Economic Power Relations Research Articles

Dependency in the Digital Age? The Experience of Mercado Libre in Latin America

ABSTRACTThis article uses Mercado Libre, the leading digital platform company in Latin America, as an illustrative case to analyse the effect of regional platforms on development, by considering their interplay with both global leaders and local actors. Building on dependency theory, the article identifies the company's structural dependence on algorithms and computing power provided by the largest information technology (Big Tech) companies in the United States. Nonetheless, it also finds that Mercado Libre is at the frontier in applied data analysis solutions tailored for its businesses. Together with a privileged access to personalized and cross‐fertilized market and financial datasets, the company's internal and purchassed technologies are the source of asymmetric relationships with its platforms’ users. The article conceptualizes Mercado Libre's place in digital capitalism as extractivist with local actors and, just like local elites when dependency theory was first formulated, it is complicit with global powers. But, unlike those elite firms, it is not technologically laggard, and its value capture is underpinned by its technological advantage. Thus, this article conceptualizes (digital) dependency as multiple layers of economic power in which leading firms from the peripheries occupy intermediate and interconnecting positions. It shows that, while these regional leaders operate at the technological frontier, economic power relations based on technological asymmetries remain crucial for studying underdevelopment.

Ukraine – China Asymmetric Economic Power Relations: What is to Come after BRI?

Ukraine – China Asymmetric Economic Power Relations: What is to Come after BRI?

Decolonising the Earth: Anticolonial Environmentalism and the Soil of Empire

The relationship between humanity and the soil is an increasingly important topic in social theory. However, conceptualisations of the soil developed by anticolonial thinkers at the high point of the movement for self-determination between the 1940s and the 1970s have remained largely ignored. This is a shame, not least because theorists like Eric Williams, Walter Rodney, Suzanne Césaire and Amílcar Cabral were concerned with the soil. Building on recent work on human-soil relations and decolonial ecology, we argue that these four thinkers conceptualised the connection between soil, empire, and anticolonial revolt. Williams and Rodney ground understanding of soil degradation in global relations of economic power, while Césaire and Cabral reconceptualise postcolonial nationhood in terms of the mutability and diversity of the soil. The article concludes by suggesting that these two anticolonial counterpoints, global connectivity and more-than-human identification, anticipate and deepen contemporary attempts to decolonise ecological thinking.

Colour Symbolism and Size: A Semiotic - Stylistic Critique of Visual Language in Mqapheli Mngadi`s editorial Cartoons

The seems to be less research that has been done on the significance of visual language in South African cartoons so far. As an attempt to bridge this gap, the aim of this research article is to investigate the literary significance of colour and size as visual language features in Mqapheli Mngadi’s South African editorial cartoons. The study is done literary through ‘semiotic – stylistics’ to interpret the ‘visuo – textually’ examined data. The reader response theory is also adopted to aid the analysis. The findings of the study demonstrate that colour and size are used as one of the narrative techniques in Mqapheli Mngadi’s selected cartoons. These features play a significant stylistic role in assisting the cartoonist to express his ideas. While colour is used figuratively or symbolically to present hidden ideas, size is used to depict the socio – political and socio – economic power relations.

Paved with Good Intentions: Moral Evaluation of Volunteer Tourism as Social Action

Abstract This article explores how social actors account for their participation in a socially contested and criticized activity, while maintaining their moral self-worth. As a case study, the article focuses on volunteer tourism—a practice positioned at the intersection of economic inequality and global historical power relations, in which tourists combine volunteering in the Global South with vacationing. Despite public criticism, the practice is growing in popularity. Analyzing 48 in-depth interviews using theoretical ideas from the new cultural sociology of morality, I identify three predominant justifications invoked by volunteers to explain their actions. With each of these, interviewees assert the righteousness of their intentions, distancing themselves from the potentially negative outcomes of their actions—thus maintaining their moral self-worth, criticism of their actions notwithstanding. In articulating these claims, social actors express a distinct logic through which the moral evaluation of a social action is undertaken, emphasizing fundamental components of the action, referred to here as the intention and outcome propositions. The article highlights the importance of these interrelated propositions in understanding moral evaluations of an action, particularly in cases of possible moral devaluation.

