Conceptualizing Economic Marginalization

Food Security and Poverty, International Development,

What are communities of practice? A comparative review of four seminal works

This paper is a comparative review of four seminal works on communities of practice. It is argued that the ambiguities of the terms community and practice are a source of the concept's reusability allowing it to be reappropriated for different purposes, academic and practical. However, it is potentially confusing that the works differ so markedly in their conceptualizations of community, learning, power and change, diversity and informality. The three earlier works are underpinned by a common epistemological view, but Lave and Wenger's 1991 short monograph is often read as primarily about the socialization of newcomers into knowledge by a form of apprenticeship, while the focus in Brown and Duguid's article of the same year is, in contrast, on improvising new knowledge in an interstitial group that forms in resistance to management. Wenger's 1998 book treats communities of practice as the informal relations and understandings that develop in mutual engagement on an appropriated joint enterprise, but his focus is the impact on individual identity. The applicability of the concept to the heavily individualized and tightly managed work of the twenty-first century is questionable. The most recent work by Wenger – this time with McDermott and Snyder as coauthors – marks a distinct shift towards a managerialist stance. The proposition that managers should foster informal horizontal groups across organizational boundaries is in fact a fundamental redefinition of the concept. However it does identify a plausible, if limited, knowledge management (KM) tool. This paper discusses different interpretations of the idea of 'co-ordinating' communities of practice as a management ideology of empowerment

A Formal Model for Trust in Dynamic Networks

We propose a formal model of trust informed by the Global Computing scenario and focusing on the aspects of trust formation, evolution, and propagation. The model is based on a novel notion of trust structures which, building on concepts from trust management and domain theory, feature at the same time a trust and an information partial order

Building Arts Organizations That Build Audiences: A Wallace Foundation Conference

Summarizes a June 2011 Wallace-sponsored conference of arts groups, marketing experts, and researchers that explored ways to build arts audiences: what works, what doesn't, and how to sustain success, including encouraging organization-wide learning

Analyzing Legal Formality and Informality: Lessons From Land-Titling and Microfinance Programs

Despite the fact that China has experienced incredible growth, there is a great deal of pressure on it to adopt a more formal legal framework—particularly with respect to economic matters. Chicago School law and economics—emphasizing the importance of formal law for development, particularly for protecting private property and the enforcing of contracts—has been influential in this discourse.2 This book has argued, however, that Chicago-style law and economics makes assumptions about the economy, as well as what the law is and how it functions, that are far from trivial and mostly untrue. Kennedy and Stiglitz in their introduction to this volume, as well as Chapters 1, 4, and 5, highlight some of these limitations and analyze their implications. Here, we focus on one particular aspect of this legal tradition: the Chicago School underestimates the difficulty of fully articulating a set of rules, as well as the role that social norms play in the legal process. As we will show, property rights are fundamentally affected by norms of use, and contracts are never complete. We will focus on four central questions. First, how does the de Soto scheme perform? In particular, as the most recent vintage of high-profile formal law reform projects, does it overcome the chronic problems faced by its predecessors—legal transplants that fail to “take root” in the developing world? Second, how does the more informal, community-based Grameen model perform, especially in relative terms? Third, how do these two models relate to the Chinese experience? Fourth, how can the relationship between law and norms be characterized, and what insights do these two experiments have for our understanding of this relationship? To what extent should we view formal law and informal norms as substitutes or complements? The central task of the chapter will be to draw insights from the comparison of formal and informal means to achieve a common developmental goal—in this case, access to credit—for systems of regulation in general. The chapter is divided into four parts. The first frames the discussion, while the following section compares the two alternative models of institutional evolution—the Yunus and de Soto programs—in terms of their efficiency and equity impacts and analyzes them in static and dynamic terms. The third section examines how the two models relate to the Chinese experience and the fourth section concludes

Discourses of ‘equivalence’ in HE and notions of student engagement : resisting the neoliberal university

