The process of social remitting is complex and multilayered, and involves numerous social actors that at each stage face several choices. By definition, the process of socially remitting ideas, codes of behav-iour and practices starts with the migrants themselves and their social context in the destination country. This paper focuses on the as yet unexplored issue of resistance performed and articulated by migrants confronted with potential change influenced by social remittances and the generalised process of diffu-sion. Faithful to the understanding of social remittances as ultimately a process where individual agency is the crucial determinant, the article follows the ideas, practices and values travelling across the trans-national social field between Britain and various localities in Poland. Resistance to change and new ways of doing things is a continuous dialogical process within one culture’s power field, which is un-derstood here in anthropological terms as a porous, open-ended field of competing meanings and dis-courses. Notions of bifocality, infra-politics of power relations and resistance are an important aspect of remittances and their reinterpretations, and resistance to social remittances by migrants, both in their destinations and in their communities of origin, is a crucial component of the whole process without which our understanding of remittances is incomplete.
The transformation of the former docks in Dublin was one of the major urban regeneration projects in Ireland, which was built during the recent economic boom. Since the start of the project in the nineties, more than six thousand apartments have been built in the area. The construction of the apartments allowed for the diversifi cation of the character of this district into a living quarter. Initially the Docklands were considered as an offi ce district that would serve the Ireland’s service-based economy. New projects also allowed for the development of housing in a close proximity to existing city centre, although it did not happen not without avoiding the gentrifi cation and social polarization of this area.
The key role in the process was played by the operator – the urban development agency (Dublin Docklands Development Authority). It acted both as a strategic landowner and the coordinator of the development. The agency was responsible for the delivery of the infrastructure and the sale of the land. The actions of the operator included setting up the of the housing standards, requirements for the development of the infrastructure, both social and technical and public transportation systems. In the hindsight, the agency was praised for the management of the development of such large site. On the other hand, the lack of procedural oversight and a few dubious fi nancial decisions, as well as the other eff ects of the neoliberal policies, such as gentrification, fi nally lower the assessment of DDDA efficiency in that matter.
The article summarizes the main aims and achievements of the DDDA’s development policy and its assessment from the long-term perspective of two decades of transformation. This includes the eff ects of the actions in the aftermath of the fi nancial crisis. Such perspective allows to highlight the various stages of the development of the agency and to examine the efficiency and efficacy of these actions.
Clients’ satisfaction with financial advice provided by professional advisors depends on how this advice has fulfilled their expectations and goals. However, once a recommendation is made, a client is unable to predict and evaluate the real financial outcome of the advisor’s proposal. In such a case, she/he can base her/his assessment on the characteristics ascribed to the financial advisor: her/his epistemic authority (competence) and level of caring. Additionally, clients expect to receive a “tailor-made” solution that takes into account her/his individual needs and characteristics. In the present study, we asked participants to evaluate financial experts who had recommended risky vs safe investments. The recommendations were congruent or incongruent with the clients’ risk tolerance (high vs low). The kind of recommendation influenced the participants’ evaluations of the advisors (and as a result, the clients’ perceived satisfaction) only for low-risk tolerance clients. For these clients, investment recommendations that were not adjusted to their levels of risk tolerance led to lower evaluations of the advisors and consequently to lower evaluation of satisfaction with their visits. These lower evaluations regarded both dimensions: the interpersonal aspect (caring) and competence in the field of finance (epistemic authority). Such incongruence between risk tolerance and the riskiness of the recommendation did not affect high-risk tolerance clients’ advisor evaluations.
