1,721,010 research outputs found
New spaces for the local welfare state? The case of General Relief in Los Angeles County
No full textThe current 'hollowing out' and devolution of the national welfare state produces new spaces for the local welfare state, theoretically allowing more leeway to dismantle, privatize, further devolve, or even experiment with new local bureaucratic structures. At the same time, national devolution places greater burdens on local resources. Over the past twenty years, a series of theoretical frameworks have been proposed to understand local welfare strategies under these concomitant opportunities and pressures, including street-level bureaucracy, shadow and workfare states. Despite the usefulness of these frameworks, they have rarely been applied to the long-term evolution of specific local programmes. A particularly glaring omission is General Assistance (GA), which constitutes a major component of many local welfare states. To address this gap, we examine the past twenty years of General Relief (GR) policies in Los Angeles County. GR is a locally funded mandatory programme that provides aid of last resort for indigent individuals. In the face of exploding demand and rising expenditures, and unable to directly eliminate the programme, the County employed a variety of strategies designed to ration services and depress demand. In the 1980s, these strategies were articulated through low-level and indirect bureaucratic disentitlements, including quality control and spatial consolidation. By the 1990s, the County took a more direct route, cutting benefits in 1993 and imposing time-limits and workfare in 1997. Despite severe constraints, the evolution of GR strategies in Los Angeles County does suggest the emergence of genuinely new regulatory spaces, including a diminution of outlays, counter-balanced by the increasing micro-management of clients and the materialization of a workfare and even shadow state. At present, the local welfare state in Los Angeles County combines the convolution of Franz Kafka with the misery of Charles Dickens. While our review goes some way in redressing the critical lack of local case studies, there remains a need to investigate instances of new local regulatory spaces, to understand in depth the engagement of various strategies, mechanisms and even resistance. Le deacutemantegravelement courant de l'Etat-providence agrave l'eacutechelle nationale cegravede la place agrave de nouveaux services sociaux agrave l'eacutechelle locale, ouvrant en theacuteorie la voie agrave la privatisation, la reacuteorganisation et l'expeacutermentation de nouvelles structures bureaucratiques. Toutefois, le deacutemantegravelement du systegraveme national impute un plus grand fardeau aux ressources locales. Au cours des vingt derniegraveres anneacutees, plusieurs cadres theacuteoriques ont eacuteteacute proposeacutes afin de comprendre les strateacutegies locales de distribution de services sociaux face agrave ces pressions et opportuniteacutes, incluant les concepts de bureaucracie de rue et 'workfare state.' Malgreacute que ces cadres d'analyse soient utiles, ils ont rarement servi agrave eacutetudier l'eacutevolution agrave long terme de programmes locaux speacutecifiques. Ce manque est particuliegraverement flagrant en ce qui a trait agrave l'Assistance Geacuteneacuterale ('General Assistance', GA) qui constitue un eacuteleacutement majeur de beaucoup de services sociaux locaux. Afin de corriger cette lacune, nous analysons les vingt derniegraveres anneacutees de politiques eacuteconomiques et sociales relieacutees au Secours Geacuteneacuteral ('General Relief', GR) dans le comteacute de Los Angeles. GR est un programme obligatoire distribuant une aide de dernier recours aux personnes sans resource. Face agrave une demande et des coucircts grandissants et pourtant incapable d'eacuteliminer directement le programme, le comteacute mit en pratique une seacuterie de tactiques dans le but de rationner les services et faire baisser la demande. Dans les anneacutees 1980, ces tactiques furent deacuteployeacutees par le biais de droits bureaucratiques, incluant controcircle de la qualiteacute et consolidation spatiale. Degraves les anneacutees 1990 le comteacute adopta des moyens plus directs, coupant les allocations en 1993 et imposant des eacutecheacuteances et programmes de support agrave l'emploi (workfare) en 1997. Malgreacute ces seacutevegraveres contraintes, l'eacutevolution des strateacutegies de secours geacuteneacuteral dans le comteacute de Los Angeles indique l'eacutemergence de nouveaux espaces reacutegulatoires - incluant la diminution des deacutepenses - dont le contrepoids est la preacutesence grandissante de 'micro-geacuterance' des clients et la mateacuterialisation de l'aide agrave l'emploi et de l'ombre eacutetatique. Au moment preacutesent, l'Etat-providence local dans le comteacute de Los Angeles est agrave mi-chemin entre les circonvolutions de Franz Kafka et la misegravere de Charles Dickens. Si notre survol