How has Japan become a major economic power, a world leader in the automotive and electronics industries? What is the secret of their success? The consensus has been that, though the Japanese are not particularly innovative, they are exceptionally skilful at imitation, at improving products that already exist. But now two leading Japanese business experts, Ikujiro Nonaka and Hiro Takeuchi, turn this conventional wisdom on its head: Japanese firms are successful, they contend, precisely because they are innovative, because they create new knowledge and use it to produce successful products and technologies. Examining case studies drawn from such firms as Honda, Canon, Matsushita, NEC, 3M, GE, and the U.S. Marines, this book reveals how Japanese companies translate tacit to explicit knowledge and use it to produce new processes, products, and services.

The knowledge-creating company : how Japanese companies create the dynamics of innovation

Contract farming is characterized by a contract between a farmer and a firm that will process and/or market the farmer's crop. It is a growing phenomenon in Africa; it has been a component of some of the most successful income generating projects for smallholder farmers; it has been a component of various schemes involving parastatal processing firms and the terms of the contracts between smallholders and parastatals have major consequences for the financial viability of the parastatals and, hence, for the macro balance picture in African economies.

	This paper reviews the role of contract farming. First, we provide background information on its nature and scope. Second, we use the New Institutional Economics to discuss ways in which contracting overcomes market failures common in African agriculture. We outline the conditions that make contracting the preferred form of market organization, as well as conditions under which it should not be encouraged. Third, we discuss Kenyan experience in light of the theories presented in the previous section. Finally, we discuss the policy implications. The paper draws on secondary sources to discuss contracting in Africa generally, and on a recent survey of contracted farmers in Kenya, where the most attention is focused.

Contract Farming in Africa: an Application of the New Institutional Economics

Missing Persons: A Critique of Personhood in the Social Sciences. MARY DOUGLAS and STEVEN NEY. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1998; 223 pp. Reviewed by SUSAN PARMAN California State University, Fullerton Missing persons is the first in a series of books to honor the fertile mind of Aaron Wildavsky by examining public policy issues with the aid of the social sciences. Setting out to address the issue of poverty and welfare, Douglas (an anthropologist) and Ney (a political scientist) stumble over the tools of their examining and end up trying to flush out the theory of the person that is implicit in such discussions. Although the book fails as a critique of personhood in the social sciences, it succeeds as a wide-ranging, reflective, philosophical discourse on the person in the Western intellectual tradition. The book fails as a critique of personhood in the social sciences because it is neither an analysis nor a synthesis of what the different social science disciplines have contributed or not contributed to the theory of the category of "person" or the category of "self." It does not provide a coherent picture of how different social science disciplines approach these concepts; it does not analyze the strengths or weaknesses of any particular theory. The study of the self that once belonged to the domain of philosophers or psychologists has now become a central concern of all the social/behavioral sciences, including anthropology. Anthropological concern with the self is rooted in the ethnographic enterprise and emic analysis. Efforts have been made to distinguish between the concept of the self and the concept of personhood, efforts recently superseded by the emergence of what has been called "person-centered ethnography" that subsumes the individual and the self in descriptions of culture from the perspective of particular individuals. The authors could have focused on recent developments in cultural anthropology and person-centered ethnography as a reflection of the shifts in intellectual currents in Western civilization that have affected all the social/behavioral sciences. In this way they could have accomplished the goals implied by the subtitle of their book, "A critique of personhood in the social sciences." What then does the book do, if not this? The authors wander far and wide, taking from Kant, Mauss, Durkheim, Keynes, Maslow, Malthus, Darwin, Marx, and Engels, discussing freedom, constraint, egalitarianism, globalization, and evolution. The book is constructed as if a series of conversations had taken place between Douglas and Ney in the context of Wildavsky but only the concluding thoughts are presented. Their reflections are like the flashes of distant mirrors across a fascinating landscape - gemlike but scattered. In 185 pages they pick up ideas, throw them back and forth, and follow diverse intellectual trails through the tangled underbrush of cross-disciplinary communication. They begin with the paradoxes of poverty. They discover that the common thread of discussion of different kinds of needs, wants, and capabilities (whether the hunter-gatherer working fifteen hours a week or the middle-class child with fewer video games than his peers) is the typological, isolated, non-social, self-contained individual -- "the idea of a nonrelational definition of a person" (p. 9). The social sciences have the potential to contribute a relational definition of personhood, a conception of the person as a locus of transactions. The authors explore implicit conceptions of the person in the Western intellectual tradition which have resulted in a variety of strategies to retain both individual identity and cultural submersion and determinism, both self and society, such as separating the role-playing self from the inner self, or the person of action from the person of thought. …