Copyright © 2014 Nadia Edmond and Jon Berry. This is an open access journal article distributed under the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits the unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly citedThere is no shortage of analysis of marketization and the theorizing of the student as consumer/customer and how this impacts on notions of student engagement. This compelling - but largely academic - analysis forms the starting point for any investigation into the possibilities for resistance to the current hegemonic view of education and learning as commodities. An example of this is the discourse of 'equivalence' in education arising from the converting of experience into academic currency linked to employability. An adjunct to the commodification and marketization of education is the growing role of academic credit awarded for work experience in HE in which work becomes part of commodified learning valued in terms of its exchange value in academia and ultimately employment. The discourse of equivalence conflates parity of this exchange value with parity of use value of the learning and serves to obfuscate the distinctiveness of learning and student engagement in different contexts and the inherent contradictions therein, yet it is these contradictions which could create scope and spaces for resistance. Against the background of academic understanding of marketization/neo-liberal hegemony, the authors suggest that the very notion of ‘student engagement’ becomes problematic and argue for wider, societal discussion of concepts of ‘engagement’ and ‘resistance’ in the academyPeer reviewe

TEACHING INDONESIAN AS A DIGLOSSIC LANGUAGE: THE IMPORTANCE OF COLLOQUIAL INDONESIAN FOR PRAGMATIC COMPETENCE

The teaching of Indonesian at home and abroad for native and non-native speakers emphasizes the importance of formal Indonesian and tends to avoid teaching the colloquial one. However, most learners understand the discrepancies between the language they learn in class and that used for daily local conversations which tend to be colloquial. This paper attempts to argue that colloquial Indonesian is an important part of the diglossic nature of Indonesian, and that the teaching and learning of Indonesian must reflect this characteristic. Based on library research as well as collection of interviews, observations and recordings of the teaching of formal Indonesian as well as the learners and native speakers’ interaction, this paper will describe importance of the teaching of informal or colloquial Indonesian for enhancing pragmatic competence and its benefits for preserving endangered local languages. The data presented will show that colloquial Indonesian which absorbs various linguistic features from local languages constitutes a type of language with its rules systems that can be taught, learned, and maintained. Finally this paper will suggest ways of integrating the teaching of colloquial Indonesian in Indonesian language classes

Civil Procedure in Cross-cultural Dialogue: Eurasia Context

Reviewed book: Civil Procedure in Cross-cultural Dialogue: Eurasia Context: IAPL World Conference on Civil Procedure, September 18–21, 2012, Moscow, Russia (Dmitry Maleshin, ed.) (Statut 2012), available at (accessed March 9, 2014) [hereinafter Civil Procedure in Cross-cultural Dialogue: Eurasia Context]

Performance and …

In titling our chapter 'Performance and...' our intention is not to privilege performance studies over theatre studies or drama but rather to call to attention the longstanding proposition that performance (studies) 'resists or rejects definition' (Schechner, Richard, 1998, 'What Is 'Performance Studies' Anyway?' in: P. Phelan and J. Lane (eds.), The Ends of Performance, NYU Press, p. 360) and as such highlight the potential it holds for interdisciplinary scholarship and the way in which the idea of performance has been conceived fluidly and expansively, both key concerns of all the volumes reviewed here. We are, we hope, at a point in the development of performance and theatre studies where there is an understanding, acceptance and exploration of the mutually constructive and beneficial interweaving of these two 'traditions' of scholarship within the broader field of drama. In the books we look at, both 'theatre' and 'performance' are brought to bear on the matters at hand almost interchangeably, with established text-based dramas taking their place alongside works in the performance art tradition to further arguments pertaining to a variety of disciplines. Such plurality of approach is a defining feature of the works we have chosen to discuss and binds them to a common purpose: the exploration of drama/theatre/performance in, with and between other disciplines and discourses in the pursuit of illuminating the world around us in more meaningful ways