4,748 research outputs found

    Reflecting on practice: negotiating challenges to ways of working

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    In this paper I explore some of the issues associated with teaching and researching in the context of dominant/non-dominant group relations. The paper stems from observations, experiences and challenges that I have encountered in researching with indigenous Australians including Aboriginal people from the mainland and Torres Strait Islander people, and teaching undergraduate and post-graduate subjects on cultural diversity. I suggest that guidelines for working in culturally sensitive ways across cultural boundaries are needed and should include issues of power that are implicit in processes of knowledge production (i.e., what we know, how we know, and on whose terms we know) and social identity construction. I also argue that the writing of indigenous authors in Australia, and other contexts, are important resources for promoting critical reflection because it serves to disrupt taken for granted ways of knowing. At a minimum, I suggest, these writings bring into focus the relationships between power and social identities. I focus on the tensions and challenges associated with negotiating the messages conveyed in Aboriginal authors’ writings about self-determination, colonisation and culturally sensitive and transformative practice and research. I locate the reflection within the broader literature base on indigenisation and the development of culturally sensitive psychology. I conclude that engaging in the explication of power associated with social identities in these contexts can be challenging but it is an important part of creating a culturally sensitive psychology

    Enduring myths: smrang, rabs and ritual in the Dunhuang texts on Padmasambhava

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    Revue d’Etudes TibĂ©taines Number 15, November 200

    A political economy of indigenisation of the Zimbabwean economy

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    A conference paper on the pros and cons of indigenising the Zimbabwean economy. Originally prepared for: "Conference on Zimbabwe: macroeconomic policy, management and performance since independence: lessons for the 21 st century," 19-21 August, Sheraton Hotel, Harare.Firstly, indigenisalion of ownership of the means of production aims at giving the indigenes of the country, either individually or collectively, ownership of the economic establishments of their country. This can be accomplished through either public or private ownership of the means of production or through a combination of both means. Secondly, indigenisation ofcontrol of the means ofproduction seeks to enable the indegenes of the country to have access to policy making boards of economic enterprises of the country. Adedeji argues that while it is possible to have indigenisation of ownership without access to the control of the means of production, the reverse, ie, indigenisation of control without ownership is at best weak and fragile.2 The third type of indigenisation is the most common within African countries. It is the indigenisation of the manpower. Soon after independence many nationalist governments took it upon themselves to Africanize the civil service and even private companies went along with the programmes by hiring a number of Africans in their operations and management of organizations. These Africanization programmes were motivated to put the indigenous people into the driving seats of political and economic programmes of their countries. However, the indigenisation of manpower without corresponding transformation in the ownership and control patterns is a deceptive and ineffectual means of indigenising African economies. Finally, there is the indigenisation of technology. Due to the obvious need to develop the African economies, African states have been continuously acquiring technology from the developed countries

    Australia's experience with local content programs in the auto industry - lessons for India and other developing countries

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    Local content programs - especially in the auto industry - accompanied many import substitution policies during the 1960s and 1970s, but most were abandoned in countries that liberalized trade in the 1980s, and early 1990s. The high economic costs of these programs, and their inherent incompatibility with open, nondiscriminatory international trade, were recognized in the Uruguay Round Agreement on Trade-Related Investment Measures (the TRIMS agreement), which required developing countries to phase them out over five years. Despite this, a number of developing countries have introduced new local content programs, and are currently pressing to relax the TRIMS rules, and to extend the year 2000 phase-out deadline. A leader in this effort at the World Trade Organization (WTO) is India, which in 1995 introduced an"indigenization"program for its auto industry that typifies similar programs in other developing countries. Under India's program, permission to import auto components for assembly, is contingent on agreements to reach specified levels of"indigenization", plus enough commitments to export cars, or components to cover the foreign exchange cost of imported components. The system is implemented by a"de facto"ban on the import of built-up cars, and import licensing of car components. The United States, and the European Union challenged the system as a violation of the TRIMS agreement. Since 1996, similar arrangements in Brazil, Indonesia, Mexico, and the Philippines have been the subject of WTO disputes. Australia hasa long, well-documented history of local content programs in the auto industry. Australia's programs started in 1948, and began to wind down only in 1985. Australia's strongly counter-competitive programs - the administering authority was effectively cartellizing the industry - led to market fragmentation, high costs and prices, and lower national income. They retarded, rather than promoted technical change, and reduced, rather than increased, employment in auto production, distribution, and repair. Export requirements increased the scheme's economic costs, which involved bureaucratic micro-management of the industry, and high transaction costs for the government, and the private sector. Once the schemes were established, they were very difficult to remove, owing to their populist appeal, their lack of transparency, and the vested interests of the international, and domestic firms which relied on them, as well as other interest groups, including the administering bureaucracies, auto industry trade unions, and politicians in electorate areas in which car production was concentrated. The Australian experience, and similar experiences of developing countries with these programs during the 1960s, and 1970s, suggest that they do not serve the economic interests of India, and the other developing countries which are presently seeking to legitimize them at the WTO. On the contrary, the present TRIMS agreement is a useful external counterweight to the influence of domestic lobbies, and populist arguments, which in Australia, and elsewhere have made local content schemes, politically difficult to oppose, and once established, even more difficult to remove.ICT Policy and Strategies,Environmental Economics&Policies,Water and Industry,Economic Theory&Research,Rules of Origin,Environmental Economics&Policies,Water and Industry,Economic Theory&Research,ICT Policy and Strategies,Rules of Origin

