The Power Elite: Number One Sign Your Parents Were Not in the Gifted Program: via kwout

Except that, of course, tests prepare for nothing other than taking other tests whose values is based only on the fact that people believe in their value. They are not good predictors of anything.

The Power Elite: Number One Sign Your Parents Were Not in the Gifted Program: via kwout

Has anyone noted that big complaints about education in the US have started ever since the corporate ideology was imposed on the school system? Personally, that’s the way I see the correlation: the more corporatized the schools become (more administrators, fewer teachers, declining budgets, more “schools should be run like businesses” ideology), the lower the quality of education.

Part of that ideology, as I have said before, education is not about critical thinking, citizenship, etc.. It is about skills acquisition for the job market. Education is not about educating students, it’s about training workers. As Foucault taught us, proficiency and self-discipline are what matters with easy assessment of skills with zero predictability, but that does not matter. This is also part of the culture war as the focus on marketable skills through certifications is seen as bypassing the need to take general education courses where one might be exposed to these awful, awful liberal professors of the Bérubé kind that might “indoctrinate” children and young adults in thinking!

Oh, and if the early toddler training / taming does not work, and if they still don’t comply…

Cop Tases 10-Year-Old Girl – November 18, 2009 via kwout

Peruvian gang ‘killed peasant farmers for their fat’ – Americas, World – The Independent via kwout

There are reasons for skepticism though (and I confess thinking that of one was looking to extract human fact, the United States would be the place to do it):

Peruvian gang ‘killed peasant farmers for their fat’ – Americas, World – The Independent via kwout

UNFPA – State of World Population 2009 via kwout

Gender and Climate Change: Poor Women Bear Brunt of Global Warming – SPIEGEL ONLINE – News – International via kwout

This is a point well-illustrated by this graph from the report:

One can see that women represent a high percentage of agricultural work in these African countries, whose production is already being destabilized by climate change. Indeed, it is these poor women in this particular part of the world that will shoulder the burden of the impact of climate change, as illustrated by this other graph from the report:

The top map illustrates the major contributors to climate change (basically the Northern hemisphere) while the bottom map represents the areas most affected by it (mostly, the entire African continent and past of South Asia). In other words, the population most responsible for the global climate change will be the least affected by its effects whereas the population least responsible for global climate change will be the ones most affected by it, on top of already being the poorest ones to start with.

UNFPA – Women Central to Efforts to Deal With Climate Change, Says New UNFPA Report via kwout

This might partially explain why the biggest culprits are dragging their feet when it comes to seriously committing to reducing emissions and other measures to reduce the causes of global climate change.

What to do then? Nothing we have not heard before:

UNFPA – Women Central to Efforts to Deal With Climate Change, Says New UNFPA Report via kwout

As I said, nothing we have not heard before. And yet again, it is up to the women and girls of the Global South to get themselves educated so that they can solve problems they did not cause in the first place.

Every once in a while, it would be nice to read / hear that countries should invest in the education and reproductive health of women and girls, just because it would benefit them, and not for some greater social good or because we need them to pitch in to solve someone else’s problem.

A small step, of course, would be to have more women in delegations, or as heads of delegation, discussing these issues at the global level, such as the Copenhagen Summit, no?

Unicef’s state of the world’s children report 2009: Where is the worst place in the world to grow up? Afghanistan | News | guardian.co.uk via kwout

What a shocking surprise that eight years of war have not improved the standard of living of the population, especially women and children.

Oh, and on a related topic, this was interesting:

Unicef’s state of the world’s children report 2009: Where is the worst place in the world to grow up? Afghanistan | News | guardian.co.uk via kwout

The hand that gave France its qualification for the 2010 World Cup in South Africa. For non-soccer fan, especially on this side of the Atlantic, that move is not allowed. It’s cheating. And this started a storm. Remember Howard Becker, deviance only matters if it is seen and noticed by the audience. In the age of widespread media and the Internet, this particular act of deviance did not go unnoticed even if the referee did not see it.

And once deviance is noticed, sanctions follow. But what kinds of sanctions? Informal ones for sure as large numbers of people expressed their anger in a variety of fora all over the Internet. Thierry Henry and the French team got called all sorts of names for this. Henry for the deed, and the French team for accepting its qualification based on cheating.

