Oldest Papers
The Politics of Food and Women's Neighborhood Activism in First World War Britain
Karen Hunt
International Labor and Working-Class History·2010·10 citations
<jats:title>Abstract</jats:title><jats:p>In 1917 and 1918 violent cost-of-living protests, largely peopled by poor urban housewives, erupted across the world. Although Britain did not experience such dramatic events, a women's politics of food can be found in local neighborhoods that touched the lives of unorganized housewives on the wartime home front. The new local committees created to defend consumer interests in the face of food shortages proved to be permeable to some women, particularly those who already had some experience with women's politics. However, limits were placed on this participation and on the self-organization of housewives by the ambiguous understanding of who constituted a consumer and thus who could speak for the ordinary housewife as she battled the food queues. By exploring the women's politics of food at a local level, it is argued that working-class women's participation in Food Vigilance Committees or in local boycotts may have had longer lasting effects in Britain than the more dramatic cost-of-living actions elsewhere.</jats:p>
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View paper →'door bitches of club feminism'?: Academia and feminist competency
Zora Simic
Feminist Review·2010
'Feminist competency' is a nascent term that has been identified in three general critiques of contemporary feminism that emerged in the course of research for The Great Feminist Denial (2008), a book on feminist debates in Australia that I co-authored with Monica Dux. The first critique highlights the importance of feminist knowledge, typically generated through the academy, to feminist identification. The second posits a perceived lack of feminist competency as an obstacle to feminist affiliation. The third assessment insists that spokespeople for feminism should be sufficiently competent. Using these responses to feminism as a starting point, combined with a reflection on my own framing as an academic feminist in the public sphere, I make a case for the potential value of 'feminist competency' as a means to assess the impact of academic feminism, in Australia and elsewhere.
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View paper →A Framework for Cross-Country Comparisons of Public Infrastructure Constraints on Firm Growth
Seabright, Paul, Schaffer, Mark, Carlin, Wendy
ideas.repec.org·2010
Downloadable (with restrictions)! How should a policy-maker prioritize interventions to improve the public infrastructure with which firms operate and how large are the benefits from doing so likely to be? To address these questions we use survey data on the obstacles arising from poor quality public inputs that managers face in running their firms. Our conceptual framework centres on the public input character of physical infrastructure and institutions, and uses an O-ring production function to model the impact of poor quality infrastructure on output. Using survey data from over 72,000 firms in 95 countries, we verify the consistency of the within- and cross-country variation in reported constraints with predictions of the model. We use the framework to construct estimates of the impact on output and productivity of improvements in the quality of public inputs and how these differ between rich and poor countries. We show how a policy-maker can use the country-level data and the benchmarks estimated from the cross-country data to prioritize public infrastructure investment in their country. Our results indicate that priorities vary widely among countries and suggest a degree of caution about donor policies tying development assistance to generic improvements in the business environment. The results also suggest that the benefits arising directly from such improvements are likely to be modest relative to the scale of impact implied by aggregate-level studies of the role of institutions in economic development.
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