1.1 Overview This unit provides a gateway to over 30 other units that have been specifically developed to have a particular relevance to Scotland.
3.2 Necessities and luxuries As the division of opinion between the government and low income people illustrates, definitions of poverty are the stuff of political debate. People in the Rowntree studies tended to focus on ‘paying bills and food’. Most people's list of basic needs would also include adequate food and clean water, clothing, shelter and heating. But are there also less apparently physiological, more evidently social, necessities of life? Acknowledgements Grateful acknowledgement is made to the following sources for permission to reproduce material in this unit: The content acknowledged below is Proprietary and used under licence (not subject to Creative Commons licence). See Terms and Conditions. These extracts are taken from DD208 © 2008 The Open University. 1 Migrants and borders These videos look at the issue of ‘gating’ in the context of border control policies and practices concerning international migrants. You will come across ideas of inclusion and exclusion, and how these relate to internal as well as external borders. The external border on which part of the video focuses is in southern Spain, where the experiences of African migrants are explored and forms of border control identified. These experiences are related to the UK where bordering is explored th Learning outcomes As with DD208_1, this unit provides a further opportunity to develop your ability to understand what we mean by the entanglements of social welfare and crime control, by exploring the tensions and relations between ‘watching over’ and watching out for’; understand policy responses and their relevance to the course; identify different kinds of evidence – in particular, visual evidence and interview evidence; develop your ICT sk Introduction This unit provides a further opportunity for you to take notes using audio visual material. Before continuing to watch the clips, please ensure that you have already worked through DD208_1. Use the advice and guidance that you learnt in DD208_1 to take notes on the video clip presented in this unit. Use the note taking techniques you learnt, and remember that your notes need to reflect what each video is showing. You need to identify the nature of the debates and the arguments and ident References 4 Review: misrecognition, disrespect and the politics of fear A recurring theme in discussions of poverty is the distinction between ‘the poor’ and ‘the non-poor’. Echoing nineteenth-century ideas of the ‘deserving’ and ‘undeserving’ poor, or 1930s notions of ‘problem estates’, such distinctions continue to permeate representations of poor populations today and also often figure prominently in policy. Binary classifications such as those highlighted in Author(s): 5 Additional learning resources Video resource If you enjoyed the theme of the videos in this unit watch the video below to find out more about the OU course DD208 Welfare, crime and society. Visual Images in Social Sciences
How do social scientists use visual images?
What does a picture or image tell you? This unit is an introduction to analysing and interpreting photographs as social data. Who controls what the image is saying? You will look at how photographs provide visual evidence and how they can illustrate and support our ideas about society. This material is from our archive and is an adapted extract from Introducing the social sciences (DD100) which is no longer taught by The 3.5 Evaluating claims, using evidence Where does this exploration of evidence lead us? Can we decisively confirm or refute the common-sense stories of the crime problem in the UK? Through an investigation of quantitative statistical evidence we certainly have some support for the claim that crime has risen considerably. But there are also doubts. The official statistics do not reflect unrecorded crime, and as one probes more deeply into the statistics we find that only certain types of crime have been on the rise. In any ca 3.3 Long-run costs and economies of scale What makes it possible to offer more output for sale at a lower price? That was one of the questions with which Section 3.2 opened. Part of the answer is that the firm's cost curves, which reflect the technology it is using, may display falling average cost as output increases over a range of output levels. The other part 3.2 Technology and costs in the short run Advertising leaflets are dropping through letter boxes around the UK, as we are writing this chapter, from cable suppliers trying to attract new customers for their services. They promise to provide a telephone line, a bundle of television channels, an Internet connection, home shopping and movies-on-demand, all at a ‘bargain price’. These leaflets raise some interesting questions. How does expanding output of cable services by selling to new customers make it possible to offer them for s 2.1 Industry and markets: what do we mean? Sales of digital cameras have overtaken traditional 35 mm cameras for the first time. According to monthly figures collated by national electric and photo retailer Dixons, digital camera sales out 1 Technological change, demand and costs Over the past 40 years global computing power has increased a billionfold. Number-crunching tasks that once took a week can now be done in seconds. Today a Ford Taurus car contains more computing power than the multimillion-dollar mainframe computers used in the Apollo space programme. Cheaper processing allows computers to be used for more and more purposes. In 1985, it cost Ford 4.7 The future? In the USA, the automobile reached the 50 per cent household penetration rate in 1923, about 23 years into the industry's development. The PC reached that threshold rate in 1999, also about 23 years into its development. Given the discussion in Section 3, this suggests that the economy-wide effects of the PC have yet to be fully see 4.5 Technological change In both industries the fall in prices was driven by radical changes in the production of the products. How might we investigate the technological changes and the changes in quality that occurred in both industries simultaneously with the drastic fall in prices? There are various methods used by economists to measure technological change. Some methods focus on the ‘inputs’ into the innovation process, such as the spending on research and development by firms. But this is not ideal as it do 4.4 Prices and industrial change Many of the new entrants entered by introducing a new variation of the product. In fact, the early period in both industries was characterised by much technological change in the form of product innovation. Once a product standard emerged, product and process innovations around that standard led to a drastic fall in the product price in both industries. We will now look at some of the indicators of this turbulence in technology and prices. How can we look at price changes over time in i
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Case study: Digital outsells film
The new economy
