Engineering Formality: Flyover and Skywalk Construction in Mumbai

This article investigates the engineering of elevated transport infrastructure in contemporary Mumbai. It argues that the conception, construction and implementation of flyovers and skywalks in Mumbai over the past 20 years has been part of elite efforts seeking to instil a more free‐flowing, predictable and regulated city. The techniques, routines, standards and visualizations comprising these engineering schemes have promised ways of reshaping the socio‐material configurations and everyday landscapes of Mumbai into a more knowable, functional and integrated realm. The article suggests that this can be understood analytically as a means of trying to establish and maintain ‘formal’ ideals, citizens and spaces in Mumbai against wider urban contexts perceived as increasingly ‘informal’. The article thus emphasizes the importance of exploring how the ‘informal’ and ‘formal’ are actively produced and imagined against each other through material practices and procedures, and the central role of urban engineering in attempts at reconfiguring the social and political dimensions of urban life.     

The Born‐Again Favela: The Urban Informality of Pentecostalism in Rio de Janeiro

Since the 1980s, the metropolitan spaces of Brazil have seen a significant upsurge of the Christian Pentecostal movement, which today dominates the religious landscape of the favelas. In Rio de Janeiro, the rise of Pentecostalism coincided with the establishment of drug gangs as actors controlling favela territories. Based on an ethnographic field study conducted in a favela complex in the city's Zona Norte, this article examines the role and significance of the Pentecostal churches in Rio's favelas, both in everyday urban life and in the ways these areas are governed. One of my focal points of analysis is the increasing entanglement of actors in the drug industry and church actors. The article posits that the Pentecostal churches' role and significance, their institutional shape and their followers' practices are inextricably intertwined with the favela's social, spatial and political structural patterns. It shows the ways in which the evolving Pentecostal movement has permeated all aspects of the favela's informal way of urban life and government and has produced a new urban religious configuration in which the Pentecostal movement and the favela are intertwined and transform each other.     

Macro-logistics and externality cost trends in South Africa – underscoring the sustainability imperative

The challenges facing the logistics industry in a fossil fuel-challenged global economy are highlighted by transportation's rising contribution to logistics costs, as evidenced in the USA's and South Africa's logistics costs time series, the two longest-running such series available globally. The anticipated persistence of rising, volatile oil prices and mounting pressure to account for externalities will exacerbate the increase in transport costs (TCs). The results of South Africa's externality cost model show that transport externalities add an additional 18% to already high TCs. In the South African context, the equally largest contributors to freight transport externalities are accidents involving road freight vehicles and road freight emissions. The visibility of these costs is the first step towards internalisation and illustrates the desirability of a fundamental shift in the structure of the South African freight transport industry through the introduction of long-distance intermodal solutions.     

Formalization by the State,Re‐Informalization by the People: A Gecekondu Transformation Housing Estate as Site of Multiple Discrepancies

This article demonstrates residents' transformative practices and discusses attendant outcomes to contribute to an understanding of state‐built housing estates for people affected by urban transformation projects. It draws upon ethnographic fieldwork conducted in a social housing estate (K‐TOKI) in the Northern Ankara Entrance Urban Transformation Project (NAEUTP). It addresses questions on why formalization of informal housing takes place today, under what conditions it is countered by re‐informalization practices, and what the outcomes of this process are. As informal housing became formalized by NAEUTP, gecekondu dwellers were forced into formalized spaces and lives within K‐TOKI, which was based on a middle‐class lifestyle in its design and its legally required central management. Informality re‐emerged in K‐TOKI when the state's housing institution, in response to the estate's poor marketability, moved out, allowing residents to reappropriate spaces to meet their needs and form their own management system. When cultural norms that are inscribed in the built environment and financial norms that treat residents as clients conflict with everyday practices and financial capabilities, the urban poor increasingly engage in acts of informality. I argue that the outcome of this informality in a formal context is a site of multiple discrepancies.     

