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Labour, protest and the Tishreen uprising: popular politics in Iraq after Saddam
No full textBased on interviews and fieldwork between 2022-2025, this thesis is about anti-sectarian popular struggles in Iraq from the US-led invasion of 2003 to the Tishreen Uprising of 2019. The thesis shows how nearly two decades of labour mobilization and popular protest set the stage for the largest popular uprising since the fall of Saddam which sought to overturn the corrupt ethno-sectarian regime established under foreign occupation. Using a Gramscian framework, it argues that popular struggles culminating with Tishreen did not achieve their aims due in part to their organizational fragmentation and ideological underdevelopment
Gold attraction: an ethnography of gold valuation from the UK to Colombia
No full textDrawing on 20 months of ethnographic fieldwork among bureaucrats, technocrats, and entrepreneurs working on a mineral traceability project in Colombia and financiers and consultants working on projects of responsible gold sourcing in London, Switzerland, and Paris, this dissertation examines the practices and narratives involved in making gold—and people along its valuation chain—attractive for investment. The valuation of gold is profoundly paradoxical. In financial markets, gold is valuable for being a risk-free asset. Gold bullion stored in banks is used to hedge the risk of investment portfolios and preserve wealth in times of economic crisis. But gold is not risk-free; in fact, it creates risks for racialised ASM miners and wider communities subjected to the intense resource extraction necessary to sustain the gold market. Therefore, for gold to become a valuable financial asset that literally enables the accumulation of capital and wealth, it needs to be physically and morally purified from the ‘dirtiness’ of its extraction. This thesis is an ethnographic exploration of how the value of gold is purified, stabilised and sustained through advertisement campaigns, training courses, market reforms, responsible sourcing standards, narratives around transparency, sustainability and development, certification schemes, traceability initiatives and sovereignty aspirations. I argue that the creation of gold’s financialised value is the result of the labour of attraction of actors along a racially hierarchised valuation chain. Actors may have different motivations to do this work, yet their labour of attraction is arguably always intended to make gold more morally pure. Gold attraction is underpinned by a racialisation of gold desire that was born in the colonial encounter—the desire of the wealthy to accumulate gold is celebrated while the desire of miners to extract the mineral is condemned. The research primarily draws on anthropological work on the connection between financial markets and resource extraction, and on critical analyses of the material consequences of financial practices in exacerbating racial and geographical inequalities. This thesis proposes shifting the focus away from resource extraction to develop a new framework for analysing resource attraction, contributing to a broader understanding of how material substances are transformed into resources with financial value
Fake online shops rely on tech skills: what drives Cameroon’s web developers to assist online fraudsters
No full textCoping with crises in (post-)developmental urbanization: the case study of Songdo International City, South Korea
No full textThis chapter examines the underlying political economy of megaproject promotion during times of post-crisis recovery, using the case study of Songdo International City in Incheon, South Korea. This large-scale urban development project, built on reclaimed land, is widely acclaimed as Korea’s first foreign-led urban development project. However, Songdo should be understood as a conjunctural space where various domestic and foreign actors have interacted to pursue their material goals throughout different historical contexts. In particular, the two economic crises that hit Korea in 1997 and 2008 were significant impetuses that led to shifts in the dynamics among different scalar actors. By investigating the consequences of these two crises on the development of Songdo, this chapter aims to show how various multiscalar urbanization actors engaged in the urban megaproject and how their dynamics shifted over time. In doing so, this chapter illustrates how speculative interests at different scales became dominant in the development process of Songdo International City
Business forms and business performance in UK manufacturing 1871–81
No full textWe explore which business forms were predominant in the later Victorian economy and why some forms were more effective among large British manufacturing firms during this period. With a dataset of 483 manufacturing firms in 1881 that either employed at least 1000 or had done so a decade earlier, we find that the great majority were partnerships. Public corporations attained higher capital–labour ratios and stronger employment growth than other business forms. The separation of ownership from control was most effective where it was most thoroughly practised, as by public, in contrast to private, corporations. Engineers were frequently encountered in all business forms and associated with expanding employment. But the large public manufacturing corporations employed almost twice the proportion of engineers and professionals in top management as other enterprises. Family firms, proxied by heirs, were present in management of three-quarters of partnerships but in only one-third of public corporations. Heirs reduced the employment growth of the firm, whereas engineers boosted it. Lords, mayors, and landed wealth in management were also associated with faster employment growth of enterprises
Neoliberalism and the global migrant crisis: a world-ecology perspective
No full textWhat is the nexus between capitalism, agroecological change, and geopolitical conflicts, and how has it historically affected global migratory movements? In answering this question, the present article employs the method of incorporated comparison and world-ecology theory based on the cases of Latin America, specifically Mexico, Venezuela, and Central American countries, and the Broader Middle East, with a particular emphasis on Syria and Afghanistan. A comparative study of these geopolitical hotspots reveals how the US-led cycles of capitalist world-ecology resulted in a global migrant crisis driven by a combination of factors, including neoliberal economic policies, imperialist interventions, narco-colonialism, and extractive capitalism
