300 research outputs found
Money and sociality in South Africa's informal economy
This article examines the interplay of agency, culture and context in order to
consider the social embeddedness of money and trade at the margins of South
Africaâs economy. Focusing on small-scale, survivalist informal enterprise
operators, it draws on socio-cultural analysis to explore the social dynamics
involved in generating and managing wealth. After describing the informal sector
in South Africa, the article elucidates the relationship between money and
economic informality. First, diverse objectives, typically irreducible to the
maximization of profit, animate those in the informal sector and challenge
meta-narratives of a âgreat transformationâ towards socially disembedded and
depersonalized economic relationships. Second, regimes of economic governance,
both state-led and informal, shape the terrain on which informal economic
activity occurs in complex and constitutive ways. Third, local idioms and
practices of trading, managing money and negotiating social claims similarly
configure economic activities. Fourth, and finally, encroaching and often
inexorable processes of formalization differentially influence those in the informal
sector. The analysis draws on these findings to recapitulate both the ubiquity and
centrality of the sociality at the heart of economy, and to examine the particular
forms they take in South Africaâs informal economy.Web of Scienc
Die methodischen Grundlagen der Jesusforschung : Entstehung, Struktur, Wandlungen, Perspektiven
Trading on a grant: Integrating formal and informal social protection in post-apartheid migrant networks
This paper describes the findings of in-depth qualitative case studies based research on how poor and marginalised people in post-apartheid migrant networks seek to ameliorate poverty and manage their vulnerability. It argues that the ways in which people make decisions regarding formal social grants and cash transfers, their utilisation and their indirect impacts need to be understood in the context of the pre-existing and underlying systems and practices of informal social protection (Bracking and Sachikonye 2006). These informal strategies are shaped by two key phenomena (du Toit and Neves 2008): first, they depend crucially on the complex, spatially extended, de- centred social networks created by domestic fluidity and porosity in an environment of continued migrancy. Second, these networks are partly constituted by - and provide the underpinnings for - deeply sedimented and culturally specific practices of reciprocal exchange. This paper shows how social grants are used in this context. A detailed consideration of the case study material illustrates how cash transfers allow poor and vulnerable people to make 'investments' in human, physical and productive capital. The paper argues that a crucial aspect of the impact of cash transfers lies in the way they allow the leveraging of resources within networks of reciprocal exchange. Cash transfers, instead of 'crowding out' private remittances, can be seen to enable households and individuals to negotiate about the distribution of scarce resources within spatially distributed networks. Social grants thus have an impact far beyond the particular groups targeted in official plans. Crucially, given the existence of unequal power relations and practices of exclusion and exploitation within the informal social protection arrangements, social grants often provide key resources for those who would otherwise be marginalised. At the same time, they have only limited utility in addressing the core dynamics that drive chronic poverty. Reducing structural poverty in South Africa requires measures that address the underlying problems of structural unemployment
The design of a visitor education and research centre for Sutherland, Western Cape
The modern visitor centre evolved rapidly with the world wide growth in tourism and its significant contribution to local economies. This new building type has provided many new opportunities for architects to work on small to medium size building with a greater meaning attached to them. However, architects would now have to deal with the problems that tourists bring! How must architects incorporate local history, culture and memory? The visitor centre is the combination of the local tourism office and museum. This new type of building is a combination of those formerly distinct building types which had two separate and different functions. âgateway buildingâ The contemporary visitor centre combines the distribution of tourist/visitor information with the interpretation of particular regions. This interpretation of cultural and natural history links the visitor centre to the local history museum, however whereas local history museums often struggle with expanding collections, limited resources and low visitation levels, visitor centres have been able to attract greater government funding. The media of interpretation also differs dramatically, with visitorâs centres often using multimedia technology to enliven cultural history or educational displays. However they can also suffer from static displays which having been viewed once, discourage repeat visits. What is a contemporary visitor centre? Figure 1: Guggenheim Museum, Bilbao. Showing centre as âiconâ building. This interpretation role of visitor centres has resulted in them becoming a major focus for visitation. The must-see status of these buildings is often pursued through dramatic form. Briefs for visitor centres often demand an âiconâ envisaging that the building will itself, become a marketable destination. Buildings that try and become destinations in themself often run the risk of not promoting the area or location but rather them self. Visitor centres can therefor contribute to the transformation of destinations in both positive and negative ways. They can either help with economic, environmental and cultural revival of regions or they can be involved in changing places and overshadowing the very features they are meant to enhance
In search of South Africaâs âsecond economyâ: Chronic poverty, economic marginalisation and adverse incorporation in Mt Frere and Khayelitsha
Since 2003, South African policy discourse about persistent poverty has been
dominated by the notion that poor people stay poor because they are
trapped in a âsecond economyâ, disconnected from the mainstream âFirst-
World economyâ. This paper considers the adequacy of this notion in the
light of research conducted in 2002 and 2005/06 in Mount Frere in the rural