Space and Identity in Resistance against Neoliberal Urban Planning in Turkey

This article highlights the role of collective identity and space in the emergence of social resistance within a neoliberal context. It argues that the attempted eviction of residents from their established neighbourhoods through public planning projects generates resistance against the reappropriation of these spaces and has encouraged new forms of resistance among inhabitants in several neighbourhoods. I particularly emphasize that planning projects often displace particular populations by force, principally minority communities, in order to confine them to new resettlement areas far from their customary living places, which has a socioeconomic impact on people's identity, everyday life and social solidarity. The article is based on empirical research in two neighbourhoods in Istanbul — 1 May?s and Sulukule — to analyse practices of resistance of inhabitants in everyday life and examine how this resistance shapes their identity and daily life.     

‘We Live on Estimates': Everyday Practices of Prepaid Electricity and the Urban Condition in Maputo,Mozambique

This article examines the transition to prepaid electricity happening in Maputo, Mozambique, in order to reflect on the contemporary geographies of urban energy infrastructure and urbanization in sub‐Saharan Africa and other cities of the South. The article draws on fieldwork and archival research conducted in 2013 and 2014, arguing that prepayment constitutes a productive juncture in the urban experience of electricity infrastructure in Maputo's postcolonial moment, not merely a neutral technology or a disciplining technique of government (as argued by some scholarship). The article examines the multiple rationalities implicated in the use of the electricity infrastructure via prepayment and the organization of urban life it engenders (and of which it is also a product) by focusing on the everyday practices surrounding prepaid electricity of urban dwellers in neighbourhoods where the ‘modern infrastructural ideal' may never be fully realized. As a result, it contributes to an understanding of the experience of urban energy in cities where ‘slum urbanism', uncertainty and provisionality are dominant aspects of the urban condition.     

The Slum Multiple: A Cyborg Micro‐history of an Informal Settlement in Lisbon

This article proposes a cyborg reading of the process of informal settlement by internal and postcolonial immigrants in Lisbon's periphery from the 1970s to the present. Cyborg does not stand for a neo‐organicist or cybernetic understanding of the informal city but rather for the conjunction of the multiple enactments of city life under conditions of urban informality—in this case the fourfold combination of history/migration; architecture/low‐fi technologies; inhabitation/body/memory; and governmentality/urban capital. The 40‐year event of settlement and inhabitation is presented through an ethnographic micro‐history of one neighbourhood in particular, with a strong focus on slum dwellers' life stories, on the details of the artefact‐machines they have built, their informal dwellings, and on their social and mental experience of place. Responding to recent calls for multidisciplinary ethnographies of informality, the article brings the specificity of Lisbon's informal settlements—their growth based in postcolonial rather than rural migrations—into current debates on informal urbanisms and geographies of sociotechnical urban assemblages.     

The High‐Rise Home: Verticality as Practice in London

This article investigates the relationship between verticality and home. It develops the idea of ‘verticality as practice'. This appreciates verticality not as something that takes place in three‐dimensional landscapes, but as the outcome of everyday practical activity. Examining a modernist high‐rise estate, the Aylesbury Estate in London, the article identifies and examines a range of vertical practices, illustrating how they are intertwined with home. Vertical practices, such as those associated with the view, help to make a unique and special home, becoming intensely meaningful to residents. However, they also unmake dimensions of home when they interact with the estate's marginality.     

HR's strategic role within MNCs: helping build social capital in Latin America

In this article, we adopt a holistic perspective in considering the impact of the country's environment as well as the multinational corporations (MNCs) strategy on human resource (HR) practices. More importantly, we argue that within MNCs human resource management (HRM) is playing a central role in the process of balancing local and global forces. HR can be critical in helping MNCs' deal with local differences while also helping the company implement practices that are critical for its global strategy. Specifically, we argue that HR plays a key role in developing social capital, which may provide the necessary ‘substitutes’ for formal control that would otherwise be neglected. Our contribution lies primarily in outlining how this new role of creating human capital confers on HR the task of filtering mission-critical practices through a ‘localization mesh’ that ensures success. In addition, given the importance of social capital as an informal mechanism that allows MNCs to coordinate and integrate activities, we suggest ways in which an MNC can build social capital within the context of the Latin American pan-regional cultural values.     

