Church networks, peacebuilding and women’s participation in Eastern DRC and the Great Lakes Region – a mapping study

This report (i) map the religious civil society networks, (ii) assess their role in local and regional peace processes and (iii) address the organisation of women and the promotion of issues of women, peace and security within these networks. The focus in this report is on the linkages between provincial centres and churches at village level in the vast rural areas of the Kivus where civilians continue to suffer from war crimes. The legitimacy of the church in peacebuilding at local and national levels hinges on the assumption that (i) the church leadership has a mandate based in their constituency on the ground, and that (ii) church coordinating structures in the province or at the national level have the capacity to coordinate church activities at lower levels of the church hierarchy.publishedVersio

Organizing capacities and union priorities in the hotel sector in Oslo, Dublin, and Toronto

In this article, we draw international comparisons between industrial relations regimes in the hotel sector and compare relevant trade union experiences in the selected metropolitan areas of Oslo, Dublin, and Toronto. We ask how union strategies differ in these different hotel markets, and how strategic choices at a local level relate to industrial relations models, regulatory change, and corporate restructuring in the hotel market. The study is based on interviews with union representatives and key informants in Norway, Ireland, and Canada. The main argument we make is that the reorientation of union priorities and the willingness to engage in innovative strategies that has characterized hotel unionism in Toronto and Dublin is not detectable in the case of Oslo. This might be a result of the relatively strong position Norwegian trade unions have in national industrial relations, but can at the same time leave local hotel unions vulnerable as they are facing low unionization levels and corporate restructuring which they are unable to tackle effectively

The politics of knowledge: Knowledge management in informal settlement upgrading in Cape Town

t In situ solutions, participatory practices and the inclusion of community knowledge have become key ingredients in urban upgrading policies across the world. Knowledge, however, is not neutral, but value-laden, representing different and conflicting interests. Including community-based knowledge, therefore, is far from straightforward. To understand the politics of urban development interventions, a deeper conceptualisation of the relationship between knowledge and power is required. This article tries to contribute to this conceptualisation through an empirical analysis of informal settlement upgrading. Specifically, it interrogates the role of community knowledge in urban development through a study of two informal settlements in Cape Town. Findings from this qualitative research contradict the notion of a unified community whose ‘community knowledge’ can be engaged with. In both settlements, knowledge politics have resulted in tensions within the settlement, creating new interest groups and knowledge alliances, showing the complex interconnectedness of knowledge, power and mobilisation

Poverty and Inequality in Middle Income Countries: Policy Achievements, Political Obstacles

This collection offers a timely reassessment of viable ways of addressing poverty across the globe today. The profile of global poverty has changed dramatically over the past decade, and around three-quarters of the poor now live in middle income countries, making inequality a major issue. This requires us to fundamentally rethink anti-poverty strategies and policies, as many aspects of the established framework for poverty reduction are no longer effective. Featuring contributions from Latin America, Africa and Asia, this much-needed collection answers some of the key questions arising as development policy confronts the challenges of poverty and inequality on the global, national and local scale in both urban and rural contexts. Providing poverty researchers and practitioners with valuable new tools to address new forms of poverty in the right way, Poverty and Inequality in Middle Income Countries shows how a radical switch from aid to redistribution-based social policies is needed to combat new forms of global poverty.Comparative Research Programme on Poverty (CROP) at the University of BergenpublishedVersio

Hotel workplaces in Oslo and Akershus

Last ned gratis This working paper presents an overview of hotel workplaces in the Oslo/Akershus region of Norway, with regards to their main characteristics. In addition, a brief discussion of work and business strategies in the hotel sector in Norway is included. The paper is based on preliminary analysis in preparation of a large-scale survey and qualitative case studies of hotel workplaces in Oslo and Akershus. Tilknyttet prosjekt Industrial relations under global stres

The Practice of Neoliberalism

This thesis examines the politics of municipal work and service delivery in Cape Town, South Africa. In particular, this study analyses the concomitant processes of employment casualisation, commercialisation of services and depoliticisation of industrial relasations. The research conducted has focused on how different groups of workers have been affected by these neoliberal public sector reforms and, importantly, how they have responded as organised labour. This report is David Christoffer Lier's thesis submitted to The University of Manchester for the degree of Doctorate of Philosophy

