Author: Ingolfur Blühdorn
Publisher: Lexington Books
ISBN: 9780739112113
Category : Business & Economics
Languages : en
Pages : 352
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Book Description
Germany and Britain are two major European economies that have been trying to confront the challenges of globalisation in very different ways. Britain has favoured market liberal strategies; Germany has endeavoured to retain its tradition of consensualism and the strong welfare state. Focusing on the period since 1997/8, this book explores the controversies and struggles surrounding the agendas of social, economic, and political modernisation in the two countries. The New Labour governments in Britain and the Social Democratic coalition governments in Germany have been introducing a range of reform policies designed to reform the welfare state and increase the respective country's competitiveness in the global market. In both countries, however, these policies have triggered societal resistance. The governing parties had to confront electoral setbacks, an exodus of party members, strains on the relationship with traditional political allies, and an increasingly alienated public. Within this context, this book focuses on the tensions between two key parameters in contemporary modernisation discourses: economic efficiency and democratic renewal. Political elites in many European countries are presenting the achievement of efficiency gains as a primary objective of globalisation-induced societal reform. At the same time civic empowerment and the engagement of civil society are widely regarded as essential for increasing the quality, legitimacy, and effectiveness of public policy making. But can these two goals be achieved at the same time? What exactly does the highly contested term efficiency imply? What is its relationship towards the equally ambiguous goal of democratic renewal? Focusing on a variety of political actors, structures and strategies in Germany and Britain, the individual chapters in this book trace how the tensions between economic efficiency and democratic renewal surface, how definitional struggles surrounding these ideals are being managed, and how new syntheses between the two parameters are being forged.
Author: James Manor
Publisher: World Bank Publications
ISBN:
Category : Business & Economics
Languages : en
Pages : 152
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Book Description
Nearly all countries worldwide are now experimenting with decentralization. Their motivation are diverse. Many countries are decentralizing because they believe this can help stimulate economic growth or reduce rural poverty, goals central government interventions have failed to achieve. Some countries see it as a way to strengthen civil society and deepen democracy. Some perceive it as a way to off-load expensive responsibilities onto lower level governments. Thus, decentralization is seen as a solution to many different kinds of problems. This report examines the origins and implications decentralization from a political economy perspective, with a focus on its promise and limitations. It explores why countries have often chosen not to decentralize, even when evidence suggests that doing so would be in the interests of the government. It seeks to explain why since the early 1980s many countries have undertaken some form of decentralization. This report also evaluates the evidence to understand where decentralization has considerable promise and where it does not. It identifies conditions needed for decentralization to succeed. It identifies the ways in which decentralization can promote rural development. And it names the goals which decentralization will probably not help achieve.
Author: Joan S. M. Meyers
Publisher: Cornell University Press
ISBN: 1501763695
Category : Business & Economics
Languages : en
Pages : 208
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Book Description
In this inside look at worker cooperatives, Joan Meyers challenges long-held views and beliefs. From the outside, worker cooperatives all seem to offer alternatives to bad jobs and unequal treatment by giving workers democratic control and equitable ownership of their workplaces. Some contend, however, that such egalitarianism and self-management come at the cost of efficiency and stability, and are impractical in the long run. Working Democracies focuses on two worker cooperatives in business since the 1970s that transformed from small countercultural collectives into thriving multiracial and largely working-class firms. She shows how democratic worker ownership can provide stability and effective business management, but also shows that broad equality is not an inevitable outcome despite the best intentions of cooperative members. Working Democracies explores the interconnections between organizational structure and organizational culture under conditions of worker control, revealing not only the different effects of managerialism and "participatory bureaucracy," but also how each bureaucratic variation is facilitated by how workers are defined by at each cooperative. Both bureaucratic variation and worker meanings are, she shows, are consequential for the reduction or reproduction of class, gender, and ethnoracial inequalities. Offering a behind the scenes comparative look at an often invisible type of workplace, Working Democracies serves as a guidebook for the future of worker cooperatives.
Author: Gene Sperling
Publisher: Penguin
ISBN: 1984879898
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 385
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Book Description
“Timely and important . . . It should be our North Star for the recovery and beyond.” —Hillary Clinton “Sperling makes a forceful case that only by speaking to matters of the spirit can liberals root their belief in economic justice in people’s deepest aspirations—in their sense of purpose and self-worth.” —The New York Times When Gene Sperling was in charge of coordinating economic policy in the Obama White House, he found himself surprised when serious people in Washington told him that the Obama focus on health care was a distraction because it was “not focused on the economy.” How, he asked, was the fear felt by millions of Americans of being one serious illness away from financial ruin not considered an economic issue? Too often, Sperling found that we measured economic success by metrics like GDP instead of whether the economy was succeeding in lifting up the sense of meaning, purpose, fulfillment, and security of people. In Economic Dignity, Sperling frames the way forward in a time of wrenching change and offers a vision of an economy whose guiding light is the promotion of dignity for all Americans.
