scholarly journals Fashion in Bolivia’s cultural economy

2019 ◽  
Vol 22 (2) ◽  
pp. 213-228 ◽  
Author(s):  
Kate Maclean

This article explores the development of Chola Paceña fashions in La Paz, Bolivia. It traces the social and political lineage of the distinctive pollera dress, and its role in traditions that continue to underpin Aymaran social networks and economies, while it is simultaneously becoming a symbol of their consumer power. Bolivian gross domestic product (GDP) has tripled since 2006, and this wealth has accumulated in the vast urban informal markets which are dominated by people of indigenous and mestizo descent. It is predictable that such a rise in consumption power should enable a burgeoning fashion industry. However, the femininities represented by the designs, the models and the designers place in sharp relief gendered and racialized constructions of value, and how the relationship between tradition, culture and economy has been configured in scholarly work on creative labour, which has been predominantly based on the experience of post-industrial cities in the global North.

2011 ◽  
Vol 3 (1) ◽  
pp. 55-70 ◽  
Author(s):  
Marie Riegels Melchior

This article discusses the mobilization of the nation for fashion, based on how the relationship between fashion and nation unfolds in the case of fashion design practice and the fashion industry in Denmark. The otherwise globalized fashion industry is equally involved in what I term “catwalking the nation,” both as a way to construct a cosmopolitan nationalist discourse for the post-industrial nation and as a strategy for local fashion industries to promote collective identity in order to strengthen potential market share, which is the focus of this article. What may at first appear in the Danish case as an absurd and non-productive relationship is actually significant, I would argue, despite its complexity. It has the potential to stimulate critical fashion design practice and give fashion designers a voice, allowing them to take an active part in contemporary public debates on important issues such as nationalism and cosmopolitanism in the age of globalization.


2020 ◽  
pp. 003802612092246
Author(s):  
Steven Roberts ◽  
Alan France

Scholars using the concept of ‘social generation’ are committed to understanding the relationship between social change and social inequality. However, in this article we raise a variety of concerns about the empirical and theoretical foundations of the social generation approach. Complementing and advancing critical scholarship on social change, our concern is to advocate for a theoretically robust sociology of youth that can properly tackle questions pertaining to contemporary intergenerational relations and tensions, and issues of power and inequality. We argue that, in relation to social generation approaches, (1) the concept of generational habitus is incoherent and moreover, redundant given the triple historicization already built into Bourdieu’s conceptual apparatus; (2) the notion of generational units cannot attend to inequality and, indeed, is absent, and potentially unworkable, in the research by its main advocates; and (3) that the idea of ‘global generation’ relies too heavily on research from the Global North and, thus, is at odds with the experience of the majority of the world’s youth population located in the Global South.


2021 ◽  
pp. 102452942110443
Author(s):  
Alexis Moraitis

The post-2008 era saw a return of the manufacturing fetish, the idea that manufacturing constitutes the flywheel of growth without which no nation can thrive. Across the Global North and South, voices are calling to reverse deindustrialization and revive manufacturing. While today deindustrialization is met with anxiety, in the 1930s economists predicted deindustrialization but interpreted it as a liberating process leading to a post-industrial age based on material abundance and widespread economic security. Far from delivering this vision, deindustrialization actually produces a precarious economic order driven by labour precarity, economic stagnation and lost development opportunities for the Global South. What can be termed the Baumolian and Kaldorian frameworks, attribute this precarious reality to services’ inability to replace manufacturing as a growth engine given their technologically stagnant nature. However, this article argues that, by focusing on the technical aspects of service economies, such views overlook the social limits of the capitalist economy and its historically specific conception of wealth, value. As capitalism matures, productivity becomes an increasingly inadequate form of augmenting social wealth as it results in great increases in physical output but counterintuitively undermines the expansion of value. Capitalism is underpinned by a secular movement towards declining dynamism, as it increasingly struggles to maintain its former economic vigour. Stagnation and heightened labour precarity are not merely the product of tertiarization but symptoms of capitalism’s declining trajectory.


