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Organizational trends toward team-based structures, globalization, and reliance on communication technology have spurred research addressing the communication processes of virtual teams. However, much of the extant research focuses on the ways virtual teams differ from conventional, face-to-face teams and fails to examine variations in virtual team characteristics that may impact team communication behaviors and experiences. The study reported here identifies two categories of virtual team characteristics (communicative and structural) and uses these to explore their relationships to team communication technology use and team outcomes. Analysis of data from 98 virtual teams reveals that structural features primarily relate to media use, whereas communication considerations are associated with team outcomes. Additional analyses indicate that various communicative predictors moderate the relationships between technology use and outcomes. These results point to theoretical and practical implications for rese...

In various parts of francophone Africa, farmers use 'pieces of paper' to record transactions such as the 'sale' (with all the inherent ambiguity of the term) of land or delegation of cultivation rights. The aim of these local institutional innovations is to certify that the transaction has taken place. The parties often try to get these contracts validated by a local government authority. Although the procedures may be incomplete and not legal, such 'informal formalisation' of transactions does help to reduce uncertainty and provide greater security within the complex web of tenure relations. New insights can now be gained into local dynamic processes and the role of the state in making tenure rights more secure. (Resume d'auteur)

(2002). Monetary Land Transactions in Western Burkina Faso: Commoditisation, Papers and Ambiguities. The European Journal of Development Research: Vol. 14, No. 2, pp. 109-128.

RELIGION Peter Paris, ed. Religion and Poverty: Pan-African Perspectives. Durham, N.C: Duke University Press, 2009. xxiv + 360 pp. Notes. Contributors. Index. $89.95. Cloth. $24.95. Paper. According to the foreword by Jacob Olupona, this book represents a culmination of several Ford Foundation-sponsored seminars, lectures, and discussions held over the course of four years in South Africa, Kenya, Ghana, Jamaica, and the United States, where various academics of religion and society interrogated issues related to the causes of poverty and the intersection between poverty and religion among African peoples, with an attendant focus on "poverty alleviation." As suggested, too, in Esther Mombo's chapter, "Religion and Materiality: The Case of Poverty Alleviation," the inference is that "poverty eradication" is viewed as a distant ideal, and that food aid and other philanthropic antihunger organizations are forced to accept poverty alleviation as the only feasible goal, given the widening chasm under globalization and neocolonialism between the haves and have-nots in the world, particularly in Africa and the African diaspora. One does wonder, though, how, if organizations like the World Bank and the IMF advance antipoor policies like Structural Adjustment that in fact exacerbate poverty, the same organizations could be expected to alleviate poverty in "partnership with religious organizations, particularly churches" (xvii). A further question is "Why do religious traditions not demand the outright eradication of poverty as a sine qua non for ethical existence of their various adherents in the world?" Perhaps writers like Kossi Ayedze in the chapter "Poverty among African People and the Ambiguous Role of Christian Thought," who proposes a materially oriented Christian gospel that caters to both souls and bodies (208), make us realize that Christian theologians still struggle with the injunction of Jesus to surrender everything to the poor and live a materially and spiritually selfless life. But the question still remains: Why does poverty exist in the world and Africa in particular, to the point that the modest United Nations Millennium Development Goal of reducing poverty by half by 2015 is now viewed as unrealistic and unattainable? Religion and Poverty is a broad-based text that charts the historical roots of poverty in Africa and the diaspora through genocidal processes like the trade in enslaved Africans from the seventeenth through the nineteenth centuries (see Katie Cannon's chapter, "An Ethical Mapping of the Transatlantic Slave Trade," and Barbara Bailey's instructive discussion of the subjugation particularly of women, "Feminization of Poverty Across Pan African Societies: The Church's Response - Alleviative or Emancipatory?"). The book highlights the challenges of economic globalization, which champions the transnational spread of corporate capitalism at the expense of informal entrepreneurs, especially women, who foster the survival of millions of families, youth, and children in the underdeveloped world (see 'The Informal Economy and the Religion of Global Capital" by the South African theologian Takatso Mofokeng), and it also investigates the contradictions between such imported notions and indigenous African religiocultural understandings - as, for example, in Maasai practice - that decry poverty and require collective access to land that cannot be owned (see Elizabeth Amoah's "African Traditional Religion and the Concept of Poverty"). …

