Institutional Heritage Research Articles

Orphaned Grandchildren in Islamic Law of Succession: Reform and Islamization in Pakistan

AbstractThe Islamic law of succession, worked out in precision by the classical jurists from a few Qurʾanic verses, is regarded as the central core and prime achievement of the shariʿa. However, in the changed circumstances of the fifteenth century Hijra, attention has focused on some perceived inequities of the traditional scheme, raising challenging questions of whether and how the traditional law can be reformed. This essay examines Pakistan's attempt to deal with the problem of the “orphaned grandchild.” It then turns to a consideration of the fate of the reformist legislation in the context of “Islamization” and the institutional heritage of the Zia period.

Conservation-Native American style

Over the past three decades, the environmental movement has promoted a view of American Indians as the original conservationists-that is, so intimately bound to the land that they have left no mark upon (White and Cronon 1988, 417). References to this image abound: Indians were, in truth, the pioneer ecologists of this country, said Secretary of the Interior Stewart Udall.(1) think most people in Indian country hold a set of ideals we should all learn from, said law professor Charles Wilkinson in a recent speech.(2) According to Wilkinson, these ideals teach human harmony with the natural environment. Calling for an environmental ethic patterned after that of Native Americans, Senator John H. Chafee recently quoted words allegedly spoken by Chief Seattle. Man did not weave the web of life. He is merely a strand of it. For many thousands of years, most of the indigenous nations on this continent practiced a philosophy of protection (first) and use (second) of the forest, says Herb Hammond in the Sierra Club book Clearcut. In scientific terms, we recognize that their use of the forest was ecologically responsible-meaning that it kept all the parts.(3) Appealing as this image of a Native American environmental ethic is, it is not accurate. The spiritual connection attributed to Native Americans frequently does not mesh with the history of Indian resource use. By focusing on this myth instead of reality, environmentalists patronize American Indians, disparaging their rich institutional heritage which encouraged resource conservation. By missing this history of Indian institutions, the environmentalists' interpretation deprives Indians and non-Indians alike of a full understanding of how we can conserve our natural heritage. The purpose of this paper is twofold. First, it will put to rest the myth of a unique and romantic American Indian environmental ethic. Second, it will illustrate how American Indians used complex and evolving institutions to conserve scarce natural resources and to survive in a sometimes hostile environment. By institutions, I mean the traditions, rules, laws and habits that guided Indian societies. Though the actual laws and customs vary among societies, all societies have such institutions to guide them.

Agricultural policy reform in Zambia: The dynamics of policy formulation in the Second Republic

The agricultural policy reform process in Africa during the 1980s has been slow partly because it has neglected a number of key factors. Analysis of Zambia's experience during the Second Republic suggests that greater attention needs to be given to institutional heritage, political acceptability, the diversity of policy-making organizations and the policy freedom of subsectoral organizations. Neglect of these issues has led to difficulties in getting policy makers to even conceptualize reform, and has led to much concern over the political implications of insensitive reform proposals.

