South Korea's automotive labour regime, Hyundai Motors’ global production network and trade‐based integration with the European Union

This article explores the interrelationship between global production networks(GPNs) and free trade agreements (FTAs) in the South Korean auto industry and its employment relations. It focuses on the production network of the Hyundai Motor Group (HMG) — the third biggest automobile manufacturer in the world — and the FTA between the EU and South Korea. This was the first of the EU’s ‘new generation’ FTAs, which among other things contained provisions designed to protect and promote labour standards. The article’s argument is twofold. First, that HMG’s production network and Korea’s political economy (of which HMG is a crucial part) limited the possibilities for the FTA’s labour provisions to take effect. Second, that the commercial provisions in this same FTA simultaneously eroded HMG’s domestic market and corporate profitability, leading to adverse consequences for auto workers in the more insecure and low-paid jobs. In making this argument, the article advances a multiscalar conceptualization of the labour regime as an analytical intermediary between GPNs and FTAs. It also provides one of the first empirical studies of the EU–South Korea FTA in terms of employment relations, drawing on 105 interviews with trade unions, employer associations, automobile companies and state officials across both parties

Geographically touring the eastern bloc: British geography, travel cultures and the Cold War

This paper considers the role of travel in the generation of geographical knowledge of the eastern bloc by British geographers. Based on oral history and surveys of published work, the paper examines the roles of three kinds of travel experience: individual private travels, tours via state tourist agencies, and tours by academic delegations. Examples are drawn from across the eastern bloc, including the USSR, Poland, Romania, East Germany and Albania. The relationship between travel and publication is addressed, notably within textbooks, and in the Geographical Magazine. The study argues for the extension of accounts of cultures of geographical travel, and seeks to supplement the existing historiography of Cold War geography

BETWEEN BROADCASTING POLITICAL MESSAGES AND INTERACTING WITH VOTERS

Politicians across Western democracies are increasingly adopting and experimenting with Twitter, particularly during election time. The purpose of this article is to investigate how candidates are using it during an election campaign. The aim is to create a typology of the various ways in which candidates behaved on Twitter. Our research, which included a content analysis of tweets (n = 26,282) from all twittering Conservative, Labour and Liberal Democrat candidates (n = 416) during the 2010 UK General Election campaign, focused on four aspects of tweets: type, interaction, function and topic. By examining candidates' twittering behaviour, the authors show that British politicians mainly used Twitter as a unidirectional form of communication. However, there were a group of candidates who used it to interact with voters by, for example, mobilizing, helping and consulting them, thus tapping into the potential Twitter offers for facilitating a closer relationship with citizens

Financial Incentives and Maternal Health: Where Do We Go from Here?

Health financing strategies that incorporate financial incentives are being applied in many low- and middle-income countries, and improving maternal and neonatal health is often a central goal. As yet, there have been few reviews of such programmes and their impact on maternal health. The US Government Evidence Summit on Enhancing Provision and use of Maternal Health Services through Financial Incentives was convened on 24-25 April 2012 to address this gap. This article, the final in a series assessing the effects of financial incentives\u2014performance-based incentives (PBIs), insurance, user fee exemption programmes, conditional cash transfers, and vouchers\u2014summarizes the evidence and discusses issues of context, programme design and implementation, cost-effectiveness, and sustainability. We suggest key areas to consider when designing and implementing financial incentive programmes for enhancing maternal health and highlight gaps in evidence that could benefit from additional research. Although the methodological rigor of studies varies, the evidence, overall, suggests that financial incentives can enhance demand for and improve the supply of maternal health services. Definitive evidence demonstrating a link between incentives and improved health outcomes is lacking; however, the evidence suggests that financial incentives can increase the quantity and quality of maternal health services and address health systems and financial barriers that prevent women from accessing and providers from delivering quality, lifesaving maternal healthcare

Rethinking the politics of gender and agency: an encounter with the ‘otherness’ of medieval Japan

This article engages with recent debates within feminism itself to rethink women, gender, body, and agency as conceptual categories for reading medieval Japanese literary/Buddhist texts. It questions the unreflexive transposition of contemporary understandings of concepts to the past, on the grounds that this produces anachronistic readings of the worlds we seek to understand. It argues that in medieval Japanese texts gender did not function as a ‘social’ category posited against the ‘natural’ fact of sex, and that gender was a kind of script and that it was the specificity of the gendered performance, rather than the sexual attributes and reproductive functions of the body, that gave substance to the categories ‘male’ and ‘female.’ The article also offers a critique of contemporary uses of the term agency in analyses of women and Buddhism in medieval Japan, arguing that agency here is defined as something possessed by autonomous individuals with free will, whose natural inclination is to strive to resist against the oppressive conditions of their lives. This modern liberal conception of agency, which is secular in nature, grants agency to humans alone. This anthropocentric view of the world necessitates the evisceration of the agency of gods, buddhas, dreams and material objects, all of whom are central actors in the cosmological/social world of medieval Japan