Robert Thornton
Biographic Data
| ID | 3611689 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Robert Thornton |
| GIVEN NAMES | Robert |
| FAMILY NAME | Thornton |
| SIGNATURE | THORNTON R |
| AFFILIATIONS | University of the Witwatersrand |
| VERIFIED | No |
| TOTAL WORKS | 23 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 125 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 23 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 0 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 1980 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2021 |
| H-INDEX | 4 |
The Minimum Income Standard and equivalisation: Reassessing Relative Costs of Singles and Couples and of Adults and Children
Equivalence scales, used to compare incomes across household types, strongly influence which households have low reported income, affecting public policy priorities. Yet they draw on abstract, often dated evidence and arbitrary judgements, and on comparisons across the income distribution rather than focusing on minimum requirements. Budget standards provide more tangible comparisons of the minimum required by different household types. The Minim…
Chiefs: Power in a Political Wilderness
Healing the Exposed Being: The Ngoma healing tradition in South Africa
Have Pay Equity Laws in Canada Helped Women? A Synthetic-Control Approach
Ontario passed a very aggressive Pay Equity Act in 1988, and in 1996 Quebec passed a similar Pay Equity Act. We use synthetic-control methods to examine what has happened to the gender pay gap (female–male earnings ratio) in Ontario since 2005 and to see whether Quebec’s Pay Equity Act has had any effect on its pay gap. Ontario and Quebec are chosen simply because they are the provinces with the most comprehensive and “aggressive” pay equity laws…
Southern Africa: Sociocultural Aspects
Magical Empiricism and 'Exposed Being' in Medicine and Traditional Healing
Southern African traditional healers often generalize too broadly from discrete ('accidental') instances of success, partly to recruit a clientele, while biomedicine frequently reasons incorrectly from the general to the specific. Both logics are based on empirical observations, but are inversions of each other; these I characterize as 'magical empiricism.' 'Magic' functions as a metapragmatic discourse to recruit a clientele from a skeptical pub…
The Transmission of Knowledge in South African Traditional Healing
Traditional healers' (sangomas) in Mpumalanga Province, South Africa, are organized into 'schools' around a senior teacher (gobela). Healing is understood by its practioners to be a profession, not a religion or even a spiritual exercise. Healers actively assess the effectiveness of their healing methods, transmit their knowledge to each other, and evaluate each others' performances in ways that stray far from the mere transmission of 'tradition'…
Marginal utilities, time, and zombies: "Comment on Jane Guyer's "Prophecy and the near future: Thoughts on macroeconomic, evangelical, and punctuated time
Four principles of South African political culture at the local level
Standard models of political thought derived from Liberal, Democratic and Classical models of political theory do not appear to fully comprehend the structure and processes of political action and culture at the local-level in South Africa. I present a concise model that is based on set of four inter-linked ‘principles’ or concepts that structure political action and sentiment: (1) the equivalence of persons, (2) respect, (3) jealousy, and (4) su…
Gender Pay Differentials and Equality Legislation in the Republic of Ireland
Mark Cassidy, Eric Strobl, Robert Thornton, Gender Pay Differentials and Equality Legislation in the Republic of Ireland, Canadian Public Policy / Analyse de Politiques, Vol. 28, Supplement: Occupational Gender Segregation: Public Policies and Economic Forces (May, 2002), pp. S149-S169
Ethnicity and the geometry of power: The aesthetics of ethnicity in the imagination of the polity
`ETHNICITY' IS GENERALLY understood to be one `part' of a polity that contains, at least, other `ethnicities' and probably many other kinds of groupings or categories, including race, sex, colour, status groups and classes (after Max Weber, 1978:302-310,385-398; or Karl Marx, for instance 1970:82; Eriksen 1993:1-15). It is the thesis of this argument that categories such as ethnicity (as well as other similar types of social categories) are perce…
The Concomitant Effects of Phrase Length and Informational Content in Sentence Comprehension
The Economist in Tort Litigation
In recent decades, the involvement of economists as consultants and expert witnesses in civil tort actions has grown rapidly. In this article, the authors discuss the reasons for this phenomenon and the extent to conflicts of interest to arise in the practice of what is frequently called 'forensic economics.' They argue that, although conflict-of-interest pressures exist, the limited evidence does not indicate that unethical practices are rampant…
Taphonomies of Topography: From the Death of "Place" to Its Hyphenated Apotheosis
Non-Places: Introduction to an Anthropology of Supermodernity. Marc Augé. London: Verso, 1995. 122 pp.Landscape and Power in Vienna. Robert Rotenberg. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1995. 385 pp.Imagineering Atlanta: The Politics of Place in the City of Dreams. Charles Rutheiser. London: Verso, 1996. 322 pp
