What are the components of complex interventions in healthcare? Theorizing approaches to parts, powers and the whole intervention

OF DISSERTATION THE STRUCTURATION OF CHINESE MIGRANT WORKERS: INSTITUTIONAL TRANSITIONS, LIFE EXPERIENCES AND SUBJECTIVE EXPERIENCES Chinese migrant workers are workers who (1) migrate from the countryside, where they continue to have the right to contract farm land, work in agricultural production, and build houses on allotted residential site, and (2) work in the nonagricultural sectors of cities and towns, where they don’t receive the same educational and urban welfare benefits as local urban residents. Chinese migrant workers are characterized by their dagong lifestyle, which means “leaving their home in rural villages, going into cities, and working for others in order to make money.” Though this group of people emerges in the rural-urban migration process associated with the rapid industrialization and urbanization in contemporary China, they live between the countryside and cities and are neither complete migrants, nor typical farmers, nor standard workers. The emergence and existence of Chinese migrant workers have contributed to the rapid economic growth of China in the past decades. The future of Chinese migrant workers is not only relevant to their life conditions, but also to the future of China as a whole. While radical scholars see Chinese migrant workers as resisting the current social institutions, conservative researchers argue that Chinese migrant workers will peacefully become urban citizens with economic restructuring and institutional transitions. This study finds that Chinese migrant workers have constituted a new working class in contemporary China, which means that they are a group of workers, who (1) exist in a large number, (2) possess a stable proportion in the population structure, (3) have a distinctive lifestyle, and (4) exist for a relatively long period of time. In other words, they are not a transitional group that will go away soon. Rather, they make up a stable social stratum in the social structure of contemporary China. This structuration process is supported by both macro-institutional arrangements and micro-subjective experiences. At the macro-level, the interaction between the state and market in the process of institutional transition has created several innovative institutional arrangements, which have contributed to the structuration of Chinese migrant workers. These institutional arrangements include (1) the development of household autonomy system in rural villages, (2) the encouragement and regulation of informal employment relationship in cities, (3) the maintenance of differential citizenship with migrant workers receiving less in the cities, and (4) the strengthening of identity-based market ideology. All of these institutional arrangements have affected the emergence and existence of Chinese migrant workers, through framing their identities and conditioning their working and living conditions. Specifically, related to the land tenure system in rural villages, the household autonomy is directly related to their identity as family members. The regulated informal economy shapes their identity as guests in cities. In the background of differential citizenship between rural and urban residents, their semi-citizenship in cities leads to their identity as rural residents. Their Hukou-based market ideology causes their identity as lower-level workers with less human capital. At the micro-level, all migrant workers have their motivations to dagong and tend to accept the dagong lifestyle. Though their motivations are stratified in different manners, four ultimate motivations are personal honor at home, personal future in cities, household needs at home, and family development in cities. While personal honor and personal future are individualistic motivations, household needs and family development are societal motivations. While personal honor and household needs are geographically rural-oriented, personal future and family development are urban-oriented. Treating

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The structuration of chinese migrant workers: institutional transitions, life experiences and subjective experiences

Toward an Understanding of "Weak Signals" of Technological Change and Innovation in the Internet Industry

/pdf/emergence-and-demergence-5a167d6nti.pdf

Emergence and Demergence

"Are students walking around with invisible triage tags attached, that only lecturers can see? Is this fair? Or is it just pragmatic? Like battlefield medical attention, lecturers’ attention is finite. And as class sizes and workloads increase, it is becoming scarcer” (Manning, 2012)

It is difficult to understate the scope and impact of the changes facing international and national higher education. Terms such as “disruption” and “innovation”, “disaggregation”, the “unbundling and unmooring”, “revolution”, and “crisis” have become endemic to discourses on the current and future states of higher education.

Against this backdrop, higher education institutions increasingly need to make strategic decisions regarding opportunities and alleviating risk. Risk within higher education both mirrors the broader societal dimensions of risk, and also presents additional aspects including the danger of obsolescence, changing funding regimes, the impact of technology on content, assessment and the role of faculty, the increasing diversification of forms of higher education and student populations, and concerns about student success and retention.