Social stigma is also part of the game:

Hands-on Thierry Henry becomes public enemy numéro un | Football | The Guardian via kwout

Note how the hand, a violation of soccer’s norms is depicted as “crime” and an inflammatory one at that. Audience perception is central indeed in the very definition of seriousness of the deviant act. In Europe, soccer is serious business. Part of it, of course, has to do with the fact that both teams were playing their qualification for the world’s most important soccer event, the World Cup. The stakes were high. Played at a local level, this would have been a simple incident, sanctioned by a red card (because done so closed to the goal cage) and maybe a suspension.

Well, Henry might not be suspended and the international soccer authorities have ruled out the possibility of a rematch, but certainly, France’s participation to the World Cup is now stigmatized, tainted and comments about the way France got there will be made at the Cup and its defeat at whatever stage (if that happens) will be depicted as well-deserved. And even if France were to win (an unlikely proposition at this point), the win itself will be tainted.

And because this incident happened at a high-stake international game, criticisms are heaped not just over the player himself, but the entire team and the country.

An additional aspect of personal stigma that Goffman studied is how stigma completely reconstructs the stigmatized person’s identity around the stigma itself so that the stigma becomes the individual’s master status, pushing into the background any other other identity that the individual possesses:

Hands-on Thierry Henry becomes public enemy numéro un | Football | The Guardian via kwout

It is too early to tell whether the stigma will “stick” and for how long. Certainly, again, this will hold through the World Cup. And this will require acts of contrition of Henry’s part (he has already done that).

At the same time, European soccer players are brands in themselves and attract sponsorship individually as part of their usual team. This is another potential source of sanctions. Will Henry lose his sponsors and therefore part of his earning? THis might be so as the stigma now attached to Henry might reflect on his sponsors.

Sleight of hand could cost Henry a fortune as sponsorship slips from his grasp via kwout

As with the case of Caster Semenya, the deviance is socially produced, collectively noticed. But the difference with Henry, is that Semenya had to face potential formal sanctions based on formal procedures that affected her basic gender identity. In Henry’s case, so far, the sanctions are only informal in nature but stronger in intensity. In Henry’s case, his “nice guy” identity as well as his status in the international classification of soccer player will take a major hit along with his monetary value. But because Henry’s sport is team-based, his offense spill over onto the entire team.

However, in Semenya’s case, the formal procedures guaranteed a conclusion, which was reached today (with a lot left unsaid and ambiguities):

Caster Semenya found ‘innocent of any wrong’ to retain 800m gold medal | Sport | guardian.co.uk via kwout

Will Semenya retain a trace of the stigma? Will this be mentioned if she competes again? The stigma might be “easier” for Semenya to shed as her sex is not something she can control where Henry’s act was plainly under his control. Semenya cannot help who she is whereas Henry could have avoided the deviant act that stigmatizes him.

But either way, in both case, the deviant label was applied based on not just visibility but notice. Semenya’s performance was questioned because groups decided she “looked” masculine (by socially defined criteria, such as heavy muscularity). Henry’s hand was captured on video for the world to see and social context made his deviance a “crime” of “inflammatory” nature.

BBC News : Afghan corruption a political obstacle via kwout

And the second one

BBC News : Afghan corruption a political obstacle via kwout

And the third one

BBC News : Afghan corruption a political obstacle via kwout

To broaden the discussion, let me re-post my summary of Keith Darden’s article:

Keith Darden has a pretty interesting article in Politics & Society (Vol. 36, No. 1, March 2008, 35-60), titled The Integrity of Corrupt States: Graft as an Informal State Institution (abstract).

In this article, Darden sets out to refute the common assumption that widespread corruption and graft are indicators of institutional breakdowns which result in ineffective states. While this assumption is not entirely untrue, Darden notes that there exists a fairly large set of states with widespread corruption AND functioning state institutions.

“I argue that graft often serves as a form of unofficial compensation that reinforces rather than undermines the formal institutions of the state and can provide leaders with additional means to control subordinate officials. In sum, despite the deleterious effect that graft may have on democracy and economic development, there are circumstances under which graft may reinforce the state’s administrative hierarchies.” (36)

In which case, Darden speaks of institutionalized graft.