2017 ◽  
Vol 5 (2) ◽  
pp. 241-249 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jacob J. Bustad ◽  
David L. Andrews

In this article, we explore the relationship between public recreation policy and planning and the transformation of urban governance in the context of the Police Athletic League centers in Baltimore, Maryland. In light of contemporary discussions of the role of youth programs for sport and physical activity within post-industrial cities, the origination, development, and eventual demise of Baltimore’s network of Police Activity League centers is an instructive, if disheartening, saga. It illustrates the social and political rationales mobilized in justifying recreation policy and programming, the framing of sport and physical activity as preventative measures towards crime and juvenile delinquency, and the precarity of such initiatives given the efficiency-driven orthodoxies of neoliberal urban entrepreneurialism (Harvey, 1989). This analysis emphasizes how the PAL centers were designed to ‘fill the void’ left by a declining system of public recreation, thereby providing an example of a recreation program as part of the “social problems industry” (Pitter & Andrews 1997).


2016 ◽  
Vol 5 (1) ◽  
pp. 32-43
Author(s):  
Emma Callon

This article analyzes several characteristics of two of Canada’s Temporary Foreign Worker Programs (TFWPs): The Seasonal Agricultural Worker Program (SAWP) and the Live-in Caregiver Program (LCP). First, I consider the social and economic contexts in which these programs have emerged. Second, I discuss how these programs maintain racial and gendered hierarchies. Third, I problematize the relationship TFWPs have with citizenship status, as well as critique TFWPs as a long-term solution to Canadian labour shortages. Last, I discuss the potential benefits of these TFWPs and suggest alternatives and potential improvements to the programs. Using a Marxist framework, this analysis situates Canada’s TFWPs within the broader political economy and argues that global capitalism and the state interact to serve the people and economies of the Global North at the expense of migrant workers from the Global South. Cet article examine deux programmes des travailleurs étrangers temporaires (PTET) du Canada: le Programme des travailleurs agricoles saisonniers (PTAS) et le Programme concernant les aides familiaux résidants (PAFR). Cet essai examine plusieurs aspects des PTET. Premièrement, je tiens compte du contexte social et économique dans lequel ces programmes sont apparus. Deuxièmement, j’explique comment ces programmes maintiennent une hiérarchie basée sur la race et le sexe. Troisièmement, je pose le problème des relations entre les PTET et le statut de citoyen, et je formule également une critique du PTET comme solution à long terme à la pénurie de main-d’œuvre canadienne. Enfin, je discute des avantages potentiels de ces PTET et propose des solutions de rechange et des façons d’améliorer les programmes. À l’aide d’un cadre d’analyse marxiste, les PTET du Canada sont évalués globalement dans le contexte de l’économie politique et il est proposé que le capitalisme mondial et l’État interagissent au service des citoyens et des économies de l’hémisphère nord, au détriment des travailleurs migrants en provenance de l’hémisphère sud.


Author(s):  
Ruha Benjamin

In this response to Terence Keel and John Hartigan’s debate over the social construction of race, I aim to push the discussion beyond the terrain of epistemology and ideology to examine the contested value of racial science in a broader political economy. I build upon Keel’s concern that even science motivated by progressive aims may reproduce racist thinking and Hartigan’s proposition that a critique of racial science cannot rest on the beliefs and intentions of scientists. In examining the value of racial-ethnic classifications in pharmacogenomics and precision medicine, I propose that analysts should attend to the relationship between prophets of racial science (those who produce forecasts about inherent group differences) and profits of racial science (the material-semiotic benefits of such forecasts). Throughout, I draw upon the idiom of speculation—as a narrative, predictive, and financial practice—to explain how the fiction of race is made factual, again and again. 


Author(s):  
Solomon A. Keelson ◽  
Thomas Cudjoe ◽  
Manteaw Joy Tenkoran

The present study investigates diffusion and adoption of corruption and factors that influence the rate of adoption of corruption in Ghana. In the current study, the diffusion and adoption of corruption and the factors that influence the speed with which corruption spreads in society is examined within Ghana as a developing economy. Data from public sector workers in Ghana are used to conduct the study. Our findings based on the results from One Sample T-Test suggest that corruption is perceived to be high in Ghana and diffusion and adoption of corruption has witnessed appreciative increases. Social and institutional factors seem to have a larger influence on the rate of corruption adoption than other factors. These findings indicate the need for theoretical underpinning in policy formulation to face corruption by incorporating the relationship between the social values and institutional failure, as represented by the rate of corruption adoption in developing economies.


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