Progressive Reform Research Articles

Embodied Action, Projection, and Institutional Action: The Exchange of Tools and Implements During Surgical Procedures

ABSTRACT There has been a long-standing interest in projection and the resources on which participants rely to produce and recognize the import and organization of turns at talk. Less attention has been paid to the character of the activity in which utterances form part and the ways in which embodied action enables the intelligibility, coordination, and in some cases, coproduction, of particular actions. In this article, we focus on specialized forms of embodied, institutional activity and focus in particular on simultaneity and the ways in which bodily action enables the progressive formation and reformation of an activity in the light of the (co)participants’ emerging contributions. We address how the routine structure of particular tasks enables participants to anticipate, prepare for, and even initiate actions in advance of the relevant activity and in turn, how participants may seek to ameliorate the interactional import of potentially premature action. The articles explores the interplay of technical practice and interactional organization and points to the distinctive character of embodied action in understanding anticipation and coordination in complex forms of institutional interaction.

Multiple home ownership during market transition in China: longitudinal analysis of institutional factors

Housing reform in China has changed its housing market as the rate of multiple home ownership has increased, causing concerns about housing inequality. Existing studies analysed the influence of institutional and market factors on multiple home ownership, but few examined the changes in institutional factors. The present study aimed to address this research gap and found that households with local hukou, better occupational status or working in units of the party, government or state institutions are more likely to own multiple homes. Furthermore, the study investigated the impacts of institutional factors on multiple home ownership. Changing influences of institutional factors due to progressive reform were noted. Market reform reduced the influence of household registration and work units, whereas the effect of occupational status persists owing to incomplete reform. Progressive reform can lead to asymmetric changes in the role of institutional factors, supporting the coexistence of competing market transition theory and power persistence theory. Policy recommendations and implications are provided finally.

Tribal Land Rights: A Situational Analysis in the Context of West Bengal

Tribal communities in India are most deprived. Socio-economically, they are poor and marginalised. The root cause of socio-economic marginalisation can be attributed to alienation of tribal people from their land, territory and resources. The overall situation of the tribal population of West Bengal is not better than the national average, even more deprived than the tribal population of other states. Despite progressive land reform laws and political commitment to implement such laws, issues of tribal land rights have not been addressed adequately. There is no such exclusive study to understand the situation of tribal land rights in the state of West Bengal. This article analyses the status of tribal land rights in the state context and makes some suggestions for improving the situation. It is found that despite distribution of land titles, a large section of the tribal population remains landless. A sizable portion has not received received record-of-rights. Claims of many tribal people for forest patta remain pending or stand rejected. Tribal land alienation continues to be a matter of concern. The state has not taken any concrete steps for the restoration of unlawfully alienated tribal lands. A large section of the tribal sharecroppers in the state remain unrecorded.

A Commentary on Kenya’s Response to the Global STEM Movement from Social Justice Perspectives: Would School-Community Innovation Centres/Makerspaces Address Apparent Gaps in the Proposed Curriculum?

This paper discusses Kenya’s proposed STEM curriculum in the context of the new education system. The new education system aims at socioeconomic development following Kenya’s Vision 2030 and the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs). The paper refers to social justice perspectives to discuss strengths and weaknesses of the proposed STEM curriculum. Our exploration of the reform documents led to the question: Has Kenya got the means to benefit from the progressive reform ideas given meagre resources and local worldviews that might conflict with the scientific/STEM worldview? In response to this dilemma, the paper suggests innovation centres or do-it-yourself centres akin to makerspace activity, as one way to engender the development of endogenous science/STEM. Setting endogenous science/STEM as the framework for the proposed STEM curriculum is likely to seamlessly address the socioeconomic goals as stipulated for the new education system.