Diagnosis and Obstacles Related to the Production Chain of Cachaça in the Context of Geographical Indications

Objective: To analyze regulatory and public policy, economic, agronomic, infrastructure, and technological barriers in the context of Geographical Indications. Method: This study was carried out from the perspective of exploratory research since it is a conceptual approach, which investigates the main characteristics of the studied phenomenon. Considering the way in which the data were obtained, it consists of a bibliographical study of a qualitative nature, which has the cachaça productive chain as its central element. Results and conclusion: It is observed that the foundation of the GI is based on the relationship between natural resources, the organization of social and economic processes, and cultural and power relations. The obstacles highlighted from the point of view of specialists directly affect the development process of the cachaça production chain, but it is a historically important activity for Brazil. Research implications: They range from direct support to the cachaça industry and the formulation of public policies to the advancement of academic knowledge and the strengthening of regional culture and economy. It contributes to multiple aspects of society, highlighting the relevance of Geographical Indications. Originality/value: The identification of critical obstacles in the cachaça production chain, deepening the understanding of the complex relationship between natural resources, culture, and social and economic processes in the formation of Geographical Indications (GIs) in Brazil fills an important gap in the context of the growing recognition of GIs in Brazil.

Violence against Women at Work

Abstract We link every police report in Finland to administrative data to identify violence between colleagues and the economic consequences for victims, perpetrators, and firms. This new approach to observe when one colleague attacks another overcomes previous data constraints limiting evidence on this phenomenon to self-reported surveys that do not identify perpetrators. We document large, persistent labor market effects of between-colleague violence on victims and perpetrators. Male perpetrators experience substantially weaker consequences after attacking female colleagues. Perpetrators’ relative economic power in male-female violence partly explains this asymmetry. Turning to broader implications for firm recruitment and retention, we find that male-female violence causes a decline in the proportion of women at the firm, both because fewer new women are hired and current female employees leave. Management plays a key role in mediating the effects on the wider workforce. Only male-managed firms lose women. Female-managed firms exhibit a key difference relative to male-managed firms: male perpetrators are less likely to remain employed after attacking their female colleagues.

Why unending? Migrations and the political economy of the xenophobic conflict in South Africa: a systematic review

The object of the research is the interaction between unending migrations and the political economy as significant drivers of xenophobic conflicts. The phenomenon of xenophobic conflict in South Africa has garnered increasing attention due to its recurrent violent nature and socio-political implications. This study delves, systematically, into the intricate connection between migration and the politics of xenophobia in South Africa. It examines how migrations, both internal and external, have influenced the development of xenophobic conflict within South Africa, alongside the historical context of the entrenched apartheid system. It further explores the underlying motives of those engaging in xenophobic acts while examining the responses of civil society and the government. By analyzing existing literature and conducting qualitative reviews of the experiences of the victims of xenophobic violence, this study contends that xenophobia in South Africa, among other factors, is a lasting legacy of the apartheid era that has created unequal economic power relations between the South African blacks and the few dominant whites. Findings further underscore the significance of understanding contemporary migration patterns in the 21st century from the context of entrenched economic inequalities, economic disenfranchisements, rising poverty among the indigenous black South African community in South Africa. In addition, economic disparities, resource scarcity, and competition for employment opportunities have emerged for being pivotal catalysts of conflict, thereby exacerbating tensions between native black South Africans and the African immigrant populations in South Africa. Relying on findings, this study thus argues that xenophobia remains an ongoing and persistent challenge that demands urgent attention from policymakers in South Africa. In conclusion, this study underscores the necessity of addressing the xenophobic conflict in South Africa through a multidimensional approach. Policymakers, civil society, and academia must collaborate to formulate strategies that target both the economic and socio-political drivers of such conflicts. By acknowledging the historical context, rectifying inequalities, and promoting accurate narratives, it becomes possible to foster a more inclusive and harmonious society, thereby mitigating the unending cycle of xenophobic tensions, phobia and violence.

