This article presents findings regarding collective organisation among online freelancers in middle‐income countries. Drawing on research in Southeast Asia and Sub‐Saharan Africa, we find that the ...specific nature of the online freelancing labour process gives rise to a distinctive form of organisation, in which social media groups play a central role in structuring communication and unions are absent. Previous research is limited to either conventional freelancers or ‘microworkers’ who do relatively low‐skilled tasks via online labour platforms. This study uses 107 interviews and a survey of 658 freelancers who obtain work via a variety of online platforms to highlight that Internet‐based communities play a vital role in their work experiences. Internet‐based communities enable workers to support each other and share information. This, in turn, increases their security and protection. However, these communities are fragmented by nationality, occupation and platform.
Africa is beginning to capture the imagination of entrepreneurs, corporate executives, and scholars as an emerging market of new growth opportunities. Over 15 years, the continent has experienced an ...average growth rate of 5%. Out of its 54 countries, 26 have achieved middle-income status, while the proportion of those living in extreme poverty has fallen from 51% in 2005 to 42% in 2014. Although there are regional differences, the primary drivers of growth have been rapidly emerging consumer markets, regional economic integration, investment in infrastructure, technological leap-frogging, and the opening up of new markets, especially in the service sector. Africa offers great potential as a context for management research, and more empirical and conceptual work is warranted to explain the richness of the opportunities on the African continent and address the challenges within them. There is a great deal more to learn from Africa than social development. Management scholars have the opportunity to provide empirical evidence and guide business executives and policy makers alike on the road ahead.
•Ninety percent of Africa’s surplus arable land is concentrated in a few countries.•Africa’s rural populations are highly clustered in relatively densely populated areas.•Median farm size is ...generally declining and land ownership concentration is rising.•Unsustainable forms of land intensification apparent in high-density farming areas.•Land access will be important for absorbing youth into gainful employment.
Evidence assembled in this special issue of Food Policy shows that rising rural population densities in parts of Africa are profoundly affecting farming systems and the region’s economies in ways that are underappreciated in current discourse on African development issues. This study synthesizes how people, markets and governments are responding to rising land pressures in Africa, drawing on key findings from the various contributions in this special issue. The papers herein revisit the issue of Boserupian agricultural intensification as an important response to land constraints, but they also go further than Boserup and her followers to explore broader responses to land constraints, including non-farm diversification, migration, and reduced fertility rates. Agricultural and rural development strategies in the region will need to more fully anticipate the implications of Africa’s rapidly changing land and demographic situation, and the immense challenges that mounting land pressures pose in the context of current evidence of unsustainable agricultural intensification, a rapidly rising labor force associated with the region’s current demographic conditions, and limited nonfarm job creation. These challenges are manageable but will require explicit policy actions to address the unique development challenges in densely populated rural areas.
Concurrent extreme events, i.e. multi-variate extremes, can be associated with strong impacts. Hence, an understanding of how such events are changing in a warming climate is helpful to avoid some ...associated climate change impacts and better prepare for them. In this article, we analyse the projected occurrence of hot, dry, and wet extreme events' clusters in the multi-model ensemble of the 6th phase of the Coupled Model Intercomparison Project (CMIP6). Changes in 'extreme extremes', i.e. events with only 1% probability of occurrence in the current climate are analysed, first as univariate extremes, and then when co-occurring with other types of extremes (i.e. events clusters) within the same week, month or year. The projections are analysed for present-day climate (+1 °C) and different levels of additional global warming (+1.5 °C, +2 °C, +3 °C). The results reveal substantial risk of occurrence of extreme events' clusters of different types across the globe at higher global warming levels. Hotspot regions for hot and dry clusters are mainly found in Brazil, i.e. in the Northeast and the Amazon rain forest, the Mediterranean region, and Southern Africa. Hotspot regions for wet and hot clusters are found in tropical Africa but also in the Sahel region, Indonesia, and in mountainous regions such as the Andes and the Himalaya.
This paper uses evidence from the historical African slave trade to extend prior theory linking modern firm ownership structure to institutions and social capital. We argue that institutions and ...social capital are not simply predictors of ownership structure but can also be historically persistent mechanisms through which past traumatic shocks to society shape modern businesses. Using data from over 30,000 firms across 41 sub-Saharan countries, we show that firms in areas that suffered high historical slave extraction are today more likely to have concentrated ownership. High slave export countries have more sole proprietorships and majority ownership, with our model implying a difference of 43 percentage points between the lowest and highest export countries. This difference is particularly pronounced in the manufacturing sector, where high capital needs can necessitate diffuse ownership when credit markets are weak. Finally, we present modest evidence that weakened institutions and social capital are among the mechanisms through which the historical slave trade increases modern ownership concentration. Our paper answers recent calls to bring both Africa and history back into management research through our theoretical extension into distinct and quantifiable historical origins of firm structure.
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