Continuity through Renewal: John Dewey, the International Institute in Spain, and Resisting the Assault on the Humanities

This paper marks the relation between humanities education and democracy as one of mutual necessity, since the pragmatic value of each is dependent on the other to be recognizable and realizable. Such an understanding is drawn from the ideas of the American philosopher and educator John Dewey. Dewey’s system clearly reveals the nature of the stakes of the assault on the humanities; it also indicates the educational measures democratic societies should take in response. By instantiating the “conjoint communicated experience” of democracy in a public, shared space in which differences are respected, human meanings are explored, and the expansion of knowledge and experience is valued as an end in itself, the humanities classroom emerges as a site of social renewal, as well as one of resistance to illiberalism. In order to present such a site in a manner befitting Dewey’s pragmatism, a lesser-known, local example of the value of humanities education is examined in this paper: that of the International Institute in Spain, located in Madrid. Beginning with its founding as a school for girls by Boston missionaries in 1892, and through its role at the center of a network of institutions invested in progressive educational reform in Spain during the pre-civil war period, IIE stands as a testament to the continuity through renewal that defines both liberal democracy and humanities education.

Radical Histories / Liberal Histories in Work Injury Law

Nate Holdren has written a brilliant, impassioned, and intellectually stimulating book on the legal history of industrial accidents. According to Holdren, work injuries were at their core a form of labor exploitation. He describes the law of work accidents as a machinery of injustice that bolstered the legitimacy of a violent and inhuman capitalist system. He fiercely critiques the workers’ compensation reforms enacted by progressive reformers a century ago as legitimating a form of systematic labor violence. He insists on recognizing and attending to the dignity of each accident victim, both in the content of his argument and as a matter of literary form. Injury Impoverished is a welcome if unsettling rebuke to complacent accounts of the field, perhaps my own among them. But Holdren’s analysis also raises many questions. Holdren attributes little value to the dramatically safer workplaces of the middle of the twentieth century. His cautious admiration for the litigation system of the years before workers’ compensation rests on a fantastical conception of the way 19th-century tort law actually worked. He calls for an impossibly demanding form of justice as recognition from the law. He misses the ways in which workers co-opted new forms of accident law and turned them to their own interests. And his single-minded focus on commodification and the point of production leads him to discount the surrounding political and legal institutions that shaped the social meaning of work injuries.

Transpacific Project: A Shared History of Progressive Reform among Settler Societies

Marilyn Lake advances knowledge of settler colonialism and transnational Progressivism in this well-researched study. Progressive New World underscores a deeply embedded, transnational linkage between racism and liberal reform within American and Australasian history. Transpacific progressivism, a movement fueled by white elites, thus evolved in concert with the denigration and regimentation of the non-white other. Progressive New World globalizes and further contextualizes the notoriously ambiguous history and legacies of the Progressive reform era. Lake’s major contribution is the illumination of “progressivism as a transpacific project shaped by Australasian example and the shared experience and racialized order of settler colonialism” (4). The book thus affirms the utility of settler colonialism as a rich framework of transnational analysis. With a few notable exceptions, including Margaret Jacobs’ 2009 award-winning book White Mother to a Dark Race: Settler Colonialism, Maternalism, and the Removal of Indigenous Children in the American West and Australia, 1880–1940, too few studies have probed the intricate linkages between the trans-pacific anglophone settler societies in an indigenous context. Lake substantially advances this discussion as well.

Before the Accommodation Principle: Disability and Employment Among Union Army Veterans.

Purpose This article examines the impact on veteran employment of the U.S. government's pension benefit provisions for Union soldiers following the Civil War. Methods To do so, it draws on both Union army pension records and U.S. census returns as well as information derived from the Union army samples designed by the Center for Population Economics at the University of Chicago ("CPE") and census samples from the Integrated Public Use Microdata Series ("IPUMS"). Results We find that, although twentieth-century Progressive reformers contended otherwise, these nineteenth-century Americans wanted what their twenty-first-century counterparts want-work at a meaningful occupation. Conclusions Our findings evidence the complex and contradictory impact on occupational rehabilitation and employment resulting from the public-private partnerships established for Union army veterans. These partnerships were based on substantially different notions of disability needs and rights than those underlying the Americans with Disabilities Act of 1990 and its central accommodation principle.

