Unpacking Africa as a dynamic continent: Insights from contemporary development issues in Ghana

2020 ◽  
Vol 9 (1) ◽  
pp. 1-8
Author(s):  
Martin Oteng-Ababio
Keyword(s):  
Social Sciences ◽  
Structural Adjustment ◽  
Test Tube ◽  
Colonial Rule ◽  
African Continent ◽  
Special Issue ◽  
Developmental Issues ◽  
Contemporary Development ◽  
Development Trajectories ◽  
Fundamental Shift

Since the last formal vestiges of colonial rule disappeared in 1994, the democratically elected governments on the African continent have been experimenting with developmental strategies and policies. These experiments come at the backdrop that Africa’s output per head is notoriously among the lowest in the world and has, on the average, expanded slowly and haltingly since 1960, albeit, with some critical changes, and variations over place, space and time. The structural adjustment programme (SAP) in the 1980s, for example, marked a watershed: a fundamental shift from administrative to market means of resource allocation. This opinion piece, appearing in this Special Issue of the Oguaa Journal of Social Sciences on the theme “Developmental issues in contemporary Ghana”, provides an overview of Africa’s development trajectories as presented by the collection of articles, using Ghana as a test-tube.

Unpacking Africa as a dynamic continent: insights from contemporary development issues in Ghana

2020 ◽  
Vol 9 (1) ◽  
pp. 1-8
Author(s):  
Martin Oteng-Ababio
Keyword(s):  
Social Sciences ◽  
Structural Adjustment ◽  
Test Tube ◽  
Colonial Rule ◽  
African Continent ◽  
Special Issue ◽  
Developmental Issues ◽  
Contemporary Development ◽  
Development Trajectories ◽  
Fundamental Shift

Since the last formal vestiges of colonial rule disappeared in 1994, the democratically elected governments on the African continent have been experimenting with developmental strategies and policies. These experiments come at the backdrop that Africa’s output per head is notoriously among the lowest in the world and has, on the average, expanded slowly and haltingly since 1960, albeit, with some critical changes, and variations over place, space and time. The structural adjustment programme (SAP) in the 1980s, for example, marked a watershed: a fundamental shift from administrative to market means of resource allocation. This opinion piece, appearing in this Special Issue of the Oguaa Journal of Social Sciences on the theme “Developmental issues in contemporary Ghana”, provides an overview of Africa’s development trajectories as presented by the collection of articles, using Ghana as a test-tube.

scholarly journals Critical Qualitative Inquiry in China Studies: Introduction to the Special Issue

2021 ◽  
pp. 107780042110146
Author(s):  
Ping-Chun Hsiung
Keyword(s):  
Social Sciences ◽  
Hong Kong ◽  
Knowledge Production ◽  
Critical Reflection ◽  
Qualitative Inquiry ◽  
Special Issue ◽  
Global Community ◽  
Disciplinary Boundaries ◽  
China Studies

This Special Issue aims to advance critical qualitative inquiry in China studies and contribute to a vibrant, inclusive global community. It builds upon debates and efforts in the behavioral and social sciences among area specialists in two eras: researchers in Taiwan, Hong Kong, and the diaspora in the 1980s who sought to sinologize behavioral and social sciences, and sociologists in China in the 2000s who are seeking to indigenize these fields. The Issue takes a two-pronged approach toward advancing critical reflection in knowledge production: (a) it aspires to diminish the current influence of Western and positivistic paradigms on behavioral and social sciences research; (b) it seeks to challenge discursive hegemonic influences to create and sustain space for critical qualitative inquiry. The Issue traverses disciplinary boundaries between history and behavioral and social sciences within China Studies. It opens dialogue with the non-area specialists who are the primary audience of the Qualitative Inquiry.

scholarly journals Literary Anthropology

2016 ◽  
Vol 25 (1) ◽  
pp. 1-8 ◽  
Author(s):  
Máiréad Nic Craith ◽  
Laurent Sebastian Fournier
Keyword(s):  
Social Sciences ◽  
Popular Culture ◽  
Literary Studies ◽  
Special Issue ◽  
The Social ◽  
Cultural Performances ◽  
Textual Strategies

This special issue on anthropology and literature invited proposals for original contributions focusing on relationships between anthropology and literature. We were especially interested in the following questions: what role does literature play in anthropology? Can literature be considered as ethnography? What are the relationships between anthropology and literature, past and present? Are anthropology and anthropological motives used in literature? We also looked for critical readings of writers as anthropologists and critical readings of anthropologists as writers. Moreover, we wanted to assess the influence of literature on the invention of traditions, rituals and cultural performances. All these different questions and topics are clearly connected with the study of literacy, illiteracy and popular culture. They also lead to questions regarding potential textual strategies for ethnography and the possibilities of bringing together the field of anthropology (more associated with the social sciences) and literary studies (traditionally part of the humanities).

scholarly journals Organizing in the Anthropocene

Organization ◽  
2018 ◽  
Vol 25 (4) ◽  
pp. 455-471 ◽  
Author(s):  
Christopher Wright ◽  
Daniel Nyberg ◽  
Lauren Rickards ◽  
James Freund
Keyword(s):  
Social Sciences ◽  
Climate Change ◽  
Exponential Growth ◽  
Life Support ◽  
Earth System ◽  
Special Issue ◽  
Human Relations ◽  
Crucial Issue ◽  
The Earth ◽  
Introductory Article

The functioning of the biosphere and the Earth as a whole is being radically disrupted due to human activities, evident in climate change, toxic pollution and mass species extinction. Financialization and exponential growth in production, consumption and population now threaten our planet’s life-support systems. These profound changes have led Earth System scientists to argue we have now entered a new geological epoch – the Anthropocene. In this introductory article to the Special Issue, we first set out the origins of the Anthropocene and some of the key debates around this concept within the physical and social sciences. We then explore five key organizing narratives that inform current economic, technological, political and cultural understandings of the Anthropocene and link these to the contributions in this Special Issue. We argue that the Anthropocene is the crucial issue for organizational scholars to engage with in order to not only understand on-going anthropogenic problems but also help create alternative forms of organizing based on realistic Earth–human relations.

