bluuebunny/crossref_metadata_2025 huggingface dataset:
Public Authority and the Public Interest
Authors: White Joseph , Wildavsky Aaron
Published: March 2007

Our paper reviews Marxist, pluralist and conservative theories of the state under capitalism from the standpoint of evidence on United States federal taxing and spending during the 1980s. The deficit panic is a product of the political stratum that defines the public interest as actions opposed to private interests because then they cannot be accused of selling out. Though there is no institutional state in America (committee chairs come closest), there is a state of mind that can be called `stateness'. There is also an important set of arguments conducted on grounds of public interests. The trouble is that the public interest defined as deficit reduction is opposed to majority rule. We urge renewed concern over maintaining authoritative procedures rather than subordinating democracy to deficits.
The Crisis of Statehood
Authors: Grinberg Lev Luis
Published: March 2007

This paper proposes a conceptual distinction of political organizations from state and society, providing an enhanced theoretical framework in the analysis of state autonomy. This theoretical argument is based on an analysis of Israel's transition to statehood, and the development of the relations between the Israeli Labor Institutional Complex (LIC) and the state. Jewish labor organizations were established amidst the historical conditions of a weak (colonial) state and a split labor market, which served to enhance the strength of the LIC vis-a-vis the state and workers. The large political and economic changes that followed statehood and industrialization failed to change the LIC's organizational features. The institutionalization of the occupation and the state's weakness after 1967 can be explained by the compatibility of the new structural characteristics to the institutional needs of the LIC.
Penalty and Crime: Further Theoretical Considerations and Empirical Evidence
Authors: Tsebelis George
Published: March 2007

Two different models of the game between police and public, one with two-sided incomplete information and the other with multiple strategies, lead to the same results as my previous research: changes in penalties at equilibrium do not affect crime but instead affect police behavior. I compare these models with alternative models of the police-public game which come to different conclusions. I provide reasons for the differences in the conclusions, as well as empirical evidence against which the different models can be evaluated.
The Hungarian Party System and Party Theory in the Transition of Central Europe
Authors: Ágh Attila
Published: March 2007

The emerging East Central European multiparty systems share many specific features of democratic transition yet cannot be characterized or even described by the usual typologies. The rise of party systems in Southern Europe, however, suggests some parallels for an historical and theoretical approach. This paper first analyses the stages of emergence of the Hungarian party system in a Central European context and then draws some theoretical conclusions for party theory in general.
David Easton and the Analysis of Political Structure
Authors: Kriek Daniel J.
Published: March 2007

This article deals with David Easton's contribution to political science. Since 1953, when The Political System appeared, Easton has published several well-known books. It is argued that one needs to consider all his works in relation to one another in order to understand his contribution properly. Special emphasis is placed on his recent contribution to the analysis of political structure.
Subcommittee Agenda Control
Authors: Eavey Cheryl L. , Miller Gary J.
Published: March 2007

The conventional wisdom holds that standing committees and subcommittees gain disproportionate influence over the policy decisions for which they have agenda control. Two solution concepts which make predictions about the influence of decentralized agenda setters are the structure-induced equilibrium (SIE) and the structural core; they differ in their predictions because the latter (but not the former) assumes that logrolling across agenda jurisdictions will occur. Experimental evidence suggests that agenda setters do bargain across jurisdictions (contrary to the SIE), and that the outcome of this bargaining process determines the value of agenda control to the agenda setters. When both subcommittee agenda setters have preferences that diverge sharply from those of the parent committee, agenda setters have an unambiguous incentive to cooperate with each other. When one subcommittee agenda setter has preferences more representative of the parent committee, the more extreme agenda setter is at a bargaining disadvantage.
Bargaining Strength in Budgetary Processes
Authors: Hagen Terje P. , Sørensen Rune J. , Norli Øyvind
Published: March 2007

