This research is founded upon three fundamental premises. The first is that good governance is central to human development. The second premise is that the realisation of socio-economic rights is a necessary condition for the attainment of human development. The third premise is that pro-poor growth policies and frameworks are veritable tools through which human development can be delivered and socio-economic rights realised. The research Focuses on the view that human development should be the end of every growth policy regime and good governance the means to such end. Socio-economic rights on the other hand should serve as indicators to the formulation, implementation and the measurement of such policies / Thesis (LLM (Human Rights and Democratisation in Africa)) -- University of Pretoria, 2008. / A Dissertation submitted to the Faculty of Law University of Pretoria, in partial fulfilment of the requirements for the degree Masters of Law (LLM in Human Rights and Democratisation in Africa). Prepared under the supervision of Dr Lilian Chenwi of the Community Law Centre, Faculty of Law, University of the Western Cape / http://www.chr.up.ac.za/ / Centre for Human Rights / LLM

This dissertation asks: what has happened to the children and grandchildren of former industrial workers, those who came of age in the shadow of industrial ruination in the Rust Belt? It draws on 105 interviews with working-class descendants who grew up in or near the Mon Valley in Pennsylvania, to explore how those descendants engage with industrial ruins. For most, the ruins recalled the breakdown of the employer-employee social contract, a sense of betrayed tradition, and the current (abysmal) state of affairs for the working class. Most advocate for the destruction of the ruins, as the loss and failure embodied by industrial ruination acts as a trap, imprisoning them in the past. Their attempts to build a new working-class identity require letting go of industrial work and the memories of the lost past. For a wider range of perspectives, two other groups of descendants were interviewed—fifteen arsonists and four cultural producers (novelists). The arsonists, who set fire to abandoned buildings, draw on regional fire symbolism and maintain their inherited association between work and identity as they struggle to resurrect industry. The novelists, who have all published in the vein of American Gothic literature, are seeking to reinterpret the past to serve the needs of the present, using supernatural figures alongside ruins in their novels in order to allow the main characters to identify, recover, and reinterpret a hidden past, which allows for mourning and the formulation of a new class identity. Each of these groups of descendants is cobbling together different versions of working-class identity, but all show that navigation of economic restructuring is a process of continual transformation. Descendants’ imaginative constructions are emblems not of solidity or permanence, but rather revision and reinvention.