Structuration of precarious employment in economically constrained firms: the case of Dutch agriculture

Precarious employment practices such as short‐term contracts, low pay and lack of voice have undesired outcomes for workers, because these impede employees in their ethical rights to freedom, well‐being and equality. Still, precarious employment practice is common in sectors with restrained economic conditions, such as Dutch agriculture. However, in every restrained industry, examples of more socially responsible employment management are reported. The question why some firms develop more socially responsible employment systems when economic conditions predict the use of low cost, precarious employment systems is central in this article. Structuration theory provides a lens to understand how employers position their employment practice in the wider (institutionalised) social context. Insight in the reproduction circuits that link employers' actions with their social context (product, market, institutions and policies, demographics) can reveal where, at a sector level, change to avoid unethical employment practice could start.     

Challenges and prospects of HRM in developing countries: testing the HRM–performance link in the Eritrean civil service

In this article, the authors examine how, when and to what extent HR practices affect performance at the employee level. As performance is a multi-faceted and complicated concept, HRM outcomes were used as mediating factors between HR practices and employee performance. The data were collected among civil servants in Eritrea, Africa's youngest and poorest country. Although the results generally are in line with previous studies using Western data, their implications in this particular country may be different. Therefore, the challenges and prospects of HR practices in Eritrean civil service organizations are critically analysed and discussed. In the authors' opinion, that the Eritrean economic and political environment within which HR practices operate has not been conducive in maximizing the impact of HR practices on performance. These findings highlight the situation of most developing countries.     

BETWEEN A ROCK AND A HARD PLACE: Heterogeneous Governance,Claims Making and Forced Eviction in a Megacity

Residents of informal settlements worldwide face challenges defending their land tenure. In contexts with overlapping systems of governance these challenges are even more complex and claims to land tenure more precarious. How do heterogeneous systems of governance, a characteristic of some global South megacities, affect evictions? This article presents an in-depth case study of the informal Otodo Gbame waterfront settlement's struggle to defend its customary land tenure through multiple authorities in Lagos, Nigeria. The analysis reveals how a heterogeneous system of governance disempowers citizens by obscuring the locus of power and creating confusion when communities make claims on the state. Communities find themselves claiming rights to the city that receive varying degrees of recognition from the many authorities within the heterogeneous system. In Lagos, the state weaponizes this heterogeneous system in pursuit of modern development and urban growth.     

Sensemaking on the Shop Floor: Narratives of Knowledge in Organizations*

ABSTRACT This paper explores the role of narratives in organizational inquiry and knowledge work. Following the tenets of the phenomenological method, the paper digs into the ‘life world’ of organizations in order to capture the taken for granted stream of everyday routines, interaction, and events that constitute both individual and social practices. An empirical case study examines the narrative‐based processes of sensemaking and knowledge acquisition in the setting of a traditional pressing plant at Fiat Auto, Italy. The focus of analysis is on how a best performing team engages in the resolution of disruptive occurrences on the shop floor. Through the deconstruction of narratives underlying problem‐solving activities, the case identifies a distinctive mode of investigation conceptualized as ‘detective stories’. The detective's method highlights the interplay between time and narrative in shaping the interconnected processes of organizational knowledge creation, utilization, and institutionalization. More generally, the findings of the paper stress the importance of conjectural knowledge and common‐sensical wisdom in the everyday life of organizations.     

Towards redressing historical inequities?

Abstract

This article examines women's positions at senior management levels of South Africa's civil service given its affirmative action policy that attempts to tackle women's historical marginalization in public sector organizations. It examines ‘women's empowerment', gender and race inside the public service within the context of South Africa's historical inequities within the civil service, and the post-apartheid government's attempts to correct these. It concludes that women's positions inside the civil service have improved gradually since the demise of apartheid, an initial step towards substantive equality with their male counterparts, but recognizes that much still needs to be done if women are to be represented proportionately in senior civil service positions. It argues that this might help to improve the implementation of gender sensitive programs at various policy levels. Information for this article was gathered from various sources including interviews with civil servants in selected national and provincial departments.     