Studies of government budget-making recurrently describe it as a bargaining process between `guardians' and `advocates'. Yet this observation has not been implemented in formal modelling of budgetary processes. This paper employs a Nash model to analyse local government budgeting. The model is implemented by assuming two different sets of assumptions about the conflict points. The paper evaluates the explanatory power of the two interpretations by estimating the models on a cross-sectional time-series dataset from Norwegian counties. Finally, we examine the impact of institutional procedures on bargaining power. The paper defines the bargaining parameters of an asymmetrical Nash model as endogenous variables, and estimates the impact of election years, long-term budgeting and the managerial style of budget-making. It is found that budgetary procedures and election cycles affect the bargaining strength of the negotiators.
Challenges to the Practice and Theory of Public Administration in Europe
Authors: Brans Marleen
Published: March 2007

Over the past two decades the practice of public administration has moved away from a monocentric understanding of the nature of policy-making and implementation towards a pluricentric one. Since the European Union conforms even less closely to a monocentric model of bureaucracy than do the government structures of member states, pluricentric theories have a particular relevance to European Union administration since they offer the possibility of devising new methods of giving direction to government in pluricentric systems. This paper offers a critical review of the analytical and empirical claims of these new models of government steering and control, their normative problems and the extent to which they present an answer to the challenges for the future of public administration in Europe.
Constitutional Contract and Discourse Ethics
Authors: Avio Kenneth L.
Published: March 2007

In the first volume of this Journal, Vanberg and Buchanan attempted to integrate contractarian and discourse models of agreement. Their interpretation of discourse ethics is inconsistent with the theory as presented by Jürgen Habermas. The present paper lays the groundwork for a reconstruction more faithful to Habermas's own theory. The possibility of a successful synthesis depends on blending aspects of strategic and communicative action. Appeal to the work of T.M. Scanlon and to Adam Smith's The Theory of Moral Sentiments helps to clarify the difficulties in such a project.
Shared Beliefs and Imposed Interdependencies as Determinants of Ally Networks in Overlapping Subsystems
Authors: Zafonte Matthew , Sabatier Paul
Published: March 2007

We add the concept of imposed interdependencies to components of the Advocacy Coalition Framework to derive four hypotheses regarding coordinated behavior in overlapping geographic and functional policy subsystems. More specifically, we address: (1) whether imposed interdependencies affect the extent to which shared beliefs are related to coordinated behavior; and (2) which types of beliefs are the principal `glue' of coordination. We then examine the implications of these hypotheses in an empirical analysis of ally networks in San Francisco Bay-Delta water policy. Our empirical results suggest that both belief congruence and functional interdependence are important for understanding coordination. Further, the types of beliefs critical to coordination are consistent with the underlying rationale - but not necessarily the specific hypotheses - of the Advocacy Coalition Framework.
Jeffrey Masson and Freud's seduction theory: a new fable based on old myths
Authors: Esterson Allen
Published: March 2007

Jeffrey Masson's version of the seduction theory episode in Freud's early career, as presented in The Assault on Truth (1984), is very plaus ible as a revised account of the traditional story. However, close examination of the seduction theory papers and of other contemporary documents reveals that Freud's later reports of the episode, the foun dation on which Masson builds his case, are false. Some purported his torical events that Masson uses to buttress his case are also shown to be without foundation. The several accounts of the episode Freud gave in his writings are dissected to demonstrate that they are tendentiously misleading and serve to conceal what actually occurred with his patients during the period in question. Some consequences of the widespread acceptance of the traditional account are briefly discussed.
Notice-board
Authors: Looseley David
Published: March 2007

French Cultural Studies will be pleased to announce in the Notice-board forthcoming events or other items involving all aspects of modern French culture. Please contact Dr D. L. Looseley, Department of Modern Languages, University of Bradford, Bradford, BD7 1DP, West Yorkshire.
Identity and Discursive Practice: Doing Gender on the Football Pitch
Authors: MEÂN LINDSEY
Published: March 2007