cherche agrave corriger le manque critique d'eacutetudes locales, le besoin demeure preacutesent d'investiguer les exemples de nouveaux espaces reacutegulatoires afin de comprendre agrave fond le chevauchement des diffeacuterentes strateacutegies, meacutecanismes et reacutesistances. La 'excavacioacuten' y la delegacioacuten actuales del estado de bienestar nacional producen nuevos espacios para el estado de bienestar local, lo cual, en teoriacutea, permite el desmontaje, la privatizacioacuten y maacutes delegacioacuten de la burocracia local o hasta la oportunidad de experimentar con nuevas estructuras de burocracia local. Al mismo tiempo, delegacioacuten nacional consume limitados recursos existentes en el aacutembito local. En los uacuteltimos veinte antildeos han sido propuestos una serie de marcos teoreacuteticos para mejor entender las estrateacutegicas de bienestar local implementadas bajo estas oportunidades y presiones concomitantes, incluso la burocracia al nivel de la calle, y los 'workfare states'. A pesar de la utilidad de estos marcos, raras veces han sido aplicados a la evolucioacuten a largo plazo de especiacuteficas programas locales. Una omisioacuten destacable es General Assistance (Asistencia General), lo cual constituye un componente importante de muchos estados de bienestar locales. Con el fin de cerrar esta brecha, examinamos las poliacuteticas de General Relief (GR) (Ayuda General) de los uacuteltimos veinte antildeos en Los Angeles County. GR es un programa mandatario, elaborado con fondos locales y que proporciona ayuda en uacuteltimo caso a individuos indigentes. En vista de la aumentando demanda y los gastos incrementados, y sin la autoridad de eliminar el programa de forma directa, el County empleoacute varias estrateacutegicas con el fin de racionar sus servicios y hacer bajar la demanda. En los antildeos 80, estas estrateacutegicas fueron articuladas por desautorizaciones burocraacuteticas, a bajo nivel e indirectas, y que incluiacutean control de calidad y consolidacioacuten espacial. En los antildeos 90, el County tomoacute una ruta maacutes directa; redujo subsidios en 1993 e impuso liacutemites-temporales y 'workfare' en 1997. A pesar de las severas restricciones, la evolucioacuten de las estrateacutegicas de GR en Los Angeles County sugiere la aparicioacuten de espacios reguladores verdaderamente nuevos, incluso una disminucioacuten de desembolsos, contrapesada con un aumento en el micro-manejo de clientes y la materializacioacuten de un 'workfare' o hasta 'shadow state'. Actualmente, el estado de bienestar en Los Angeles County combina la circunvolucioacuten de Franz Kafka con la miseria de Charles Dickens. Mientras que nuestra criacutetica compensa, hasta cierto punto, la carencia tan grave de estudios de casos locales, todaviacutea hace falta una investigacioacuten de ejemplos de nuevos espacios reguladores locales, para profundizar nuestro conocimiento del empleo de varias estrateacutegicas, mecanismos y hasta resistencia
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From Street Market to Superstore: Retail Modernization and Food Waste in South Korea
Get PDFFood waste is an increasingly pressing issue with adverse environmental, social, and economic impacts related to climate change, water use, land use change, and food security. A better understanding of this phenomenon is required to better shape policies for its reduction and improved management. One trend especially relevant to food waste that remains under-examined is retail modernization, which occurs in concert with urbanization and involves the food retail sector’s transition from traditional and family-owned retailers to corporate-owned retailers, who operate a range of store formats, including hypermarkets, supermarkets, and convenience stores.In this dissertation, I explore and compare the potential for corporate and traditional retailers to exert influence both “downstream” and “upstream” in South Korea’s food supply chain, with varying consequences for food waste. Downstream, I investigate and compare the influence of corporate and traditional food retail formats on South Korean households’ grocery shopping and food-related practices. In particular, I focus on how factors such as grocery shopping trip characteristics like shopping frequency, travel time, and mode choice, in addition to related influences like marketing tactics, product mix, and packaging sizes, affect households’ tendencies to buy too much food, contributing to household food waste. Turning upstream, I then compare the production and distribution networks that serve corporate and traditional retailers, which are differentiated mainly by corporate retailers’ greater vertical integration, access to cold-chain technology, and improved logistics. While these factors may reduce food waste during distribution and retailing, corporate retailers may also employ more stringent quality standards, which may exacerbate food waste by increasing the discards of potentially edible food that does not