Local Contingencies Research Articles

The Portuguese Translation of Oyono'sUne vie de boy:José Saramago's Invisible Postcolonial Intervention

Translators are Typically invisible, noticed only when they blunder. how might one interpret, then, a book translated by a now very visible Nobel laureate, especially when the underlying text confronts controversial subjects that the laureate's own works avoid? Such is the case of the Portuguese writer José Saramago (1922-2010), who in 1981 translated Ferdinand Oyono's 1956Une vie de boy.In its press release announcing the 1998 Nobel for literature, the Swedish Academy called him a writer “who with parables sustained by imagination, compassion and irony continually enables us once again to apprehend an elusory reality” (“Nobel Prize”). It is this ability to communicate what refuses fixed meaning that Walter Benjamin famously restored to the art of translation, endowing it with a philosophical and artistic distinction: “Even when all the surface content can be extracted and transmitted, the primary concern of the genuine translator remains elusive” (19). “Escrever é traduzir” (“To write is to translate”), Saramago would state years after he gained world visibility thanks to the translations of his works. In both cases, he argues, the objective is to pursue what lies beyond language, but the translator strives to communicate what may have been beyond not only the language of the original but also that of the translation (“Traduzir”). Saramago's translation of Oyono'sUne vie de boy, a text that readers of Saramago's oeuvre generally overlook along with his other translations, invites a consideration of how the elusive as an artistic value with broad appeal may relate to the local cultural contingencies informing the translator's language choices.

Is variability an operant?: introductory remarks.

Is variability an operant?: introductory remarks.

Bourdieu, The Master

Tony Bennett, Mike Savage, Elizabeth Silva, Alan Warde, Modesto Gayo-Cal, and David Wright, Culture, Class, Distinction. Abingdon, Oxon: Routledge, 2009, 311 pp. $US 55.95 paperback (978-0-415-56077-1), $US 153.00, hardcover (978-0-415-42242-0) Elizabeth Silva and Alan Warde, editors, Cultural Analysis and Bourdieu's Legacy: Settling Accounts and Developing Alternatives. Abingdon, Oxon: Routledge, 2010, 182 pp. $US 42.95, paperback (978-0-415-53414-7), $US 138.00, hardcover (978-0-415-49535-6) Simon Susen and Bryan S. Turner, The Legacy of Pierre Bourdieu: Critical Essays, London: Anthem Press, 2011, xxix + 439 pp. $US 130, hardcover (9780857287687) These volumes are ample evidence--41 authors, writing over 900--pages--of the continuing influence of Pierre Bourdieu a decade after his death in 2002. I believe Bourdieu is as great a sociologist as ever lived. His biographical situation positioned him to produce what is arguably the most compelling culmination of the social science tradition that begins with Marx. But Bourdieu's work may endure mostly because his limitations create openings: the gaps, assumptions, and even biases in his writing incite controversy, attempts at revision, on-going searches for updated empirical application reflecting local contingencies, and as the title of Elizabeth Silva and Alan Warde's volume puts it, alternatives. The final section of Michele Lamont's chapter in Silva and Warde poses the question: Bourdieu, good to think with? (p. 138). The affirmative response is evident in the consistent fascination and remarkable variation of these books' engagements with Bourdieu. THE CASE FOR BOURDIEU Let me count six ways in which Bourdieu seized the possibilities of his temporal and spatial place in the social scientific tradition; specifically, his place in the field of sociology. Bourdieu was not what he would have called an inheritor of academic capital, but he was distinctly positioned to be able to generate capital, and he utilized his position, or positionings, to maximum advantage. First, Bourdieu did not think in terms of convergence that Talcott Parsons sets as the goal of theory in his classic The Structure of Social Action (1937). Yet Bourdieu's writing is always a dialogue with Marx, Durkheim, and Weber especially, and as the chapters in Simon Susen and Bryan Turner's collection show, many other theorists as well. Bourdieu's never-completed graduate studies were in philosophy. He was self-taught as an ethnographer, and as far as I can determine from the text he insisted is not an autobiography--Sketch for a Self-Analysis (published posthumously in 2007)--he learned sociological theory primarily by teaching it. In the volumes being reviewed, the sole moment when Bourdieu speaks for himself other than in short quotations is in Susen's translation of a 1999 interview originally published in German. Here Bourdieu recalls when he first taught Marx, Durkheim, and Weber. His writing never ceased to juxtapose and adapt their ideas. Second, Bourdieu's theoretical dialogue proceeds in relation to a sequence of research projects that have their apex in Distinction: A Social Critique of the Judgement of Taste, published in English in 1984. Distinction represented an ambitious attempt to survey the relationship between cultural taste and class position in France. It provides the model for the equally ambitious research of Tony Bennett and his colleagues to determine how well Bourdieu's findings apply, decades later, in the United Kingdom, and more about that below. What matters here is that Bourdieu's career balance between theory and research is--always arguably--unmatched, and the books under review reflect that balance, situating Bourdieu's concepts in relation to other theories and collecting new data to test his research questions. Third, as Bourdieu himself emphasized, he entered the academic field at a particular time, in a particular place. …