Sport is a highly potent site for the construction of masculine identity and, as the dominant sport in many countries, it is football that is especially linked to masculinity, national and local identities. Consequently, the increasing number of women entering the field of football comprises a direct threat to masculine identity, creating a significant site of gender conflict. Based upon the proposition that identity is constructed and enacted in talk, this article presents an analysis of an `everyday' discursive practice within football: the routine refusal of appeals to the referee. Using recordings of male referees during both men's and women's matches, the discursive function of this routine practice, its gendered deployment in the collaborative construction and non-collaborative undermining of salient identity categorizations, and the deployment of alternative categories is explored.
Power and Discourse in Organization Studies: Absence and the Dialectic of Control
Authors: Mumby Dennis K. , Stohl Cynthia
Published: March 2007

This paper argues for a postmodern conception of power in which discourse is conceived as the principal medium through which power relations are maintained and reproduced. Specifically, power is identified as a pervasive characteristic of organizational life which constitutes the identity of organization members. Discourse, as a structured social practice, creates meaning formations rooted in a system of presence and absence which systematically privileges and marginalizes different organizational experiences. By way of exemplification, three organizational texts are subject to a deconstructive analysis in order to explicate the processes through which meaning structures are produced and reproduced organizationally.
Principles of Critical Discourse Analysis
Authors: van Dijk Teun A.
Published: March 2007

This paper discusses some principles of critical discourse analysis, such as the explicit sociopolitical stance of discourse analysts, and a focus on dominance relations by elite groups and institutions as they are being enacted, legitimated or otherwise reproduced by text and talk. One of the crucial elements of this analysis of the relations between power and discourse is the patterns of access to (public) discourse for different social groups. Theoretically it is shown that in order to be able to relate power and discourse in an explicit way, we need the `cognitive interface' of models, knowledge, attitudes and ideologies and other social representations of the social mind, which also relate the individual and the social, and the micro- and the macro-levels of social structure. Finally, the argument is illustrated with an analysis of parliamentary debates about ethnic affairs.
Conflation of Institutional and Cultural Stereotyping in Asian Migrants' Discourse
Authors: Sarangi Srikant
Published: March 2007

Younger Asian migrants—as interviewees and clients in the British institutional context—primarily view their confrontation with `white' gatekeepers as one between their ethnic minority status and the cultural dominance of the majority. By calling into play their migrant status more readily than their client status, they tend to interpret the perennial mismatch between their socioeconomic needs and the institutional processing of those needs in terms of negative cultural stereotyping, ahead of institutional stereotyping. My main focus in this paper is twofold: first, in order to explain why Asian migrants interpret institutional actions as discriminatory devices against their ethnicity, I appeal to the broader sociohistorical context surrounding the migration phenomenon itself; second, I draw attention to the structure of their accounts of cultural discrimination—discursively realized as strategies of consensus and contrast—in the context of gatekeeping encounters. By pointing out the limitations of an activity-based analysis of communicative mismatches in client-gatekeeper discourse, I argue that in order to account for minority groups' discursive practices it is essential that we supplement the pragmatic analysis of mismatches with a socio-psychological analysis of `self- and other-stereotyping' on the one hand and institutional and cultural stereotyping on the other hand.
`The Editorial Family of Al-Kateb Bows in Respect': The Construction of Martyrdom Text Genre in One Palestinian Political and Literary Magazine
Authors: Najjar Orayb Aref
Published: March 2007

Fifty-nine `Martyrs' Lists' of 1650 Palestinians killed during the Palestinian Uprising against the Israeli occupation are analyzed to shed light on what Freedman and Medway (1994: 2) call `the rhetorical action taken within a recurring social situation'. The analysis of the structure, style, syntax, rhetoric and use of metaphor in the lists (taken from the Palestinian magazine, al-Kateb) illustrates that, while they share some important structural and rhetorical features with news text, they differ from news reports in ways that enhance the lists' communicative function. The study also shows how al-Kateb uses the narrative text genre of the lists to comment on the ongoing Palestinian-Israeli peace negotiations and to prescribe the socially sanctioned behavior of sacrifice.
Regulation in `Progressivist' Pedagogic Discourse: Individualized Teacher-Pupil Talk
Authors: Chouliaraki Lilie
Published: March 2007

