A Smart
Dados Biográficos
| ID | 9050 |
|---|---|
| NOME | A Smart |
| PRENOMES | A |
| SOBRENOME | Smart |
| ASSINATURA | SMART A |
| AFILIAÇÕES | University of Calgary |
| ORCID | 0000-0001-7880-9799 |
| VERIFICADO | Sim |
| TOTAL DE OBRAS | 76 |
| TOTAL DE CITAÇÕES | 658 |
| TOTAL COMO AUTOR | 76 |
| TOTAL COMO EDITOR | 0 |
| PRIMEIRO ANO DE PUBLICAÇÃO | 1969 |
| ANO MAIS RECENTE DE PUBLICAÇÃO | 2026 |
| ÍNDICE H | 15 |
Man in a Hurry
Forever Hong Kong
Beyond Formal-Informal Dichotomies
Debates on informality have been mainly structured along dichotomous formal-informal, regular-irregular, or legal-illegal lines, where government and the law equate to formality. Ethnographic studies, however, have often demonstrated that formality and informality coexist. An increasing number of scholars have emphasized that the formal and the informal are always and everywhere intertwined. Domains that seem very formal contain informal practice…
Pierre Bourdieu on capitals, the state and forced resettlement
Pierre Bourdieu distinguished two main ways to teach sociology, by either teaching the principles and formal procedures, or by revealing examples of these formal procedures at work, and preferred to harness both together. This essay attempts to adopt this approach to consider three of his books recently translated to English, using my own research on forms of capital, the state and resettlement to engage with his arguments. I suggest that the uti…
Neglected Transportation Infrastructure
Verkhnemarkovo, a small Siberian town located on an oil field in Russia’s Irkutsk region, is plagued by bad roads and limited mobility. This article explores the relationship between corporate social responsibility and the wellbeing of individuals and communities, with a focus on transport and mobility infrastructure. Some oil companies, such as Irkutsk Oil Company, are tied to the sustainability standards of international financial institutions.…
Data-driven governance, smart urbanism and risk-class inequalities
This article contributes to the politicisation of smart urbanism and data-driven governance by making visible some of the potential inequalities emerging from these transitions through a provisional risk-class analysis. To pursue this analysis, it focuses on the case of smart urbanism and its associated process of data-driven governance in China. It looks specifically at the manner in which Chinese smart urbanism, in terms of its security measure…
Posthumanist perspectives on transhumanist marketing
Transhumanism advocates enhancement of current human capacities with new technologies, in pursuit of human improvement and perfection, and thereby creates lucrative marketing opportunities. We use the broader concept of posthumanism, which includes this, but also all the other ways in which humans are enhanced by non-humans. However, our study is not about posthumanism, but about how a posthumanist critique can enhance our analyses and diagnoses.…
We are unhousing people and so are obliged to rehouse them
Previous articleNext article FreeBook SymposiumWe are unhousing people and so are obliged to rehouse them The moral economy of squatting Grohmann, Steph. 2020. The ethics of space: Homelessness and squatting in urban England. Chicago: Hau Books.Alan SmartAlan SmartUniversity of Calgary Search for more articles by this author Full TextPDF Add to favoritesDownload CitationTrack CitationsPermissionsReprints Share onFacebookTwitterLinked InRedditEmai…
Squatter Housing
Squatting is one of the most important forms of housing for the world’s poor, accommodating perhaps a billion people, with the numbers continuing to grow. Squatters occupy vacant land or buildings without the consent of the owner. Squatting in existing buildings is more common in the Global North, particularly in Europe, and tends to be more political, often explicitly anticapitalist, than squatting on vacant land, which accounts for the vast maj…
Squatters
Important contributions have been made to our knowledge of squatters in sociology, anthropology, geography, political science, planning, and architecture. In addition, there is research led by international organizations, agencies, and NGOs. Squatting is the occupation of vacant land or buildings, without the consent of the owner. But squatting involves a wide range of activities, claims, goals, resources, locations, and relationships with author…
Neoliberal wrongdoing, or same as it ever was? A review essay
Review article of James G. Carrier, ed., Economy, crime and wrong in a neoliberal era, New York, Berghahn, 2018, pp. 276
Financializing Chinese cities
Current enquiries into the transformation of cities from ‘growth’ to ‘debt machines’ are largely based on studies of selected European and American cities where municipal governments temporally repackaged and rescheduled current fiscal problems by selling off city futures. This study of a recent episode of housing speculation in urban China identifies a distinctive trajectory in which the state has reshuffled financial resources sectorally and sp…
A market with a view, on global neoliberalisms
Structuration
The theory of structuration is primarily associated with the work of Anthony Giddens. He attempted to avoid the problems of structural determinism and theories of action by integrating them through the notion of the duality of structure, in which structure is both medium and outcome of the social practices of agents. Action is in turn enabled as well as constrained by structures, which consist of rules and resources that are reproduced only throu…
Social Capital
Social capital has extensive roots in anthropology and sociology, but the term itself came into wide usage in the 1980s. It is associated primarily with the work of Pierre Bourdieu, James S. Coleman, and Robert Putnam, whose conceptualizations of social capital varied substantially. The formulation by Putnam, which sees social capital as a property of collectivities as well as individuals (or as embedded in the relationships between individuals) …
