No description available.

No description available.

Industry growth and the reduction of available seasonal labour in New Zealand’s horticulture and viticulture industries led to a collaboration with the government in 2005, and the formation of a seasonal labour strategy for the future, the Recognised Seasonal Employer Scheme (RSE) was launched in 2007. The objectives of this policy were twofold: to fill labour gaps of the horticulture and viticulture industries and to promote economic development in Pacific Island states by prioritising workers from the region. Different actors have different aims, and different measure for success. In order for this scheme to be successful for the New Zealand government it needs to meet theses policy objectives of supplying reliable labour to the industries, and increasing economic development in the Pacific. For Pacific island states success depends on the continuity of the scheme, and the remittances that workers will send home to aid economic development. For the industries success comes from having a dependable and controllable labour force. Success for the workers in the scheme relies on them making as much money as possible during the season to meet their goals of financing family and community needs. In order to achieve these various successes workers are made unfree. Unfreedom means that the workers have no freedom in the labour market and are restricted to working for the grower stipulated in the employment contract. Conditions of employment contracts, visa regulations and informal pressures to be ‘good’ men both at work and in free time from the Vanuatu government, men’s home communities and industry participants all work to limit the men’s freedom, which is entrenched largely through threats of being sent home or blacklisted from the scheme. Workers are aware of the mechanisms used to control them and they do resist some of the conditions imposed, but only in a limited way that will not see them excluded from the scheme. Using the anthropological approach of participation observation this research was undertaken in the first season of the RSE scheme 2007/2008, where I lived and worked with 22 ni-Vanuatu migrant workers in Central Otago to gain knowledge of how, they and others in the industry experienced the RSE scheme.

No description available.

No description available.

Stooping and crouching (SC) postures are integral to many daily tasks, such as retrieving objects from the floor and reaching to low shelves, yet nearly one in four community-dwelling older adults (24%) report having difficulty or being completely unable to perform SC movements. While limited research has identified physical (e.g., lower extremity strength and joint immobility) and behavioural (e.g., obesity and balance confidence) determinants of SC difficulty, little is known about how aging affects the manner in which SC tasks are performed. The objective of this thesis was to describe age-related differences in movement kinematics and balance control during stooping and crouching tasks. Healthy younger (n = 12) and older (n = 12) participants performed a series of object-retrieval tasks ??? varying in initial lift height, precision required, and duration ??? that required them to bend over or reach toward the floor. In addition to kinematic and postural control measures describing the movements, measures of lower limb isometric strength, passive range of motion (ROM), and balance confidence were obtained for each participant. Compared to younger, older participants moved slower into and out of self-selected postures, which were characterized by higher whole-body centre of mass (COM) vertical positions. Specifically, older adults exhibited lower vertical COM linear velocities and lower hip, knee, and ankle joint angular velocities during transitions, and higher COM heights achieved through comparatively less flexion in the hip, knee, and ankle joints during object retrieval. Older participants also displayed smaller, more centralized anterior-posterior (AP) COM excursions and lower COM velocities, but higher centre of pressure (COP) activity compared to younger participants, demonstrated through increased COP velocity (relative to COM velocity) and more frequent COP adjustments aimed at regulating COM position. Changing task constraints (i.e., lower initial lift height or longer duration) elicited greater postural changes in younger compared to older participants, potentially reflecting a diminished ability in older adults to make appropriate task-specific adaptations. In particular, younger participants were 4 times more likely than older participants to use a lower to the floor, forefoot crouching posture, especially during longer duration tasks. Older participants also had decreased leg strength and less passive range of motion compared to younger participants. Overall, the results of this thesis demonstrate that despite moving slower through shorter distances, older adults displayed higher COP activity, which may have reflected a heightened effort to control COM position, during SC tasks. This compliments existing works describing age-related differences in movement strategies and balance control during lifting and sit-to-stand tasks. Further work exploring relationships between specific physiological and behavioural factors and SC task performance measures is needed to inform therapeutic intervention strategies.

Notions such as transference, movement, transit and mobility have become fundamental to understand the mechanisms that rule the circulation, reception and production of contemporary cultural artifacts. In spite of the growing scholarship on the topic, very little attention has been given to a particular cultural arena: the realm of contemporary entertainment. By contemporary entertainment, I refer to a set of industrial products which are especially directed to urban young audiences: cartoons, comic books, computer games, blockbuster movies, theme park attractions, etc. This thesis argues that the realm of contemporary entertainment is marked by the presence of intense mobility, by movement and acceleration on at least two levels. First, movies (The Matrix, City of God, Run Lola Run, etc.), TV programs (the so-called “MTV aesthetics”), computer games (Doom or games based on blockbusters) and even cartoons for children (Spongebob, Pokémon, etc.) present frantic editing and engage the audiences’ senses through moving images in a vertiginous “bombardment” of signs – a phenomenon I will call kinesthesics. Second, the production and reception of these cultural objects take place in a highly intermedial environment: computer games become feature movies (Tom Raider, Resident Evil), comic books become feature movies (Sin City, Spiderman, etc.) feature movies become theme park attractions (Jurassic Park), theme park attractions become feature movies (Pirates of the Caribbean) and so on. This thesis shows how these two basic mobile characteristics play a determinant role in the complex economic, technologic and aisthesic rationale that drives the contemporary entertainment industry. i The investigation of these basic traits suggests the existence of mobility paradigms that help us better understand not only products like the ones mentioned above, but also disparate cultural artifacts such as the Brazilian aparelhagem – a traveling technological paraphernalia that brings musical entertainment to poor audiences in the Brazilian Amazon Region. Aparelhagens present an intricate blending of physical displacement, media mobility, visual spectacle and musical frenzy. This successful combination propels a popular and powerful entertainment industry in Northern Brazil known as tecnobrega. By analyzing the phenomenon and comparing it to global entertainment products, the thesis discloses aisthesic patterns that cross social, economic and cultural boundaries.

This thesis examines the micro-process of social mobility in modern Hong Kong. It also studies Hong Kong's mobility regime in a conventional macro-comparative fashion. By applying the core model of social fluidity developed in the CASMIN (Comparative Analysis of Social Mobility in Industrial Nations) project to the mobility data collected in the 1989 Hong Kong Social Mobility Survey, I point to several distinctive features of Hong Kong's mobility regime. This exercise also allows me to engage in the ongoing debate concerning the degree of commonality and variation in relative mobility rates across industrial nations. Having made this macrocomparison, I turn to explore the micro-mobility process. Drawing on worklife data collected in the 1991-92 follow-up study, I consider the following issues: (a) typical mobility paths in Hong Kong, (b) how social networks facilitate the job search process, and (c) how career beginning affects subsequent mobility outcome. In this study, I also test and apply a new technique, Optimal Matching Analysis, which compares and classifies complete career sequences. Thus, apart from offering substantive findings on social mobility in Hong Kong, this thesis also seeks to make a technical contribution to the analysis of life course data.

No description available.

No description available.