A dissertation submitted to the Faculty of Science, University of the Witwatersrand, Johannesburg, in fulfilment of requirements for the degree of Master of Science. Johannesburg, 2016. / Environmental income in rural socio-ecological systems consists of the monetary and non-monetary value derived by people from non-agricultural ecosystem goods and services that are sourced from wild or uncultivated natural systems. This environmental income forms an important part of rural households' diversified livelihood income portfolios and includes resources like fuelwood, herbs, fruits, game, medicinal plants and other materials that are used for clothing, shelter, arts and crafts. Rural households also depend on income from two other land-based income streams, crop farming and livestock husbandry, and off-farm activities income stream, which includes grants and wages, for both consumption and cash generation. While rural livelihoods are becoming increasingly reliant on off-farm income, land-based livelihood income streams (including environmental income) still play an important supplementary role, especially to satisfy subsistence needs. Past studies in the developing world have quantified livelihood incomes and have often associated these income values to the socio-economic characteristics of households. However, neither do these studies examine the different livelihood income streams collectively as a portfolio, nor do they sufficiently account for and create understanding around the correlations within the suites of influencing factors. Livelihoods are often analysed using frameworks that are used to understand households' livelihood income portfolios, especially their environmental income dependencies, in relation to influencing factors. These frameworks can be useful tools to gain a quantitative understanding of households’ livelihood income portfolios. This study aimed to quantify and understand the contribution of environmental income to rural households as part of their diversified livelihood portfolios and relate these livelihood portfolios to household socio-economic characteristics and adopted livelihood strategies using the Sustainable Livelihoods Approach (SLA) framework. Interviews were conducted during 2010 in 590 households spread across nine villages in the Bushbuckridge region, Mpumalanga, South Africa. The interviews focussed on the quantification of four livelihood income streams — environmental, livestock, crops and off-farm. These income streams were assessed at three points of assessment (POAs) in the livelihood income chain — the initial, primary income value into the household, the value used for household consumption, and the amount of cash generated. Livelihood incomes were analysed using summary statistics, frequency distributions and ordinations. These were used to gauge the value of these incomes to individual households as well as to the system as a whole, in both absolute terms and relative to each other. Ordinations were then used to explore the relationships between variables within the suite of household socio-economic characteristics and within the suite of adopted household livelihood strategies, and finally incorporating both. Lastly, the proportional environmental income dependencies of households were explored using global fractional logit generalised linear models (GLMs). The models first included the socio-economic characteristics as explanatory variables, and then the adopted livelihood strategies. Almost all households used the environmental, crop and off-farm income streams for primary income and consumption, with the primary income from off-farm activities being in the form of cash generation. In contrast, less than 12% of households were involved in the primary collection and consumption of livestock income. In general, fewer households were involved in the cash generation from the land-based livelihood income streams. However, these sellers represented a larger fraction of users for the livestock income stream then when compared to the other two land-based income streams. While livestock income was used less frequently than the other two land-based income streams, it was comparatively as valuable as the off-farm income stream to its users. Overall, absolute changes in the correlated land-based income streams were not related to the off-farm income streams. Relative variation in livestock primary income was related to the relative variation in primary income values from off-farm activities. Relative variation in the crops and environmental cash generation was related to corresponding cash generation values from off-farm activities. Whether the livelihood incomes were examined for primary income, consumption or cash generation, the worth of the different livelihoods were valued differently to the socio-ecological system as a whole compared to their value to households that were involved in those activities, and their value to individuals within households. The collective variations at all POAs of the land-based strategies were associated with different sets of household socio-economic characteristics and adopted livelihood strategies, compared to the sets that were associated with the off-farm livelihood income stream. Factors that were associated with an income stream at one POA did not necessarily have the same association at the other POAs. The choice of adopted livelihood strategies reduces the need to understand and account for all factors that influences the translation of different types of capital, which includes household socio-economic characteristics, into livelihood incomes. This simplified connection is crucial to standardising and creating models that can be put into practice at all POAs within the livelihood chain in these socio-ecological systems. Furthermore, proportional environmental income dependencies can be useful for evaluating how the worth of environmental income is related quantitatively to influencing factors. However, many of the dynamics between influencing factors and the income streams that contribute to environmental income stream are not captured. The methodological approach used in this study in analysing the livelihoods of households in the Bushbuckridge region provides a standardised framework of analysis. The quantification of the livelihood data in common monetary units at the three different POAs of primary income, household consumption and cash generation, allows the analysis to be expanded to different platforms of understanding. The collective understanding of the variation between the different income streams can be expanded to understand the worth of these income streams to households and individuals within these households, as well as to understand the worth of these income streams to the socio-ecological system as a whole. When combining the collective understanding of the income portfolios at the different POAs with a collective understanding of the suite of household socio-economic characteristics or with a collective understanding of the suite of adopted livelihood strategies, a platform for understanding the dynamics within livelihoods is created. This has potential for creating workable predictive models of environmental income dependency in these systems, especially using the adopted livelihood strategies. The results of this dissertation also raise caution that analyses of these socio-ecological systems needs to be interpreted at all POAs simultaneously with the collective understanding of the links between incomes and socio-economic characteristics, and with the links between incomes and adopted livelihood strategies. There is more value during strategic planning in asking how to encourage a set of adopted livelihood strategies that are associated with the desired dependencies than asking which socio-economic household factors are likely to result in said dependencies. Policy intervention in the area that is aimed at increasing households' dependence on land-based activities needs to differentiate whether it will be encouraging the subsistence sourcing and consumption of resources, or will it encourage the cash generation from these income streams. Particular attention needs to be paid as to which households will be addressed. It will be wiser to implement some interventions across all households and rather focus other interventions on a few more involved households. / LG2017