Ethnographic perspectives on the mediation of informality between people and plans in urbanising China
In this introduction to some of the themes of this special issue on People and plans in urbanising China, I draw on Herbert Gans’ prescient comments about the importance of informality in mediating between plans and the various groups of people, users and planners, who shape their formation and implementation. Informality is even more important in the governance of cities in China. Comparing contemporary Chinese cities with Hong Kong, I suggest t…
The Unbearable Discretion of Street-Level Bureaucrats
Since 1974, Hong Kong has gone from being pervasively corrupt to being the best example of effective anti-corruption programs and, most recently, to experiencing widespread concerns about collusion and corruption convictions at the top levels of the government. I examine these transformations, focusing on the role of informal processes operating within government and how policies may have consequences that are very different from those that were …
Transnational Social Networks and Negotiated Identities in Interactions Between Hong Kong and China
This chapter explores transnational social networks in action as they are constituted and mobilized for practical activities. It considers the ways in which others can make claims on such networks and how such claims can be resisted or subverted. The chapter discusses the deal with issues of identities, as shared identities and claims of exclusion operate in the process of situated ethnicity. However, we are also critical of excessive attention t…
Ain't Talkin' 'Bout Gentrification
The concept of gentrification has become stretched, both conceptually and geographically, in ways that both erode its utility and displace alternative ways of understanding the displacement of lower-income people by urban transformation. Among the negative consequences that we consider is that the resulting pressure to reframe analysis in terms of gentrification reinforces Anglo-American academic hegemony and increases the difficulty of introduci…
Informality within government agencies tasked with controlling informal economic practices
The trend to dualism in the study of in/formality means that we usually neglect informality within government, usually seen as the locus of formality, but in practice usually relying on informal practices to get things done. This commentary uses archival documents on colonial Hong Kong to challenge this duality
In/formalization
Addressing a variety of locations and subjects across several social contexts and countries, this forum intends to stimulate novel ways of conceptualizing the inevitable interpenetration and entanglement of formalization and informalization as two interlinked social processes. Rather than proposing a new coherent definition of 'informality', we propose to consider 'in/formalization' as a space of practice and reflection which is crucial for engag…
Profit, prestige and the liberal arts in the 'neoliberal' academy
I argue that the Canadian academy, at least, is not neoliberal in the sense of acting as a profit-seeking corporation. Rather it serves the agenda of the corporate sector while operating under what is better seen as a symbolic economy of prestige and status
Formalization as confinement in colonial Hong Kong
The nature of informal economies is structured by conflict between governmental strategies of confinement, to places, times and how things are done, and the transgression of these confines by informal actors in pursuit of survival or advantage. This article examines the influential development program of formalization in the context of these conflicts. Informality can be formalized in two ways, by eradication and by regularization. Building on th…
Customs control over illicit international trade
This article examines a process central to the anthropological understanding of the state, how smuggling persists despite diverting a large portion of the revenues critical to the operation of state organizations. Developing the author's prior typology of basic reasons why illegal practices persist, the article argues that there are five distinct types of smuggling, related to factors such as the social legitimacy of the activity. Legitimacy appe…
Extralegality
Gifts, Bribes, andGuanxi
Anthropological Takes on (Im)Mobility
In this introduction, we outline the general conceptual framework that ties the various contributions to this special issue together. We argue for the importance of anthropology to “take on” mobility and discuss the advantages of the ethnographic approach in doing so. What is the analytical purchase of mobility as one of the root metaphors in contemporary anthropological theorizing? What are the (dis)advantages of looking at the current human con…
Unruly Places
Our knowledge of the governance of cities has expanded in recent years with the application of Foucauldian approaches. However, the majority of such work has concentrated on areas where governmental control is heightened, such as prisons and asylums. In this article, I discuss unruly places where governments have less control than usual: squatter settlements. Hong Kong has had substantial numbers of squatters throughout its postwar rise from dire…
Personal Relations and Divergent Economies
Local Citizenship
After 1949 China's welfare system developed on the basis of a status division between urban and rural residents. Urban and rural societies were profoundly influenced by the respective organization of their welfare systems, which shared the feature of being fixed to specific places (rural) or enterprises (urban). Reform of core institutions is constrained by path dependency. Knowledge of those constraints, however, can aid efforts to shape new pat…
Local Capitalisms, Local Citizenship and Translocality
