Marginal Actors Research Articles

The 2014 federal and European elections in Belgium

Highlights: • The Flemish regionalist party N-VA won the elections and entered the federal government. • Flemish radical-right and populist parties suffered heavy losses and became marginal actors. • The French-speaking party system became more fragmented as small political forces entered the federal parliament. • The federal government formation ‘only’ took 139 days (compared to 541 days in 2010). • The incumbent government was replaced by a centre-right cabinet despite its relatively good electoral performance in a difficult economic and institutional context.

Marginal Actors? The Role of Bedouin in the Ottoman Administration of Animals as Property in the District of Salt, 1870-1912

This article examines the roles of Bedouin in the implementation of late Ottoman regulations that aimed to create an intrusive system for managing animals as property. Using material of the central archives, the article outlines relevant regulations and amendments, showing how communications between central officials and provincial bureaucrats in regions with nomadic populations contributed to the process of lawmaking. It then presents an analysis ofsharīʿacourt records from the district of Salt, in southeastern Syria, arguing that Bedouin both participated in implementing this system at the district level and challenged its parameters, especially with regard to taxation of their livestock property.

THE CONCEPT OF POWER IN ELITE AND PLURALIST THEORIES

This article analyses and compares the concept of power in elite and pluralist theories, particularly the work of Michels and that of the pluralists Lindblom and Woodhouse, with the aim of considering how power is interpreted within these theories. While elite theories emphasise the central role of the elite in shaping political change, pluralist theories oppose elite theories and do not attribute such a significant role to the elite. A comparison of elite and pluralist views on the issue of power consolidation, however, shows a basic assumption underlying the two bodies of work: for both, power is concentrated in the hands of the ruling elite, which is stable and which is slowly renewed with new members. Via direct or indirect assimilation, the ruling elite absorbs those connected with strategic state resources (military, economic, and so forth), and maintains its integrity and unity by, for instance, integrating opponents into state bureaucracy structures, or through the use of force, or assimilation or the creation of internal closure via internal rotation. Those not belonging to the elite – poor, marginal actors – are disconnected from the realisation of their interests.

What Got You Here Won't Get You There: Peripheral Knowledge Workers and Their Strategies for Success

This study examines the knowledge and skills that marginal actors prioritize in service of their professional development and advancement. I analyze over 1,000 stories from a rich dataset of 105 semi-structured interviews with senior leaders of a global investment bank. Through inductive analysis of stories, I build on a nascent literature about peripherality, which refers to individuals’ perceptions of being outsiders at work. I find that those who perceive themselves to be peripheral disproportionately value technical knowledge. I argue that peripherality is associated with the pursuit of technical knowledge for two reasons. First, technical knowledge is accessible, relatively independent from interactions and relationships with others. Second, technical knowledge is legitimate, perceived as rational and meritocratic. These findings may expose knowledge-seeking behaviors as a mechanism behind stratification within internal labor markets. As peripheral actors pursue technical knowledge, they may actually neglect knowledge about interactions and relationships that is necessary for the upper echelons of organizations and management. That different knowledge-seeking behaviors may have negative consequences for career outcomes of peripheral members demonstrates the importance of attending to the micro-foundations of human capital.

Third World Countriess Marginal Position in the Contemporary Global Economy: An Assessment

It is ironic that today as in the past, despite the process of a globalizing world order; the Third World economies have remained marginalized from active participation in the benefits of growth and sustainable development. This paper aims at assessing why and how the countries of the South have remained marginal actors in the world economic system despite their efforts to arrest the trend. The article is driven by the need for a sustained normative and pragmatic representation of existing paradigmatic discourses within the field of political economy. To achieve this objective, the article leaned heavily on the content analysis of available literary materials in both the humanities and the Social sciences, linking the discourse to the failure of the countries of the South to emancipate their economies from marginalization in the global economy. The paper argues that, given the countries of the South’s massive fertile landmass, they could maximize the potentials at their disposal by perfecting the practices in the agricultural industry through which they would develop vibrant value chains of locally produced products thereby entrenching their economies as indispensable actors in the global economy.

Between missions and development: Christian NGOs in the Canadian development sector

This paper examines how Canadian Christian development organisations construct the boundaries between missions and development work. Because of their participation in evangelism, and their often conservative political and social stances, missionary organisations are considered marginal actors and are regarded with suspicion by donor agencies, secular NGOs and more liberal faith-based NGOs. Yet, they remain primary service providers in many development contexts. They make complex political decisions about fundraising and resource allocation, and these choices are affected by their efforts to balance between religious identity and strategic goals. These choices have become more difficult as missionary organisations have experienced increased pressure from the Canadian International Development Agency and their own donors to “NGO-ise”.

