Rachel Schurman

Industrial Dynamics and the Problem of Nature

Existing literature suggests that food, fiber, and raw material sectors differ from manufacturing in significant ways. However, there is no analytical basis for engaging the particular challenges of nature-centered production, and thus the distinct ways that industrialization proceeds in extractive and cultivation-based industries. This article presents a framework for analyzing the difference that nature makes in these industries. Nature is seen as a set of obstacles, opportunities, and surprises that firms confront in their attempts to subordinate biophysical properties and processes to industrial production. Drawing an analogy from Marxian labor theory, we contrast the formal and real subsumption of nature to highlight the distinct ways in which biological systems - in marked contrast to extractive sectors - are industrialized and may be made to operate as productive forces in and of themselves. These concepts differentiate analytically between biologically based and nonbiologically based industries, building on theoretical and historical distinctions between extraction and cultivation.

Targeting capital: A cultural economy approach to understanding the efficacy of two anti-genetic engineering movements.

In the late 1990s, the British anti–genetic engineering (GE) movement effectively closed Britain’s market for genetically modified foods, while the U.S. anti‐GE movement had a negligible impact. In seeking to explain the different outcomes of these similar social movements, the authors draw upon the global commodity chains (GCC) literature to extend the understanding of the economic and industry‐related openings and closures social movements face as they seek to promote social change. This analysis not only illustrates the importance of economic structures and organization for movement outcomes, but also shows how the economic sphere is culturally constituted. In this fashion, it broadens the social movement literature’s understanding both of the way that political economy matters to movement efficacy and of the way that cultural processes infuse the economic sphere. The study advances the GCC literature by showing how GCCs are cultural as well as economic constructs.

Snails, southern hake and sustainability: Neoliberalism and natural resource exports in Chile

Abstract This examination of the recent history of the fishing sector in Chile shows that in this sector, which has played an important role in Chiles export success, short-term growth was achieved at the cost of long-term sustainability, with negative implications for those involved in the industry. This case raises the more general issue of the importance of regulatory frameworks in the promotion of natural resource exports. “Neoliberal” policy frameworks, which generally assume that self-regulating markets produce better results than explicit efforts to modify market results, have been increasingly adopted by developing countries. Analyses of the implications of these policy frameworks for the long-term sustainability of growth based upon natural resource exports have not grown along with the popularity of the policies themselves. This article is an effort to redress the imbalance.

Access to private obstetrics/gynecology services under Medicaid.

Improving pregnancy outcomes for low-income women has been a longstanding Medicaid objective, yet exceptionally low Medicaid participation rates for private practice obstetrician-gynecologists (OB-GYNs) suggest that access to maternity care may be particularly limited. Using a national sample of more than 2,800 office-based physicians, the authors analyzed the factors influencing the Medicaid participation decision of physicians in three specialties: OB-GYN, pediatrics, and general surgery. Regression results suggest that OB-GYNs are equally, or even more, sensitive to Medicaid reimbursement and program administration characteristics. Higher Medicaid fees definitely raise OB-GYN participation rates, for instance. OB-GYNs are also more willing to participate in those states where Medicaid programs are more generous in their eligibility requirements and where administrative red tape is less onerous.

Chile’s new entrepreneurs and the “economic miracle”: The invisible hand or a hand from the state?

The Chilean economy has grown by leaps and bounds over the last decade, thanks to a dramatic increase in export activities (and earnings), and the emergence of a more entrepreneurial capitalist class. This article attempts to explain that remarkable phenomenon using original data on entrepreneurs in one of Chile’s most important new export industries, namely, fishing. The central argument of the article is that domestic entre-preneurship flourished during the Pinochet period not because the state “got the economic environment right,” as the neoliberal ideologues are wont to argue, but rather because the Pinochet government behaved, in several important senses, like a “developmental state,”a la the states of East Asia. The analysis also reveals a heretofore ignored role of a developmental state, which is to help produce a new capitalist class culture. In the Chilean case, it was state policy as well as ideology that gave rise to a new generation of entrepreneurs.

Defederalizing Medicaid: Fair to the poor, fair to taxpayers?

This paper explores the access and equity implications to the poor and taxpayers of further defederalizing Medicaid program administration. New data on enrollees and tax incidence indicates little horizontal, let alone vertical, equity in the system. Styles of cost control are also examined, showing a systematic bias towards providers and taxpayers at the expense of the poor in penurious states.