meet these standards. I developed a mixed-methods research design to assess the above-described effects of retail modernization on food waste. Employing a theoretical framework that primarily draws from practice theory, I collected data on household food waste using a household survey (N=460), food waste diary (N=102), and semi-structured interviews (N=13), which I analyzed using a combination of multivariate regression and bivariate analyses. I evaluated the causes and extent of fresh fruit and vegetable (FFV) food waste from the postharvest to retail stages of the food supply chain using a case study approach built on data from informant interviews and secondary research. In this case study, I trace and compare traditional and corporate retailers’ supply chains for FFV in order to identify the main causes of food waste. Using interview data and existing data on transactions South Korean FFV distribution channels, I also develop a rudimentary model that estimates and compares the quantity of food waste in the South Korean FFV distribution system attributable to traditional and corporate retailers.My findings connected retail modernization to food waste in several ways, while also raising questions for further research. At the household level, there was evidence to suggest from analysis of my survey data that avoidable food waste per person tended to decrease as households’ grocery shopping trips increased in frequency from once a week to every day. The survey data also showed that longer travel times were associated with more avoidable food waste per person. Both longer travel times and less-frequent grocery shopping trips tended to be more closely associated with corporate retail formats, in particular hypermarkets. Analysis of diary data also implicated corporate retailers in contributing to household food waste due to the greater presence of sell-by dates on their food products. At the retail stage, limited access to cold chain and demand forecasting technology meant that traditional retailers discarded more FFV food waste than corporate retailers due to their vulnerability to adverse weather conditions and poorer-than-expected sales. During post-harvest processing, corporate retailers’ food waste was not substantially differentiated from traditional retailers’ because FFV processing and grading is undertaken at facilities common to corporate and traditional retailers’ supply chains.Although my findings indicated that while retail modernization may reduce food waste in the pre-consumer stages of the food supply chain, there was also evidence to indicate that this advantage may be being eroded by its simultaneous contribution to increased household food waste. Policy implications include the need to ensure the continued presence of small-format food retailers while supporting the modernization of their food procurement systems and infrastructure. This should be accompanied by efforts to regulate packaging and marketing promotions as well as continued consumer initiatives that help households buy the right amounts and manage their food more efficiently. Future research should examine more closely the potential interrelationships between food retailing, households’ grocery shopping trip characteristics, and households’ food management practices. It may also be valuable to formally investigate the role that actor diversity in agricultural production and distribution systems helps mitigate pre-consumer food waste by providing more sales channels for lower-quality produce.A limitation to the research is the reliance of the household survey on self-reported household food waste data, although this was mitigated to an extent by asking households’ to quantify their food waste using South Korea’s volume-based food waste pricing system as a frame of reference. The research is also limited by its potential lack of applicability and replicability in other geographic or cultural contexts, which stems from the context-specific nature of food production, distribution, and consumption
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Geopolitical Ecologies: Tracing the Shift From Citizen to User at Tempelhof and the Presidio
Get PDFThis project examines the post-Cold War development of two new public parks at Tempelhof Airfield in Berlin, Germany, and the Presidio Army Base, in San Francisco, California. It situates these two cases against a larger literature on the revival of the public park during the same period, providing an alternative theoretical understanding of public parks linked to technology and geopolitics. This takes form by examining each case across three chapters, the first establishes the development of each site and its role in nation-state formation and urban development in its respective location. The second examines the emergence of post-war urban environmentalism, and the new concepts of nature and citizenship that manifested in the management of the urban environment by organizations like Grün Berlin GmbH, the Golden Gate Parks Conservancy, and the Presidio Trust. Finally, the third chapter examines the impact of these organizations on the production of public park spaces at the Presidio and Tempelhof. Comparing the genealogical development of these spaces sheds light on the political and social processes at work in the contemporary production of public park spaces, as well as the broader reconfiguration of concepts of citizenship and nature
