Place, space and the reinvention of social emancipation on a global scale : second thoughts on the Third World Social Forum

empowerment;trade unions;internationalism;social movements

Estimating the Causal Effects of Marketing Interventions Using Propensity Score Methodology

Propensity score methods were proposed by Rosenbaum and Rubin [Biometrika 70 (1983) 41--55] as central tools to help assess the causal effects of interventions. Since their introduction more than two decades ago, they have found wide application in a variety of areas, including medical research, economics, epidemiology and education, especially in those situations where randomized experiments are either difficult to perform, or raise ethical questions, or would require extensive delays before answers could be obtained. In the past few years, the number of published applications using propensity score methods to evaluate medical and epidemiological interventions has increased dramatically. Nevertheless, thus far, we believe that there have been few applications of propensity score methods to evaluate marketing interventions (e.g., advertising, promotions), where the tradition is to use generally inappropriate techniques, which focus on the prediction of an outcome from background characteristics and an indicator for the intervention using statistical tools such as least-squares regression, data mining, and so on. With these techniques, an estimated parameter in the model is used to estimate some global ``causal'' effect. This practice can generate grossly incorrect answers that can be self-perpetuating: polishing the Ferraris rather than the Jeeps ``causes'' them to continue to win more races than the Jeeps $\Leftrightarrow$ visiting the high-prescribing doctors rather than the low-prescribing doctors ``causes'' them to continue to write more prescriptions. This presentation will take ``causality'' seriously, not just as a casual concept implying some predictive association in a data set, and will illustrate why propensity score methods are generally superior in practice to the standard predictive approaches for estimating causal effects.Comment: Published at http://dx.doi.org/10.1214/088342306000000259 in the Statistical Science (http://www.imstat.org/sts/) by the Institute of Mathematical Statistics (http://www.imstat.org

Conservatism amongst Nigerian workers

In a recent paper (Waterman 1974) I discussed the debate that has been taking place, largely amongst socialists, over the role of workers and unions in Africa. I identified three major positions that have emerged. One was the traditional Communist position that the workers and unions are the leading force for national and social revolution in Africa. Another was the Fanonist thesis (as well as a common liberal one) that the regularly-employed workers and their unions are a privileged and conservative 'labour aristocracy'. The third was the new Marxist one that whilst workers and unions could not be categorised wholesale as a labour aristocracy (having considerable radical potential), such a group did exist significantly amongst them

International labou's Y2K problem : a debate, a discussion and a dialogue : (a contribution to the ILO/ICFTU Conference on Organised Labour in the 21st Century)

The Institute of Social Studies is Europe's longest-established centre of higher education and research in development studies. Post-graduate teaching programmes range from six-week diploma courses to the PhD programme. Research at ISS is fundamental in the sense of laying a scientific basis for the formulation of appropriate development policies. The academic work of ISS is disseminated in the form of books, journal articles, teaching texts, monographs and working papers. The Working Paper series provides a forum for work in progress which seeks to elicit comments and generate discussion. The series includes the research of staff, PhD participants and visiting fellows, and outstanding research papers by graduate students. For further information contact

Communist Theory in the Nigerian Trade Union Movement

The subject of this paper is the Nigerian Trade Union Congress (NTUC), the Communist trade union organisation in Nigeria. More specifically, it is about the central leadership of the NTUC, since the organisation is in origin and structure a central, national and Lagos-based federation of trade unions. Even more specifically, it concerns the theoretical activity of this group, its view of Nigerian society and its organisational strategy. While this focus might seem excessively narrow for the study of a trade union organisation, it is perhaps justified for examination of a Marxist-oriented group. A true understanding of their environment has traditionally been considered a prerequisite of effective political action by Marxists. And Marxists working in the trade unions have traditionally paid great attention to organisational strategy

Union organisations, social movements and the Augean stables of global governance

The traditional international union organisations are currently engaged in a series of 'social partnership' initiatives at global level. Prominent amongst these is that addressed to 'global governance'. This project comes from outside and above the unions, is addressed to the existing hegemonic interstate instances, and is carried out primarily by lobbying. This orientation is increasingly challenged by a 'global justice and solidarity movement', more concerned with the democratisation of the global, and more oriented to consciousness-raising and mobilising than lobbying. The new movement, moreover, operates in places and spaces, with forms and understandings, that relate rather to a contemporary globalised-informatised capitalism than to the old national-industrial-colonial one which gave rise and shape to the international unions. Trade unions will have to abandon the discourse of global governance for that of global democracy, and to operate on the terrains of this new movement, if they are to effectively defend and advance worker rights and power under the new global despensation

The Bamako Appeal of Samir Amin: a post modern Janus?

The Bamako Appeal is an attempt to move the World Social Forum process from being some kind of agora for discussion of alternatives to neo-liberal globalisation, to the provision of an anti-capitalist leadership for the global justice and solidarity movement. Sponsored by prominent left activist intellectuals of the 'Thirdworldis' tradition, it has nonetheless adopted much of the language of the new movement. Because of its authors' apparent vanguardism, the BA has proven controversial within and around the leadership of the WSF. Such charters, declarations and manifestos are, however, common within the wider movement, occur within the WSF itself and should be welcomed. But the process by which the BA has appeared and been launched reproduces old movement practices that the new movement has been surpassing. The BA's chapter on labour suggests the possibility and necessity for a meaningfully global and open dialogue on the BA more generally. Whilst the BA is commonly seen as a deviation from or opposition to the WSF process, both of these instances reveal the simultaneous backward-looking and forward-looking nature of emancipatory movements

Reflections on the 2nd World Social Forum in Porto Alegre : what's left internationally?

trade unions;activism;internationalism;social movements;capitalism