Bridging skills demand and supply in South Africa: The role of public and private intermediaries

ABSTRACT

Demand-led skills development requires linkages and coordination between firms and education and training organisations, which are major challenges considering that each represents a ‘self-interested’ entity. The need for a ‘collaborative project’ involving government, firms, universities and colleges, and other bodies is thus increasingly recognised. However, the crucial role of intermediaries has been largely overlooked. The article addresses this gap by investigating the main roles of public and private intermediaries across three case studies: sugarcane growing and milling, automotive component manufacturing, and the Square Kilometre Array sectoral systems of innovation. The research highlights the need for a move towards systemic thinking, to bridge across public and private objectives. It shows that private intermediaries play a larger role than is recognised in policy; that public–private intermediaries play crucial roles in coordination; and the potential for public intermediaries to contribute more effectively to systemic functioning.     

Women's opportunities in Swedish society

Abstract

Research in economic history has been accompanied by rapidly developing research in social history. Demographic history, the family and social change, together with popular movements, have been taken up as objects of study. The three Swedish studies discussed here arise from projects in these fields. The studies of Sten Carlsson and Kerstin Moberg form part of projects in the Department of History at the University of Uppsala on ‘the family in demographic and social change in Sweden after 1800’ and on ‘functions of the class society: popular movements’. Gunhild Kyle's study is part of a project in the Department of History at the University of Gothenburg on ‘women in industrial society’.     

Higher education responsiveness through partnerships with industry: The case of a university of technology programme

ABSTRACT

In the context of mid-level skills shortages and the promotion of industry–education partnerships, this article examines the case of a longstanding partnership between the pulp and paper industry and a university of technology. The partnership resulted in the development of a focused qualification. We explore the experiences and understandings of academics and students in order to examine the benefits and pitfalls of such partnerships in addressing the needs of business, higher education and the students. The results show that while the university of technology has benefitted through work placements for their students and funding for industry-seconded lecturers, the partnership’s links are weakening. The programme is unattractive to high-achieving ‘matric’ graduates and is taken as a stepping-stone to other engineering fields. The article explores why this has developed. The curriculation of qualifications that are narrowly focused on one industry may limit articulation and portability of skills between different industries by graduates.     

Technical change and the ‘technology’ myth

Abstract

In recent years, historians and other English-speaking commentators on technical change and technical functions have often chosen to discuss these matters under the heading ‘technology’. Thus, there have been discussions about such matters as ‘echnological innovation’, ‘technological invention’, and even ‘the imperatives of technology’, ‘the technostructure’ and ‘technological drivenness’.¹ One economist with a special interest in historical matters, Kuznets, has virtually defined a separable condition of ‘modernity’ as the era of ‘technology’ — ‘The epochal innovation that distinguishes the modern economic epoch is the extended application of science to problems of economic production’ alternatively, it is ‘the utilization of a potential provided by modern technology’. An economic historian (Musson) has it that ‘applied science is … the major force behind modern economic growth’. And a prominent historian of the so-called ‘technology’, Forbes, has argued that in ‘our modern world both technology and engineering are branches of applied science’.²     

The ‘price revolution’ of the sixteenth century: Some Swedish evidence

Abstract

Since the publication in 1895 of George Wiebe's work, Zur Geschichte der Preisreuolution des XVI. und XVII. Jahrhunderts, ¹ the ‘price revolution’ has been a generally accepted concept found in most historical textbooks. By the ‘price revolution’, Wiebe meant the general rise in commodity prices which occurred in western Europe during the 16th century, the primary cause of which according to him was the influx of silver from the new Spanish possessions in America. His explanation also came to be generally accepted, but perhaps an even more significant contribution to the influence which this book has wielded is the fact that he synthesized in readily usable form the price analyses in existence when he wrote, i.e. at the end of the 19th century. In the 1930s his tables still formed the basis of sweeping conclusions and generalizations.     

Handbook of New Institutional Economics

Abstract

Recent Scandinavian work on the relationship between exports and economic growth gives preference to home market factors as opposed to foreign demand, thus strengthening the view that growth is home-led rather than export-led. This article claims that the difficulty in determining the causal role of exports stems from the failure to differentiate between individual industries and macro-economic growth. Addressing the macro-aspect, the argument, called the ‘export specialization theory’, is developed that for small countries trade and pro-trade policies have been central to their economic success; moreover; in these cases it makes no sense to distinguish between home-led or foreign-led development, since by definition trade includes both demand and supply factors. In the light of this clarification the current controversy about the causal role of exports for successful growth in small countries disappears. By way of conclusion, the article argues that country size may prove to have been a critical variable in successful economic growth.     

Resistance to coal inequalities and the possibilities of a just transition in South Africa*

ABSTRACT

Coal mining and burning are among the most destructive activities on the planet, and a major driver of environmental inequality in South Africa. This article suggests that, despite heavy constraints, initiatives involving resistance to coal are building a ‘counter-power’ which challenges inequality, generates solidarity, and is potentially infused by imaginative visions of another world beyond coal. Following the ‘social power’ approach this vision could, with deeper connections between three sites of resistance to coal – organised labour, mining affected communities and environmental justice organisations – cohere into a vision of a ‘just transition’. This could embed the anti-coal struggle in a social movement for an alternative development path to challenge deepening poverty and inequality.     