Going Beyond Counting First Authors in Author Co-citation Analysis
Get PDFThe present study examines one of the fundamental aspects of author co-citation analysis (ACA) - the way co-citation
counts are defined. Co-citation counting provides the data on which all subsequent statistical analyses and mappings
are based, and we compare ACA results based on two different types of co-citation counting - the traditional type that
only counts the first one among a cited work's authors on the one hand and a non-traditional type that takes into
account the first 5 authors of a cited work on the other hand. Results indicate that the picture produced through this non-traditional author co-citation counting contains more coherent author groups and is therefore considerably clearer. However, this picture represents fewer specialties in the research field being studied than that produced through the traditional first-author co-citation counting when the same number of top-ranked authors is selected and analyzed. Reasons for these effects are discussed
Variations on the Author
Get PDF“Variations on the Author” discusses two of Eduardo Coutinho’s recent films (Um Dia na Vida, from 2010, and Últimas Conversas, posthumously released in 2015) and their contribution to the general question of documentary authorship. The director’s filmography is characterized by a consistent yet self-effacing form of authorial self-inscription: Coutinho often features as an interviewer that rather than express opinions propels discourses; an interviewer that is good at listening. This mode of self-inscription characterizes him as an author who is not expressive but who is nonetheless markedly present on the screen. In Um Dia na Vida, however, Coutinho is completely absent form the image, while Últimas Conversas, on the contrary, includes a confessional prologue that moves the director from the margins to the center of his films. This article examines the ways in which these works stand out in the filmography of a director who offers new insights into the notion of cinematic authorship
Appropriate Similarity Measures for Author Cocitation Analysis
Get PDFWe provide a number of new insights into the methodological discussion about author cocitation analysis. We first argue that the use of the Pearson correlation for measuring the similarity between authors’ cocitation profiles is not very satisfactory. We then discuss what kind of similarity measures may be used as an alternative to the Pearson correlation. We consider three similarity measures in particular. One is the well-known cosine. The other two similarity measures have not been used before in the bibliometric literature. Finally, we show by means of an example that our findings have a high practical relevance.information science;Pearson correlation;cosine;similarity measure;author cocitation analysis
Dispelling the Myths Behind First-author Citation Counts
Get PDFWe conducted a full-scale evaluative citation analysis study of scholars in the XML research field to explore just how different from each other author rankings resulting from different citation counting methods actually are, and to demonstrate the capability of emerging data and tools on the Web in supporting more realistic citation counting methods. Our results contest some common arguments for the continued
use of first-author citation counts in the evaluation of scholars, such as high correlations between author rankings by first-author citation counts and other citation
counting methods, and high costs of using more realistic citation counting methods that are not well-supported by the ISI databases. It is argued that increasingly available digital full text research papers make it possible for citation analysis studies to go beyond what the ISI databases have directly supported and to employ more
sophisticated methods
koamabayili/VECTRON-author-checklist: VECTRON author checklist
No full textWe have done our best to complete the author checklist relating to the use of animals in the hut study. Note that the objective for the hut study was to evaluate the IRS treatment applications for residual efficacy against Anopheles mosquitoes, including the local An. coluzzii mosquito population. Cows were only used to attract mosquitoes into the huts and no tests were carried out directly on the cows. The author checklist is intended for use with studies where experiments are carried out on animals, which is why we have had such difficulty in completing this for the hut study, as many of the questions do not relate to how the cows were used
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