Lost and Found: The WikiLeaks ofDe FactoState-Great Power Relations

De facto states are typically seen as marginal actors in the international system. Although they control territory and provide governance, their claims to sovereignty remain largely unrecognized. It is widely believed that such entities are either ignored or viewed with hostility by the vast majority of sovereign states. Rather than theoretically presume such relations, we empirically investigate de facto state–great power interactions through the use of a novel data set comprising 448 “WikiLeaks” US diplomatic cables from 2003 to 2010. Specifically, we examine US relations with the four de facto states of Abkhazia, Nagorno-Karabakh, Somaliland, and Northern Cyprus to test four different hypotheses designed to explain what determines the degree of US support or hostility toward individual de facto states. We find that hostility/support and isolation/engagement often go hand in hand, yet vary significantly across our selected cases. De facto states are not treated as homogenous entities and US foreign policy is quite capable of discriminating between them and calibrating its interactions with them.

The Empire Sings Back: Glee's Queer Materialization of Filipina/o America

Watching the fall 2010 season premiere of the popular musical television show Glee, I recall wondering, “What is a Filipina doing in Lima, Ohio?” when Sunshine Corazon, a new Philippine exchange student played by Filipina international recording artist Charice Pempengco, sang Lady Gaga and Beyonce’s “Telephone” in the girls’ bathroom with Rachel Berry, William McKinley High’s glee club star whom viewers love to hate. Given the underrepresentation of Filipina/os on mainstream US television, I found Sunshine particularly surprising because she was a featured character and because she was in the Midwest—a part of the country not readily imagined as a place where Asians and Asian Americans live. Five shows later, Blaine Anderson, an attractive, openly gay, and vocally talented student from a rival glee club, The Warblers, captured viewers’ hearts with his rendition of Katy Perry’s “Teenage Dream.” Whereas Blaine’s racial-ethnic identity was not made obvious on the show, the Internet was abuzz with reports that the actor who plays Blaine, Darren Criss, is half Filipino, citing Criss’s Twitter page. Together, Sunshine and Blaine dramatize the simultaneous absence and presence of Filipina/os in US national culture and illustrate how race and sexuality continue to be framed as mutually exclusive within popular discourses. More importantly, these two characters invite us to consider the erotics of racial difference and remind us that race continues to play a central role in the visual economy of television despite popular claims that we now live in a post-racial United States. Focusing on Glee’s second season, in which these two Filipina/o actors debut, this essay explores how Filipina/o-ness simultaneously materializes as queer and materializes queerness, even if the actors do not necessarily play Filipina/os on the show. On the one hand, the presence of Filipina/os on Glee initially seems strange and out of place—in short, queer—because these racially marginal actors

Multi-event ethnography: doing research in pluralistic settings

Purpose– The purpose of this paper is to overcome the challenges of doing research in pluralistic settings by performing multi-event ethnographies. The proposal redirects the efforts of longitudinal data collection toward field-configuring events (FCEs), wherein multiple organizations with divergent perspectives over an issue are strategizing in concentrated efforts, at the same time and space. The authors apply traditional ethnographic tools in this understudied setting. On the one hand, these tools allow for a thick description that results in in-depth accounts of actors within FCEs. On the other hand, they provide flexibility because they can be used in complementary ways.Design/methodology/approach– The authors propose the use of three interconnected ethnographic tools in multiple events: shadowing, practitioner's diary and researcher's reflexive journal.Findings– The illustration of an ongoing research project showed how the approach helped the researchers to follow a practitioner in multiple discursive spaces but also to see how the practitioner, even with a different status in a later FCE, transported a deviant practice that denounces his persistent disadvantaged position in the field. The approach delineated here allowed the researchers to open a new window for the appreciation of the activities of marginal actors fighting against hegemonic discourses.Research limitations/implications– The application of the shadowing technique might be challenging. Attention might also be paid to the implications of previous FCEs to current dynamics.Practical implications– The tools developed in this approach have a large potential to have practical implications, as the practitioner accounts of the phenomenon in question are at the center of the data collection and analysis.Originality/value– The proposal contributes to the literature on organizational ethnography by drawing attention to the importance of tracking multiple events, not only different sites, to unveil organizational practices in pluralistic settings as events progress over time.

