Class Of Owners Research Articles

"Unsubstantiated Belief": What We Assume as Truth, and How We Use Those Assumptions

THE WORD FOLKLORE IS DEFINED in my Random House Dictionary of English Language (1987) as body of widely held but false or unsubstantiated beliefs. Oxford English Dictionary (1991) gives a slightly different but related definition: The traditional beliefs, legends, and customs, current among common people. study of these. class bias in latter is obvious: beliefs, legends, and customs held or practiced by the common are suspect, somehow-and thus, perhaps, unsubstantiated or false. As folklorists you are familiar with these definitions, familiar with them in waysand with nuances-I cannot duplicate. And of course you know what means personally to you. Before going further, I should make it clear that I do not believe you subscribe to these dictionary definitions; later I will get back to ways in which you yourselves describe valuable work you are doing. My comments here will necessarily be those of a layperson. I will not attempt to enter your field or take on range of issues it embraces. Yet I find connections. In my years of working as an oral historian, I faced some of problems you face. As a poet, a writer, thinking about your invitation to speak at this meeting, I started by considering what term folklore has meant to me, someone outside field. Folklore, or folkloric-at least to unspecialized ear-implies something exotic. Not necessarily unsubstantiated, but certainly Other. There is ever-so-slight aura of that which is legend rather than accurately recorded history, superstition rather than scientific truth, a wisdom not easily quantified, cultural practices or creativity prevalent among people who are different from ourselves; often dramatically different. Identification with mainstream society-white, owner class, formally educated, elitist, generally male-builds upon our socially conditioned racism and xenophobia to make sure we see people who inhabit these categories as central while relegating those of other races, ethnicities, economic status, gender identity, and religious or political beliefs to category of marginal, that is, Other. Indigenous peoples everywhere seem particularly folkloric to middle-of-the-road United States Ameri-

EDUCATION AND MODERNITY

Modernity is the combination of capitalism and democracy. Its economic core is based on property rights, which mobilise the organisation of resources. It also requires mass education to select intellectual talent for a complex division of labour. Western education paradoxically lacks developed property rights and a class of owners who seek profits through the satisfaction of consumer (educational) demand. Most of the intellectual ills in our society reflect this absence of modernity in our educational arrangements.

The Myth of the Residual Owner: An Empirical Study

In economic theory, the residual owner is the perfect person to control the bankrupt firm. The residual owner risks its own money and has incentives identical to those of the firm. But in more than fifteen years of trying, scholars have not been able to specify a mechanism that would identify the residual owner of a bankrupt firm and put that residual owner in control. Despite this lack of success, scholars continue to frame their theories in terms of residual owners and continue to propose mechanisms. The most recent was proposed by Baird and Rasmussen in 2002. This article recounts the theoretical debate and presents the findings of an empirical study. The principal finding was that no single residual owner class existed in the large majority of reorganizing firms studied. Instead, investors from more than one priority level shared the marginal dollar of gains or losses. The article concludes that no mechanism can identify and empower the single residual owner class because, in the large majority of cases, no single residual owner class exists. The study included data on 78 to 86 of the 98 large, public companies that emerged from bankruptcy reorganization from 1991 to 1996. Tables present class-by-class data on percentage recoveries by unsecured and shareholder classes in each of the cases. Creditor investors were considered residual owners if they recovered at least 10% and less than 90% of their claims. Shareholders were considered residual owners if they received at least 10% of the stock of the emerging firm and that stock had a value of at least $5 million. The data show that investors at different levels of priority shared residual owner status in more than 62% of the cases. The average number of investor priority levels in the reorganizing firms was 4.3; the median was 4. Subordinated debt existed in 70 of 86 cases (81%).