Ethnography and the Historical Imagination. John Comaroff and Jean Comaroff
South Africa: Countries, Boundaries, Enemies and Friends
La Republique d'Afrique du Sud se caracterise par ses multiples limites et frontieres arbitraires mais qui sont au centre de toute politique et de tout conflit, conflits qui n'ont cependant pas empeche l'integration economique et politique. Pour ce pays (et non nation) la terre est une ressource ambigue, un probleme purement culturel dont veut etre issu chaque groupe. Johannesburg, Durban et Cape Town sont les trois etats-villes du pays ayant leu…
The End of the Future
Concentration in the Labor Market for Public School Teachers
Recent studies that have investigated the relationship between the monopsony power of school districts and teachers' salaries have reached conflicting conclusions. The authors of this paper argue that the discrepancies among previous studies may be due to the arbitrary demarcation of the boundaries of teacher labor markets and the use of faulty measures of monopsony. Using a new procedure for defining teacher labor market boundaries and several a…
Invaluable ally or imminent aggressor? Australia and Japanese naval assistance, 1914–18∗
Narrative Ethnography in Africa, 1850-1920: The Creation and Capture of an Appropriate Domain for Anthropology
The ethnographic monograph has its roots in two traditions. While its format and rhetoric are strongly influenced by the natural science monograph, its content derives largely from genres of travelogue and missionary letters and bulletins. In the period I850-I900, ethnographic writing was addressed to two audiences, but by the turn of the century it had been 'captured' by theoretical social scientists and became the appropriate and legitimate dom…
The elusive unity of Sir George Grey's library
1983). The elusive unity of Sir George Grey's library. African Studies: Vol. 42, No. 1, pp. 79-89
Modelling of Spatial Relations in a Boundary-Marking Ritual of the Iraqw of Tanzania
Evolution, salvation and history in the rise of the ethnographic monograph in Southern Africa 1860-1920∗
The ethnographic monograph, despite its particularistic content, is a universalizing symbolic form that confirms the existence of human universals. It arose in the period 1860-1920 in response to intellectual and moral concerns of missionaries in Africa and intellectuals in European, universities. Temporal concepts of evolution, salvation and history, central to Victorian social and religious thought, all played a role in shaping the genre. It is…
The Transmission of Knowledge in South African Traditional Healing
Traditional healers' (sangomas) in Mpumalanga Province, South Africa, are organized into 'schools' around a senior teacher (gobela). Healing is understood by its practioners to be a profession, not a religion or even a spiritual exercise. Healers actively assess the effectiveness of their healing methods, transmit their knowledge to each other, and evaluate each others' performances in ways that stray far from the mere transmission of 'tradition'…
Narrative Ethnography in Africa, 1850-1920: The Creation and Capture of an Appropriate Domain for Anthropology
The ethnographic monograph has its roots in two traditions. While its format and rhetoric are strongly influenced by the natural science monograph, its content derives largely from genres of travelogue and missionary letters and bulletins. In the period I850-I900, ethnographic writing was addressed to two audiences, but by the turn of the century it had been 'captured' by theoretical social scientists and became the appropriate and legitimate dom…
Healing the Exposed Being: The Ngoma healing tradition in South Africa
Modelling of Spatial Relations in a Boundary-Marking Ritual of the Iraqw of Tanzania
Magical Empiricism and 'Exposed Being' in Medicine and Traditional Healing
Southern African traditional healers often generalize too broadly from discrete ('accidental') instances of success, partly to recruit a clientele, while biomedicine frequently reasons incorrectly from the general to the specific. Both logics are based on empirical observations, but are inversions of each other; these I characterize as 'magical empiricism.' 'Magic' functions as a metapragmatic discourse to recruit a clientele from a skeptical pub…
Marginal utilities, time, and zombies: "Comment on Jane Guyer's "Prophecy and the near future: Thoughts on macroeconomic, evangelical, and punctuated time
Gender Pay Differentials and Equality Legislation in the Republic of Ireland
Mark Cassidy, Eric Strobl, Robert Thornton, Gender Pay Differentials and Equality Legislation in the Republic of Ireland, Canadian Public Policy / Analyse de Politiques, Vol. 28, Supplement: Occupational Gender Segregation: Public Policies and Economic Forces (May, 2002), pp. S149-S169
The Concomitant Effects of Phrase Length and Informational Content in Sentence Comprehension
Evolution, salvation and history in the rise of the ethnographic monograph in Southern Africa 1860-1920∗