This paper examines some discursive practices of `progressivist' education, in order to investigate the forms of power and control which constitute pedagogic knowledges and institutional subjects in the context of the `progressivist' classroom. It draws on the work of Basil Bernstein (1990), so as to theorize the classroom as `pedagogic discourse' and to foreground classroom practices as regulative practices which `recontextualize' discourses and knowledges under a principle of institutional control, rather than under a principle of pedagogic experience and learning, for pupils. Simultaneously, it uses Critical Discourse Analysis (Fairclough, 1992, 1995) as a methodology which grounds the theoretical claims on the regulative practices of `progressivist' pedagogic discourse onto concrete data of individualized teacher-pupil interaction. By examining textual properties of such interactions (particularly the teacher's extensive use of modality), the article claims that `progressivist' practices work in a subtle way, so as to privilege `procedural' or `ritual' types of knowledge rather than `principled' ones (Edwards and Mercer, 1987) and to produce pedagogic subjects who are oriented towards executing secretarial tasks, rather than developing autonomy and creativity in their learning.
Paradigms and `the Myth of Framework'
Authors: Robinson Daniel N.
Published: March 2007

Very little that passes today for conventional practices in psychology would measure up well against the current and traditional standards that guide thinking in the developed sciences. The best explanation for this is not the alleged complexity of the subject matter, but an utterly tamed and merely habitual mode of explanation tied to profound misunderstandings about the nature and conditions of scientific progress. Culprits are not difficult to identify, but the editorial practices of the major journals must rank high on the list of perpetrators.
Psychological Inquiry and the Pragmatic and Hermeneutic Traditions
Authors: Polkinghoime Donald E.
Published: March 2007

Psychological practitioner inquiry differs in kind from psychological researcher inquiry. From the perspective of researcher inquiry, practice should consist of applying research-generated knowledge. Because practitioners consistently report that this is not how they approach their clients, and because the epistemological foundations of psychology research inquiry have been questioned, it is necessary to study how practitioners actually engage in practice. The hermeneutic tradition of Heidegger and Gadamer and the pragmatic tradition of Dewey provide a philosophical groundwork for the study of practitioner inquiry. Gadamer and Dewey propose that in everyday functioning people primarily act out of their internalized, culturally provided knowledge, which primarily functions outside of awareness. However, they also hold that people are not locked into their socially transmitted backgrounds. People can advance the effectiveness of their received practical knowledge through reflective inquiry and trial-and-error activity. People learn from the effect of these trials and thereby expand their background understandings. For ordinary everyday functioning, psychological practitioners are assumed to engage in a process similar to the one outlined by Dewey and Gadamer.
Trait Stability as a Noncontingent Truth
Authors: Quackenbush Steven W.
Published: March 2007

Numerous studies have yielded data consistent with the hypothesis that the `Big Five' personality traits are highly stable in adulthood. For McCrae and Costa, such findings suggest a need to significantly revise our understanding of adult personality development: stability, rather than change, appears to be the rule. The central purpose of the present essay is to demonstrate that McCrae and Costa's strong claims in favor of personality stability are not contingent upon any set of empirical observations. Rather, they necessarily follow from the acceptance of two related pre-empirical assumptions: (a) personality traits are transcontextual; and (b) revelations of the `true' personality structure must be reliable. If these propositions are accepted without qualification, then evidence inconsistent with the stability thesis can simply be attributed to the `inadequate' conceptualization or measurement of traits. Thus, McCrae and Costa's arguments in favor of personality stability are insensitive to falsification. Implications for researchers interested in the study of life-span personality development are discussed.
Reliability as a Value in Personality Research
Authors: Quackenbush Steven W.
Published: March 2007