Chinese economic reforms have profoundly changed the scale at which things get done. Much of the existing literature on scale has concentrated on the politics of rescaling from above. Less has been written about rescaling initiatives from below, the focus of this study. It distinguishes three important localisms.Local capitalismstreats capitalism as subordinate to local social and political processes that provide crucial conditions of existence.L…
Critical perspectives on multispecies ethnography
In a wide variety of disciplines, from English to Biology, attention to human- animal relations is challenging traditional definitions of the intellectual division of labour between the humanities, social sciences, and natural sciences (Maturana and Varela, 1992). In anthropology, in some ways, the trend towards research that focuses on ''multi-species ethnography'' or the ''anthropology of life'' or ''post-humanism'' is creating new opportunitie…
Financialization and the Role of Real Estate in Hong Kong's Regime of Accumulation
The greater dominance of finance in the global economic system is widely considered to have increased instability and created difficulties in constructing modes of regulation that could stabilize post-Fordist regimes of accumulation. Heightened competition and the discipline of global finance restrict the use of Fordist strategies that expand social wages to balance production and consumption. Robert Boyer suggested a model for a possible stable …
Urbanization and the Global Perspective
Much of the literature about globalization exaggerates the degree of novelty. In this review, we concentrate on claims about what has changed about cities under late capitalism and globalization. Although we suggest that cities have long been influenced by global forces, we conclude that the roles of cities in the global system have changed considerably as a result of the time-space compression made possible by new transportation, communication, …
Tops and bottoms
Ain't Talkin' 'Bout Gentrification
The concept of gentrification has become stretched, both conceptually and geographically, in ways that both erode its utility and displace alternative ways of understanding the displacement of lower-income people by urban transformation. Among the negative consequences that we consider is that the resulting pressure to reframe analysis in terms of gentrification reinforces Anglo-American academic hegemony and increases the difficulty of introduci…
The Unbearable Discretion of Street-Level Bureaucrats
Since 1974, Hong Kong has gone from being pervasively corrupt to being the best example of effective anti-corruption programs and, most recently, to experiencing widespread concerns about collusion and corruption convictions at the top levels of the government. I examine these transformations, focusing on the role of informal processes operating within government and how policies may have consequences that are very different from those that were …
Time-space Punctuation
Chinese people seem to be increasingly on the move, as this special issue emphasizes, among the diaspora, and especially among residents of the People’s Republic of China after it re-opened to the capitalist world after 1979. We argue, however, that an emphasis on mobility can be misleading unless we also pay close attention to factors that inhibit movement. Foremost among the inhibiting factors are international borders. The notion of a “world w…
Obligation and Control
The A. discusses a theoretical perspective which helps to make sens of the forms of labour relations found in Hong Kong factories in China. Following that, he explores in detail a case study of a factory where kinship ties were extensively used in recruitment. He concentrates upon one particular strategy of the Chinese capitalism: the recruitment of kin as workers within the enterprise
Invisible real estate
The Squatter Property Market in Hong Kong
Sharp edges, fuzzy categories and transborder networks
The sharp edges of inclusion or exclusion from citizenship are in contrast with the complex webs of transnational networks and interactions. The return of colonial Hong Kong to Chinese sovereignty posed great challenges for citizenship categories. The definition of the right of abode in the Basic Law, Hong Kong's constitution, resulted in very large numbers of people who could claim this right, as many as 1.67 million. These numbers reflect the c…
Data-driven governance, smart urbanism and risk-class inequalities
This article contributes to the politicisation of smart urbanism and data-driven governance by making visible some of the potential inequalities emerging from these transitions through a provisional risk-class analysis. To pursue this analysis, it focuses on the case of smart urbanism and its associated process of data-driven governance in China. It looks specifically at the manner in which Chinese smart urbanism, in terms of its security measure…
Forgotten Obstacles, Neglected Forces
There are three explanations in the literature for Hong Kong embarking upon the state provision of housing in 1954. One explanation sees this provision as an inevitable response to the inability of the private sector to provide affordable housing for the influx of immigrants after 1945. The second interprets it as support for the property development industry, rather than for public welfare. The third explanation traces the intervention to the ne…
Mad Cows, Regional Governance, and Urban Sprawl
History matters. Inspired by evolutionary approaches in economics and, more recently, economic geography, the authors present, through the lens of a slaughterhouse development on the city's fringe, a historical model of urban development in the metropolitan region of Calgary, Canada. Their analysis shows how an unanticipated system shock conditioned by strong historical differences in the political and economic aspirations of adjacent urban and r…
Financializing Chinese cities