    Rethinking the African economic ethic of indigenisation in the light of the expansion of global neo-liberal capitalistic practices : a critical study on the prospects for purposeful regional economic integration in the Southern African Development Community (SADC).

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    Doctor of Philosophy in Ethics. University of KwaZulu-Natal, Pietermaritzburg, 2019.During the Cold War, the world order was bi-polar and largely divided between liberalism and communism. The end of the Cold War saw global neo-liberal capitalism emerging to dominate the world as the only economic system available for development. However, that development is yet to be seen in Africa despite pursuing neo-liberal policies for many years. The failure of neo-liberalism in the Southern African Development Community (SADC) region to stimulate economic development has been attributed partly to the failure by the region to domesticate capitalism. In response to the challenges of neo-liberalism, SADC states went into a regional integration with an overarching objective of eradicating poverty and improving the economic well-being of the people. The regional economic integration has had its own challenges. One of the reasons for the failure of the SADC regional economic integration was because of the absence of regional capitalism to promote intra-regional trade and investment. Another response by the post-colonial SADC states to global neo-liberal capitalism was the African economic ethic of indigenisation. This was also an effort to address economic inequalities introduced by colonial and apartheid systems. Indigenisation sought to promote fair participation in economic activities by deliberately empowering the majority previously marginalised people. The economic policy of indigenisation was popular and implemented at the national level by most of the SADC states, but at the regional level it seems there was no clear expression of the same policy. The indigenisation policy has been a controversial policy with its own ethical challenges regarding its fairness and consequences. This research attempts to explore ways in which the SADC region can come-up with a purposeful regional economic integration which can help reduce poverty and domesticate capitalism for the greatest benefit to the greatest number of people as argued by utilitarianism. The study also investigates why there was no regional SADC policy on indigenisation if the policy was popular at the national level. The research used a qualitative analytical case study desk research design which analysed SADC policies and the theories and concepts that inform global-neo-liberal capitalism and regional integration. The research established that, the African economic ethic of indigenisation can be ethically justified from a utilitarianism perspective as it sought to deliver the greatest good to the greatest number of local people. It also came out from the research that the African economic ethic of indigenisation was a response to unethical discriminative colonial and apartheid practices which were viewed as sources to poverty and economic inequality. The research also observed that the SADC through the Common Agenda of the treaty sought to eradicate poverty and improve the well-being of the people of SADC. These objectives were well aligned to those of the African economic ethic of indigenisation. However, the pressures of global neo-liberal capitalism have seen the SADC region failing to explicitly express the African economic ethic of indigenisation in any of its policies and initiatives. The other reason for the failure by SADC as a region to express indigenisation explicitly in its policies was that the political elite sought to maintain unchallenged authority and unethical benefits from indigenisation in their own countries free of the regional oversight. The research however, found it ethically beneficial for the SADC region to embrace neo-liberalism but at the same time promoting the development of regional capitalism; which I would call ‘SADCapitalism’. Developing capitalism in SADC would help domesticate capitalism for the benefit of the majority of the SADC people. To domesticate capitalism at the regional level, there is a need to come up with a regional integration which promotes regional indigenous entrepreneurs or capitalists. This would be in the form of a regional indigenisation policy which promotes SADC citizens to invest and migrate within the region enjoying preferential treatment ahead of non-SADC citizens. In the rethinking, there is need to redefine the people who should be regarded as regional indigenous people include at least fourth generation descendants of former colonial or apartheid white rulers, Indians and coloureds