Types of Geoeconomic Power and Competition over Myanmar Before and During the Reform Era of the 2010s

Over the past decade, the United States, China, and Japan contested for influence in Myanmar, as the country began to emerge from decades of isolation and military rule. Despite the rich descriptions of rivalries between the United States and China, as well as Japan and China, the nature of geoeconomic power competition in Myanmar remains underarticulated. Popular accounts often use a magnitude-based concept of power to track how much power countries have gained or lost over Myanmar. However, the types of power may be equally important, particularly for understanding the geoeconomic dynamics in play. This article thus examines the geoeconomic power competition in Myanmar using a typology of interstate economic power relations. This typology expands the conventional framework centered on geographic distance to incorporate other types of geoeconomic power, such as deterritorialized financial regulatory power and the adjacent power exercised through shared borders. This approach contributes to a better understanding of the geoeconomic rivalries in Myanmar and across Southeast Asia.

Introduction: Platform Challenges to Creative Industries in India

ABSTRACT Recent developments in digital technologies in South Asia require special attention on the restructuring of industries based on creativity, arts and culture. More specifically, powerful players from the communication industries have been at the heart of changes in the legacy creative industries. The aim of this special section is twofold. On the one hand, to critically assess transformations taking place in the industrial and policy dynamics shaping the creative industries in India; and, on the other hand, to identify the peculiarity of Indian dynamics amidst what is widely perceived as a fairly uniform set of global phenomena. Through examples focusing on audiovisual and music sectors, the contributions explore how these dynamics are deeply anchored within social and political contexts at the local, national and global scales, and how – far from its emancipatory promise – the digital often tends to reinforce uneven economic scenarios and power relations.

An Event Study of Perindopril (Servier) Reverse Payment Patent Settlements' Case: Is Krka Truly an Exception Within the Pay-For-Delay Commission Decision?

The article aims to fill the gap in the literature on reverse payment patent settlements between patent-holders and generic pharmaceutical firms in EU competition law. Based on the event study of the Perindopril (Servier) case of the European Commission, the research provides a novel assessment of the welfare effects of Commission enforcement and the following judiciary decision on the legality of Commission sanctions. Within the case, the analysis paid particular attention to the generic corporation Krka because Commission fined Krka for the settlement with Servier that did not include the reverse payment, and the Commission decision did not survive the scrutiny of the General Court. The relative economic power of Krka in the perindopril market is also a factor that, together with the enforcement effect assessment, provides a different perspective of the event study's normative implications to the existing research.

Chapter One: Confucianism and Nature

Abstract Environmental writers have sought to retrieve ecological wisdom from traditional Chinese thought to critique anthropocentrism, but the rediscoveries remain a disembodied discourse and ignore the relationships among humans: the political, social, and economic structures and power relations rooted in repressive hierarchy and class and gender oppression. This chapter targets political, social, and productive relations as the crucial areas for diagnosing the ills of ecological degradation. Rather than a question of how humanity as a whole stands against nature, the chapter contends that the all-too-human power relations in economy, hierarchy, and oppression are the real culprits for environmental disasters. Humanity's domination of nature is necessarily linked to the domination of other humans and of inner human nature. This perspective illuminates Kang Youwei's ecological visions in his writings about the great world community. Kang regarded nature as the foundation for culture and civilization, valorized the public principles of common goods and equality over private property, and linked women to a vital, regenerative nature. Kang heralded the eco-socialist notions of public economy, fair distribution of wealth, and wise uses of natural resources.

