The preference for male children transcends many societies and cultures, making it an issue of local and global dimensions. While son preference is not a new phenomenon and has existed historically in many parts of Asia, its contemporary expressions illustrate the gendered outcomes of social power relations as they interact and intersect with culture, economy and technologies. Son Preference brings together key debates on the subject of son preference by assessing existing work in the field and providing new insights through primary research. The book covers a broad range of social science...

This title was first published in 2000. The privatization of former social state housing through recent public-private partnerships is becoming increasingly prevalent in Third World as well as in Western countries. In most Third World countries, this shift has had profound effects upon the patterns of access of shelter. Drawing on studies of South Asian and other Third World contexts, as well as original in-depth empirical research from Amritsar, a city in North-West India, this book offers an analysis of the withdrawal of state housing provision. It develops and applies a unique model based...