Explaining Asian economic organization

Social theorists are challenged to explain an increasingly complex economic order. It is clear that old theories that posited a developmental sequence from “undeveloped” to “industrialized” cannot explain the diverse patterns of industrialization that exist. Certainly, Japan is as developed as Western nations but its patterns of development, its economic norms, and its industrial practices are substantially different from the United States and even its Asian neighbors in Taiwan and South Korea. For example, the fact that Japan has the largest banks in the world, and Taiwan relatively few and weak ones (despite the world's largest per capita foreign reserve holdings), cannot be explained only by recourse to market or state factors, although each play a role. Both countries were literally awash in money in the 1980s, and both countries are clearly capitalist societies where banking institutions are assumed to be critical to economic development, as they have been in the West. But more than market and political economy factors are at work here. In Japan, historically developed institutional factors, dating from before the Meiji Restoration and industrial revolution, created conditions for business group self-financing. Modern-day keiretsu, such as Sumitomo and Mitsui, with their huge banks as centerpieces, trace their origins to pre-industrial merchant houses under family ownership. Inheritance practices in Japan are based on primogeniture, inheritance of the entire fortune by the eldest son. This practice allowed merchant family fortunes to remain intact under the stewardship of the heir. Successful families thus had huge sums of money available to finance the businesses of affiliated branches operating under the “badge” of the mother house. The descendents of the zaibatsu merchant houses, the keiretsu, continue to rely on their own sources of finance, now institutionalized in banks that serve their credit and other financial needs. To see large banks encapsulated within business networks as only the outcome of distorted market conditions, or as only the result of a powerful business class, misses the institutional origins and overlooks the contemporary institutional underpinnings of the Japanese banking system. Ironically, the weakness of Taiwanese banks can also be traced to a strong family system. Chinese societies practice partible inheritance, that is, division of a family estate equally among all sons. As a result, families divide their fortunes every generation, mitigating against the development of large sums of money. Instead, there is great pressure within families to develop multiple businesses so that at the death of the family head, each son can claim an independent enterprise. Because all Chinese families face the problem of setting up children in business (being an employee is not a desirable status in Taiwan as it is in Japan), a range of informal lending arrangements have arisen within families and among friends to generate investment capital. Strong social norms dictate that one assist financially a kin member or close friend. Banks play a relatively minor role in Taiwan because alternative institutional arrangements, also with preindustrial origins, have obviated the need for banks for some financial functions. Again, market factors are important to understanding the strong curb market and weak formal banking system in Taiwan, and political economy factors, notably the absence of a strong central bank, are also significant. But an institutional explanation integrates these factors into an explanation that begins with the character of the society being explained. We need theories that can account for difference without reducing cases to unique instances, that do not presume the individualistic character of Western social orders, and that are sensitive to an array of ideal as well as material factors operating in different locations. Although political economy, market, and culture theories each have contributions to make, an institutional perspective of the type I outline may be especially suited to the comparative analysis of emerging world economic organization. I think, ironically, that a sensitivity to institutional factors may yield better theories of the West. Rather than assume that the United States and Europe are the exemplars of advanced capitalism, the closest empirical instances of the idealized competitive market, Japan and other Asian nations are suggesting that the West is simply one form of capitalist economic development, an expression no doubt, of the West's own institutional heritage. When we relinquish ethnocentric perspectives we can begin to look at ourselves and our own institutional heritage more clearly.

The impact of rapid population growth, expanding urbanisation, and other factors on development in sub-Saharan Africa: the contrasting responses of Tanzania and Kenya.

When the nations of Sub‐Saharan Africa won independence some twenty years ago, they faced formidable constraints on development which continue to impede their economic and social progress, despite considerable interim achievements. This article discusses five of these constraints‐internal factors based largely on historical circumstances and the physical environment: (1) underdeveloped human resources; (2) military and political conflict; (3) the colonial institutional heritage; (4) climate and geography; and (5) the twin factors of rapid population growth and expanding urbanisation. However, as an urban sociologist, the author will focus on the fifth development constraint and on the contrasting policies Tanzania and Kenya have devised in response to it. These two countries were chosen because while Tanzania is a low‐income Sub‐Saharan African nation, defined by the World Bank as one with a per capita income of $370 or less, and Kenya is a middle‐income Sub‐Saharan African nation with a per capita income exceeding $370, Tanzania and Kenya are similar in total population, being the fourth and fifth most populous nations in Sub‐Saharan Africa (Nigeria ranks first with a population of 82.6 million; Ethiopia, second, with a population of 30.9 million; Zaire, third, with a population of 27.5 million; Tanzania and Sudan essentially tying for fourth place with populations of 18 million and 17.9 million, respectively; and Kenya, fifth, with a population of 15.3 million, its closest competitors being Uganda with a population of 12.8 million and Ghana with a population of 11.3 million). Moreover, Kenya and Tanzania had the same average annual rate of population growth‐3.4 percent‐between 1970 and 1980, and their projected populations for the year 2000 are only 1 million apart – 34 million and 35 million, respectively. Even more relevant to the theme of this article, however, is the fact that by 1980 Tanzania had reached nearly the same level of urbanisation – 12 percent and 15 percent, respectively, as well as nearly the same concentration of urban population in their capital or primate cities—50 percent and 57 percent, respectively (World Bank, 1983).

The Politics of Backwardness in Hungary, 1825-1945

Why did Hungary, a country that shared much of the religious and institutional heritage of western Europe, fail to replicate the social and political experiences of the latter in the nineteenth and early twenties centuries? The answer, the author argues, lies not with cultural idiosyncracies or historical accident, but with the internal dynamics of the modern world system that stimulated aspirations not easily realizable within the confines of backward economics in peripheral national states. The author develops his theme by examining a century of Hungarian economic, social, and political history. During the period under consideration, the country witnessed attempts to transplant liberal institutions from the West, the corruption of these institutions into a "neo-corporatist" bureaucratic state, and finally, the rise of diverse Left and Right radical movements as much in protest against this institutional corruption as against the prevailing global division of labor and economic inequality. Pointing to significant analogies between the Hungarian past and the plight of the countries of the Third World today, this work should be of interest not only to the specialist on East European politics, but also to students of development, dependency, and center-periphery relations in the contemporary world.