A master on the periphery of capitalism: Machado de Assis

A Master on the Periphery of Capitalism is a translation (from the original Portuguese) of Roberto Schwarz’s renowned study of the work of Brazilian novelist Machado de Assis (1839–1908). A leading Brazilian theorist and author of the highly influential notion of “misplaced ideas,” Schwarz focuses his literary and cultural analysis on Machado’s The Posthumous Memoirs of Bras Cubas , which was published in 1880. Writing in the Marxist tradition, Schwarz investigates in particular how social structure gets internalized as literary form, arguing that Machado’s style replicates and reveals the deeply embedded class divisions of nineteenth-century Brazil. Widely acknowledged as the most important novelist to have written in Latin America before 1940, Machado had a surprisingly modern style. Schwarz notes that the unprecedented wit, sarcasm, structural inventiveness, and mercurial changes of tone and subject matter found in The Posthumous Memoirs of Bras Cubas marked a crucial moment in the history of Latin American literature. He argues that Machado’s vanguard narrative reflects the Brazilian owner class and its peculiar status in both national and international contexts, and shows why this novel’s success was no accident. The author was able to confront some of the most prestigious ideologies of the nineteenth century with some uncomfortable truths, not the least of which was that slavery remained the basis of the Brazilian economy. A Master on the Periphery of Capitalism will appeal to those with interests in Latin American literature, nineteenth century history, and Marxist literary theory.

A requiem for the IFQ in US fisheries?

Despite their apparent economic benefits to harvesters, individual fishing quotas (IFQs) have only been adopted in three US fisheries: Mid-Atlantic surf clam and ocean quahog; South Atlantic wreckfish; and, North Pacific halibut and sablefish. During the 1996 reauthorization of the Magnuson-Stevens Fishery Conservation and Management Act, Congress temporarily blocked implementation of additional IFQ programs in US fisheries. In this paper, we argue that because of the emergence of an alternative, the cooperative, it is unlikely that new IFQs will be adopted in federally managed US fisheries. From an economic perspective, cooperatives offer the advantage of eliminating production externalities that may remain under an IFQ program with relatively large owner classes. More significantly, development of IFQ programs appears to be increasingly overwhelmed by the proliferation of both equity concerns and seemingly interminable rent-seeking behavior — both issues that can effectively block adoption of IFQs. Ironically (and paradoxically?), by reducing the scope of the equity issues acknowledged, the cooperative alternative narrows the pool of claimants and modifies the behavior of the remainder, making implementation more likely. A further irony exists in that IFQs are widely thought to be best designed at the local/regional level while part of the appeal of the cooperative model is that it appears to shortcut the often protracted nature of the local/regional political process by relying on direct intervention from Washington, DC, in the form of actions by Congress or the Justice Department.

Ownership, Control and Performance of Turkish Listed Firms

The paper describes the main characteristics of ownership structure of the Turkish companies listed on the Istanbul Stock Exchange. We present information on the pyrimidal and complex ownership structures within business groups, on the main owner classes, and on changes in large shareholdings. Ownership is highly concentrated in Turkey, families being the dominant shareholders. Changes in large shareholdings do not suggest the existence of an active market for share stakes. We also show that concentrated ownership and pyramidal structures have a negative effect on performance as reflected in lower return on assets, market to book ratios and dividend payments. We conclude by discussing some important problems introduced or fostered by the presence of this type of ownership structure.

Econometric Analysis of the Factors Influencing Forest Acreage Trends in the Southeast

Abstract Econometric models of changes in land use acreages in the Southeast by physiographic region have been developed by pooling cross-section and time series data. Separate acreage equations have been estimated for the three major private forestland owner classes and the three major classes of nonforest land use. Observations were drawn at three or four different points in time for the 21 Forest Survey Units in the Southeast. Of the variables examined, population and personal income measures were the major significant explanatory variables in the land use equations. Forest Sci. 32:119-134.

Diverse Owners of Nonindustrial Private Timberland in Western Oregon

Abstract Three classes of nonindustrial private owners-farmers, individuals other than farmers, and corporations-were selected prior to a USDA Forest Service inventory of western Oregon. Statistical tests following the inventory showed that owners of each class differed in condition of their land for timber production and in harvesting practices. Corporations had a high proportion of manageable forests and a high rate of clearcutting; farmers also had a high rate of clearcutting but a low proportion of manageable forests. Individuals had a low rate of clearcutting and ranked between corporations and farmers in proportion of manageable forests. Projections of timber supply will be improved if these owner classes are projected separately.

Formation des classes, luttes populaires et discours religieux au Nicaragua

The article describes in the first part the constitution of the social classes in Nicaragua. In the first periode, after Indepen dence till the 1850ies, the major groups were constituted by a class of owners of cattle (ganaderos) and another one of peasants. Cof fee plantation introduced Nicaragua into the world capitalist eco nomic structure, but this became more acute still after the intro duction of cotton in the 1950ies. The international importance of the region has been underlined by the frequent interventions of the USA in the country, considered as a part of its zone of secu rity. The US marines left Nicaragua only after the organization of the Guarda Nacional, headed by Somoza. After 45 years of dicta torship, the regime was overthrown by a coalition of popular for ces, organized by the Sandinist Front and a part of the bourgeoisie (conservative and liberal).