Resource misallocation, production efficiency and outward foreign direct investment decisions of Chinese enterprises

Resource misallocation, as an essential characteristic of China’s “progressive reform,” has become a significant factor restricting high-quality outward foreign direct investment (OFDI). Using the Database of Chinese Industrial Enterprises (2009–2013), this paper empirically analyzes the impact of resource misallocation on OFDI and its heterogeneous characteristics via the Heckman two-stage selection model. This study finds that total factor productivity has a positive influence on expanding investment quantity. In addition, from the perspective of resource misallocation, factor price distortion inhibits the role of productivity in increasing investment propensity. A mechanism analysis indicates that there is no “productivity paradox” in the decision-making process of OFDI in China as a whole; but there may be an investment productivity paradox in foreign-funded enterprises, enterprises in coastal areas, and large-scale enterprises. After controlling for factor price distortions, the productivity paradox disappears. Thus, total factor productivity (TFP) becomes an important factor in promoting OFDI propensity of overseas-funded enterprises, enterprises in coastal areas and large-scale enterprises.

“A company of gentlemen”: confederate veterans and southern universities

ABSTRACT Between 1911 and 1914, four major Southern public universities – the University of North Carolina, the University of Virginia, the University of Georgia, and the University of Alabama – conferred honorary degrees upon former students who had abandoned their studies to join the Confederate military. Some 400 Confederate veterans received this tribute a half century after their enlistment, during a critical moment in the development of Lost Cause commemoration, of Southern Progressivism, and of Southern higher education. This essay explores how the decision to honour former Confederates at these four state universities not only reflected the desire to recognize the patriotic sacrifices of aged Confederate veterans, but also helped to solidify a political order based on white supremacy and Progressive social reform.

Support for Progressive Reforms: Evidence from California’s 1911 Referenda

An analysis of county-level election results in a 1911 California special election in which voters considered multiple state constitutional amendments—women’s suffrage, direct democracy, home rule, worker safety, and business regulation—finds that certain socially active Protestant denominations endorsed most of these reforms. Otherwise, support for these measures showed little group uniformity. Urban counties favored several reforms but opposed women’s suffrage. Support in counties with greater wealth, a larger proportion of immigrants, and several other religious denominations extended to certain reforms but not to others. Although many leaders and chroniclers typically claimed Progressivism to comprise a coherent movement, empirical study challenges this interpretation by showing varied patterns of electoral support for Progressive reforms and a notable divergence in support for women’s suffrage.

Progressive New World: How Settler Colonialism and Transpacific Exchange Shaped American Reform by Marilyn Lake

Progressive New World: How Settler Colonialism and Transpacific Exchange Shaped American Reform by Marilyn Lake

Development evaluation in authoritarian states: A case from Kazakhstan

AbstractMotivationAuthoritarian states receive development funding from international donors for programmes and interventions, some aimed at improving their governance systems. This article reports on the evaluation of an EU‐funded programme in Kazakhstan, seen as the most progressive reformer in Central Asia. The EU Programme was aimed at enhancing Kazakhstan’s business competitiveness through better regulation and civil service modernization.PurposeThis article addresses two research questions. What was the impact of the EU‐funded intervention? What role, if any, did the evaluation play in reflective policy learning for the future?Approach and MethodsThe research draws on quantitative and qualitative evidence. This involved analysing secondary data sources on the effectiveness of governance over time in Kazakhstan and interviews for 34 key stakeholders on the impact of the EU interventions.FindingsWe find no significant improvements in governance over time. While the donor responded in a flexible way to meet the changing strategic goals of the state (which were at the personal behest of the President), this did not help to embed evaluation as part of the policy cycle for future learning. The key beneficiary here was the Government of Kazakhstan.Policy implicationsWider systemic change from upward accountability to downward accountability to citizens is needed to make evaluation relevant for authoritarian states. Upward accountability to the President is a feature of authoritarian regimes, which precludes citizens from being able to hold the state to account. Without these systemic changes, autocracies simply engage in development evaluation as a perfunctory exercise to meet donor requirements.