The ethnographic monograph, despite its particularistic content, is a universalizing symbolic form that confirms the existence of human universals. It arose in the period 1860-1920 in response to intellectual and moral concerns of missionaries in Africa and intellectuals in European, universities. Temporal concepts of evolution, salvation and history, central to Victorian social and religious thought, all played a role in shaping the genre. It is…
The Minimum Income Standard and equivalisation: Reassessing Relative Costs of Singles and Couples and of Adults and Children
Equivalence scales, used to compare incomes across household types, strongly influence which households have low reported income, affecting public policy priorities. Yet they draw on abstract, often dated evidence and arbitrary judgements, and on comparisons across the income distribution rather than focusing on minimum requirements. Budget standards provide more tangible comparisons of the minimum required by different household types. The Minim…
The elusive unity of Sir George Grey's library
1983). The elusive unity of Sir George Grey's library. African Studies: Vol. 42, No. 1, pp. 79-89
Four principles of South African political culture at the local level
Standard models of political thought derived from Liberal, Democratic and Classical models of political theory do not appear to fully comprehend the structure and processes of political action and culture at the local-level in South Africa. I present a concise model that is based on set of four inter-linked ‘principles’ or concepts that structure political action and sentiment: (1) the equivalence of persons, (2) respect, (3) jealousy, and (4) su…
The Economist in Tort Litigation
In recent decades, the involvement of economists as consultants and expert witnesses in civil tort actions has grown rapidly. In this article, the authors discuss the reasons for this phenomenon and the extent to conflicts of interest to arise in the practice of what is frequently called 'forensic economics.' They argue that, although conflict-of-interest pressures exist, the limited evidence does not indicate that unethical practices are rampant…
South Africa: Countries, Boundaries, Enemies and Friends
La Republique d'Afrique du Sud se caracterise par ses multiples limites et frontieres arbitraires mais qui sont au centre de toute politique et de tout conflit, conflits qui n'ont cependant pas empeche l'integration economique et politique. Pour ce pays (et non nation) la terre est une ressource ambigue, un probleme purement culturel dont veut etre issu chaque groupe. Johannesburg, Durban et Cape Town sont les trois etats-villes du pays ayant leu…
Concentration in the Labor Market for Public School Teachers
Recent studies that have investigated the relationship between the monopsony power of school districts and teachers' salaries have reached conflicting conclusions. The authors of this paper argue that the discrepancies among previous studies may be due to the arbitrary demarcation of the boundaries of teacher labor markets and the use of faulty measures of monopsony. Using a new procedure for defining teacher labor market boundaries and several a…
Evolution, salvation and history in the rise of the ethnographic monograph in Southern Africa 1860-1920∗
The ethnographic monograph, despite its particularistic content, is a universalizing symbolic form that confirms the existence of human universals. It arose in the period 1860-1920 in response to intellectual and moral concerns of missionaries in Africa and intellectuals in European, universities. Temporal concepts of evolution, salvation and history, central to Victorian social and religious thought, all played a role in shaping the genre. It is…
Modelling of Spatial Relations in a Boundary-Marking Ritual of the Iraqw of Tanzania
Invaluable ally or imminent aggressor? Australia and Japanese naval assistance, 1914–18∗
Narrative Ethnography in Africa, 1850-1920: The Creation and Capture of an Appropriate Domain for Anthropology
The ethnographic monograph has its roots in two traditions. While its format and rhetoric are strongly influenced by the natural science monograph, its content derives largely from genres of travelogue and missionary letters and bulletins. In the period I850-I900, ethnographic writing was addressed to two audiences, but by the turn of the century it had been 'captured' by theoretical social scientists and became the appropriate and legitimate dom…
The elusive unity of Sir George Grey's library
1983). The elusive unity of Sir George Grey's library. African Studies: Vol. 42, No. 1, pp. 79-89
Concentration in the Labor Market for Public School Teachers
Recent studies that have investigated the relationship between the monopsony power of school districts and teachers' salaries have reached conflicting conclusions. The authors of this paper argue that the discrepancies among previous studies may be due to the arbitrary demarcation of the boundaries of teacher labor markets and the use of faulty measures of monopsony. Using a new procedure for defining teacher labor market boundaries and several a…
The End of the Future
South Africa: Countries, Boundaries, Enemies and Friends
La Republique d'Afrique du Sud se caracterise par ses multiples limites et frontieres arbitraires mais qui sont au centre de toute politique et de tout conflit, conflits qui n'ont cependant pas empeche l'integration economique et politique. Pour ce pays (et non nation) la terre est une ressource ambigue, un probleme purement culturel dont veut etre issu chaque groupe. Johannesburg, Durban et Cape Town sont les trois etats-villes du pays ayant leu…