Capabilities: Their Origins and Ancestry

Capabilities: Their Origins and Ancestry

Spatial synchrony of malaria outbreaks in a highland region of Ethiopia

To understand the drivers and consequences of malaria in epidemic-prone regions, it is important to know whether epidemics emerge independently in different areas as a consequence of local contingencies, or whether they are synchronised across larger regions as a result of climatic fluctuations and other broad-scale drivers. To address this question, we collected historical malaria surveillance data for the Amhara region of Ethiopia and analysed them to assess the consistency of various indicators of malaria risk and determine the dominant spatial and temporal patterns of malaria within the region. We collected data from a total of 49 districts from 1999-2010. Data availability was better for more recent years and more data were available for clinically diagnosed outpatient malaria cases than confirmed malaria cases. Temporal patterns of outpatient malaria case counts were correlated with the proportion of outpatients diagnosed with malaria and confirmed malaria case counts. The proportion of outpatients diagnosed with malaria was spatially clustered, and these cluster locations were generally consistent from year to year. Outpatient malaria cases exhibited spatial synchrony at distances up to 300 km, supporting the hypothesis that regional climatic variability is an important driver of epidemics. Our results suggest that decomposing malaria risk into separate spatial and temporal components may be an effective strategy for modelling and forecasting malaria risk across large areas. They also emphasise both the value and limitations of working with historical surveillance datasets and highlight the importance of enhancing existing surveillance efforts.

Neoliberalization and Its Geographic Limits: Comparative Reflections from Forest Peripheries in the Global North

Recently, a number of economic geography studies have emphasized that when neoliberalism is grounded in particular places, it takes on hybrid forms, a result of local contingencies that are found at those sites. This article contributes to this literature by explicating the processes by which hybridization occurs by drawing on a comparative study of neoliberalism in three contemporary forest-based regions in the Global North: British Columbia, Canada; Tasmania, Australia; and the North Island, New Zealand. A key term for us is geographic limits, by which we mean regionally specific constellations (assemblages) of institutional and material forms that resist; hybridize; or, at junctures, even offset neoliberalism with alternative agendas. In turn, our idea of geographic limits is derived from our larger conceptual framework that integrates Anna Tsing’s (2005) concept of friction with the notion of remapping and a four-leg stakeholder model that consists of different, albeit overlapping, institutional agencies that represent the political, the industrial, the environmental, and the cultural. These institutions provide the animus for a remapping that variously implements, modifies, and occasionally counters neoliberalism.

Introduction: Special Forum on Sociological Perspectives of Accounting

A nthony Hopwood (e.g., 1983) has long observed that we have had few field studies that have examined accounting in the contexts in which it operates. Indeed, in his 2006 plenary address as the American Accounting Association’s Presidential Scholar, Hopwood concluded that accounting research has become ‘‘increasingly detached from the practice of the craft . . . [as well as] too cautious and conservative, too rigid and traditional, and insufficiently attuned to grapple with the new, and to embrace novel insights and bodies of knowledge’’ (Hopwood 2007, 1365, 1370). In part, he urged that more innovative field research be conducted, informed by theories derived from sociology and employing qualitative, naturalistic research methods (e.g., Hopwood 2007, 1372). This special forum of Behavioral Research in Accounting is devoted to publishing original papers detailing field studies of accounting in their natural organizational and institutional contexts which have drawn on sociological perspectives and employed qualitative methods. Webster’s dictionary defines sociology as ‘‘the science of society, social institutions, and social relationships: the systematic study of the development, structure, and function of human groups conceived as processes of interaction or as organized patterns of collective behavior.’’ As such, a sociological perspective of accounting as a form of structure focuses on examining the multiple roles accounting plays in the social constitution of organizations and institutions, or on the social constitution of accounting, rather than the orthodox view that accounting faithfully represents an objective, economic reality. On this theme, for example, Fombrun (1986; see also Van de Ven and Poole 1996; Dirsmith 1998) reasoned that such forms of structure as accounting may simultaneously serve as: technological solutions to the instrumental problems of production; political exchanges among contending organizational and institutional factions; and social interpretations within the organization and by its external, institutional constituents. Thus, accounting may simultaneously be seen as: technical solutions to the problems of fostering production rationality—the more traditional, orthodox province of accounting, and as political advocacy devices for representing the positions of various constituent groups within the