Missing Persons: A Critique of Personhood in the Social Sciences

The Shuar of eastern Ecuador are the second largest indigenous Amazonian group. Numbering approximately 40 000, the Shuar were unconquered by the Inca and Spanish. Today, the Shuar, like other indigenous groups in Amazonia, are now fighting to save their cultural heritage and environmental integrity in the face of acculturation. Easily one of the most extensive ethnobotanical surveys of any Amazonian group, this book documents 579 plant species utilized by the Shuar for food, medicine, construction, textiles, fiber, and fishing, to name a few. The arrival of this book is a watershed for Shuar ethnobotany. The book begins by covering previous ethnobotanical studies in Ecuador, Shuar ethnology and history, and climatic data of the study area. This is followed by a description of methodology, classification of useful plants, the format of the data, and Shuar orthography. The authors go on to discuss their results in the context of Shuar resource management, plant terms and classification, and plant use. This first section comprises 90 pages and is then followed by the bulk of the book, an inventory of taxa utilized by the Shuar. This section is divided into Magnoliophyta, Pteridophyta, Lycophyta, Sphenophyta, Bryophyta, and Lichens, with alphabetical listings of families, genera, and species with their Shuar names and uses. As a result of their efforts, the authors collected some 9000 plant specimens, many of which are new records for Ecuador and not cited in other florulas of the region. The authors have also devised a family use index (FUI) that considers both the number and proportion of species used. Not surprisingly, the families Fabaceae, Arecaceae, Rubiaceae, Moraceae, and Solanaceae have high FUI values. This family use index notes families with many useful plant species, but not necessarily the most culturally significant plants. Interestingly, nearly one half of the plants cited have two or more uses, and eighteen species are employed in five use categories. Several plants cited are used by other indigenous groups of western Amazonia (e.g., Manihot esculenta, Strychnos tomentosa, Banisteriopsis caapi), yet some are especially associated with the Shuar (e.g., Ilex guayusa, Cyperus articulatus). Of the 579 species listed here, the authors note that this is only about 50% of the plants utilized by the Shuar. The only thing this text lacks is an index of scientific and Shuar plant names. An index would make this book easier for those working in the field who need to quickly reference a specific plant. Regardless, Ethnobotany of the Shuar of Eastern Ecuador will serve as the basis for future ethnobiological studies in Ecuador for years to come. This compilation of plants used by the Shuar will be invaluable to scientists investigating the ecological impact of Shuar plant use, resource management, and conservation. I highly recommend this book to anyone interested in the ethnobotany of the Amazon basin.

Agroecological Innovations. Increasing Food Production with Participatory Development

Sustaining the Soil: Indigenous soil and water conservation in Africa

Keywords: small-scale rice farmers, collective action, community rice seed, local innovations, green manure crop, contract farming, participatory technology development, up-scaling, technological configuration, grid-group theory, Northern Thailand Many small-scale rice farmers practise collective action to overcome production constraints, and to generate and redistribute benefits for maintaining improved household livelihoods. The practice is particularly important for small-scale rice farmers in Northern Thailand where rice-based livelihood diversification prevails. The thesis seeks to build an understanding of farmer capacity in cooperation, as well as to identify crucial enabling factors that stimulate collective action to enhance continued learning and adaptation for sustainable development, via analysis of group attributes in relation to four sets of elements: agro-ecological conditions, socio-economic variables, cultural context and the role of government intervention. The study focuses on small-scale rice farming in Northern Thailand , with the aim to understand the social and technical relations involved in rice based farming systems, and to illuminate scope for participatory technology development more generally. This thesis targets rice farmers because of their important contribution to the country's food security and social economic development. The research was carried out during 2003- 2005 in a village with viable forms of collective action (Dong Palan, DPL) and in another village (Buak Mue, BM), included for comparative purposes, where off-farm employment affects labour use and household composition in such a way that collective action eroded or has a different orientation. Both qualitative and quantitative methods were used for data collection. Semi-structured interviews of key informants, group meetings, focus group discussion, farmer workshops and participant observation were all employed. The collective action was explored under four case studies including (i) community rice seed production scheme, (ii) local innovations in rice farming (frog protection as integrated pest management practice, modification of weed slashing machine as hand-held rice harvesting equipment, and double rice transplanting technique), (iii) participatory technology development in green manure crop, and (iv) contract farming. There are various forms of collective actions, and the forms suitable for technology development depend on social and material circumstances in the local context. The varying organizational forms of collective action reveal a hybridity of institutional modalities, which is further described, using grid-group theory, by the level of regulation of individual behaviour and the level of absorption of individuals in group memberships. The most important institutional and individual mechanisms are flexible forms of benefit sharing, recognizing and managing common interests, trust building, and finally, joint problem solving and knowledge exchange among farmers themselves and between farmers and external agencies. This thesis evidently shows that effective technology development and agro-technological innovation depend on social relationships and, more specifically, on the capacity to link to existing forms of collective action. Technology that works is a configuration resulting from a combination of agro-ecological conditions, technological artifacts and social arrangements, including collective action. The incentive for people to participate in technology development as well as the management and development of resources is a major enabling factor for sustainable collective action. In addition, collective knowledge can make an important contribution to technology development and innovation so that people with long experiential learning from trial and error in rice farming are able to integrate their own knowledge with outside knowledge in developing technology. This thesis indicates that horizontal up-scaling worked in the context of DPL which exhibits good social networking among farmers, but not in BM village. The observed variety in organizational forms and social coherence leads to an important lesson for the practice of participatory technology development, namely that attractive technologies may be incommensurable with realities in rural economies. Hence, an insight from this thesis is that constructing a fit-for-all model of collective action for small-scale and sustainable technologies may not be desirable because of the different social and material conditionalities in the field.

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Budsara Limnirankul

Papers

Collective action and technology development : up-scaling of innovation in rice farming communities in Northern Thailand