In this article, Darden eschews the never-ending debate on the definition of the state by focusing on one specific aspect that the major schools of thought on the subject recognizes:

“The institutional mechanisms used to secure the loyalty and obedience of officials with the state’s administrative hierarchies.” (37)

Any state form needs to be able to extract compliance from state officials in order to fulfill such functions as tax collection or the maintenance of law and order in addition to the provision of other services. What is the role of graft in this? As Darden explains, the major support for the theory of graft as state-weakening comes from the agency theories of economics. In this perspective, graft is a violation of the basic contract between state leaders and state officials when the latter substitute personal financial enrichment for the fulfillment of their stately tasks against a salary. And officials do so especially when they know that the systems of surveillance and sanctions are defective. Hence the lack of effectiveness of the state.

For Darden, this is not an entirely false picture but it is not the entire story and it is based on a narrow conception of state institutional form: the Weberian bureaucracy with all its well-known characteristics, a model which works well for the established Western democracies but not beyond those.

“It is not difficult to find cases where (1) graft is allowed as part of an informal agreement or contract between leaders and their subordinates, or, (2) the state is not grounded in the rule of law and functions largely through informal institutions – stable rules that are not written down or codified as law. (…) Corrupt practices and other violations of the law may signal the absence of a Weberian bureaucracy but do not necessarily imply absence or weakness of administrative hierarchy. It is possible to achieve a stable administrative hierarchy without the law-based bureaucracy that Weber saw as typical of modern organization or the web of personal obligations of traditional rule.” (38)

For Darden, a fairly large number of countries fall into that category (widespread graft + robust state capacities and hierarchies) based on the 2003 Transparency International Corruption Perceptions Index (CPI 2008).

2008/cpi/surveys_indices/policy_research via kwout

The CPI is considered one of the most reliable analytical measure of corruption at the global level. Countries are ranked based on a score between 0 and 10 where 0-3 is considered most corrupt and 7-10 least corrupt. Among such states with high corruption and high state capacity, we find Algeria, Kenya, Nicaragua, Romania, Russia, Papua New Guinea, and Ukraine.

When it comes to graft, Darden distinguishes between three types of graft in relation to the state:

1. State-weakening graft: graft that undermines administrative hierarchies.

   “Graft unconditionally weakens the administrative hierarchy when it serves to buy disobedience – when officials take “a remuneration for what you are not supposed to do.” (…) In such cases, the role of graft follows precisely the logic identified by agency theorists.” (41)

2. State-benign graft: graft that has no effect on administrative hierarchies.

   “Some forms of graft may have little effect on the functioning of the administrative hierarchy – it plays little role in determining whether officials loyally perform their obligations. It is simply a form of theft. This is common in environments where bribery takes the form of a convention, and officials receive additional informal payment for tasks that they are obligated to perform anyway. If everyone knows that bribes must be paid for officials to perform their functions and everyone pays bribes as a result (assuming that all can afford to do so), then a graft-ridden state of this type differs from a functioning graft-free bureaucracy only in the way that private wealth is distributed (it is reallocated from citizens to officials). Graft is “benign” in these cases only in the sense that it neither enhances nor undermines loyalty in the administrative hierarchy of the state.” (41)

3. State-strengthening graft: graft that reinforces administrative hierarchies

   “In such cases, administrative compliance is based on an informal contract between state leaders and their subordinates in which graft plays a critical role. In contrast to the benign case, state-reinforcing graft provides the basis, in whole or in part, for official loyalty and obedience. The illegal practices we identify as corruption reflect the fulfillment rather than the violation of an informal “contract.”" (41)

And he identifies two mechanisms related to state-strengthening graft as a means to obtain compliance.

1. Graft can serve as an alternative mode of compensation or as a second salary. The proceeds of theft or embezzlement or bribery are distributed to carry out the duties of the state. It is graft that guarantees the effective functioning of the state.

2. Graft provides state leaders with means of coercion over their subordinates. If the officials do not fulfill their end of the bargain (discharge their official state duties in an efficient manner), they risk losing not only the money they get from graft but potentially to be among the few prosecuted and incarcerated for corruption.

“State leaders must be able to monitor their subordinates (1) to ensure that they are complying with directives, (2) to guarantee that they take no more than the allotted amounts, and also (3) to maintain a complete record of their illegal activities in the event that sanctions should be required.” (43)

For Darden, it is important to note that such a state would still fit the Weberian characteristics of monopoly, hierarchy and impersonal authority. Such a state is able to function relatively effectively in terms of waging war, maintaining law and order, managing infrastructures and institutions, controlling political dissent, etc. Darden illustrates such state-effectiveness with the very enlightening (and entertaining) example of Ukraine under the rule of Leonid Kuchma. Such a study is made possible due to the fact that Kuchma’s interactions were recorded by a member of his security detail. These recordings allow access to the inner mechanisms of state-strengthening graft. Through them, we can see the different aspects of graft and its management in Ukraine.