This study examines the nature and characteristics of the informal sector within the Makana municipal area in South Africa. The focus is on the socio-economic characteristics of the informal sector operatives; operational characteristics of the microenterprises that we studied, such as longevity, employment generation, growth potential, and linkages of the informal sector with the formal sector of the economy. Extensive studies on the informal sector have been conducted in many parts of the world relative to South Africa. The key finding in most of these researches is that the informal sector is highly heterogeneous. These studies provide us with the parameters for analysing the nature and characteristics of the informal sector in the Makana Municipality. The results of the thesis show that the majority of people in Makana Municipality join the informal sector as a result of such push factors as unemployment, retrenchment and the need to survive. While there is evidence of lucrative activities amongst the surveyed enterprises, most of the informal sector micro-enterprises are concentrated in the lower segment of the sector where earnings are very low. Results from this study reveal that employment generation (beyond owner-operator) is very limited. The co-existence of a small number of remunerative activities alongside a large proportion of relatively unproductive activities is not only a sign of restricted economic potential but, most importantly, it points to the heterogeneous nature of the informal sector. Precisely, the informal sector encompasses activities which are different in terms of asset holdings, earnings, etc. From the study, it is also evident that the informal sector micro-enterprises play a crucial role in distributing goods produced in the formal sector. Evidence indicates that these micro-enterprises are Iinked to the formal sector. The idea of a 'second economy' devoid of linkages with the 'first economy' is of limited heuristic value. Thus, the 'second economy' is an extension of the first.

This work critically examines the justiciability of the Sudan model of constitutionalising socio-economic rights (SER) and the legal implications of this model. Discusses the following questions: (1) What is the scope and extent of the Sudan Bill of Rights? (2) What is the effect of section 27(3) on section 22 of the Sudan Interim National Constitution? (3) Does the Constitution provide for justiciable SER, if yes, can the South African model of rendering SER justiciable and their standard of review provide a useful guide to the Sudan? / Mini Dissertation (LLM (Human Rights and Democratisation in Africa)) -- University of Pretoria, 2008. / A Dissertation submitted to the Faculty of Law University of Pretoria, in partial fulfilment of the requirements for the degree Masters of Law (LLM in Human Rights and Democratisation in Africa). Prepared under the supervision of Professor Julia Sloth-Nielsen of the Community Law Centre, University of the Western Cape / http://www.chr.up.ac.za/ / Centre for Human Rights / LLM

Recent years have witnessed a proliferation in the number of products receiving specialized ethical certification labels, even though scholars have underscored that the actual effects of such labels are not well understood. (Luetchford 2012) In the area of coffee in particular, case studies have highlighted that Fair Trade labeling seems to operate in unexpected ways, beyond its straightforward financial incentives. This has led to a call for deeper investigation into the specific mechanisms—particularly the extra-economic and social processes—through which Fair Trade acts on coffee growers and their communities. This is seconded by recent studies that have noted a lack of equality between men and women members of Fair Trade co-operatives, in stark contrast to the label’s advertised aims of advancing gender equity and women’s development. (Bacon 2010; Lyon 2008) This friction has contributed to the emergence of separate, all-women’s Fair Trade co-operatives in coffee-growing regions around the globe, and the specialty marketing of their coffee (e.g., Café Femenino and Las Hermanas from Nicaragua) as specifically empowering for women. (Fair Trade USA 2012; Bacon 2010; Lyon 2008) Yet, as with other ethical labels, the actual processes through which these women’s co-operatives affect their members is under-studied and in need of deeper ethnographic investigation. (Hanson et al. 2012; Lyon 2008) In order to address these gaps in the literature, this study captures the complex social processes set in motion by Fair Trade through a comparative ethnography of a traditional mixed men and women’s co-operative and a newer, all-women’s co-operative in neighboring coffee-growing communities in northern Nicaragua. This research positions the sociological construct of social capital as a robust theoretical lens capable of illuminating diverse dynamics within these groups and their larger structural contexts. The use of social capital theory not only allows access to critical and unexplored insights into the “associational life” created by Fair Trade co-operatives, but also presents an opportunity to explore a “strategic site” of social capital in action and extend the theory by addressing debates surrounding its oft-contested definitions and relationship to gender. (Putnam 2000:60; Portes 2010:2; Burawoy 1998) Specifically, this research examines three perspectives on social capital: Bourdieu’s (1986) resource framework, Coleman’s (1988:108) description of social capital as a platform or “appropriable social organization,” and Putnam’s (2000) notion of social capital as trust. Further, this study critically interrogates the characterization of social capital as a kind of “women’s capital,” and its promotion as both a means and an ends to gendered empowerment. (Maclean 2010:498) In pursuit of these aims, this research both draws on and adds to the literature in the areas of ethical consumption and Fair Trade studies, economic sociology, the sociology of globalization, gender theory, gender and development, men and masculinities, local and transnational feminist movements, empowerment frameworks, and the social determinants of health. This extended case method ethnography links microprocesses to macroforces, through a localized understanding of globalization—in this case the impact of Northern ethical consumption practices and ideologies on producer communities in the Global South. In addition, as an applied ethnography in the tradition of public sociology, this study provides analysis that is useful not only to scholars, but could directly inform further setting-appropriate development efforts.