Claiming industrial citizenship: The struggle for domestic worker rights in Indonesia

The author argues that recent attempts to build a domestic workers’ movement in Indonesia can be understood as an ongoing and non-linear process driven by claims for industrial citizenship. Thomas Humphrey Marshall’s concept of industrial citizenship, presented in his historical analysis of industrial Britain, drew some profound connections between political mobilisation and the realisation of rights that seemed to resonate with contexts far beyond its (i.e. industrial Britain’s) time and place. Based on a qualitative research project in five Indonesian cities, the author shows how an embryonic movement has mobilised for legislative recognition of domestic worker rights, and explains why mobilisation has proved difficult. Based on both a decontextualised and recontextualised reading of the concept of industrial citizenship, the author concludes there are three main reasons for the limited political success of the domestic workers’ movement are identified: a limiting social identity attributed to domestic workers in Indonesia; the intersectionality of informal domestic work as reflected in the institutions of the labour market; and the lack of mutually constitutive scales of organising between the urban neighbourhoods in which domestic workers live and work and policymaking at the national level

Liminality at Work in Norwegian Hotels

Hotels are spaces of temporary accommodation, but they are also important temporary spaces for an increasingly mobile and segmented workforce with different backgrounds and motives. In this paper we wish to address the temporary and transitional nature of hotel work by employing the term ‘liminality’. More specifically, we analyse the hotel as a liminal space for transient workers that view this work as a temporary endeavour. By drawing upon data from a study of hotel workers in Norway, we discuss how the liminality of hotel work may be understood. Here, we turn to an important debate within tourism studies on the blurring relationships between consumer and producer identities in resorts, often referred to in terms such as ‘working tourist’ or ‘migrant tourist-worker’ (Bianchi, 2000). For a relatively privileged group of workers, the hotel becomes a space of liminal lifestyle pursuits as well as a space of work. We also contrast this privileged group with a different and less privileged liminal group of ‘expatriate workers’ (cf. Longva 1997). Bianchi (2000) highlights the potentially problematic effect of transient lifestyles and consumption of recreation, a problematic we wish to develop further by investigating how worker representation and solidarity develops in liminal spaces of work. While strategies of liminality may have a transformative impact on the individual, their aggregate effects might simultaneously alter the way in which hospitality work is negotiated – from the collective to the individual level. As such, hotels as employers of working tourists pose a great challenge to collective representation, and may undermine effective worker action for less privileged groups of workers. The final section of this paper addresses this challenge, asking what bearings the individualism that dominates liminal work spaces has for trade unionism in the hospitality industry

Industrial Relations Under Global Stress: Fragmentation and the Potential for Representation of Workers in the Norwegian Hospitality Sector, 2013

The research project seeks to understand social relations in the Norwegian hospitality sector. The relationships between employers and employees, and between different groups of employees and their representatives, are shaped by globalisation, economic restructuring and international labour migration. The research will address how these processes of social inclusion and exclusion affect workers ability to influence employment and other work issues. A key ambition behind this project is to examine how global stress affects the ability of organised labour to represent the diversity represented by the Norwegian hospitality sector? By focusing on a sector dominated by women and migrant workers - characterised by low wages, low unionisation rates and precarious forms of employment - this project will challenge our understanding of the "Nordic model" of industrial relations, both in terms of its normative sustainability and its ability to adapt to a globalising world. At the centre of the theoretical framework are recent advances in human geography exploring the new geographies of work: both from the employer side, through flexibilisation, outsourcing and human resource management, and from the labour side, through the challenges of fragmentation, social partnership and multicultural integration in the sector. Moreover, the potential for representation of workers in this sector will be examined both at the level of the workplace and in industrial relations in the sector. This dataset consist of a quantitative study of hotel workplaces in the Oslo region

A hospitable world? : organising work and workers in hotels and tourist resorts

xviii, 234 p. ; 24 cm