    Influence of government policies on industry development: The case of India's automotive industry

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    The automotive industry in India has come a long way from its nascent state at the time of India's independence in 1947 to its present day dynamic form. As compared to the production of mere 4,000 vehicles in 1950, the production of the industry crossed the historic landmark of 10 million vehicles in 2006. Today, the industry produces a wide range of automobiles and auto-components catering to both the domestic as well as foreign markets. The development of the industry has been shaped by the demand on the one hand and the government interventions on the other; the influence of the latter being considerable. The evolution of India's automotive industry is identified to have occurred in four phases. In the first (1947-1965) and second phase (1966-1979), the important policies identified were related to protection, indigenisation and regulation of the industry. On the one hand, these policies helped India to build an indigenous automotive industry, while on the other it led to unsatisfactory industry performance. In the third phase (1980-1990), the single most important policy identified was the one with regard to relaxation in the means of technology acquisition. The foreign competition inducted into the industry transformed its dynamics. Lastly, in the fourth phase (1991 onwards) the liberalisation with regard to foreign investment had a significant influence on the Indian automotive industry as we see it today. This work traces the evolution of the automotive industry from its inception to present day and identifies the important policies made by the Indian government. The work also studies the influence of important policies on the development of the industry. --India,Automotive,Industrial Policy,Government Policy,Government Influence

    Strategic Trade Policy and the Home Bias in Firm Ownership Structure

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    In this note we consider the preferences of a profit maximizing firm for international ownership in a world in which firms compete in an international Cournot oligopoly, and in which countries use strategic trade policy. We find that firms prefer national ownership and show that full indigenisation occurs in the equilibrium.strategic trade, international ownership, Cournot oligopoly, home bias

    Depoliticised ethnicity in Tanzania: a structural and historical Narrative

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    Much of the literature on ethnicity in Africa regards ethnicity as a central cleavage and associates its politicisation with civil war and deteriorating socio-economic conditions. Tanzanian society is not structured by this cleavage, making it an outlier among African states. Despite the negative impact of politicised ethnicity, little is known of the circumstances through which it germinates and comes to have negative consequences, or how it can be suppressed in Africa. The present article attempts a comprehensive analysis of the structural and historical factors that have made the move away from politicisation of ethnicity in Tanzania possible. It provides an eclectic structural and historical explanation that attributes lack of ethnic salience in Tanzanian politics to a particular ethnic structure, to certain colonial administrative and economic approaches, and to a sustained nation-building ethos. The argument results from a critical analysis of secondary material on ethnicity and the politics of Tanzania

    Macbeth in Nineteenth-Century Bengal: A Case of Conflicted Indigenization

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    Adaptation, a complex bilingual and bicultural process, is further problematised in a colonial scenario inflected by burgeoning nationalism and imperialist counter-oppression. Nagendranath Bose’s Karnabir (1884/85), the second extant Bengali translation of Macbeth was written after the First War of Indian Independence in 1857 and its aftermath - the formation of predominantly upper and middle class nationalist organisations that spearheaded the freedom movement. To curb anti-colonial activities in the cultural sphere, the British introduced repressive measures like the Theatre Censorship Act and the Vernacular Press Act. Bengal experienced a revival of Hinduism paradoxically augmented by the nationalist ethos and the divisive tactics of British rule that fostered communalism. This article investigates the contingencies and implications of domesticating and othering Macbeth at this juncture and the collaborative/oppositional strategies of the vernacular text vis-à-vis colonial discourse. The generic problems of negotiating tragedy in a literary tradition marked by its absence are compounded by the socio-linguistic limitations of a Sanskritised adaptation. The conflicted nature of the cultural indigenisation evidenced in Karnabir is explored with special focus on the nature of generic, linguistic and religious acculturation, issues of nomenclature and epistemology, as well as the political and ideological negotiations that the target text engages in with the source text and the intended audience
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