Economic sociologists have long produced rich accounts of the economy’s embeddedness in social relations and the hybridity of contemporary governance architectures. However, all too often, they contented themselves with merely disenchanting a liberal ontology that divides the social world into neatly differentiated spheres, such as the state and the economy or the public and the private. In this dissertation, I argue that this is not enough. If we want to understand actually existing economic government, we also need to attend to the consequences of its persistent violation of the precepts of liberal order. This dissertation does so by accounting for the simultaneity of the Federal Reserve’s rise to the commanding heights of the US economy and the repeated, multi-pronged controversies over it. I contend that together, the Fed’s ascendance and the controversies surrounding it are symptomatic of the contradictions inherent to a liberal mode of governing ‘the economy’ which, on the one hand, professes its investment in a clear boundary between the state and the economy but which, on the other hand, operationally rests on their entanglement. Its embeddedness in financial markets exposes the Fed to attacks that it is either colluding with finance or that it unduly smuggles in political considerations into an otherwise apolitical economy. In response, to secure its legitimacy as a neutral arbiter of market struggles, the Fed needs to invest in autonomization strategies to demonstrate that it is acting neither in the interests of capital nor on behalf of partisan politicians but in the public interest. Its autonomization strategies in turn feed back onto the modes of embeddedness and governing techniques the Fed deploys, often resulting in new controversies. Combining insights from economic sociology and the sociology of expertise, the perspective developed in this dissertation thus foregrounds the persistent tension between embeddedness and autonomy and the sequences of reiterated problem-solving it gives rise to.Based on extensive archival research and interviews with actors, I reconstruct three such sequences in the Fed’s more-than-a-century long quest for embedded autonomy in three independent but related empirical essays. The first focuses on the decade immediately following the Federal Reserve System’s founding in 1913. It traces how the confluence of democratic turmoil in the wake of World War I, its hybrid organizational structure, and an alliance with institutionalist economists led Fed policymakers to repurpose open market operations from a banking technique into a policy tool that reconciled different interests. This made it possible to take on a task no other central bank had attempted before: mitigating depressions. This major innovation briefly turned the Fed into “the chief stabilizer” before it failed to fulfill this role during the Great Depression. The essay thus adds a critical, oft-forgotten episode to the genealogy of the Fed’s ascendancy and the rise of central banks to the foremost macroeconomic managers of our time. The second essay most explicitly develops the theoretical argument underlying this dissertation and applies it to a practice that has been all but ignored in the scholarship on central banking and financial government: bank supervision. Emphasizing its distinctiveness from regulation, I reconstruct how the Fed folded supervision into its project of governing finance as a vital, yet vulnerable system over the course of the second half of the 20th century and into the 21st. I especially focus on the Fed’s autonomization strategies in the wake of the 2008 Great Financial Crisis and its internal struggles which resulted in a more standardized, quantitative, and transparent supervisory process centered around the technique of stress testing. However, the Fed’s efforts to reassert its autonomy and authority have in the meantime become attacked themselves. The essay traces these controversies, and subsequent reforms, to the present day, further demonstrating the recursive dynamic of the Fed’s quest for embedded autonomy. The third essay finally zooms in on a single event during the Great Financial Crisis: the first major public stress test run by the Fed and the Treasury between February and May 2009. By reconstructing its socio-technical assembling in detail and comparing it to the failures of stress tests run by European agencies between 2009 and 2011, I show that the stress test’s success rested on a reconfiguration of the state’s embeddedness in financial circuits, allowing the Treasury’s material and symbolic capital to back the exercise and the Fed to function as a conduit that iteratively gauged and shaped its audiences’ expectations as to what a credible test would look like. This made it possible to successfully frame the test as an autonomous exercise based on expertise. Probing the structural, socio-technical, and performative conditions of the Fed’s claims to legitimacy, the essay thus resolves the ‘mystery’ (Paul Krugman) how a simulation technique could become a watershed event in the greatest financial crisis in a lifetime.

