We explore puzzling outcomes in a Virginia school district: in 2018, the Williamsburg-James City County School Board voted to redraw attendance boundaries to achieve greater racial and socio-economic integration among its middle schools, yet abandoned similar efforts for high schools. Drawing on Critical Race perspectives, we conducted a content analysis of archival materials, including school board meeting transcripts, to analyze the conditions under which school decision-makers mobilize to enact equity-oriented policy reforms. We found that school board members abandoned high school rezoning in the face of fierce opposition from white, affluent residents who saw school reassignments as a threat to their entitlements to a highly rated school and to their property values. For the middle schools, board members avoided white families’ entitlements, which neutralized opposition, at the same time as strong community advocacy in favor of equity and integration shifted the political landscape. This activated ‘interest convergence’ among school board members supportive of equity and resulted in the approval of middle-school attendance boundaries that produced greater racial and socioeconomic integration. This case underscores the importance of community advocacy for equity-based reforms; however, the scope of these efforts may be limited to changes that do not substantively threaten white parents’ perceived entitlements.
Social cohesion has become a magic bullet that policy makers imagine will rescue communities from the ravages of the market. Behind the apparent cohesiveness of rural community, however, lies another reality. This article examines characteristics of social cohesion in two rural communities in Saskatchewan. Although new forms of cohesion are emerging, these communities are riven with cleavages along multiple axes. Some of these local divisions appear to be deepening with global and regional processes of socioeconomic transformation. Long-term crises lead to strategies and solutions that precipitate new problems. Ongoing practices of inclusion and exclusion affect the possibilities of development in these communities.
This paper explores changing relationships between apparel firms and rural labor markets in Wisconsin over the last decade. Mainstream explanations of recent changes in the apparel industry suggest that rural communities will lose tedious or physically demanding, low-skilled apparel manufacturing jobs but will gain more information-intensive and desirable ''apparel service'' employment. Through case studies of apparel firms located in two Wisconsin communities, the paper argues that current changes in the industry not only affect communities unevenly but, even in regions where apparel service firms have provided significant numbers of new jobs, these jobs are less well paid, more casually structured, and less secure than manufacturing employment has been. The paper argues that current concepts of the economic embeddedness of firms in communities need to be refined to permit consideration of the kinds of leverage and voice that community organizations have in confronting new forms of corporate capital. The two case studies demonstrate that corporate embeddedness and its labor market outcomes are linked to changes in the global market in which firms compete.
We are in an era of uncertainty over whose rules will govern global economic inte gration. With the growing market share of Chinese firms and the power of the Chinese state it is unclear if Western firms will continue to dominate transnational governance. Exploring these dynamics through a study of contract rules in the global cotton trade, this article conceptualizes commodity chain governance as a contested process of institution-building. To this end, the global commodity chain/global value chain (GCC/GVC) framework must be revised to better account for the broader institutional context of commodity chain governance, institutional variation across space, and strategic action in the construction of legitimate governance arrangements. I provide a more dynamic model of GCC governance that stresses how strategic action, existing institutions, and dominant discourses intersect as firms and states compete for institutional power within a commodity chain. This advances our understandings of how commodity chain governance emerges and chan ges over time.
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