‘They don’t need us’: Affective precarity and critique in transnational media work from the margins of ‘Cultural China’

Creative labour studies has yielded much critical insights from workers’ experiences of ‘precarity’ and ‘self-exploitation’ with increasing neo-liberalization. This important work’s overwhelming focus on the critique of neoliberalism based on Euro American case studies risk overlooking insights that can be gained from other socio-geopolitical contexts. Drawing on a mix of ethnographic observations and interviews with transnational media producers in Singapore working at the margins of the mainland Chinese media industry, this paper teases out how intersecting cultural, economic and geopolitical power relations manifest in transnational creative labour working under the shadows of both the West and a rising China. Expanding on conceptions of emotional labour and precarity as serving neoliberal structures, I highlight how these producers’ experiences go beyond the economic connotations of precarity to capture what I call affective precarity – a felt sense of spatial-temporal dissonance confronting marginalized media workers. I also consider how such emotional labour can constitute a form of critique.

Looking Back on Problems of Transcultural Methodology in Asian Studies

In previous issues of the journal, its authors have often made it clear that creative philosophers will always seek to improve their own methods. Even those who sincerely respect other cultural values, epistemologies, and methodologies will always retain some of their own preferences, subjective insights, and blind spots (Bunnin 2003, 352). What really matters is only their equality of opportunity, their evaluation regardless of the seemingly pervasive economic, political, and cultural power relations. Regardless of where they originate, and of their individual originators, such subjective inclinations should be checked by an equally reliable culture of academic critique and discussion, rather than silenced by demands for strict conformity in methods, theories, and doctrines.

Dominance and Societal Effects in Human Resource Practice Transfer

This paper investigates how meso-level actors (MeLAs) contribute to human resources (HR) practice transfer in diffusion and adaptation processes, drawing on the System-Society-Dominance-Corporate Effects (SSDC) theoretical framework to interpret the role of MeLAs in the transfer of the Japanese management model to the Indonesian automotive industry. We focus on two issues: i) the way Japanese MeLAs’ training regimes in Japan contribute to the understanding and diffusion of the model and ii) the coordinated strategy of both Japanese and Indonesian MeLAs in seeking procedural influence through intelligence-sharing and lobbying activities over how the Japanese model is adapted in Indonesia. Our research adds to our limited understanding of the significance of MeLAs in processes of diffusion-adaptation in emerging market economies characterized by weak regulatory regimes and asymmetric economic power relations. Drawing on interviews with 75 key informants in Japan and Indonesia, we explore the significance of MeLAs from corporate and labor spheres alongside those of non-corporate MeLAs such as non-governmental and quasi-governmental organizations. The study elaborates the SSDC framework by highlighting MeLAs’ influence in both diffusing conceptions of dominant management ‘best practice’ (dominance effects) and their role – and that of dominance effects – in shaping societal effects that inform how the model is adapted. We theorize the complex processes through which the effects identified in the SSDC framework are experienced by local actors, showing that they are neither monolithic nor mechanical in nature and thereby elaborating the inter-relationship in how dominance effects inform societal effects.

Can dialectic materialism produce beauty? The “Great Aesthetic Debates” (1956–1962) in the People's Republic of China

AbstractThis article focuses on a set of aesthetic debates that took place in China in the late 1950s. By exploring the main arguments presented by different thinkers, particularly the writings of Zhu Guanqian and Li Zehou, this article demonstrates how the aesthetics took part in the ideological formation of the new socialist state. From the debates, we observe the tensions between the complexity of the material-political and the reductionism of the state ideology. We also recognize why and how aesthetics could be such an important site of political contestation in this young socialist country, and how the interactions between human senses and the material world are essential to arts universally. The dominant materialist aesthetics presented in the debate was less a theory of things than a theory of the social. This historical materialist approach might be useful as a social critique; however, when handled dogmatically, it not only rejects the autonomy of things, but also disallows art works to reflect the complex human interactions with the material world beyond economic power relations. We can find more sophisticated analysis in Zhu's aesthetic theory, which tries to incorporate the interactions between the subjects and the objects into materialism.