This dissertation analyzes the relationship between élites and urban spaces with the aim of creating a profile of municipal patronage of art and architecture in Italian cities during the late republican period (2nd and 1st centuries BCE). Starting from a discussion of the methods and the terms previously used by scholars (euergetism, munificence, etc.), the research delves into the civic and urban histories of Italian cities to study the interactions between monuments and society. With the aid of a substantial epigraphic dossier – as well as archaeological and literary sources – I discuss the actors, the processes, and the cultural aspects behind the construction of public buildings and monuments in late Hellenistic Italy. At the center of the work stand three case studies (Aquileia, Praeneste, and Pompeii), each offering a peculiar perspective on the topic. Thanks to the close reading of these cases, I offer new readings and conclusions on various problems connected with the social and economic history of Italian communities, the relationship between Rome and the Italian allies, and the development of Italian urbanism in the context of the Roman hegemonic expansion.

This dissertation studies three topics related to different types of network effects in financial economics. The first chapter, "Of Coupons and Cargo - International Debt, Production, and Trade," quantifies the relationship between firms' supply chain networks and financing decisions. Most multinational corporations raise a significant amount of debt capital outside their home country. In contrast to prevailing evidence, access to deeper financial markets cannot explain this phenomenon in its entirety, as international debt issues carry higher spreads than securities concurrently issued domestically. Novel data on the universe of fixed income securities, subsidiary locations, and shipment-level trade flows from seventeen countries, is used to understand the drivers of international debt issuance. On the extensive margin firms raise debt in exactly those markets which play a key role in their supply chain (through subsidiaries, suppliers, or customers). Tests on the intensive margin indicate that firms adjust the face value of debt outstanding in a given country following exogenous changes in their operating exposure. These results are consistent with firms using international capital markets to hedge their exposure to fluctuations in exchange rates. The second chapter, "Did You Catch the Game Last Night? - Peer Group Effects in Sell-Side Analyst Forecasts," assesses the reaction of sell-side equity analysts to sentiment shocks, as well as how such non-financial information permeates through social networks. We identify a source of peer group influence that is plausibly orthogonal to information provision, yet nonetheless affects economic decision-making: the shock to an equity analyst of their undergraduate college football team winning the NCAA Championship Game. We find that analysts' forecasts respond positively to their undergraduate school's football team winning the NCAA final. We then show that the shock of 'winning' spreads within an analyst's brokerage, positively influencing the forecasts of their colleagues. Brokerages where the degree of this diffusion is greater have lower female representation in their analyst teams, as well as lower ESG scores. The third chapter, "Sharing is Caring? - Knowledge Diffusion in Researcher Networks," focuses on the effects of social networks in innovation. Social interactions are at the core of many economic processes, including research and development. Yet their contribution to innovation is not well understood. A novel dataset on more than 19,000 economists linked to more than one million unique research projects and fifty million tweets (#EconTwitter) is used as laboratory to explore the relationship between different social interactions and research outcomes. Results suggest that interactions play a dominant role in the idea generation phase of research and a lesser one in the context of ongoing projects. They seem to matter little for completed research projects. More socially active scholars are more productive, as measured by the number of papers written, and their working papers are more visible (i.e., downloaded more frequently). A working paper being endorsed leads to an increase in downloads by 20%. However, indicative of a trade-off in spending their valuable time, these projects are less impactful based on citation measures.

A sociological approach is used to analyze incidences of extreme opportunism in financial markets. Through an analysis of arguably the most widely publicized "rogue" trader events in recent history, a determination is made of the validity of explaining these events as aberrations, attributable to the actions of "rogues". The primary focus is the role of structural factors underlying these incidences of extreme opportunism in financial markets. A diverse range of documentary and other sources is used to avoid any form of bias as far as possible. It was found that structural factors act as countervailing forces to inhibit such behavior or as motivators and facilitators acting as catalysts for extreme opportunism. The balance between these factors largely determines the level of opportunistic behavior in a particular environment. Extreme opportunism is therefore not an aberration or "rogue" occurrence but a manageable phenomenon intrinsic to the social structural context within which it occurs. By conceptualizing these factors as countervailing forces one is forced to view structural factors, like compensation structures and formal and informal restraints, relative to one another and no longer in isolation. This realization translates into the conclusion that restraints and oversight systems for example, should be designed relative to the relevant motivators and facilitators in its area of application. In an environment where traders of highly geared financial products are motivated with multimillion USD incentive packages, a low budget oversight system and inexperienced regulatory staff, is clearly not the appropriate tools to control and manage extreme opportunism. / Criminology / D.Phil. (Sociology)