Within this context, higher education and in particular open distance and elearning (ODeL) increasingly relies on the harvesting, analysis and use of available data to inform strategic decisions regarding enrolment, marketing, curriculum development, the appointment of staff, student assessment and increasingly, strategies that inform initiatives to increase student retention and success.

The harvesting and analysis of student data therefore offers opportunities for higher education institutions to respond, timeously and appropriately, to identifying students who are at risk of failing or dropping out. The opportunities offered by learning analytics have, however, also brought to the fore concerns regarding a number of issues such as governmentality, data privacy, consent and other ethical issues and challenges.

The central question this paper poses is “how do we make moral decisions when resources are (increasingly) limited?”
This paper
• briefly introduces learning analytics as tool in the practice of educational triage;
• provides a short overview of the notion and practice of triage;
• discusses educational triage;
• assesses the potential of educational triage to responsibly and ethically respond to legitimate concerns about the “revolving door” in distance and online learning and the sustainability of higher education.

Though educational triage is germane to higher education within the discourses and practices of accountability, governmentality and the optimisation of resources; there is a dire need to explore the epistemological and ontological assumptions underlying and informing these discourses and practices.

Educational triage in higher open education: walking a moral tightrope

The Causal Power of Social Structures: Cause

ABSTRACT In this wide-ranging interview, Dave Elder-Vass discusses his main contributions to critical realist theory over two decades. In the first half, he explains his early work on emergence, agency, structure, the concept of culture and norm circles, as well as his work on a broad array of social theorists and positions. Sometimes this has involved differences with other realists, including Tony Lawson, Margaret Archer, Alison Sealey and Bob Carter, which he also comments on here. In the second half, he discusses the common themes of his two most recent books (focused on economic form and value respectively) and current project (focused on the concept of profit), in which he is developing a critical realist approach to political economy.

‘Materially social’ critical realism: an interview with Dave Elder-Vass

Value is central to the market sectors of the contemporary economy, yet the best-established theories of value fail to expose how it operates and how it is manipulated for profit. This book begins to reconstruct the theory of value. In one sense, it argues, value is a personal assessment of worth, but those assessments draw deeply on normative standards. The book examines those standards and how they are formed, transformed and supported by the construction of new social structures. The empirical evidence comes from contemporary financial examples: the mortgage-backed securities that caused the global crash of 2008, how venture capitalists secure outrageous valuations for so-called unicorn companies, and the rise of Bitcoin. The result is a theory that shows how value is invented by value entrepreneurs in pursuit of their interests and thus provides a new basis for criticising the role of value in the commodity economy and the finance sector.

Inventing Value

ABSTRACT This paper examines the relationship between pragmatism and critical realism, first as alternative philosophies for the social sciences in general, and second, as an illustration, in the social study of monetary valuation. The paper argues that both traditions are internally diverse. Hence, the relations between the two are complex, with both substantial overlaps and real differences revealed in encounters between them. Perhaps the most significant difference is pragmatism’s distrust of invocations of structural power in social explanations, whereas realism encourages them, in interaction with other explanatory elements. The paper problematizes claims that recent work in the study of value is predominantly pragmatist. Nevertheless, it argues that pragmatist influence has encouraged valuation studies to focus on the micro level at the expense of the macro. From a realist perspective, however, there is much to be gained from an approach that embraces both micro and macro levels and the relations between them.

https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/pdf/10.1080/14767430.2022.2049088?needAccess=true

Pragmatism, critical realism and the study of value

ABSTRACT This is an edited transcript of a keynote paper given at IACR's 2021 Annual Conference. The paper outlines a critical realist approach to critique and illustrates its application to the contemporary economy. It argues that responsible, constructive critique depends on ethics, on causal explanation, and on the development of utopian visions. Utopias are tools, and concrete utopias are not visions of whole alternative ready-made societies, but rather partial models that can be built in practice as elements of the larger social world. The argument is illustrated with three cases of digital utopianism, which help to demonstrate the practical challenges facing utopian schemes. Concrete utopias are a vehicle for combining our theoretical understandings of possibilities with an ethical analysis of needs in order to offer practical schemes for improving human flourishing.

Dave Elder-Vass

Papers

The Causal Power of Social Structures: Cause

‘Materially social’ critical realism: an interview with Dave Elder-Vass

Inventing Value

Pragmatism, critical realism and the study of value

Ethics and emancipation in action: concrete utopias