Eastern Cape, and in Cape Townâs African suburbs. It argues that a process of
simultaneous monetisation, de-agrarianisation and de-industrialisation has
created a heavy reliance on a formal sector in which employment is
becoming increasingly elusive and fragile. Fieldwork suggested high levels of
economic integration, corporate penetration and monetisation, even in the
remote rural Eastern Cape. Rather than being structurally disconnected from
the âformal economyâ, formal and informal, âmainstreamâ and marginal
activities are often thoroughly interdependent, supplementing or subsidising
one another in complex ways. The dynamics involved diverge significantly
from those imagined both in âsecond economyâ discourse and in small,
medium and micro enterprise (SMME) policy. Instead of imagining a separate
economic realm, âstructurally disconnectedâ from the âfirst economy,â it is
more helpful to grasp that the South African economy is both unitary and
heterogeneous, and that peopleâs prospects are determined by the specific
ways in which their activities are caught up in the complex networks and
circuits of social and economic power. Rather than âbringing people intoâ the
mainstream economy, policy-makers would do better to strengthen existing
measures to reduce vulnerability, to consider ways of counteracting
disadvantageous power relations within which people are caught, and to
support the livelihood strategies that are found at the margins of the formal
economy
The design of a visitor education and research centre for Sutherland, Western Cape
The modern visitor centre evolved rapidly with the world wide growth in tourism and its significant contribution to local economies. This new building type has provided many new opportunities for architects to work on small to medium size building with a greater meaning attached to them. However, architects would now have to deal with the problems that tourists bring! How must architects incorporate local history, culture and memory? The visitor centre is the combination of the local tourism office and museum. This new type of building is a combination of those formerly distinct building types which had two separate and different functions. âgateway buildingâ The contemporary visitor centre combines the distribution of tourist/visitor information with the interpretation of particular regions. This interpretation of cultural and natural history links the visitor centre to the local history museum, however whereas local history museums often struggle with expanding collections, limited resources and low visitation levels, visitor centres have been able to attract greater government funding. The media of interpretation also differs dramatically, with visitorâs centres often using multimedia technology to enliven cultural history or educational displays. However they can also suffer from static displays which having been viewed once, discourage repeat visits. What is a contemporary visitor centre? Figure 1: Guggenheim Museum, Bilbao. Showing centre as âiconâ building. This interpretation role of visitor centres has resulted in them becoming a major focus for visitation. The must-see status of these buildings is often pursued through dramatic form. Briefs for visitor centres often demand an âiconâ envisaging that the building will itself, become a marketable destination. Buildings that try and become destinations in themself often run the risk of not promoting the area or location but rather them self. Visitor centres can therefor contribute to the transformation of destinations in both positive and negative ways. They can either help with economic, environmental and cultural revival of regions or they can be involved in changing places and overshadowing the very features they are meant to enhance
Vulnerability and social protection at the margins of the formal economy
This report sets out the results of an in-depth study of livelihood strategies and
âcoping mechanismsâ among poor people in one very specific, but highly significant
context of poverty in South Africa. Its core concrete concern is with social grants
and cash transfers; but it does not focus narrowly on how they are administered
and used. Instead, it firstly focuses on the broader context of the livelihood
strategies and coping mechanisms within which these are used â strategies that
might be called âprivate social protectionâ and which other researchers have
referred to as âdistal social welfareâ. Secondly, it is motivated by a conviction that
social protection and social grants should be aimed, not only at the important goal
of alleviating poverty, but also supporting pathways out of it. While current
research clearly suggests that the massive expansion in social welfare has made
possible a significant reduction in monetary poverty, a decisive and further
reduction in poverty requires attention to the structural conditions that interrupt
or impede these pathways out of poverty. If these underlying structural issues are
not addressed, there is a very real danger that social protection, and social grants
in particular, may end up contributing only towards ensuring what might be called
âmanaged povertyâ â in other words, a situation in which poverty is managed
through the amelioration of its harshest effects â but not reduced in a sustainable
manner
New Forces Influencing Savanna Conservation: Increasing Land Prices Driven by Gentrification and Speculation at the Landscape Scale
Land transformation reduces biodiversity and regional sustainability, with land price being an indicator of the opportunity cost to a landowner of resisting land conversion. However, reliable spatially explicit databases of current land prices are generally lacking in developing countries. We used tools from data science to scrape 1,487 georeferenced land prices in southern Kenya from the internet. Prices were higher for land near cities and in areas of high agricultural productivity, but also around the Maasai Mara National Reserve. Predicted land prices ranged from US4,618,805 per acre. Land speculation associated with expanding urbanization increases the opportunity and acquisition costs of maintaining conservation buffer zones, corridors, and dispersal areas. However, high land values are also found adjacent to a world-famous tourist destination. Profit-driven turnover of ownership, subdivision, and transformation of land is occurring at a rapid pace in southern Kenya, to the detriment of savanna biodiversity and the sustainability of the pastoral socialâecological system
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