Medicaid Myths: Trends in Medicaid Expenditures and the Prospects for Reform

Medicaid expenditures, which had reached more than +32 billion by 1981, have grown substantially throughout the programs history. As a result, the conventional wisdom is that Medicaid expenditures represent a significant public-policy problem. Using other measures, however, it can be shown that the program is much less of a problem than it appears to be. By 1981, spending for Medicaid represented only 12.7 percent of total state spending and had contributed only 14.2 percent to the overall growth in state expenditures since 1965. Moreover, considering only the funds which states raise from in-state sources, the median share of state budgets accounted for by Medicaid was just 5.6 percent, and only 7 states spent as much as 9 percent of their own money on the program. These figures suggest that the marginal reductions in Medicaid expenditures which would result from typical program changes are likely to be so small that rational state officials might be unwilling to incur the political opposition of powerful provider groups or the resistance of large state bureaucracies by proposing substantial reforms. The major exceptions are the few states with very large programs where even small proportional savings would amount to millions of dollars. We conclude that, given its present federal-state form and the current distribution of expenditures, it is unlikely that major reforms will be enacted because the stakes are too small for most states and the federal interest is too diffused.

The future of regional fisheries cooperation in a changing economic environment: The South Pacific island countries in the 1990s

In the past half decade, the Pacific Island countries have changed the development strategy for their Tuna Fisheries from a rent maximization approach to an approach that entails developing their own “locally based”; tuna industries. This article seeks to explore how this new development strategy could affect the future of cooperation among Pacific Island countries. In the past, cooperation among Pacific Island countries has been extensive and vital to their collective well‐being; in the future, it promises to be the only means of safeguarding the health of the tuna resource and avoiding the costly and wasteful excess capacity problem that plagues most commercial fisheries. The purpose of this article is not to prescribe policies, or to advocate a particular position, but rather to stimulate discussion and reflection about the future of cooperation before any major changes take place.

Shadow space: suicides and the predicament of rural India

the democracy to which Paraguay aspires. Throughout the book, Hetherington critiques transparency reforms that seek to depoliticize the public bureaucracy as elitist and perversely anti-democratic. However, to be more precise and fairer to the new democrats, their ideal is not to remove all contestation and politics from society. That would indeed render the project of democratization entirely meaningless. Instead, their goal is to restrict politics to its ‘proper’ place in the electoral and legislative realm, by removing the administration of property titles and other documents from the political realm and by making bureaucracies function according to predictable, technical rules. Thus, while the book levels a seemingly universal critique at the ideal of transparency, readers who are familiar with Paraguay may wonder whether it is only the country’s electoral dysfunction that inevitably makes transparency an ideological tool to insulate elites from the potential political power of the poor. In Paraguay, the rural poor lack autonomous and institutionalized access to state power via the electoral system. There is no peasant party in Paraguay. Campesinos’ interests in redistribution get mediated and co-opted by the clientelist structures of the Colorado and Liberal parties, which inevitably privilege the interests of wealthy property owners. Yet campesinos’ primary power assets remain their numbers and their capacity for political mobilization. A sophisticated new democratic would object that the transparency reforms which Hetherington critiques are anti-democratic only insofar as they close off the bureaucracy as a venue for campesinos to exercise political power without opening the electoral arena. Indeed, as Hetherington alludes to in his brief concluding chapter, the electoral possibilities for campesino inclusion seemed practically non-existent until the 2008 election of Fernando Lugo ended 61 years of one-party rule and gave guerilla auditors and their leftist allies their first real foothold within the state. After Guerrilla auditors went to press, Colorado and Liberal Party leaders expelled Lugo and the incipient Paraguayan left from the State in an impeachment backed by landed interests and widely described by international observers as an ‘institutional coup’. While Hetherington’s speculative hope about the potential for Lugo to promote ‘populist transparency’ at the State level has been disappointed by recent history, his analysis remains indispensable for making sense of that history and of the profound challenges facing democratic inclusion in Paraguay.

Erratum: Plenitude: The new economics of true wealth (Contemporary Sociology (2011) 40:4 (485-486) DOI: 10.1177/0094306111412516mm)

Schurman, R. (2011). Plenitude: The New Economics of True Wealth. Contemporary Sociology: A Journal of Reviews 40(4), 485-486. (Original DOI: 10.1177/0094306111412516mm) In the July 2011 issue, pp. 485, Professor Rachel Schurman’s affiliation was listed incorrectly. Professor Schurman’s professional home is in fact the University of Minnesota, Minneapolis. Publications Received. Contemporary Sociology: A Journal of Reviews 40(4), 517-525. (Original DOI: 10.1177/0094306111412521)