In the case of Ukraine, the system of state-strengthening graft is accompanied by strict monitoring (to make sure that officials do not take more than their cut and adequately cover their tracks), intensive surveillance (another well-functioning state apparatus), and permits widespread intimidation and enforcement.

In the Ukrainian case, Darden identifies four types of officials:

1. Criminal: those whose loyalty lies outside of the state structure, such as gang members.

2. Selfish: those who are in it for personal enrichment and tend to take more than their share.

3. Disloyal: those who secretly support political rivals.

4. Compliant: those who conform to the state hierarchy.

The first three categories are those who can expect sanctions from the state as a result of extensive surveillance. The compliants reap the rewards of their loyalty but they are also subject to monitoring (precisely to ensure their compliance). Such extensive state-surveillance apparatus seems to be especially present in the former republics of the USSR, as legacy from that regime.

The massive use of surveillance for political repression and the mobilization of officials to “get the votes” when election time comes explains the stability and resilience of such states and regimes. Their weakness is that everyone knows what is going on and these regimes tend to be highly unpopular (see the Orange Revolution in late 2004 – 2005). Pakistan under Ali Bhutto and Peru under Fujimori are other good examples.

But the main point stands, there is no necessary negative correlation between graft and state capacity. As Darden concludes:

“This alternative view of the relationship between graft and the state may explain both the pervasiveness of graft and the objective stability of states that were hitherto classified as weak. If the pervasiveness of corrupt practices only signaled the breakdown of political authority, then political leaders would have clear incentives to overcome it, but if graft plays an important role in the informal institutions of state administration and political domination, then leaders have every incentive to sustain it.” (54)

]]> http://globalsociology.com/2009/11/18/re-post-when-corruption-sustains-institutions/feed/ 2 http://globalsociology.com/2009/11/18/the-really-cool-visualization-du-jour-declining-empires/ http://globalsociology.com/2009/11/18/the-really-cool-visualization-du-jour-declining-empires/#comments Wed, 18 Nov 2009 21:16:40 +0000 SocProf http://GlobalSociology.edublogs.org/?p=2633 Via Sean Carroll on Twitter,

The 1960s make it all really visually cool but those were brutal years for the Global South.

And yes, where are the non-Western Empires?

Hungry America: food insecurity, state by state | News | guardian.co.uk via kwout

And here are some more specific data about this appalling state of affairs and what should be the shame of the nation considering how much money have been funneled to financial institutions and will be funneled to the health insurance sector:

Record numbers go hungry in households in the US | World news | guardian.co.uk via kwout

Maybe it is time for the UN to send some food aid to the United States? Because heaven forbid that this country reconsider its economic organization of food production and distribution, including the enormous subsidies going to the Big Corn.

It is indeed misleading to speak of “food shortage”. Food is available but healthy food is unaffordable for many households. It is a redistribution problem, not a production one.

First, the usual animated map:

What´s new in CPI 2009/2009/cpi/surveys_indices/policy_research via kwout

The Top 10 (least corrupt countries):

CPI 2009 Table/2009/cpi/surveys_indices/policy_research via kwout

No real surprise here.

And the bottom ten (most corrupt countries):

CPI 2009 Table/2009/cpi/surveys_indices/policy_research via kwout

No surprises here either. As noted, war-torn countries are characterized by failing states, bad or non-existent governance.

This video is interesting as well as it addresses the issues of massive disbursements of monies to banks by states as part of stimulus policies:

When it comes to corruption, what afflicts poor countries:

BBC NEWS | Business | War-torn nations ‘most corrupt’ via kwout

And what afflicts middle and high-income countries as well:

BBC NEWS | Business | War-torn nations ‘most corrupt’ via kwout

An Unemployment Solution: Pay People to Work Shorter Hours – CEPR via kwout

The social benefits of this seem obvious, from greater family time to time for other pursuits which might lead to healthier results (mentally and physically) but this goes against the puritan ideology that non-work time is equivalent to sitting on one’s hands.