In contrast to the usual integration of migrant workers in the ‘bottom jobs’ on the labour market, the em-ployment of Ukrainian workers in Hungarian electronics plants seems to take place in a more beneficial way. With the active mediation of temporary (temp) agencies, Ukrainian migrant workers are offered regular blue-collar assembly work, together with the same social rights and benefits as their local Hungarian col-leagues. Relying, in our analysis, on the literature on industrial sociology, migration research and global value chains, we are developing a critical perspective in which migration and employment are not seen as separate spheres but as mutually reinforcing each other. We combine bottom-up empirical research based on interviews with workers and a sectoral inquiry on industrial and employment relations in the temp agency sector supplying multinational corporations. Our main argument is that complex contracting also means subtle controlling. Such contracting is not the cheapest form but it creates a different, efficient employment regime with dependent, controllable, flexibly available, ‘fluid’ employees. Employee respondents described their position as dependent, ‘out of control’ and a temporary earning opportunity. Devoid of clear mecha-nisms for controlling their work conditions or growth within the job, all respondents turned to a more instru-mental approach, in which they invested in building up social capital through friendships, networks and personal relationships. Obtaining Hungarian citizenship and learning the language were two other main strategies for dealing with insecurity. Their efforts correspond with and reinforce a more globally integrated but ethnically motivated immigration regime, characteristic of post-socialist Hungary.
The author outlines a basic framework for anarcho-capitalism, a stateless social order in which safety, law and adjudication of disputes are provided by private companies (private defense agencies) competing with each other in the free market. In the course of presentation, three fundamental problems of anarcho-capitalism are addressed. (1) Is a peaceful cooperation among agencies possible? (2) Would agencies respect the rights of their customers? (3) How would the law look like in an anarcho-capitalist society? The last problem is especially vexing, since anarcho-capitalists seem to be caught up in a contradiction here. On one hand they are proponents of a specific moral theory (based on non-aggression principle), on the other hand they do not allow for any central, monopolistic agency to impose that moral theory on society. Is it possible for the law in the anarcho-capitalist society to be simultaneously produced by competing agents and remain libertarian at the same time?
The philosophical tradition defines the subject as a reflective being, in principle aware of its agency which makes it capable of making free decisions and taking responsibility for them. Agency, understood in this way, is clearly attributed only to people. However, the technological development of artificial cognitive enhancements and of increasingly autonomous artificial intelligence, that has been taken place in last few decades, casts doubts whether such an approach is not too anthropocentric. This doubt is indicated by some proponents of extending cognitive processes beyond the human brain; they argue for the need of appropriate extension of the subject as well. Moreover, there is an increasing number of proposals attributing agency to artifacts. In the first part of the article, I refer to the two most commonly used philosophical criteria distinguishing the subject of cognition from all information processing systems: being a reflective system, and being the subject of intentional stance. Next, I assess, from such a perspective, the attempts to attribute agency to both one-person extended cognitive systems and artificial systems, such as relatively autonomous computer programs. I argue that the gap between conceptions of the extended subject and the artificial subject, and the standard approach incline toward the usage of the term “agent” designating this phenomenon. The term is already widely used in cognitive science to designate any relatively autonomous information processing system performing a cognitive task. The need of the clear distinction between “the subject” (“subjectivity”) and “the agent” (“agency”) is especially noticeable in Polish, where the difference in meanings of these concepts is not so evident as in English. The awareness of the applying in cognitive science these two different notions of agency prevents against a conceptual misuse which could lead to erroneous explanations and predictions.
In this text, a critical reflection is presented on assessment practices in early childhood education, which are discussed in the context of the creation by those practices of the students’ sense of agency which, according to J. Bruner, is treated as a category of school culture. The discussion is based on the results of the recent research conducted in Poland on students’ agency and an analysis of the data collected as part of the author’s own research.
The picture obtained by using the triangulation of methods and sources confirms that assessment in early childhood education strips children of the opportunity to build a sense of agency, even in terms of independent control of a task situation. The surveyed students, admittedly, are capable of a relatively independent reflection on the context of school assessment, but the world of their educational experience is limited to the incapacitating culture of the school grade. It is a culture that becomes one of the sources of children’s self-restraint in the perception of themselves as agents, perpetuating their external steerability and passivity. To change this situation, external regulations will not suffice, but only the organizing of the learning environment based on the relationship between the teacher and the student, which is free from the daily pressures of assessment and the worship of formal correctness.