The sacred mountain: Confronting global capital at Niyamgiri

Translocal mobilizations on issues of social and environmental justice have arisen across the world, often in response to the depredations of extractive industries linked to global capital networks. A key challenge in theorizing such mobilization is to understand how dispersed and diverse actors come together contingently around common campaigns of justice, and enable powerless and marginal actors to contend with powerful state and corporate actors. In my paper, I draw on DeLanda’s work on assemblages to engage with this question in the context of the case of Niyamgiri in India. The proposal to mine Niyamgiri, a mountain located in South Odisha in India, gave rise to a transnational mobilization which included local grassroots movements, activists, lawyers, conservation organizations and human rights/indigenous rights networks from around the world. I describe the mobilization as a translocal assemblage of resistance, individuated out of interactions between diverse actors across locations and scales. I discuss how this assemblage emerged through interactions between pre-existing actors, networks and institutions, and enabled marginalized and powerless communities to contend with powerful assemblages of state and capital. I argue that thinking in terms of assemblages can provide a strategic depth to social and environmental justice movements, which totalizing discourses of capital, power and revolution often foreclose.

Peripheral governance: administering transnational health-care flows

AbstractThis paper develops the concept of peripheral governance as a kind of legal transnationalism that is being generated by responses to outward travel for health care. I argue for a recuperation of the ‘peripheral’ in order to think through the ways in which marginal actors and marginal objects contribute to transnationalism. The paper draws on the idea of networked governance, nodal governance in particular, to capture governance mechanisms that have emerged in response to outward flows for health care. Peripheral governance comes into being through the cultivation of dependency on core provision of health care in other jurisdictions and by focusing domestic provision on those services (information, counselling, check-ups), which lie on the margins of health care. Peripheral governance has four key technologies: non-development, exit, use and return. These technologies illustrate how state agencies may actively mobilise the peripheral as they claim to address local needs through participation in the regulation of cross-border health care. In so doing they configure a conception of the peripheral that does not want to become core, participates in transnational networks on its own terms, and focuses on marginal objects of health care. I develop this account of peripheral governance through a critical reading of the strategies that the Irish Crisis Pregnancy Agency has adopted in response to women's practices of travelling for abortion care.

Talking to the wind: the strategic practices of marginal actors at a Field-configuring Event

This paper examines the strategic practices of marginal actors in Field-configuring Events in the context of a Multilateral Environmental Agreement. In order to do that, the empirical study is base...

Better Judicial Review? EU Courts and the Smart Regulation Agenda in Implementing Chemicals Regulation

AbstractThis article argues that implementation of EU law should be analysed and studied as part of EU BR policies. In particular this is so after adoption of the Commission's smart regulation initiative, which makes a conscious effort to include the whole policy-making chain as its concept of better regulation. In this article I will shift attention away from the preparatory stages to the later stages of policy-making and analyse implementation projects of Chemicals Regulation REACH as a new manifestation of EU smart BR policies. Acknowledgement of the implementation stage in BR studies will offer some important insights into the relationship between BR and the courts. The courts are marginal actors mainly due to the soft law nature of much of the BR agenda. However, EU BR policies and their outcomes can become helpful for the courts by providing them with increasingly accurate information. I will then proceed to show how REACH implementation projects, especially guidance documents, can be utilised by th...

Competitive Tradition: Intellectual Property and New Millennial Craft

AbstractIn 2006, Peru's government awarded an intellectual property (IP) title known as a denomination of origin to the traditional ceramics made by artisans in the northern town of Chulucanas. The move was celebrated by the state as a culturally sensitive strategy for regional development that promised to preserve cultural tradition and heritage and to provide a model for future economic development strategies among other native populations across the country. This study explores the means by which rural and native communities – once framed as economically marginal actors and potential liabilities for the nation‐state – are selectively transformed into new agents of cultural innovation under contemporary IP‐based development plans. Based on interviews with participants and planners of Chulucanas' IP‐based development initiative, this research highlights how local accounts question the state's claims to use IP to pursue a national “export culture” and promote rural producers' global “competitivity” while simultaneously protecting local, collectively held production techniques.

Poverty, minority economic discrimination, and domestic terrorism

Recognizing that the empirical literature of the past several years has produced an inconclusive picture, this study revisits the relationship between poverty and terrorism and suggests a new factor to explain patterns of domestic terrorism: minority economic discrimination. Central to this study is the argument that because terrorism is not a mass phenomenon but rather is undertaken by politically marginal actors with often narrow constituencies, the economic status of subnational groups is a crucial potential predictor of attacks. Using data from the Minorities at Risk project, I determine that countries featuring minority group economic discrimination are significantly more likely to experience domestic terrorist attacks, whereas countries lacking minority groups or whose minorities do not face discrimination are significantly less likely to experience terrorism. I also find minority economic discrimination to be a strong and substantive predictor of domestic terrorism vis-à-vis the general level of economic development. I conclude with a discussion of the implications of the findings for scholarship on terrorism and for counter-terrorism policy.