Exploring the Role of Dedicated Online Biotechnology News Providers in the Innovation Economy

In this article, the authors examine the role of dedicated online biotechnology news providers in disseminating and shaping stories of technological promise within the bioeconomy. In this field, communication of future-orientated claims is closely linked to a firm’s ability to attract speculative investment and so dedicated biotech news services play an important role in facilitating this interaction between technology producers and investors. Using the emerging field of regenerative medicine (RM) as a case study, the authors illustrate how coverage of RM biotechnologies and firms by these online news services acts to increase the intensity of promissory communication and how interaction between news providers can create dominant framings of particular events in which some aspects are emphasized while others are marginalized. Considered cumulatively, the authors show how these accounts ultimately present a highly linear account of technological innovation which renders the actions of multiple technoscientific actors meaningful to investors but at a cost to addressing the local contingencies of scientific research.

Support and evidence for considering local contingencies in studying and transcribing silence in conversation

Using a conversation analytic methodology, this report looks at conversations in English in which lengthy silences are regularly present. These silences are treated as unproblematic in this corpus. They apparently deviate from the proposals that gaps are minimized (Sacks, Schegloff, & Jefferson 1974) and that there is a standard maximum silence of one second (Jefferson, 1988). This is discussed in light of context and culture. Then the robustness of some features of the organisation of sequences (Schegloff 2007) and turn- taking (Sacks, Schegloff, & Jefferson 1974) are considered. Finally, solutions are compared for rendering lengthy silences in such a way that their meaning is preserved in conversation analytic transcripts or others that include timed silences.

The Promise of Play: A New Approach to Productive Play

Games are woven into webs of cultural meaning, social connection, politics, and economic change. This article builds on previous work in cultural, new media, and game studies to introduce a new approach to productive play, the promise of play. This approach analyzes games as sites of cultural production in times of increased transnational mediation and speaks to the formation of identity across places. The authors ground their explorations in findings from ethnographic research on gaming in urban China. The spread of Internet access and increasing popularity of digital entertainment in China has been used as an indicator of social change and economic progress shaped by global flows. It has also been described as being limited by local forces such as tight information control. As such, gaming technologies in China are ideal to ask broader questions about digital media as sites of production at the intersection of local contingencies and transnational developments.

Emerging Standardization

This paper discusses the dynamics associated with the implementation and deployment of an information infrastructure designed to standardize work practices. The analysis is based on a case study conducted in a pharmaceutical R&D organization. The infrastructure in use, comprising a computerized system and surrounding organizational procedures, seems to support work practices not always as originally planned. The paper discusses the role played by local characteristics, contingencies, and practices in shaping a standardization protocol implemented to standardize work practices. Building on actor-network theory, the paper concludes that the standardization of work practices is the result of the dynamic interplay between technology and its users, rather than the consequence of a planned and well-defined design project.

Global frameworks, local contingencies: policy translations and education development in India

Policies and programmes pursuing the universalisation of elementary education (UEE) in developing nations have been influenced by a set of complex forces in international, state, and local arenas. This paper explores how a large‐scale standardised assessment programme shaped by international and market‐oriented discourses has been differently re‐worked in the south Indian state of Karnataka. We draw on observation and interview data with educators and administrators to shed some light on their roles in reconstituting the meaning and practice of this programme. The intended frameworks of ‘borrowed’ education policies are not always reproduced or sustained in local contexts. Our paper shows how policies, rather than ‘borrowed’ from one context to another, undergo a process of ‘translation’ involving the contextualisation and inevitable transformation of policies.

