rise to differing constructions of problems that expanding tutoring may create. In this paper, I draw on Bacchi’s ‘What’s the Problem Represented to be’ framework to scrutinise how private tutoring has been problematised in government policy in England – most recently in the country’s National Tutoring Programme. Analysing policy documents and parliamentary discussions, I show that policy in England has since 2020 presented mass private tutoring as being a positive and desirable phenomenon – the only salient ‘problem’ being that some require greater access to this tutoring. I locate such a position in historical and comparative context, tracing its roots while also arguing that it normalises further and legitimises the practice of mass privately paid-for tutoring, with likely significant implications for children, families and schools. The paper contributes to an emerging body of literature on the way that governments worldwide are reacting to and engaging with the growth of ‘shadow education’
Not as bad as I thought’ economic attitudes and motivated reasoning in coalition governments
No full textTwo prominent mechanisms have been advanced to explain the effects of election outcomes on economic attitudes/perceptions: partisan competence attribution, based on voters' genuine belief of an elected party's competence; and partisan motivated reasoning, where voters change their economic attitudes so as to remain consistent with their past behavior/view. To date, these two mechanisms have not been considered jointly. We draw on a unique, closely spaced, panel dataset around the 2013 German general elections to consider retrospective (past evaluations) and prospective (future expectations) attitudes about both one's personal economic situation and that of the national economy. We find no evidence for competence attribution; voters of the future coalition parties do not expect higher household incomes nor their job situation to improve. We find changes in retrospective attitudes about the national economy, explained by partisan motivated reasoning given a political alliance that was negated and depreciated throughout the pre‐election period. We discuss the implications these results have
Why regional spending does not affect support for the European Union
No full textIt is usually assumed that spending by the European Union translates into greater support for the EU among those who benefit from that spending. Empirical work has, however, produced mixed findings as to the association between the EU’s regional development spending and EU support. To better test this relationship, we link a unique dataset on EU spending in Wales at a hyper-local level to survey panel data that measures EU support at, and in the years following, the Brexit referendum. Using this novel data, we find no evidence of an association between spending and various measures of EU support. We demonstrate that this is, at least partially, due to the fact that very few people know of spending in their local area, and that this knowledge is itself only weakly related to amounts of spending. We further show that views of spending are largely driven by perceptual biases rather than actual spending. Our findings contribute to our understanding of the drivers of EU support, but also the effect of public spending on attitudes more generally
Building engaged humanities infrastructure: an experiment in intra-institutional collaboration
No full textEqual before luck? Well-being consequences of personal deprivation and transition
No full textPast trauma resulting from personal life shocks, especially during periods of particular volatility such as regime transition (or regime change), can give rise to significant long-lasting effects on people’s health and well-being. We study this question by drawing on longitudinal and retrospective data to examine the effect of past exposure to major individual-level shocks (specifically hunger, persecution, dispossession, and exceptional stress) on current measures of an individual’s health and mental well-being. We examine the effect of the timing of the personal shocks, alongside the additional effect of ‘institutional uncertainty’ resulting from regime change in post-communist European countries. Our findings are as follows. First, we document evidence of the detrimental effects of shocks on a series of relevant health and well-being outcomes. Second, we show evidence of more pronounced detrimental consequences of such personal shocks experienced by individuals living in formerly communist countries (which accrue to about 8% and 10% in the case of persecution and hunger, respectively) than in non-communist countries. The effects are robust and take place in addition to the direct effects of regime change and exposure to personal shocks
Import liberalization as export destruction? Evidence from the United States
No full textIn trade models with scale economies import liberalization reduces exports within industries by shrinking real market potential. We find that this export destruction mechanism reduced US export growth following the permanent normalization of trade relations with China (PNTR). There was also an offsetting boost to exports from lower input costs. We use our estimates to calibrate a quantitative model and show that scale economies are economically important for trade policy analysis. Although PNTR increased aggregate US exports relative to GDP, exports declined in the most exposed industries. US gains from PNTR are positive, but 30 percent smaller than under constant returns
Mobile technology and political behaviour in Africa
No full textIn recent decades, mobile technology has become widespread across Sub-Saharan Africa. Mobile phones provide material benefits, but also shape how people learn about the economy, are targeted by political parties, and are taxed by the state. Through three interrelated chapters, I examine these multifaceted political consequences of Africa’s “mobile revolution”. Each chapter focuses on a distinct type of technology, and a particular mechanism by which it shapes political outcomes, drawing on a range of cross-national data and fieldwork in Ghana and Malawi. Chapter one asks how basic mobile phones shape the availability of political information. I show that rural voters across Africa use mobile phones to regularly call relatives living in towns and cities. This rising domestic connectivity leads to the diffusion of new information from urban centres, leading to a fall in rural political trust and the urban-rural divides that structure politics in many African states. Chapter two turns to mobile internet and the quality of elections. Focusing on a controversial election in Malawi, I show that 3G coverage reduces ruling party vote share and election irregularities. I then build on fieldwork to explore mechanisms, finding that opposition groups use social media to campaign, online platforms expanded the reach of civic education groups, and election workers used WhatsApp to coordinate on polling day. Chapter three focuses on mobile payment platforms and recent moves by governments to tax them. These taxes are a substantive source of domestic revenue for low-capacity states, but have been difficult to implement due to public backlash. Using a conjoint choice experiment in Malawi, I examine how these taxes could be designed to attract greater support. The results stress the importance of earmarking revenues for local services and providing exemptions to protect the poorest citizens
Replication Data for: The Train Wrecks of Modernization: Railway Construction and Separatist Mobilization in Europe
No full textMaterials necessary to replicate the figures, tables and supplementary materials of the article