Tackling the federal debt problem fairly

Rising federal debt threatens to reduce the growth of the economy, people’s living standards, wages, and the standard of living. A policy solution needs to respect many constraints, most importantly, that it is seen as fair—both within generations and across generations. This article addresses concepts of fairness and their application to resolutions of the federal debt problem. The major conclusions are that policymakers should push only limited amounts of debt to future generations and that they should use the need to reform fiscal policy as a way to expand government investments in a wide range of programs—ranging from early childhood to higher education, from infrastructure to basic research. The resolution of these issues will also require progressive tax reforms.

Question worth 20 million lives: Why federal housing assistance has not had its Obamacare

AbstractThe equitable character of a policy determines its progressiveness, yet some domestic policies are more equitable than others. The question of how and why this is the case is addressed by studying federal housing and health policies in the United States, a critical case known for its rampant inequalities in both sectors. Although social equity is a fundamental aspect of welfare provision, explaining differences in coverage and government support among policy areas remains a weakness in the literature. This comparative historical analysis shows that both housing assistance and health care suffered from inequities almost as early as their inception. But a progressive reform took shape with the Affordable Care Act (ACA) and extended coverage to 20 million people formerly uninsured. This essay tackles an unsolved puzzle: Why has such grand policy reform never taken place in housing where more than 20 million people are eligible for assistance but do not receive help? We found that it is largely explained by housing assistance distinctiveness with regard to its weak constituency, racial connotation and low public concern. We conclude with the analytical payoffs of studying social equity, both for political scientists and observers of social affairs.

The risks and opportunities of free trade agreements for progressive labour law reform: the case of the TPP

ABSTRACT This paper was originally presented as a keynote speech to the AIRAANZ 2020 Conference in Queenstown, New Zealand. By way of background, it was delivered in the context of New Zealand's continued pursuit of multilateral and bilateral trade and investment agreements. The most recent of these is the Comprehensive and Progressive Agreement for Trans-Pacific Partnership (CPTPP), involving New Zealand and 10 other countries in the Asia Pacific region. Such agreements now impose or remove rules well beyond the traditional realm of trade. For example, they incorporate chapters on services, investment, competition, and intellectual property rights protection, and make deep inroads into local regulatory freedom regarding digital development and government procurement. For decades, the treatment of labour standards in the context of globalisation has been debated, both between and within the north and the south, and the labour movement and free trade adherents. What might be called the 'settled centre' of this discussion, has been the inclusion of provisions in these agreements purporting to recognise and encourage the application of selected labour standards. In this paper, the writer assesses the risks and opportunities of agreements like the CPTPPA for progressive labour law reform and argues for alternatives.

Getting Consent ‘Right’: Sexual Assault Law Reform in New South Wales

For the purposes of rape/sexual assault, the preferred approach for pursuing modernisation in Australia has been to legislate a positive definition of consent as ‘free and voluntary agreement’. The absence of consent in this form has become the primary touchstone for the crime. And yet, despite multiple waves of progressive legislative reform, too few victims of sexual violence find justice in the criminal courts. This article questions whether prevailing statutory models of consent definition may be more problem than solution. Drawing on the work of Pateman and Gatens in particular, I argue that while the repetition of the words ‘free and voluntary agreement’ make it a familiar and reassuring formula, its meaning is neither self-evident nor self-executing. It is possible that the definition opens a ‘gap’ between what is intended by the phrase and how it is filled in practice by the ‘common knowledges’ (Mariana Valverde, Law's Dream of a Common Knowledge (Princeton University Press, 2003)) of rape myths. Myth as ‘misunderstanding’ may be capable of legislative correction, but legislative correction of myth, understood as an excess of signification (Roland Barthes, Mythologies trans A Lavers (Jonathan Cape, 1972)), is elusive. The article also suggests that the practice of legislative correction may be flawed to the extent that it relies on naming and marking the limit of what consent is not – via categories of (exceptional) circumstance and vulnerability.