Best practices for implementing electronic care records in adult social care: rapid scoping review
No full textBackground In the past decade, the use of digital or electronic records in social care has risen worldwide, capturing key information for service delivery. The COVID-19 pandemic accelerated digitization in health and social care. For example, the UK government created a fund specifically for adult social care provider organizations to adopt digital social care records. These developments offer valuable learning opportunities for implementing digital care records in adult social care settings. Objective This rapid scoping review aimed to understand what is known about the implementation of digital care records in adult social care and how implementation varies across use cases, settings, and broader contexts. Methods A scoping review methodology was used, with amendments made to enable a rapid review. Comprehensive searches based on the concepts of digital care records, social care, and interoperability were conducted across the MEDLINE, EmCare, Web of Science Core Collection, HMIC Health Management Information Consortium, Social Policy and Practice, and Social Services Abstracts databases. Studies published between 2018 and 2023 in English were included. One reviewer screened titles and abstracts, while 2 reviewers extracted data. Thematic analysis mapped findings against the nonadoption, abandonment, scale-up, spread, and sustainability (NASSS) framework. Results Our search identified 2499 references. After screening titles and abstracts, 71 records were selected for full-text review, resulting in 31 references from 29 studies. Studies originated from 11 countries, including 1 multicountry study, with the United Kingdom being the most represented (10/29, 34%). Studies were most often conducted in nursing homes or facilities (7/29, 24%) with older people as the target population (6/29, 21%). Health records were the most investigated record type (12/29, 41%). We identified 45 facilitators and 102 barriers to digital care record implementation across 28 studies, spanning 6 of the 7 NASSS framework domains and aligning with 5 overarching themes that require greater active management regarding implementation. Intended or actual implementation outcomes were reported in 17 (59%) of the 29 studies. Conclusions The findings suggest that implementation is complex due to a lack of consensus on what digital care records and expected outcomes and impacts should look like. The literature often lacks clear definitions and robust study designs. To be successful, implementation should consider complexity, while studies should use robust frameworks and mixed methods or quantitative designs where appropriate. Future research should define the target population, gather data on carer or service user experiences, and focus on digital care records specifically used in social care
Organizational governance and trade-offs between pay and subjective employee well-being: a comparative analysis
No full textThe incompleteness of labour contracts is expected to cause uncertainty among forward-looking employees as to whether implicit contracts with greater intrinsic rewards in lieu of pay will be breached by employers, thus reducing employee well-being. David Marsden theorized that an organization's form of governance can serve as a stable, easy-to-observe signal of the likelihood of a breach, and thus employees across governance types will exhibit different extrinsic–intrinsic trade-offs. Using the European Working Conditions Survey, we extend Marsden's theory and find supportive evidence across 35 European countries and 9 governance categories. We also extend Marsden's theorizing into the comparative domain and analyse patterns of subjective well-being, compensatory pay and organizational governance across varieties of political economies
The multi-level politics of countering democratic backsliding: state of the art and new research directions
No full textAfter more than a decade of inaction or, at best, using soft instruments, the EU has become more assertive against democratic backsliding in member states. This special issue adopts a multi-level perspective to tackle the new research avenues that arise from this change in EU policy. Its contributions investigate two broad questions: first, the causes of this policy change, and second, its potential domestic impact in the backsliding countries. Focused on the EU level, a first set of articles revisits and refines existing accounts of EU inaction in order to explain the EU’s recent turn towards greater assertiveness. A second set of contributions concentrates mainly on the domestic level to explore the potential impact of the EU’s efforts to counter democratic backsliding in the member states that are the targets of EU actions. This introduction identifies the main themes of this new research agenda, provides an overview of the individual contributions to the special issue and their main insights, and sketches avenues for further research on countering democratic backsliding in the EU
Rethinking the ‘wellness influencer’ medical doctors, lifestyle expertise and the question of credentials
No full textMedical doctors are central to existing networks for wellness content on Instagram in and beyond the UK, yet remain overlooked within scholarship concerned with this terrain. Taking a case study approach, this article examines three such figures prominent in the UK context. In doing so, it challenges existing conceptualisations of the ‘wellness influencer’ and argues for an expanded understanding of the category, one that does not assume its representatives are ‘lay’ persons without recognised expertise in health and well-being. The analysis developed demonstrates that credentials cannot resolve the problems associated to wellness influencing as a genre and, as such, the entry of medical doctors to the ranks of social media celebrity may not be the ‘fix’ it is often imagined to be. Ultimately, I argue that medically qualified wellness influencers extend doctors’ role in the ‘regulation of lifestyle’, and make the case for attending to their ideological operations