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Randall Hansen: “War, Work, and Want: The Political Economy and Human Trafficking in South Africa and Thailand”

This paper examines two countries with sharply different levels of trafficking: South Africa and Thailand. Both are middle-income countries; both are larger than their contiguous neighbours; both are much wealthier than their immediate neighbours; and both are regional hegemons. Their common migration experiences, geopolitical contexts, and relative wealth levels are precisely the factors that the existing literature cites as the drivers of human trafficking. Given these shared characteristics, the fact that there is more trafficking in Thailand than in South Africa is puzzling. The paper argues that contrasting growth models, developed in the 1980s, explain the difference: whereas Thailand adopted a growth model based on cheap exports and cheap labour, South Africa adopted one based on finance.

Darius Ornston: “Ideas as an Innovation Policy Instrument: How Collective Narratives Shape Economic Adjustment”

This paper argues that innovation studies should take ideas more seriously, because innovation is a complex, uncertain, and fundamentally collective activity. While scholars are sensitive to the ways in which ideas shape policy choice, this paper illustrates how collective narratives can function as a policy instrument in their own right, facilitating and channeling innovative activity. Closer attention to collective narratives, and the role of ideas more generally, sheds new light on old cases (high-technology competition in Finland) and resolves some empirical puzzles (the entrepreneurship in Kitchener-Waterloo and financial services in Iceland).