Towards a feminist global trade politics

ABSTRACT Socially progressive globalization in a post-neoliberal era must recognize the centrality of gendered and other social hierarchies to the deeper workings of the global political economy and actively seek to dismantle them. In practice, this involves: (i) redefining the purpose of global trade in ways that value, prioritize and support progressive forms of social reproduction; (ii) centreing trade policy on a holistic understanding of the economy; and (iii) democratizing global trade relations. In this article, we outline a feminist International Political Economy theoretical perspective for understanding global trade, take stock of a range of gender and trade initiatives pursued by various trade actors and organizations to show where progressive reforms have already been taken and where these fall short, and make concrete suggestions on how to formulate trade policies in line with globalist, feminist prerogatives.

MUHAMMAD ‘ABDUH’S REFORMISM: THE MODES OF ITS DISSEMINATION IN PRE-INDEPENDENT MALAYSIA

Muhammad ‘Abduh (1849-1905) was a prominent scholar, pedagogue, mufti ‘alim, theologian and reformer. Though trained in traditional Islamic knowledge, ‘Abduh, who was influenced by the ideas of Jamal al-Din al-Afghani, became discontent with the existing methods of traditional Islamic learning. Based in Egypt, ‘Abduh led the late 19th-century Muslim reform to revitalize some aspects of Islamic doctrine and practice to make them compatible with the modern world. This reformist trend called for the reform of intellectual stagnation, revitalization of the socio-economic and political conditions of the ummah, and to make Islam compatible with modernity. ‘Abduh’s progressive reformism found following in various parts of the Muslim world including the Malay Archipelago. Among those influenced by ‘Abduh in the region were Sheikh Tahir Jalaluddin and Abdullah Ahmad in West Sumatra, Syed Sheikh al-Hadi in Malaya, and Kiyai Ahmad Dahlan in Yogyakarta. Though there is increasing literature on Muslim reformism, few works examine the social history of the transmission of ideas from one part of the Muslim world to another. Thus, this study analyzes how ‘Abduh’s reformism was transmitted to pre-independent Malaysia.

“It's terrible and I'm not going to try to tell you it isn't”: Steinbeck's Perspectives on Education

Abstract John Steinbeck's formal schooling experiences shaped his worldview of education as a series of dreary classrooms in which children studied “subjects in which no one was interested.” Yet he had great reverence for teachers and envisioned teaching to be an art form with potential to awaken the mind and spirit with curiosity, while also providing literacy opportunities for the children of migrants and the poor. From this perspective, his vision aligns with that of John Dewey, Jane Addams, and other progressive reformers. Steinbeck's hatred of formal schooling, combined with his progressive beliefs about the power of learning, reading, and inquiry, shaped both his fictional portrayals of schooling and also his persuasive essays on related subjects. This analysis of Steinbeck's attitudes toward education has a triple focus: his own experiences as a student; the state of the contemporary educational curriculum, policies, and practices; and the experiences of his fictional characters as they encounter formal and informal educational opportunities. The study reveals connections between Steinbeck's work and a surprising range of educational issues—from compulsory attendance to the contrast between rural and urban attitudes to classism in higher education. Although Steinbeck did not propose an educational or curriculum design, in his own life he modeled the value of participation in the act of learning—chiefly by seeking out excellent mentors and reading broadly. Thus, the examples set by his own life and in his fiction continue to challenge an educational system focused on conformity, often to the neglect or exclusion of creativity.