ANTHROPOLOGY AND SOCIOLOGY Paula Heinonen. Youth Gangs and Street Children: Culture, Nurture and Masculinity in Ethiopia. New York: Berghahn Books, 2011. vii + 180 pp. Bibliography. Index. $99.00. Cloth. $25.00. Paper.During the 1990s and 2000s many countries in Africa and elsewhere in the developing world experienced an explosion of street children and youth gangs in their urban centers. Scholars and other observers attribute the increase in the number of children and youth making a living and/or living on the streets to myriad causes: poverty, structural adjustment policies and other forces of globalization, drought, famine, floods, political instability, and civil wars. Paralleling the growth of these groups, Paula Heinonen notes in Youth Gangs and Street Children in Ethiopia: Culture, Nurture and Masculinity, has been an explosion in the growth of international nongovernmental organizations (NGOs) whose mission it is to address the needs of these children and their families. These NGOs, along with scholars, the media, and polidcians in industrialized countries, typically portray street children and their families as dysfunctional, their lives dominated by violence, neglect, abuse, and low levels of education and health care. Solutions usually involve a combination of social welfare schemes and law enforcement which, even when implemented, barely scratch the surface of the problem.In her study of homeless street gangs and home-living street children in Ethiopia, Heinonen argues that most of what we know and understand about these young people is a distortion. Based on six years of field work in Addis Ababa, Youth Gangs and Street Children in Ethiopia provides a careful ethnographic examination of the lives of male and female children as many of them passed from childhood to adulthood and parenthood before Heinonen's eyes. There is violence, to be sure, but it comes mostly from the police, members of the public, and fellow gang members. The street children in her study lived with their families (a limitation of the study, as this is not necessarily representative of street children, generally, throughout the world). They were entrepreneurial and often parented their siblings and even their parents. Many attended school, using their trading and other earnings to pay their school fees. Street gang members did not find the gang to be a substitute family, as much of the literature asserts. Instead, the street gang members among whom Heinonen worked "were not only at odds with one another most of the time, but frequently went in and out of groups" (2-3). Gang violence was often perpetrated against female gang members, who were sexually abused, sexually exploited, and raped by male gang members, particularly in mixed-sex gangs.Heinonen found that central to understanding the lives of street children and youth gangs in Ethiopia-their livelihoods, criminal activities, and interactions with one another, with parents, and with other members of their communities-is the concept of yilunta (shame, honor, or family pride), which "promotes hegemonic masculinity within the 'wider Ethiopian' culture and accounts for the gendered nature of how Ethiopian children are socialized and how gang members operate" (8). …

The Globalization and Localization in Computer-Assisted Language Learning (GLoCALL) series of conferences, which are jointly organized by APACALL and PacCALL, aim primarily to share knowledge, rese...

There is no shortage of research that purports to tell us something new about globalization and its varied impacts on domestic politics and international relations today. Moreover, students mining this literature continue to find a broad spectrum of opinion on globalization, from those offering a strong state thesis that seemingly willfully ignores the many interdependent relationships states are entangled in today, to those embracing a weak state thesis that accepts the erosion of state sovereignty as a given. Edward Cohen's new book avoids these analytical traps, as he navigates through both popular and academic debates on globalization to produce a well-rounded and useful picture of a prosperous and hegemonic United States nonetheless increasingly agitated and divided internally over trade, immigration, and language policy at the end of the twentieth century.

Blowers, A., and Evans, B. (eds) 1997 TOWN PLANNING INTO THE 21ST CENTURY London: Routledge, £15.99 paper. Boddy, M., Lambert, C. and Snape, D. 1997: CITY FOR THE 21ST CENTURY? GLOBALISATION, PLANNING AND URBAN CHANGE IN CONTEMPORARY BRITAIN Bristol: The Polity Press, £16.95 paper.

Jennifer Cole and Deborah Durham, eds. Generations and Globalization: Youth, Age, and Family in the New World Economy. Blooming to n: Indiana University Press, 2007. 240 pp. Photographs. Notes. Works Cited. Index. $65,00, Cloth. $24.95. Paper. In their introduction to these case studies of change in generational relations and the new transnational economy, Cole and Durham remind us that World Bank and International Monetary Fund structural adjustment programs (SAPs) contributed to globalization. In Africa and elsewhere, the conditions attached to IMF loans had a deleterious effect on social programs that previously provided incentives and a safety net, particularly for a country's youngest and oldest generations. Likewise, globalization deepened the chasm between beneficiaries of the new market-driven economy and the many who found themselves further marginalized. The outcome was plummeting incomes and increased class divisions with "consumer driven enclaves" of wealthy elites surrounded by others for whom elite lifestyles and Western goods "were mostly out of reach" (4). Two demographic factors intersect with globalization: changing demographic balances from lowered infant mortality rates and extended life expectancy, and increased transnational migration as young people from the global South seek improved economic opportunities or safe havens from war in more affluent regions. Such demographic alterations challenge existing policies, both in Africa and elsewhere. Three of the seven cases in this volume illustrate how the state's role in providing a social safety net is under siege. China confronts lingering vestiges of state socialism as it faces new demands for "quality" (sushi) education from its growing urban, middle-class population (Woronov, ch. 1). Education that privileges individual achievement and prepares youth for roles in the new, highly competitive global economy is the goal of quality education in China. Madagascar struggles to define the gendered role of youth as its government moves from socialism to a liberalized global economy that has spawned new generational and gender relations (Cole, ch. 3). In the North, Western European nations work to shed their welfare state apparatuses in favor of a European Union model that champions individual responsibility, achievement of knowledge, and economic competitiveness, all in a socially integrated global economy that includes youth, middle-age wage earners, "third-age" (55-74 years) physically able workers, and "fourth-age" elders needing care (Greenberg & Muehlebach, ch. 6). Of the contributions, four investigate changing concepts of youth and work. Magazine and Sanchez (ch. 2) focus on transnational migration between Tlalcuapan, Mexico, and California, demonstrating how generational expectations of ayuda (reciprocal family work) have changed over time as global capitalism has opened opportunities for transformation and adaptation between and within generations. The new global market and "fresh contacts" with global players from abroad also affect cycles of intergenerational exchange in Madagascar (Cole, ch. 3), where youth negotiate older networks of patronage and exchange, creating novel opportunities for upward social mobility. …

The article contains sections titled: 1. Paper and Board Today 2. Overview of the Manufacturing Process for Paper and Board 3. Historical Background and General Aspects 3.1. Invention of Paper 3.2. Chinese Paper 3.3. Arab Paper 3.4. Medieval European Paper 3.5. Mechanization and Industrialization 3.6. Paper Machines 3.7. Pulping and Sizing 3.8. From Industrialization to Automation and Globalization: Technical and Economic Trends of the 19th and 20th Centuries 4. Economic Aspects