McCrae seems to believe that the empirical status of the stability thesis is guaranteed by virtue of the fact that scores on measures of personality traits are always free to change over time. Yet, my thesis that trait stability is a noncontingent truth is not predicated on specific claims regarding phenotypic manifestations of personality traits. Rather, I maintain that McCrae and Costa's pre-empirical assumptions logically require an interpretation of the human personality in terms of stable traits. In this rejoinder, I further clarify this `strong' claim and I defend my `weaker' claim that the transcontextual nature of traits loads the dice in favor of empirical demonstrations of long-term stability.
Will and Self in Augustine
Authors: Bertelsen Preben
Published: March 2007

The crystallization of the Modern self can be found in Augustine's writings. He developed a discourse wherein central currents from Antiquity's reflections, religions, understanding of the world and of humanity are brought together and crystallized with the main components of Modern psychological self-knowledge: cognition, emotion and conation. Such a discourse provides the fundamental phenomenological material whereby one acquires the possibility of being able to think, to feel and to strive for something in a consciously reflective way. In fact it is only when the will is crystallized as an independent discursive component of understanding that we possess the complete possibility for being a self in the Modern sense. Augustine opened the gates to Modern self-consciousness-but he also infused his discourse with a double-bind, which is still troubling to our contemporary self-understanding and self-consciousness.
Self and Values
Authors: Campbell Robert L. , Christopher John Chambers , Bickhard Mark H.
Published: March 2007

The standard research programs in moral development have been criticized for adopting a narrow and restrictive view of the moral domain. There has been a dearth of alternative theories that account for the diversity of mature moral viewpoints both within and outside Western culture. We present an interactivist framework that takes into account the plurality of moral perspectives. It does so by addressing fundamental issues of psychological ontology and providing an account of values and the self based on the interactivist conception of knowledge and the knowing-levels treatment of consciousness and developmental stages. We discuss foundational questions such as the nature of the self, how it develops and the relationship between the self and values or morals, with special attention to the nature and source of value conflicts.
Theories of Human Reasoning: The Fragmented State of the Art
Authors: Evans Jonathan St B.T.
Published: March 2007

The current state of theory in the psychology of reasoning is examined. It is argued that theories have become highly fragmented partly because different authors have focused their explanations on different issues and on different experimental paradigms. Three basic questions are identified as arising from the numerous experimental findings in this area: (1) what mechanism is responsible for logical competence, (2) what causes errors and biases in reasoning, and (3) why is reasoning performance so dependent upon problem content and context? The discussion of contemporary attempts to answer these questions reveals that most theories have been implicitly focused on one or another and that none provide a convincing approach to all three. Several issues underlying the various theoretical disagreements are then identified and discussed. The article ends with some recommendations for progress towards a more integrated theory of human reasoning.
How Shall I Name Thee?
Authors: Oyama Susan
Published: March 2007

The relation between Cartesian dualism and the developmental dualism of the nature-nurture dichotomy is discussed, with special attention to the treatment of subjectivity and agency. I argue that causal explanation need not drive out active subjects, as it so often seems to, and that it is especially questionable to attempt to solve questions of moral responsibility by weighing biological against environmental causes, or causes in general against reasons. A developmental systems perspective provides a way of seeing subjectivity as both constructed and natural. Aspects of persons cannot then be attributed to biology or culture, and responsibility is a matter not of independence from causal influence, but of action and accountability in a social world.
Modes of Thinking
Authors: Laucken Uwe
Published: March 2007

This article is a contribution to theoretical psychology. It is composed of three parts. The first part is postulatory; it explicates the minimal logical prerequisites for scientific cognition. Cognition requires at least a goal, an object, means of cognition and a cogitating subject. This set will be called the logically demanded voids of cognition. It will be shown that a `psychologizing' of the process of cognition leads to logical antinomies. The second part distinguishes between clearly distinctive programmes of psychological research, called modes of thinking. To become operative the differentiated set of voids of cognition has to be filled by content. Each specific mode of thinking is a consistent contentbased specification of this set. This will be explained by examples. The third part deals with the question of how to relate the conceptually separated modes of thinking. Is there a possibility of doing this with conceptual clarity and empirical productivity?
Discourse Participation, Reported Speech and Research Practices in Social Psychology
Authors: Leudar Ivan , Antaki Charles
Published: March 2007