Non-domination and constituent power: Socialist republicanism versus radical democracy

Two of the dominant frameworks for criticizing capitalism and liberal democracy in contemporary political theory is Socialist republicanism, on the one hand, and radical democracy, on other hand. Whereas radical democratic thinkers have for decades criticized liberal democracy for being elitist, hierarchical and outright anti-popular, socialist republicans have for the last 10 years developed critiques of capitalism centred on the neo-republican idea of freedom as non-domination and proposed various arguments for workplace democracy and cooperative forms of ownership. Despite the common ambition of uncovering hierarchical relations of economic, political and social power, and creating new egalitarian and participatory modes of political organization, no systematic comparison of socialist republicanism and radical democracy exists. This paper fills this gap by comparing the different understandings of (a) institutions and (b) political action and (c) their diverging historical and political relations to socialism.

Contested transition? Exploring the politics and process of regional energy planning in Indonesia

Transitioning to low carbon energy involves policies, institutions, and actors across different scales of governance. Indonesia's aspiration for a transition to low carbon energy is occurring in the dynamics of the re-scaling of environmental governance through decentralization processes. This article examines the interplays of actors at the national and provincial levels in negotiating energy futures as the energy planning processes unfold on the ground and identifies context specific factors that shape the outcomes. Further, it investigates how the regulatory framework and institutional arrangements for energy transition planning could not only generate obstacles for renewable energy transition but also open opportunities for actions. It is based on interviews with stakeholders at national and subnational levels, combined with the analysis of policy documents, studies, and relevant reports. The findings reveal emerging spaces for local actions amid constraining regulatory and institutional fields through the process of regional energy plan development. However, the ability of sub-national actors to seize these spaces is influenced by several factors, most notably political leadership, civil society engagement, political economic structure and power relations. These in-depth insights from Indonesia have wider implications for understanding the multi-scalar dynamics of energy transitions and provide useful policy recommendations for engaging subnational actors in the transition process.

Beyond "heartfelt condolences": A critical take on mainstream psychology's responses to anti-Black police brutality.

Anti-Black police brutality in the United States is not a new problem, but at least a 400-year old one. Mainstream psychology has responded to this critical racial and social justice issue by conceptualizing it primarily as an outcome of police officers' social cognition (e.g., threat perceptions) or implicit racial biases. Such individualistic and cognitive perspectives, however, ignore the fundamental role of anti-Black structural racism in facilitating the ability of law enforcement to terrorize, brutalize, and kill Black people with impunity. As with the media and public attention, mainstream psychology has also tended to frame acts of anti-Black police brutality as outliers, or occasional lethal and spectacular events, rather than as a broad spectrum of routine acts that structure policing and police brutality as a world for Black people in the United States. Informed by critical psychology, and the critical theoretical frameworks of critical race theory, intersectionality, and Afro-Pessimism, the goal of this article is to critically engage with the topic of anti-Black police brutality. By critically engage, we mean expose and challenge the economic, social, and material power relations that disproportionately expose Black people to police brutality; and conceptualize police brutality not as a series of aberrant incidents, but as a structure that in essence constructs and reifies Blackness and Whiteness. We also introduce the Anti-Black Police Brutality Continuum, a conceptual framework of police brutality as a broad spectrum of routine manifestations of anti-Black structural racism, and criticize mainstream psychology's deferral of a critical and transformative response to anti-Black police brutality. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2022 APA, all rights reserved).

Identity and memory as resilience: Applications of liberation psychology in a rural Maya Achi community.

This study sought to understand interpretations of interconnections between historical trauma, contemporary violence, and resilience in a Maya Achi community currently engaged in promoting peace and social change through popular education. In particular, the ways in which participants drew upon identity and memory in articulating characteristics of community distress and resilience are discussed. The research is informed by liberation psychology and critical perspectives of mental health, particularly considering the challenges inherent in the promotion of collective memory of trauma and resistance in contexts of violence and humanitarian settings. Participant reflections on historical and contemporary violence highlight elements of collective distress, connecting identity and memory with acts of both oppression and resistance. Education and development are signaled as possible sites of resilience but also experienced as sites of power upholding the status quo. Diverse experiences and applications of identity and memory provide insight into the ways in which community organizations working in contexts of political violence might navigate polarizing and paradoxical discourses in order to subvert, co-opt, or adapt to hegemonic cultural, political, and economic power relations in the process of transformation for collective resilience.