Protestant Responses to Darwinism in Denmark, 1859–1914

From the 1870s onwards, Charles Darwin's theory of evolution, published in On the Origin of Species (1859) and Descent of Man (1871), was an important topic among the followers of the influential theologian N.F.S. Grundtvig (1783-1872). The Grundtvigians constituted a major faction within the Evangelical-Lutheran Established Church, which included more than ninety percent of the population in the period 18591914.This article demonstrates the influence of local contexts on the reception of scientific ideas by analyzing how specific aspects of intellectual culture made the Grundtvigian reactions to Darwin's theory different from Protestant denominations in America and Britain. Firstly, Grundtvig's critique of Lutheran scriptural theology and his preference for the living word to the letters of the Bible legitimized liberal interpretations of Scripture. Secondly the philosophy of the Soren Kierkegaard protagonist, Rasmus Nielsen, made it possible for Grundtvigians to draw radical distinctions between science and faith. This specific Danish Protestantism, as the clergyman Frederik Jungersen phrased it in 1873, led the way for liberal Grundtvigians in coming to terms with Darwinism in the first decades of the twentieth century.1PROTESTANT RESPONSES TO EVOLUTIONIn recent decades historians have paid considerable attention to religious responses to Darwinism. Studies have revealed a variety of reactions to evolution depending on local contingencies, which has made it impossible to uphold any grand narrative of the dissemination of Darwinism.2 In his study of Calvinist attitudes toward Darwinism in Princeton, Belfast, and Edinburgh, David N. Livingstone thus emphasizes the importance of place in the reception of evolution.3 The historical complexities shaped by local contexts have been further demonstrated by scholars, who have explored the responses to Darwinism in a wide range of Protestant denominations in Britain and America.4 From the 1870s, when evolution was generally accepted among British and American scientists, liberal and even some orthodox theologians advocated various kinds of theistic evolutionism. It was not until the 1920s that creationists, who rejected evolution in general and human evolution in particular, took center stage in American Protestant answers to the Darwinian challenge. While many Protestant theologians in the decades around 1900 accepted that God had created the living world, including man, through evolution, very few embraced the specific Darwinian mechanism of natural selection that was often said to have atheistic implications. Instead liberal theologians, in line with many naturalists, often applied Lamarckian concepts of use-inheritance and teleological development and prevalent ideas of progress that were seen as consistent with viewing evolution as a meaningful process and the unfolding of the Creator's plan. According to James R. Moore, Peter J. Bowler, and Frederick Gregory this was the common way for liberal Christians to respond to organic evolution at least in the English-speaking world. It offered an acceptable compromise between science and faith. However, this article demonstrates that this strategy did not dominate in Denmark, where a separation model of science and faith was a more widespread approach when embracing the theory of evolution.5While studies by Jon H. Roberts and Ronald L. Numbers reveal considerable differences within the leading Protestant denominations such as Calvinists, Baptists, Lutherans, Episcopalians, and Methodists in their attitudes toward evolution, they detect no significant differences among the groups. Numbers notes however that theological convictions sometimes influenced how people viewed Darwin's theory.6 This was especially the case when we move from the Protestant mainstream into distinctive groups such as the Seventh-day Adventists and the Pentecostals. In the case of the Adventists, their hyper-literalism and strong support for youngearth creationism owed much to the inspired writings of their founding prophetess Ellen G. …

The strategic competence of accountants and middle managers in budget making

This paper aims to advance the notion of the “situated functionality of numbers” ( Ahrens & Chapman, 2007) by investigating the practical knowledge of strategy which shapes the calculations performed by accountants and middle managers when they are making a budget. It proposes an in-depth investigation of the budgeting conversations collected during an extensive field study in a large construction firm that had undertaken a new partnership strategy. Drawing on a conversation analytical approach, it identifies three micro-practices of calculation constitutive of the accountants’ and middle managers’ strategic competence: invoking the usefulness of numbers to activate local projects; constructing the acceptability of numbers to report them to external partners; authorising the plausibility of numbers to reconcile local contingencies and global coherence. The paper then explores how accountants and middle managers come to a mutual understanding of their respective accountabilities when they perform their strategic competence. It ends by discussing the unintended consequences of these transformations in their professional roles.

Code-Switching as an Interactional Resource in Garrwa/Kriol Talk-in-Interaction

This paper is a study of bilingual talk among Garrwa/Kriol speakers in the communities of Borroloola and Robinson River, NT, focussing on choices speakers make between traditional and non-traditional Indigenous languages in ordinary conversations. The analysis presented here supports the view of code-switching, recently summarized by Matras, as an interactional resource—a means by which speakers can structure their talk around the local contingencies of an interaction. Language choice may be symbolic of a particular social stance or ‘social arena’ in a given context, but the fact of language shift (regardless of the direction of the shift), may be equally significant in demarcating conversational activities, and marking shifts in perspective.