Ethnography and the Historical Imagination. John Comaroff and Jean Comaroff
Taphonomies of Topography: From the Death of "Place" to Its Hyphenated Apotheosis
Non-Places: Introduction to an Anthropology of Supermodernity. Marc Augé. London: Verso, 1995. 122 pp.Landscape and Power in Vienna. Robert Rotenberg. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1995. 385 pp.Imagineering Atlanta: The Politics of Place in the City of Dreams. Charles Rutheiser. London: Verso, 1996. 322 pp
The Economist in Tort Litigation
In recent decades, the involvement of economists as consultants and expert witnesses in civil tort actions has grown rapidly. In this article, the authors discuss the reasons for this phenomenon and the extent to conflicts of interest to arise in the practice of what is frequently called 'forensic economics.' They argue that, although conflict-of-interest pressures exist, the limited evidence does not indicate that unethical practices are rampant…
Ethnicity and the geometry of power: The aesthetics of ethnicity in the imagination of the polity
`ETHNICITY' IS GENERALLY understood to be one `part' of a polity that contains, at least, other `ethnicities' and probably many other kinds of groupings or categories, including race, sex, colour, status groups and classes (after Max Weber, 1978:302-310,385-398; or Karl Marx, for instance 1970:82; Eriksen 1993:1-15). It is the thesis of this argument that categories such as ethnicity (as well as other similar types of social categories) are perce…
The Concomitant Effects of Phrase Length and Informational Content in Sentence Comprehension
Gender Pay Differentials and Equality Legislation in the Republic of Ireland
Mark Cassidy, Eric Strobl, Robert Thornton, Gender Pay Differentials and Equality Legislation in the Republic of Ireland, Canadian Public Policy / Analyse de Politiques, Vol. 28, Supplement: Occupational Gender Segregation: Public Policies and Economic Forces (May, 2002), pp. S149-S169
Four principles of South African political culture at the local level
Standard models of political thought derived from Liberal, Democratic and Classical models of political theory do not appear to fully comprehend the structure and processes of political action and culture at the local-level in South Africa. I present a concise model that is based on set of four inter-linked ‘principles’ or concepts that structure political action and sentiment: (1) the equivalence of persons, (2) respect, (3) jealousy, and (4) su…
Marginal utilities, time, and zombies: "Comment on Jane Guyer's "Prophecy and the near future: Thoughts on macroeconomic, evangelical, and punctuated time
The Transmission of Knowledge in South African Traditional Healing
Traditional healers' (sangomas) in Mpumalanga Province, South Africa, are organized into 'schools' around a senior teacher (gobela). Healing is understood by its practioners to be a profession, not a religion or even a spiritual exercise. Healers actively assess the effectiveness of their healing methods, transmit their knowledge to each other, and evaluate each others' performances in ways that stray far from the mere transmission of 'tradition'…
Southern Africa: Sociocultural Aspects
Magical Empiricism and 'Exposed Being' in Medicine and Traditional Healing
Southern African traditional healers often generalize too broadly from discrete ('accidental') instances of success, partly to recruit a clientele, while biomedicine frequently reasons incorrectly from the general to the specific. Both logics are based on empirical observations, but are inversions of each other; these I characterize as 'magical empiricism.' 'Magic' functions as a metapragmatic discourse to recruit a clientele from a skeptical pub…
Have Pay Equity Laws in Canada Helped Women? A Synthetic-Control Approach
Ontario passed a very aggressive Pay Equity Act in 1988, and in 1996 Quebec passed a similar Pay Equity Act. We use synthetic-control methods to examine what has happened to the gender pay gap (female–male earnings ratio) in Ontario since 2005 and to see whether Quebec’s Pay Equity Act has had any effect on its pay gap. Ontario and Quebec are chosen simply because they are the provinces with the most comprehensive and “aggressive” pay equity laws…
Healing the Exposed Being: The Ngoma healing tradition in South Africa
Chiefs: Power in a Political Wilderness
The Minimum Income Standard and equivalisation: Reassessing Relative Costs of Singles and Couples and of Adults and Children
Equivalence scales, used to compare incomes across household types, strongly influence which households have low reported income, affecting public policy priorities. Yet they draw on abstract, often dated evidence and arbitrary judgements, and on comparisons across the income distribution rather than focusing on minimum requirements. Budget standards provide more tangible comparisons of the minimum required by different household types. The Minim…
Political science (12 works) · Sociology (10 works) · Law (8 works) · Economics (6 works) · History (6 works) · History (5 works) · Law (5 works) · Philosophy (5 works) · African history and culture studies (4 works) · Anthropology (4 works)