Narrow Results

Generalized language-of-thought arguments, appropriate, in the sense of Dretske, to interacting cognitive modules, permit exploration of how disease states interact with medical treatment, given an embedding context of structured psychosocial stress. The interpenetrating feedback between treatment and response creates a kind of idiotypic hall of mirrors generating a synergistic pattern of efficacy, treatment failure, adverse reactions, and patient noncompliance which, from a Rate Distortion perspective, embodies a distorted image of externally-imposed structured stress. For the US, accelerating spatial and social spread of such stress enmeshes both dominant and subordinate populations in a linked system of pathogenic social hierarchy which will express itself, not only in an increasingly unhealthy society, but in the diffusion of therapeutic failure, including, but not limited to, drug-based treatments.

Compared to other ethnic groups, the black population of South Africa has a low participation rate in entrepreneurship activities. The research question of this article is to explain this empirical fact. Based on twenty-four expert interviews, five patterns of explanation are presented and elaborated: a historical apartheid explanation, a financial resources explanation, a human capital explanation, a traits and mindset explanation and a social capital and network explanation. The historical apartheid explanation cannot be qualified independently of the other explanations as a distinctive explanation of its own. Although missing financial resources and shortages of human capital are the factors most often mentioned by the experts, and probably the most important ones, the remaining two explanations (mindset and social network) also deserve attention. A point argued in the conclusion of this article is that socio-cultural values, and the concept of "social capital" in particular, merit further investigation with respect to the question of why there is a lack of black entrepreneurship in South Africa.

Why does South Africa underperform on benchmarks for nascent entrepreneurship? We use a contextualization framework to evaluate articles on entrepreneurship in South Africa, which appear in seven leading global entrepreneurship journals for the period 1986–2017. The literature is then discussed using a six-dimension contextualization framework. The historical and institutional dimensions of the contextualization framework unveil the path-dependent nature of entrepreneurial choice for Black South Africans. Understanding entrepreneurship in South Africa requires research designs that focus on where and when entrepreneurship developed in the country to render meaningful the why of entrepreneurial choices made by Black South Africans. This study illustrates the idiosyncratic nature of South Africa and its social, political and economic transitions, and how these have affected entrepreneurship development, particularly among previously disadvantaged Black South Africans. The nature of the South African case has broader impact and importance for developing and transitional economies.

The current forms of American Apartheid express longstanding and persistent dynamics of segregation and serial forced displacement that have successfully adapted to challenge over several centuries. Segregation confines non-white people to closely specified areas while serial forced displacement moves them repeatedly from one place to another. Both inhibit or destroy the nondisjunctive ‘weak’ ties that unify a community across its inherent or imposed divisions. Absent these social ties, it is almost impossible to carry out normal daily life, let alone advance the civil rights struggle. How are such ties to be reconstructed? While community-building is an inherent human activity, and significant mobilizations of any kind will begin to reknit social cohesion, the policies of serial forced displacement are so powerful that it impossible to do the work of rebuilding ties without simultaneously fighting for community stability. Thus, for many Americans, the Future Information Society, in the absence of suppression of the evolving institutions that instantiate racism, will simply resemble the past. Driving the self-perpetuating and highly adaptive modalities of American Apartheid to extinction remains today as urgent a calling as was the Abolitionist enterprise of previous centuries.