Author: Nick Vlahos
Publisher: Springer Nature
ISBN: 3030487296
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 271
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Book Description
This book examines the political economy of devolution in Britain from the postwar period to the present. It situates devolution in Britain within an understanding of the partisan recalibration of political, economic and democratic scales (or levels) of the state. The author utilizes various explanatory tools to unpack complex social, economic, spatial and political phenomena across national, regional and local scales. The book further contributes to our conceptual understanding of decentralization as a broader, comparative, phenomenon. Particular emphasis is placed on examining why decentralization and devolution occur at particular points in time, which enables the investigation into how political and fiscal powers are (re)organized at different levels of the state.
Author: Ingolfur Blühdorn
Publisher: Verlag Barbara Budrich
ISBN: 3847413872
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 273
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Book Description
In European societies social differentiation, value pluralism and international integration have brought about a condition of previously unknown complexity. Citizens’ expectations regarding political participation and the legitimization of government policy are rising, yet the capacities for social integration and political consensus formation may be in decline. This volume investigates how political actors and institutions in established European democracies are seeing to manage the condition of complexity and how this condition reconfigures the foundations of democratic politics. From the Contents: Legitimacy Crises, Efficiency Gaps, Democratic Deficits Efficiency versus Democracy: Conceptual Reconciliation of a Troubled Relationship? Citizens’ Expectations: Is what matters only what works? Re-engaging Citizens: Institutional Responses to Political Disengagement Informal Government Delegated Authority: Legitimizing Independent Regulatory Agencies Delegation to the EU The Open Method of Co-ordination (OMC) and The European Employment Strategy Committee Governance in EU Agricultural Policy Efficiency versus Legitimacy: The Governance of Technology Does citizen involvement improve the quality, legitimacy and implementability of environmental policy? The Allocation of Health Care The Post-democratic Turn: Complexity and the Reconfiguration of Democratic Politics
Author: David Levi-Faur
Publisher: Edward Elgar Publishing
ISBN: 178811356X
Category : Law
Languages : en
Pages : 310
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Book Description
This book looks at democratic empowerment via institutional designs that extend the political rights of European citizens. It focuses on three themes: first, the positive and negative effects of the European Union institutional design on the political rights of its citizens; second, challenges for democratic regimes across the world in the 21st century in the context of regionalism and globalization; third, the constraints of neoliberalism and capitalist markets on the ability of citizens to effectively achieve their political rights within the Union.
Author: Ingolfur Bluhdorn
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1317968360
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 216
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Book Description
Two decades after its launch by the UN Brundtland Commission, the paradigm of sustainability seems to have reached its limits. Whilst the concept figures more prominently in public debate and policy making than ever before, the ecological footprint of advanced liberal consumer societies continues to grow, and the forceful economic development of countries such as China and India reinforces concerns that the world is moving further away from, rather than closer towards the ideal of sustainability. Given the proven failure of ecological modernisation strategies to secure sustainability, the traditional question "How may our established lifestyles and socio-economic practices be made more sustainable?" needs to be supplemented by a second, equally important, question: "How do advanced modern consumer democracies try and manage to sustain what is known to be unsustainable?" Put differently, traditional research into the politics of sustainability needs to be supplemented by a new line of research into the politics of unsustainability. Exploring the recent transformation of eco-political discourses and a variety of ways in which the unfolding paradox of sustaining the unsustainable is being managed, the present volume pioneers this new research agenda. This book was previously published as a special issue of Environmental Politics.
Author: D. Judge
Publisher: Springer
ISBN: 1137317299
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 239
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Book Description
Clear disparities exist between notions of representative democracy and political practice in Britain. Alternative models of democracy, however, have their own incongruities in trying to marry representation and democracy. This book analyses the mismatches in democratic theories and between theory and practice in British representative democracy.
Author: Shoshana Zuboff
Publisher: PublicAffairs
ISBN: 1610395700
Category : Business & Economics
Languages : en
Pages : 683
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Book Description
The challenges to humanity posed by the digital future, the first detailed examination of the unprecedented form of power called "surveillance capitalism," and the quest by powerful corporations to predict and control our behavior. In this masterwork of original thinking and research, Shoshana Zuboff provides startling insights into the phenomenon that she has named surveillance capitalism. The stakes could not be higher: a global architecture of behavior modification threatens human nature in the twenty-first century just as industrial capitalism disfigured the natural world in the twentieth. Zuboff vividly brings to life the consequences as surveillance capitalism advances from Silicon Valley into every economic sector. Vast wealth and power are accumulated in ominous new "behavioral futures markets," where predictions about our behavior are bought and sold, and the production of goods and services is subordinated to a new "means of behavioral modification." The threat has shifted from a totalitarian Big Brother state to a ubiquitous digital architecture: a "Big Other" operating in the interests of surveillance capital. Here is the crucible of an unprecedented form of power marked by extreme concentrations of knowledge and free from democratic oversight. Zuboff's comprehensive and moving analysis lays bare the threats to twenty-first century society: a controlled "hive" of total connection that seduces with promises of total certainty for maximum profit -- at the expense of democracy, freedom, and our human future. With little resistance from law or society, surveillance capitalism is on the verge of dominating the social order and shaping the digital future -- if we let it.