Electrification and industrialisation: An assessment of the industrial breakthrough in Norway

Abstract

The article relates the ‘industrial breakthrough’ in Norway to the introduction of electricity in manufacturing production. Viewing electricity as a General Purpose Technology (GPT), the new device fostered advances across a broad spectrum of sectors. Several other key technologies (e.g., within chemical industries) also played their part. However, in Norway, electricity took an extraordinarily strong position. By presenting quantitative evidence of the electrification process, and relating it to annual estimates of employment, productivity and value added between 1896 and 1920, it is shown that the manufacturing sector was too small to form a ‘breakthrough’ before the turn of the century. It was not until the widespread introduction of electricity and electric motors gained some momentum in the first decades of the twentieth century that the economy become really industrialised.     

Nuclear power: The family in decolonial perspective and ‘pro-family’ politics in Africa

ABSTRACT

This article argues that the normative construction of ‘family’ in heteronormative ‘nuclear’ terms is infused with power relations, and therefore must not be taken for granted as an analytical category or concept. Not only a site where racialised and patriarchal western notions of sexed and gendered hierarchies have been naturalised and institutionalised, the ‘nuclear family’ model was positioned as a signifier of modernity, civilisation and progress within eurocentric knowledge construction that served colonial interests. This discussion reviews decolonial thinking on the nuclear family, as well as anti-imperialist literature on the colonial history of the nuclear family ideal. These perspectives are brought into conversation with current developments in which the nuclear family model is being reinvigorated by the conservative US-based ‘pro-family’ movement. The ‘family’, it is concluded, is entangled in multiple relations of geo-political power that should be taken into account in research and the production of knowledge around kinship in African contexts.     

Population mobility in the Netherlands 1880–1910. A case study of Wisch in the Achterhoek

Abstract

In the last two decades, migration as 3. phenomenon has been studied intensively and scientifically. Apart from migration in general, Scandinavian scholars have taken a special interest in the great flood of emigration during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. A large number of dissertations and other studies have described and analysed the phenomenon. Samson's work on emigration and mobility must be seen in this context, having started as a dissertation within the project ‘Sweden and America after 1860’, commonly referred to as the Emigration Research Project.¹     

(In)equality and the South African Constitution

ABSTRACT

Does the South African Constitution constrain or empower government, courts and citizens in addressing systemic social and economic inequalities? This article argues that the Constitution is explicitly ‘transformative’, but is an enabling document, providing ‘scaffolding’ for political and legal activities. It is government, strong institutions and civil society that are ultimately responsible for securing its equality aspirations. Here the Constitution admits of different understandings of equality and different economic and social policy choices. This article identifies these contested meanings of equality and suggests that a liberal egalitarian/social democratic version is dominant in policy choices and the jurisprudence of the Constitutional Court. It illustrates this with reference to the Court’s jurisprudence on equality, and suggests that more radical and transformative interpretations remain possible. However, it concludes that we cannot escape politics, the need for good policy choices and effective implementation and enforcement.     

Are children poor men's riches?

Abstract

Extract

Fertility declined fairly simultaneously in most western countries nearly a century ago. The question of which social groups were early in starting the decline is thought to have been answered: the common assertion is that the highest social groups started to control their fertility and, as time passed, that their new reproductive behaviour percolated down through the social layers. The current project on the secular decline in fertility in Norway has revealed that the families at the very top of the social hierarchy were the national pioneers in family limitation. The hypothesis in this article is, however, that family limitation in Norway also had an independent point of departure in the rural lower classes. In this article, I will therefore challenge the ‘general truth’ that there is always an inverse relationship between fertility and social status in the initial phase of the secular decline in fertility.     

Serfdom in esthonia during the period of Swedish rule

Abstract

For quite some time after World War II peasant behavior in less developed countries was ‘unproblematic’. There was a general consensus that peasants were not ‘economic men’, in the sense that they tried to maximize profits as postulated by mainstream economic theory. Instead, their acts were assumed to be governed by ‘tradition’, or ‘conservatism’, which by and large had nothing to do with the type of maximizing or minimizing behavior which acquired prominence in economic theory not least by the central role that was conferred on it in Paul Samuelson's Foundations of Economic Analysis.¹ Their ambitions and horizons were thought to be limited in such a way as to render standard economic theory inapplicable in the study of peasant behavior. The discussion focused on the ‘inert’, or ‘lazy’, (satisficing) peasant.²     

Birgit Karlsson,Egenintresse eller samhällsintresse,Nazityskland och svensk skogsindustri 1933–1945

Abstract

In Vol. XV (1967) of this journal, Alan S. Milward and Jorg-Jöhannes Jäger published criticisms of my article on Swedish iron are exports to Nazi Germany.¹ Turning first to Milward's contribution, this is based on the assumption that the German economy was a ‘blitzkrieg war economy’ in the period preceding the attack upon the Soviet Union. This view, which has been expressed before by B. H. Klein, undoubtedly brings a number of valuable refinements into the hitherto exaggerated estimates of the level of German armaments at the outbreak of the Second World War.² But when he goes on to say that ‘in such a war economy all considerations of potential armaments-producing capacity were rejected in favour of present armaments-producing capacity’,³ Milward palpably oversimplifies a complex problem. In fact, the demand for an armaments programme ‘in depth’, to quote General Thomas, did make itself heard long before the autumn of 1941.     