Simultaneous discrimination reversal learning in pigeons and humans: anticipatory and perseverative errors

Pigeons were trained on a two-choice simultaneous discrimination (red vs. green) that reversed midway through each session. After considerable training, they consistently made both anticipatory errors prior to the reversal and perseverative errors after the reversal, suggesting that time (or number of trials) into the session served as a cue for reversal. In Experiment 2, to discourage the use of time as a cue, we varied the location of the reversal point within the session such that it occurred semirandomly after Trial 10, 25, 40, 55, or 70. Pigeons still tended both to anticipate and to perseverate. In Experiment 3, we required 20 pecks to a stimulus on each trial to facilitate memory for the preceding response and sensitivity to local reinforcement contingencies, but the results were similar to those of Experiment 2. We then tested humans on a similar task with a constant (Experiment 4) or variable (Experiment 5) reversal location. When the reversal occurred consistently at the midpoint of the session, humans, like pigeons, showed a tendency to anticipate the reversal; however, they did not show perseverative errors. When the reversal location varied between sessions, unlike pigeons, humans adopted a win-stay/lose-shift strategy, making only a single error on the first trial of the reversal.

Plant Cover, Herbivory, and Resiliency in a Cape Cod Salt Marsh: Multi-year Responses and Recovery Following Manipulation of Nutrients and Competition

To assess responses and recovery of salt marsh grass species, we manipulated external nutrient supply and removed shoots of Spartina alterniflora or Spartina patens from fertilized and control plots in a Massachusetts marsh. The pulse-and-recovery experiment included treatments for 5 years, and recovery for an additional 7 years. Responses of these potential competitors sensitively depended on local contingencies of elevation and nutrient dose, and, moreover, the differences in outcomes were emphasized at longer time scales. Local contingencies became manifest as differences in responsiveness and resiliency of the different grass species, with differing time courses and longer-term outcomes as to what species were present. These features might explain the diverse results obtained in shorter-term salt marsh experiments, and provide a view of the complex suite of species-specific and external environmental variables that may control competitive interactions in general.

Synthetic biology in society: learning from past experience?

Drawing an analogy to past debates over biotechnology, some stakeholders fear that synthetic biology (SB) could raise public concerns. Accordingly, ‘lessons from the past’ should be applied to avoid controversies. However, biotechnology in the 1990s is not the only possible comparator. The potential to become contested has been attributed to a number of other novel technologies. Looking at nanotechnology for example, controversies have not materialised to the extent predicted. The article discusses factors relevant for controversies over technologies as well as differences to the situation when modern biotechnology began to proliferate. Certain properties attributed to SB in the discussion so far indeed suggest a potential for controversies of its own, but perceptions may follow those on other aspects of biotechnology subject to local contingencies. Finally, it is questioned whether ELSI research should see its task in applying lessons from the past to ease technology introduction. Today, rather than seeing themselves being embedded in a linear model of technology development, social scientists take an interest in developments ‘upstream’ where technologies take shape.

Emulating and/or embodying the ideal: The gendering of temporal frameworks and Islamic role models in Shi‘i Lebanon

ABSTRACTIn this article, I discuss two of the major temporal frameworks that pious Shi‘i Muslims in Lebanon draw on, as seen through the example of the Battle of Karbala, its annual commemoration during Ashura, and the work that the religious figures Imam Husayn and Sayyida Zaynab do in linking history to the contemporary moment. I suggest that, to fully understand how these two temporalities work, it is necessary to attend to the ways in which they are differently gendered. I conclude by proposing explanations for that gendering that take into account both the Ashura history itself and contemporary local and transnational political contingencies. [temporality, gender, Islam, Shi‘ism, narrative, role models, transnationalism]

Cyclicity in the structure of female baboon social networks

There is an established and very influential view that primate societies have identifiable, persistent social organizations. It assumes that association patterns reflect long-term strategic interests that are not qualitatively perturbed by short-term environmental variability. We used data from two baboon troops in markedly different habitats over three consecutive seasons to test this assumption. Our results demonstrate pronounced cyclicity in the extent to which females maintained differentiated relationships. When food was plentiful, the companionships identified by social network analysis in the food-scarce season disappeared and were replaced by casual acquaintanceships more representative of mere gregariousness. Data from the fourth, food-scarce, season at one site indicated that few companions were re-united. It is likely that this reflected stochastic variation in individual circumstances. These results suggest that attention could profitably be paid to the effects of short-term local contingencies on social dynamics, and has implications for current theories of primate cognitive evolution.