Some Characteristics of the Alabama Slave Population in 1850

D IFFERENCES in density and composition of a population can generally be explained by variations in economic opportunity from area to area or by differences in the stage of economic development. Such discrepancies are normal manifestations of population mobility within a nominally free society. However, the ante bellum slave population of the United States was not subject to these free-society controls, and its distribution and composition should have principally reflected control of the owner class. If this owner class regarded the slave only as a unit of labor, as the present-day farmer regards his tractor, there should have been a pronounced relationship between the type of economic activity, its organization and productivity, and the type of slave labor force. A slave, however, was more than a unit of labor. His creation was subject to inherent biological vagaries, his productive capacity changed with age, and his power of self-reproduction was an asset not yet duplicated by the John Deere factory. Even the most callous slaveowner must subconsciously have admitted that his labor force was human, and that he himself was subject to such human frailties as the desire for status symbols and services beyond the demands of necessity. Although these human qualities of both slave and owner may have decreased the interrelation between slave-population characteristics and the physiographic and economic factors of productivity, there should have remained, nevertheless, distributional and compositional patterns that can be explained only by the economic verities of an economy in which one segment of the population arbitrarily controlled another. In agriculture, which engaged about 78 per cent of the slave labor force,' such control should have concentrated the best units of labor on the most productive units of land. For a test of this thesis, the slave population of Alabama in 1850 has been analyzed. Alabama was chosen as a type study because it possesses distinctly diversified physiographic regions (Fig. 2), and because the agricultural pro-

Changes in Organization and Farm Practices

This discussion of changes in organization and in farm practices that have recently been effective on professionally managed Midwest farms is based upon reports made by several farm management organizations located in Ohio and Indiana and only such changes are noted as seem to have been effected recently and rather generally on professionally managed properties in those states. As these changes are enumerated an attempt will be made to comment on their background and observe whether they are or are not being effected on farms in general, that is, including those not professionally managed. The farms which are under professional management in this territory fall largely in two groups as to ownership. First, the larger group is comprised of those in the hands of so-called unwilling owners, that is, those who originally made a loan but now find that they bought a farm. The second principal class comprises farms which are owned by estates, those which have been purchased outright as investments, and those which have been purchased as a hobby or side interest. There are, of course, other classes of owners but they are in the minority. It is evident that landowners with too much debt are not generally in a position at the present time to avail themselves of professional farm management service with fixed tax and interest charges demanding so large a share of the income. Hard run farms with heavy mortgages seem to be cases for the undertaker rather than for the doctor.

Who Owns the Agricultural Land in the United States?

In attempting to answer the question Who owns the agricultural land of the United States? the census classification of owneroperated, tenant-operated, and manager-operated farms is of assistance. In the first division the ownership is in the hands of the tiller of the soil. In 1920 there were 636,508,324 acres in this class, of which 46I,I12,031 acres were under the control of owners operating an entire farm and 175,396,293 acres in the hands of farmers operating rented acres in addition to the land actually their property. From another standpoint, part of this area ought to be classed with the tenant-operated acreage, of which there are 265,193,415 acres. In the third class are 53,974,806 acres operated by hired managers.' Expressed in percentages, the land operated by both classes of owners composed 66.6 per cent of the farm land of the United States, the tenant area 27.7 per cent, and the manager-operated area 5.6 per cent. Owner-Operated Farm Land.-Of the land operated by owners only a small fraction is the property of the colored races. Figures for the acreage owned by various classes are not yet available for 1920, but in 191o the colored farmers owned only 3 per cent of the entire owner-operated land area of the United States and the proportion probably has not changed much since then.2 The acreage owned by foreign-born white farmers is not separated from that owned by white farmers in general. However, in 1910, 81.4 per cent of the foreign-born white farmers were owners. In order to get an estimate of the acreage owned, we may disregard the differences in acreage in owner-, tenant-, and manager-controlled farms and take 80 per cent of the 111,176,522 acres operated by all foreign-born farmers in I920.3 This gives us about 89,ooo,ooo acres, or 13Y2 per cent, of the owner-operated area under the control of foreign-born white farmers.