Clé Lesger,The Rise of the Amsterdam Market and Information Exchange – Merchants,Commercial Expansion and Change in the Spatial Economy of the Low Countries,c.1550–1630

Abstract

Between 1930 and 1935, Sverre Steen wrote four volumes of Det norske folks liv og historie [The Life and History of the Norwegian People], covering the period 1500–1814. He has now half completed the task of bringing the work further towards our own time in a comprehensive series entitled ‘Free Norway’. The first three volumes are devoted to political history in the period immediately following 1814. In this, the fourth volume, entitled ‘The Old Society’, Steen examines the social and economic history of the period 1814–1840. Both the title and the arrangement of the book indicate that Steen's intention is to provide a survey of the foundations of Norwegian society before continuing his work in further volumes, not only about ‘Free Norway’, but also about ‘New Norway’.     

Cooperating mercantile networks in the early modern Mediterranean 1

This article outlines the commercial and financial activities of commercial networks active in the ‘Venetian’ eastern Mediterranean between the loss of Cyprus (1571) and the onset of the War of Candia (1645). The goal of the article is to present the results of recent research on early modern Mediterranean trade and finance, drawing attention to some promising areas of investigation that have been overlooked by scholarship and that constitute part of the author's own work in progress. The central question is: how did traditional Mediterranean networks and trade fare in the age of global expansion? In other words, did Mediterranean trade networks experience an evolution in their structures similar to the rest of the world? An attempt is made to answer this question through an analysis of the activities of Greek, Venetian, and English mercantile and financial networks in the eastern Mediterranean, showing the peculiarities of the interplay between trade and finance that underpinned the economy of the Venetian Stato da Mar. This attempt highlights two phenomena at play within the ‘Venetian Mediterranean’: firstly, that foreign operators began directly financing Venetian imperial administrative structures, and secondly, that the number of Venetian merchants involved in these operations increased as new players entered the financial game.     

Finnish mortality in the eighteenth century: The sources and the reality

Abstract

Mr. Niels Steensgaard, in his ‘Consuls and Nations in the Levant from 1570 to 1650’¹ referred in note 4, p. 14, to my article on the beginning of Anglo-Turkish relations, and stated: ‘Apparently Horniker is not aware of the existence of the French capitulations of 1569’. There is no point in arguing whether or not I am aware of them, but later on I will give my reasons for omitting reference to them in my article. The implication of Steensgaard's statement, however, is that they were new capitulations, which, of course, they were not. They were a renewal, in the form of a grant,² by Sultan Selim II of the treaty concluded between his predecessor Suleiman I Kanuni and Francis I in 1536.³ Revised capitulations were granted to France in 158l.4 These, and the treaty of 1536, gave the French certain exclusive privileges in the Ottoman Empire. And until 1593, when Elizabeth I of England obtained capitulations which gave her subjects the same privileges as those enjoyed by the French, France was the paramount capitulatory nation in the Levant.     

Measuring impact and contributions of South African universities in communities: The case of the North-West University

Using the North-West University (NWU) as a case study, this article argues for and demonstrates the value of empirically assessing the impact of universities on their communities. A cross-sectional survey design (n?=?984) was used to investigate the NWUs impact on three different communities, as well as to empirically assess the needs of these communities. Results suggest that community-based projects and services, work-integrated learning activities, and, to a lesser extent, the quantity and quality of a university's graduate students, as well as initiatives such as science and engineering weeks, open days, sports weeks, and botanical gardens likely represent the most powerful and viable avenues for universities to achieve impact in their communities, especially when such endeavours are specifically tailored to community needs. The findings also suggest that universities’ outputs do not necessarily equate with or guarantee impact, and that impact is optimised when outreach activities are based on the actual needs of communities.     

Short-distance migration,circles and flows: Movement to and from Ullensaker according to the population census lists of 1865

Abstract

This article arose from the ‘Ullensaker research project’ of the Institute of History of the University of Oslo (supported by the Norwegian Research Council for Science and the Humanities), which has as one of its objectives the application of micro-historical methods and electronic data processing techniques to social history. The article examines how far it is possible to reconstruct the migration patterns of a local population by detailed study of place-of-birth data in a nominative population census, and discusses some aspects of short-distance migration as a historical, sociological and socio-psychological phenomenon.