Current enquiries into the transformation of cities from ‘growth’ to ‘debt machines’ are largely based on studies of selected European and American cities where municipal governments temporally repackaged and rescheduled current fiscal problems by selling off city futures. This study of a recent episode of housing speculation in urban China identifies a distinctive trajectory in which the state has reshuffled financial resources sectorally and sp…
Impeded self-help
Formalization as confinement in colonial Hong Kong
The nature of informal economies is structured by conflict between governmental strategies of confinement, to places, times and how things are done, and the transgression of these confines by informal actors in pursuit of survival or advantage. This article examines the influential development program of formalization in the context of these conflicts. Informality can be formalized in two ways, by eradication and by regularization. Building on th…
Tactful Criticism in Hong Kong
Criticizing flawed social arrangements would seem to be a natural right. But when the social critic is not a citizen, engagement raises different ethical and methodological dilemmas. In formerly colonized contexts, particularly where anthropological knowledge influenced the practices of rule, can the outside anthropologist criticize? If so, how? Regardless of whether or not moral philosophy supports a right or obligation to criticize practices ou…
From the Mountains and the Fields
This article critically reviews important developments in the anthropology of urban China. Although its primary focus is on works by China anthropologists, it addresses the interdisciplinary challenge and the increasingly ambiguous boundary between the "rural" and the "urban". More specifically, the article analyzes major theoretical and pragmatic issues addressed by anthropologists in the following seven thematic areas: minority urbanization; ur…
Performing In/formality beyond the Dichotomy
This introduction to the special issue "Moving Beyond the Formal/Informal Dichotomy: Implications for Governance" provides an overview of recent debates on informality and argues in favour of understanding in/formality as a performance. Although informality and formality are often presented as opposing or even mutually excluding domains of social practice, ethnographic studies show how they coexist and are intertwined. Our special issue, with stu…
Mobility in the Australian Public Service
The Squatter Property Market in Hong Kong
Invisible real estate
Old huts and new regulations
Forgotten Obstacles, Neglected Forces
There are three explanations in the literature for Hong Kong embarking upon the state provision of housing in 1954. One explanation sees this provision as an inevitable response to the inability of the private sector to provide affordable housing for the influx of immigrants after 1945. The second interprets it as support for the property development industry, rather than for public welfare. The third explanation traces the intervention to the ne…
Personal Relations and Divergent Economies
Gifts, Bribes, andGuanxi
Obligation and Control
The A. discusses a theoretical perspective which helps to make sens of the forms of labour relations found in Hong Kong factories in China. Following that, he explores in detail a case study of a factory where kinship ties were extensively used in recruitment. He concentrates upon one particular strategy of the Chinese capitalism: the recruitment of kin as workers within the enterprise
Society for the Anthropology of Work
Society for the Anthropology of Work
The Hong Kong-Guangdong Link
Hong Kong's Twenty-First Century Seen From 1997
Capitalist story‐telling and hegemonic crises
The Return of the God of Wealth
Essential Outsiders
Essential Outsiders: Chinese and Jews in the Modern Transformation of Southeast Asia and Central Europe. Daniel Chirot and Anthony Reid. eds. Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1997.336 pp
Making Capitalism
Maid to Order in Hong Kong
Maid to Order in Hong Kong. Nicole Constable. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1997. 230 pp
The Trading Crowd
The Trading Crowd: An Ethnography of the Shanghai Stock Market. ELLEN HERTZ. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998. xiv. 238 pp., illustrations, glossary, bibliography, index
The Artisans and Entrepreneurs of Dongyang County
This book brings together historians, geographers, political scientists, and legal scholars to examine each of China's twenty land or sea borders
Local Citizenship
After 1949 China's welfare system developed on the basis of a status division between urban and rural residents. Urban and rural societies were profoundly influenced by the respective organization of their welfare systems, which shared the feature of being fixed to specific places (rural) or enterprises (urban). Reform of core institutions is constrained by path dependency. Knowledge of those constraints, however, can aid efforts to shape new pat…
Unruly Places
Our knowledge of the governance of cities has expanded in recent years with the application of Foucauldian approaches. However, the majority of such work has concentrated on areas where governmental control is heightened, such as prisons and asylums. In this article, I discuss unruly places where governments have less control than usual: squatter settlements. Hong Kong has had substantial numbers of squatters throughout its postwar rise from dire…
Agents of Eviction
More is known about the policies that produce forced evictions and their consequences than about the agencies whose responsibility it is to conduct them. Understanding the nature of forced evictions requires greater comprehension of responsible agencies since the ways in which they implement policies may be a crucial intervening variable influencing the outcomes. In this paper, I use documentary and ethnographic research to describe the Squatter …
The Life of the Law
Impeded self-help
Political science (53 obras) · Sociology (53 obras) · Law (40 obras) · Economics (34 obras) · Law (22 obras) · China (18 obras) · Politics (18 obras) · Geography (17 obras) · Hong Kong and Taiwan Politics (15 obras) · Business (14 obras)