Displaying power, contesting authority. Preparatoria students in Guadalajara

Este texto se presentó como comunicación al II Congreso Internacional de Etnografía y Educación: Migraciones y Ciudadanías. Universidad Autónoma de Barcelona, Barcelona, 5-8 Septiembre 2008This paper deals with students' political culture in two preparatory schools in Guadalajara, Mexico where I carried out fieldwork in the year 2000. I focus on the precarious relationship between students and teachers and forms of contesting authority and displaying power that I observed among students in one school. In North American or Western European public schools as well as in public Mexican secondary schools the power relations between students and teachers and between the students and the administration are generally reported to be fixed, in the sense of the students being the weak party and the others powerful, despite attempts of resistance to this authoritarian structure by students (Willis 1975, 1981). Although this is seldom spelled out, this power difference is seen to result from a confluence of (assumed) differences in age, knowledge and structural positions in the school as organisation. As Eckert argued for high schools in the U.S.A., ―ultimate power in the hierarchy resides with the staff, who control the basic resources-materials, space, time, freedom of movement, and sponsorship-necessary to produce all activities and to achieve visibility‖ (Eckert 1989: 111). Sketching the organisation of preparatorias, I will show that the staff have much less control over the resources in this type of school, thus being in a structurally weaker position from the outset. Partly due to the heterogeneous student body, students have considerable leeway in negotiating their individual interests as well as their interests as a group. During my fieldwork, students and teachers were engaged in a tug of war, in yielding and wielding power (Villarreal 1994) which was at times more salient than at others. I will illustrate this with two examples of students displaying power and contesting authority, one of leaving lessons, which concern the large majority of students, the second of the occupation of school as a contestation of authority made public, concerning only a handful of student activists. In both examples it became evident that students used multiple ways of displaying power and contesting authority different to forms of resistance in European or American schools. These displays of power formed a vital part of the ―hidden curriculum‖ (Streissler 2005) and are best described by Foucault's notion of power, namely that it is ubiquitous, is produced and reproduced through constant social interaction, can be negotiated and contested. This cultural knowledge is vital for students' life in Mexican society at large

Economic vs. juristic thinking in Carl Menger’s principles of economics

Austrian Economic School is increasingly being treated as one of the most significant and ever more influential bodies of ideas affecting the contemporary economic science. It is well known that Carl Menger, the founder of the Austrian School, was a lawyer by education. The paper is devoted to the degree to which his legal education influenced his economic theorizing. After a close examination of the Menger’s conceptual apparatus and the epistemological ramifications of the key notions underlying his thinking, the paper concludes that the juristic background of the far-reaching theoretical contributions contained in Menger’s Principles was truly decisive. That holds true despite the fact that Menger only exceptionally utilized the juristic vocabulary. The key ingredients of his theoretical creation? such as the individual autonomy, the coincidence of the wills in concluding a contract the effective protection of property and making transactions based on the individual motivation to further one’s own interests to the utmost? are clearly inspired and in many ways influenced by private law, particularly the doctrines underlying the Roman Law and the Austrian Civil Code

Beginning, crises, and end of the money economy

A crisis is but a crisis when the long run outlook is definitively positive. Then a lower turning point must exist. This implicates a vision or, in the ideal case, a formalized theory of the money economy’s possible end states. This theory has to provide an endogenous explanation of end states and crises. The equilibrium approach excludes endogenous causes in principle. Thus disturbances can only be explained by exogenous random shocks. The structural axiomatic approach, that is applied in the following, consistently defines the potential systemic crisis point and the conditions of an economic happy end

Friedrich August von Hayek

SIGLEAvailable from Bibliothek des Instituts fuer Weltwirtschaft, ZBW, Duesternbrook Weg 120, D-24105 Kiel A 196599 / FIZ - Fachinformationszzentrum Karlsruhe / TIB - Technische InformationsbibliothekDEGerman