‘Dominant ethnicity’ and the ‘ethnic-civic’ dichotomy in the work of A. D. Smith

This article considers the way in which the work of Anthony Smith has helped to structure debates surrounding the role of ethnicity in present-day nations. Two major lines of enquiry are evident here. First, the contemporary role of dominant ethnic groups within 'their' nations and second, the interplay between ethnic and civic elements in nationalist argument. The two processes are related, but maintain elements of distinctiveness. Smith's major contribution to the dominant ethnicity debate has been to disembed ethnicity from the ideologically-charged and/or anglo-centric discourse of ethnic relations and to place it in historical context, thereby opening up space for dominant group ethnicity to be considered as a distinct phenomenon. This said, Smith's work does not adequately account for the vicissitudes of dominant ethnicity in the contemporary West. Building on the classical works of Hans Kohn and Friedrich Meinecke, Anthony Smith has also made a seminal contribution to the debate on civic and ethnic forms of national identity and nationalist ideology. As well as freeing this debate from the strong normative overtones which it has often carried, he has continued to insist that the terms civic and ethnic should be treated as an ideal-typical distinction rather than a scheme of classification

Brokering justice: global indigenous rights and struggles over hydropower in Nepal

This article explores the dynamics of brokerage at the intersection between the justice conceptions enshrined in global norms and the notions of justice asserted in specific socio-environmental struggles. Using the case of a small hydropower project in Nepal, we trace the attempts of an indigenous activist to enrol villagers in his campaign against the background of villagers’ everyday negotiations with the hydropower company. The study shows how global norms, such as indigenous peoples’ rights, may fail to gain traction on the ground or even become sources of injustice in particular contexts

What factors influence training opportunities for older workers? Three factorial surveys exploring the attitudes of HR professionals

The core research questions addressed in this paper are: what factors influence HR professionals in deciding whether to approve training proposals for older workers? What kind of training are they more likely to recommend for older employees and in which organizational contexts? We administered three factorial surveys to 66 HR professionals in Italy. Participants made specific training decisions based on profiles of hypothetical older workers. Multilevel analyses indicated that access to training decreases strongly with age, while highly-skilled older employees with low absenteeism rates are more likely to enjoy training opportunities. In addition, older workers displaying positive performance are more likely to receive training than older workers who perform poorly, suggesting that training late in working life may serve as a reward for good performance rather than as a means of enhancing productivity. The older the HR professional evaluating training proposals, the higher the probability that older workers will be recommended for training. keywords: training; older workers; HR professionals; factorial survey; multilevel model

Schools and civil society : corporate or community governance

School improvement depends upon mediating the cultural conditions of learning as young people journey between their parochial worlds and the public world of cosmopolitan society. Governing bodies have a crucial role in including or diminishing the representation of different cultural traditions and in enabling or frustrating the expression of voice and deliberation of differences whose resolution is central to the mediation of and responsiveness to learning needs. A recent study of governing bodies in England and Wales argues that the trend to corporatising school governance will diminish the capacity of schools to learn how they can understand cultural traditions and accommodate them in their curricula and teaching strategies. A democratic, stakeholder model remains crucial to the effective practice of governing schools. By deliberating and reconciling social and cultural differences, governance constitutes the practices for mediating particular and cosmopolitan worlds and thus the conditions for engaging young people in their learning, as well as in the preparation for citizenship in civil society

Apprenticeship Training in Germany – Investment or Productivity Driven?

The German dual apprenticeship system came under pressure in recent years because enterprises were not willing to offer a sufficient number of apprenticeship positions. A frequently made argument is that the gap could be closed if more firms would be willing to incur net costs during the training period. This paper investigates for the first time whether German enterprises on average indeed incur net costs during the apprenticeship period, i.e. if the impact of an increase in the share of apprentices on contemporary profits is negative. The paper uses the representative linked employer-employee panel data of the IAB (LIAB) and takes into account possible endogeneity of training intensity and unobserved heterogeneity in the profit estimation by employing panel system GMM methods. An increase in the share of apprentices has no effect on profits. This can be interpreted as a first indication that most establishments in Germany do not invest more in apprentices than their productivity effects during the apprenticeship period

Differentiation and displacement: Unpicking the relationship between accounts of illness and social structure

This article seeks to unpack the relationship between social structure and accounts of illness. Taking dentine hypersensitivity as an example, this article explores the perspective that accounts of illness are sense-making processes that draw on a readily available pool of meaning. This pool of meaning is composed of a series of distinctions that make available a range of different lines of communication and action about such conditions. Such lines of communication are condensed and preserved over time and are often formed around a concept and its counter concept. The study of such processes is referred to as semantic analysis and involves drawing on the tools and techniques of conceptual history. This article goes on to explore how the semantics of dentine hypersensitivity developed. It illustrates how processes of social differentiation led to the concept being separated from the more dominant concept of dentine sensitivity and how it was medicalised, scientised and economised. In short, this study seeks to present the story of how society has developed a specific language for communicating about sensitivity and hypersensitivity in teeth. In doing so, it proposes that accounts of dentine hypersensitivity draw on lines of communication that society has preserved over time

Cornish identities and migration: a multi-scalar approach

The definitive version is available at www.blackwell-synergy.com. 24 month embargo by the publisher. Article will be released July 2009.In this article we argue that theories of transnationalism have value in exploring the historical context of migration and that historical contexts help to shape such theoretical conceptualizations. Historians of migration have now begun to engage more directly with the literature of transnationalism, focusing on the networks that linked settler and home communities. Here we add to this by examining a nineteenth-century migrant community from a British region through the lens of transnationalism, applying the concept to the case of the Cornish, whose economic specialization produced culturally distinct Cornish communities on the mining frontiers of North America, Australia and South Africa. In doing so, we bring together the issues of scale and time. We review the multiple levels of the Cornish transnational space of the late nineteenth century, which exhibited aspects of both core transnationalism and translocalism. This waned, but in the later twentieth century, a renewed interest in a transnational Cornish identity re-emerged, articulating with changing identity claims in Cornwall itself. To capture better the experience of the Cornish over these two very different phases of transnationalism we identify another subset of transnationalism - that of transregionalism.Leverhulme Trus

Beliefs in national continuity are related to essentialist thinking and to perceptions of the nation as a family

National narratives serve to foster a sense of collective continuity-the perception that the nation has preserved its traits, values and goals across many generations. The present study explores some of the correlates of such perceptions of collective continuity (PCC). We predicted that people who see their nation as more continuous would tend to think about social groups in more strongly essentialist terms and to feel personally attached to other group members (a phenomenon known as identity fusion). An international sample of 307 respondents (predominantly from the United States and India) completed measures of PCC, social essentialism, identity fusion and national identification. Both hypotheses were supported at the level of the level of the full sample, suggesting that perceived national continuity is related to a general cognitive predisposition for essen-tialist thinking and also to one's sense of personal attachment to the nation. However, exploratory analyses by nationality revealed that the results could not be replicated with the Indian participants, potentially as a result of cultural factors. Identity fusion was also more strongly correlated to cultural/essentialist continuity than to historical continuity. Interpretations and directions for future research are discussed