Formal and Informal Corruption Environments and Multinational Enterprise Social Irresponsibility

Using an institutional theory framework we theorize, hypothesize, and empirically show that higher levels of formal and informal corruption environments found in a firm's operating portfolio are related to higher levels of corporate social irresponsibility (CSiR). Failing to consider corruption's informal dimension leads to potentially false perceptions about a multinational enterprise's (MNE) operating environment, particularly when the formal dimension is low but the informal corruption dimension is high, as is the case in about one third of our sample. Including the informal corruption environment component provides additional explanatory power over the formal corruption environment alone in predicting CSiR and yields a superior understanding of both the formal and informal dimensions of the corruption institutional environment's influence on corporate social irresponsibility levels of MNEs. Managerial implications and future research directions are discussed.     

Neighbourhood Effects as Indirect Effects: Evidence from a Dutch Case Study on the Significance of Neighbourhood for Employment Trajectories

One of the key challenges in the study of neighbourhood effects on work is to understand the pathways through which disadvantaged neighbourhoods impact the employment opportunities of residents. Endogenous explanations for neighbourhood effects focus on social life in these neighbourhoods, identifying mechanisms of social isolation, deviant work ethics and neighbourhood disorder. This article studies these mechanisms in a low‐income neighbourhood in the Netherlands. The case study shows that unfavourable socioeconomic outcomes can be indirect and unintended consequences of actions and choices in everyday life that are not directly concerned with work. Nevertheless, these individual actions and choices reflect local social practices that are influenced by the marginalized context in which residents lead their lives.     

IDENTITARIAN MOVEMENTS IN THE TOURISTIC CITY: The Marketing of Hate in Verona

Verona is known as the touristic city of Romeo and Juliet, but its position as a strategic node in the rising identitarian movement goes unnoticed to the thousands of tourists visiting the city every day. This article articulates the historical centre of Verona as a public space in which far-right and populist right groups seek to construct an exclusionary territorial identity that draws on white supremacy, northern pride and Catholic fundamentalism, which manifest themselves in practices of bordering and territorialization. I argue that the city's perfectly preserved heritage and its assumed authenticity are not only utilized to construct the ideal protagonists of city life, but also that such territorial themes of defending the ‘native homeland’ and its traditions are marketed to the outside world by constructing a ‘model’ city for a growing transnational movement. In this study, which is based on ethnographic fieldwork, archival research and in-depth interviews, I investigate the mechanisms through which certain historical centres are showcased to build an identitarian network through everyday practices of boundary-drawing and the marketing of a territorial anti-modernist nostalgia.     

The Unintended Consequences of Italy's Labour Laws: How Extensive Labour Regulation Distorts the Italian Economy

Simple solutions to complex problems often have unintended and undesirable consequences. An example is Italy's approach to combating unemployment. Rigid laws designed to protect the employed perversely discourage businesses from hiring and people from working. They also encourage precarious temporary employment among young people, informal work, and under‐the‐table deals that compromise worker benefits. The numbers of Italy's unemployed and of those outside the workforce are much higher than official estimates suggest. Italy's employment protection legislation – arguably the most restrictive in Europe – creates that which it seeks to prevent: the insecurity of unemployment.     

GEOGRAPHIES OF EXCLUSION: Reproducing Dispossession and Erasure within a Waste Picker Organization in Mumbai

A rich seam of waste scholarship already addresses the exclusion faced by informal waste workers as cities in the global South undergo spatial transformations to become ‘world class’. However, less attention has been paid to how state practices have reproduced inequalities within and across waste picker communities. Drawing upon eleven months of ethnographic research at Mumbai's Deonar dump site, this article maps the practices through which waste workers have responded to their exclusion following a massive fire in 2016. It demonstrates that social exclusion is experienced differently by different members of the community and calls for a greater focus on heterogeneity amongst waste workers. Multi-dimensional vulnerabilities manifest through these workers’ deal-making strategies, while simultaneously mirroring the conditions of marginality produced by the state. The article contributes to debates on marginality by employing the lens of erasure to show how exclusion relies on the optics of visibility and invisibility. By unpicking the hierarchical structure within one waste worker organization, the article argues that the state-led mandate for garbage-free cities in India disproportionately affects those located at the margins of marginalized groups.