Re-conceptualising VET: responses to covid-19

The paper addresses the impact of Covid-19 on vocational education and training, seeking to discern the outline of possible directions for its future development within the debates about VET responses to the pandemic. The discussion is set in its socio-economic context, considering debates that engage with the social relations of care and neo-liberalism. The paper analyses discourses that have developed around VET across the world during the pandemic, illustrating both possible continuities and ruptures that may emerge in this field, as the health crisis becomes overshadowed in public policy by the prioritisation of economic recovery and social restoration. The paper concludes that, alongside the possibility of a narrowing of VET to its most prosaic aims and practices, the health crisis could also lead to a re-conceptualisation that develops its radical and emancipatory possibilities in both the global south and north.N/

Neoliberalism and the revival of agricultural cooperatives: The case of the coffee sector in Uganda

Agricultural cooperatives have seen a comeback in sub‐Saharan Africa. After the collapse of many weakly performing monopolist organizations during the 1980s and 1990s, strengthened cooperatives have emerged since the 2000s. Scholarly knowledge about the state–cooperative relations in which this “revival” takes place remains poor. Based on new evidence from Uganda's coffee sector, this paper discusses the political economy of Africa's cooperative revival. The authors argue that donors' and African governments' renewed support is framed in largely apolitical terms, which obscures the contested political and economic nature of the revival. In the context of neoliberal restructuring processes, state and non‐state institutional support to democratic economic organizations with substantial redistributional agendas remains insufficient. The political–economic context in Uganda—and potentially elsewhere in Africa—contributes to poor terms of trade for agricultural cooperatives while maintaining significant state control over some cooperative activities to protect the status quo interests of big capital and state elites. These conditions are unlikely to produce a conflict‐free, substantial, and sustained revival of cooperatives, which the new promoters of cooperatives suggest is under way

Necessity entrepreneurship and industry choice in new firm creation

Research Summary Research on necessity entrepreneurship has generated important insights, yet it views necessity entrepreneurs in developed countries as one encompassing group of unemployed individuals-ignoring that the level of need is not uniform but instead increases with time spent in unemployment. We begin to unpack the role of unemployment duration in necessity entrepreneurship by asking how it affects one of the most fundamental decisions in start-ups: "what business should I be in?" Analyzing primary data on 576 necessity entrepreneurs combined with three secondary data sets, we find that unemployment duration affects whether ventures are launched in "home" or in external industries, and moderates the extent to which founders' industry experience and the attractiveness of external opportunities relative to those in the "home" industry shape industry choice. Managerial Summary Necessity entrepreneurs-individuals who create new firms because they have no other options for work-represent a substantial proportion of world-wide entrepreneurial activity, and, in developed countries, often come from the ranks of the unemployed. We analyze these entrepreneurs by answering the question "what business should I be in?," a fundamental strategic decision that founders make. Our findings reveal that duration in unemployment is a key, hitherto unexamined factor that systematically affects the industry-choice decision in startups. Moreover, we find that duration of unemployment moderates the founder's industry experience and the attractiveness of external opportunities relative to those in the "home" industry, with a markedly different picture for the long-term unemployed-suggesting the need for customized government policies for formerly unemployed entrepreneurs

Contesting ethical trade in Colombia's cut-flower industry: a case of cultural and economic injustice

Based on a case study of Colombia's cut-flower industry, this article draws strategically on Nancy Fraser's model of (in) justice to explore the mutual entwinement of culture and economy. It examines responses by cut-flower employers and their representatives to ethical trade discourses demanding economic justice for Colombia's largely female cut-flower workers. It argues that employers' misrecognition of both ethical trade campaigners and cut-flower workers may serve to deny and redefine claims of maldistribution. Through a 'home-grown' code of conduct, employers also seek to appropriate ethical trade in their own interests. Finally, a gender coding of worker misrecognition ostensibly displaces workers' problems from the economic realm to the cultural, offering the 'modernity' of full capitalist relations as the solution. In further examining the 'responses to the responses' by workers and their advocates, the contestation of ethical trade is highlighted and its prospects assessed