Organizing Contests for Status: The Matthew Effect vs. the Mark Effect

What is the best way to design tournaments for status, in which individuals labor primarily for the esteem of their peers? What process, in other words, should organizers of status-based contests impose upon those who covet peer recognition? We propose a formal model of status-based competition that contrasts two competing alternatives. The first, following Merton, is the “Matthew Effect,” according to which a tournament's architect directs slack resources to elite actors and thus widens the distribution of rewards by favoring cumulative advantage. The second is the “Mark Effect,” under which a tournament's designer instead pushes slack resources to marginal actors and thus tightens the distribution of rewards. Our results suggest that although the Mark Effect is better for the social welfare of most tournaments, the Matthew Effect is preferable in two distinct contexts: in small tournaments where variation in underlying ability translates into acute advantages for the most capable contestants; and in large tournaments whose contestants face constant, rather than rising, marginal costs—a condition we relate to contestants' perception of their work as intrinsically valuable. Our contributions are twofold: We find, counter to the thrust of Merton's work, that cumulative advantage is not invariably optimal for the functioning of status contests; and we identify circumstances in which the production of superstars is likely to make contests for status better off in aggregate. Implications for future research on status and management are discussed. This paper was accepted by Olav Sorenson, organizations and social networks.

Eating in Mouthfuls while Facing the Door: Some Notes on Childhoods and their Displacements in Eastern Zimbabwe

Following one child referred to as Priscilla, the article explores the fluid nature of childhood and parenthood within the complexities and losses of contemporary Zimbabwean chaos while also noting the historical precursors of current social forms. The extreme hardships faced by Zimbabwean children are thrown into relief by the exigencies of living with HIV, and further dramatized by being marginal actors in the failing state. The article argues that, methodologically, children's experiences require the ‘thick description’ generated through attention to the use of language and, more theoretically, that the social costs of mass impoverishment and displacement require scholarly attention to the most marginal, liminal and expendable members of Zimbabwean society.

Abjection as ‘Singular Politics’ in Janet Frame’s The Carpathians

Abjection as ‘Singular Politics’ in Janet Frame’s The Carpathians

REPRODUCING NATION, REDESIGNING POSITIONING: RUSSIAN AND pALESTINIAN STUDENTS INTERPRET UNIVERSITY KNOWLEDGE

This paper discusses the reproduction of hegemony and social hierarchy through education. It brings together two case studies of marginal groups at a university—Russian Jewish immigrants and Palestinian Israeli women—who make sense of their position in social hierarchies and power relations through constant interpretative work on the various dimensions of university knowledge. The article reveals how marginal actors’ interpretations of knowledge simultaneously are guided by students’ positioning vis-à-vis the dominant collective and also articulate and redesign positioning. The two groups redesign their marginalities vis-à-vis the Israeli-Jewish collective by transforming knowledge to identity. In so doing, these groups reproduce national borders of Israeli social hierarchy, while working to change the meaning of these borders for their group's positioning.

Ahead, A Bright but Challenging Future

It is good that cultural geography is thriving. Together with other positive trends, this can help to strengthen the field's foundation and identity in the new millennium. This will, however, require hard work and continuous questioning of approaches. It is good that boundaries between subfields and disciplines are weakening. Over the past few decades cultural geographers have formed happy unions with other geographers and explored opportunities in other disciplines. One mighty example is the blurring of lines between cultural and political geographies in research about cultural identity politics and the politics of culture. Networks are being woven across the board. Stimulating interaction opens new, critical paths. Turf wars and silly disciplinary prejudices should be consigned to the dustbin of history. It is good that the expanding scope of research is adding volume to previously silent or silenced voices. The stubborn battle between masculine and feminine is loosening up and giving welcome space to those who are somewhere in between, or outside of, these two extremes, to children, animals, and other significant but marginal(ized) actors in daily life. The frontier is far from closed--instead, cultural geographers have the opportunity to trek where no one has trekked before. It is good that the mainstream is giving space to marginality and weirdness in academia as well. Popular and subcultures are now respectable research topics. Food, sports, and other conventional subfields of this research attract further explorations of what people like (to do) in their mundane spaces and how they create their own niches in these spaces. Those interested in the geographical soul of Elvis, the Sex Pistols, or Las Vegas make-believe will need to spend less time on justifying their research and defending their funding to colleagues who think their own work is somehow serious. Internal class hierarchies should be a thing from the past as well. In the new millennium, the wicked are increasingly at rest within cultural geography. All this points to an expanding and more inclusive understanding of what constitutes culture and who gets to participate in defining it. Indeed, this development confirms that one does not need to exclude others in order to exist and that there are multiple, equally worthy ways of doing things right. In my mind, this pluralism is a strength and an opportunity. However, it poses a few challenges, which need to be addressed in order to guarantee intellectually sound continuity. …