Introduction to the Special Issue on ‘Charisma’

2019 ◽  
Vol 12 (2) ◽  
pp. 99-114
Author(s):  
Maren Freudenberg ◽  
Tim Weitzel
Keyword(s):  
Social Sciences ◽  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Sociology Of Religion ◽  
Special Issue ◽  
Theoretical Approaches ◽  
The Social ◽  
Conceptual Debate ◽  
The Individual

The introduction to the special issue on ‘charisma’ offers a very brief overview of the development of the concept in the social sciences and various critiques and intersecting debates. It casts a close look at Max Weber’s sometimes contradictory use of the concept and the different ways he conceptualized it in his sociology of religion and his sociology of domination. It then examines alternative theoretical approaches to ‘charisma’ that emerge in the course of the twentieth century before outlining this special issue’s contribution to the conceptual debate and the individual articles’ operationalization of the term by viewing charisma as relational, communicative, procedural, as well as related to ideas, practices, and objects.

scholarly journals The Embeddedness of Social Sciences and Economics in Research on Resources

Resources ◽  
2020 ◽  
Vol 9 (2) ◽  
pp. 15
Author(s):  
Juan Uribe-Toril ◽  
José Luis Ruiz-Real ◽  
Jaime de Pablo Valenciano
Keyword(s):  
Social Sciences ◽  
State Of The Art ◽  
Local Development ◽  
The State ◽  
Special Issue ◽  
Continuous Review ◽  
The Past ◽  
Research Fields ◽  
Wide Range ◽  
Knowledge Area

Sustainability, local development, and ecology are keywords that cover a wide range of research fields in both experimental and social sciences. The transversal nature of this knowledge area creates synergies but also divergences, making a continuous review of the existing literature necessary in order to facilitate research. There has been an increasing number of articles that have analyzed trends in the literature and the state-of-the-art in many subjects. In this Special Issue of Resources, the most prestigious researchers analyzed the past and future of Social Sciences in Resources from an economic, social, and environmental perspective.

scholarly journals Erfahrung und Erwartung – eine vernachlässigte wirtschaftshistorische Perspektive?

2018 ◽  
Vol 59 (2) ◽  
pp. 329-341
Author(s):  
Mark Jakob ◽  
Alexander Nützenadel ◽  
Jochen Streb
Keyword(s):  
Social Sciences ◽  
Rational Expectations ◽  
State Of The Art ◽  
Special Issue ◽  
Historical Events ◽  
Main Hypothesis ◽  
Expectation Formation ◽  
Economic Behaviour ◽  
Complex Process ◽  
Economic Expectations

Abstract The DFG Priority Programme “Experience and Expectation – Historical Foundations of Economic Behaviour” explores how economic actors form their expectations under certain historical conditions. This project’s main hypothesis is that the formation of economic expectations is a complex process that cannot be explained solely by simple concepts such as adaptive or rational expectations, and is shaped by historical events and experience. In this introduction, we review the state of the art of modelling expectation formation in social sciences and history and preview the main findings of the articles published in this special issue.

An African Balance Sheet

Worldview ◽  
1980 ◽  
Vol 23 (10) ◽  
pp. 7-10
Author(s):  
Ross K. Baker
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Saudi Arabia ◽  
Civil War ◽  
Balance Sheet ◽  
The United States ◽  
Colonial Rule ◽  
African Continent ◽  
Regional Power

It hardly seems possible that two decades have elapsed since the floodtide of African independence. We have become so accustomed to associating Africa with newness that we are apt to forget that the premier states of independent Africa—Ghana and Sudan—are coming up on their twenty-fifth anniversaries of freedom from colonial rule. The scant score of years has seen some remarkable transformations. Nigeria, whose first decade was blighted by Africa's bloodiest civil war, has emerged not merely as a regional power but a major world actor. Second only to Saudi Arabia as a supplier of oil to the United States, Nigeria is able to exert a degree of influence on this country unequaled among the states of the African continent.

scholarly journals Still Minding the Gap? Reflecting on Transitions between Concepts of Information in Varied Domains

Information ◽  
2020 ◽  
Vol 11 (2) ◽  
pp. 71 ◽  
Author(s):  
David Bawden ◽  
Lyn Robinson
Keyword(s):  
Social Sciences ◽  
Biological Sciences ◽  
Information Science ◽  
Boundary Spanning ◽  
Library And Information Science ◽  
Special Issue ◽  
Unified Theories ◽  
Complementary Nature ◽  
Conceptual Paper ◽  
Multiple Meanings

This conceptual paper, a contribution to the tenth anniversary Special Issue of Information, gives a cross-disciplinary review of general and unified theories of information. A selective literature review is used to update a 2013 article on bridging the gaps between conceptions of information in different domains, including material from the physical and biological sciences, from the humanities and social sciences including library and information science, and from philosophy. A variety of approaches and theories are reviewed, including those of Brenner, Brier, Burgin and Wu, Capurro, Cárdenas-García and Ireland, Hidalgo, Hofkirchner, Kolchinsky and Wolpert, Floridi, Mingers and Standing, Popper, and Stonier. The gaps between disciplinary views of information remain, although there has been progress, and increasing interest, in bridging them. The solution is likely to be either a general theory of sufficient flexibility to cope with multiple meanings of information, or multiple and distinct theories for different domains, but with a complementary nature, and ideally boundary spanning concepts.

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