Recent moves in psychology to use people's talk as data have been highly productive, but we should look carefully at the way the context of such talk is reproduced when the research is published. It can easily be shown how context is stripped out of reports of experiments and questionnaire studies, but we argue that even discursive analyses risk systematically underestimating the dialogicality of people's talk, and hiding the researchers' part in its production. We put the flesh on the notion of `dialogicality' by using Levinson's updating of Goffman's concept of footing. This is a useful tool that reveals how participants occupy shifting positions, and how reported speech is a far from transparent record of the original utterance.
Functions and Causes
Authors: de Jong Huib Looren
Published: March 2007

In this reply, I begin by emphasizing the crucial distinction between `narrow' and `wide' functional explanations. Second, I question Meyering's (1997) focus on the metaphysical foundations of functional explanation and the notion of (multiple) supervenience which seems designed to provide such a foundation. More precisely, I doubt both the viability and the necessity of a causal underpinning of wide functional explanation. In my opinion, the notion of cause is as interest-relative as the notion of function, and not necessarily more fundamental. Also, the suggestion that explanations need an independent justification over and above empirical and pragmatic success is disputable.
Wittgenstein's Problem and the Methods of Psychology
Authors: Jost John T. , Gustafson Donald F.
Published: March 2007

The philosophy of Wittgenstein is often used to attack scientific approaches to psychological subject matter. Maraun (1998) furthers the anti-psychological interpretation of Wittgenstein by criticizing contemporary assumptions about reliability, validity and the measurement of psychological concepts in general. On one reading, Maraun's argument amounts to the modest claim that scientific measurement is (in part) a matter of following prescriptive rules and norms. A more substantial but seriously problematic version of the argument is that measurement claims are entirely independent of empirical evidence. Drawing on textual analysis and scientific examples, we demonstrate that conceptual and empirical issues are interdependent in a variety of ways and that this interdependence is consistent with Wittgenstein's observation that `grammar depends on facts'. By clarifying the significance of Wittgensteinian philosophy of psychology, it is hoped that conceptual confusions concerning measurement techniques may be cleared away so that meaningful empirical investigations may flourish.
The Signs We Live by
Authors: Smythe William E. , Jorna René J.
Published: March 2007

In our introduction to this special issue on semiotics and psychology, we outline the background and motivation for this project, preview the main themes addressed by the seven contributions, and draw some conclusions about the mutual relevance of psychology and semiotics for each other. Our motives for undertaking this special issue were basically three-fold. First, we were curious, given the recent decline of traditional approaches to cognitive psychology, about the status of sign-or symbol-processing explanations of human cognition and behavior. Second, we were interested in the practical application of semiotics to understanding recent developments in electronic communication systems, particularly in the domain of non-linguistic communication. Finally, we wanted to pursue the relevance of semiotics to postmodern conceptions of psychology as a human science. Not all of the issues we had in mind could be addressed in the contributions to this special issue; however, they do reflect the wide diversity of scholarship in semiotics and they point to some unexpected parallels between the fields of semiotics and psychology. We conclude that future inquiry in both fields could profit from pursuing these parallels in more detail.
Transnational Investment and National Labour Market Regimes: A Case of `Regime Shopping'?
Authors: Traxler Franz , Woitech Birgit
Published: March 2007

In western Europe, highly integrated product markets coexist with profound differences between national labour market regimes in terms of both material labour standards and industrial relations institutions. This offers transnational firms the opportunity to target investment towards regimes where labour standards are lowest and regulatory institutions least restrict management prerogatives. How far such `regime shopping' occurs is tested by examining the impact of labour market regimes on US foreign direct investment across 14 western European countries from 1981 to 1992. Empirical evidence suggests that investors neither attribute high priority to labour market regimes when selecting locations nor pursue a coherent strategy regarding such regimes. The article concludes by discussing explanations for this finding.
Associations and Non-Market Coordination in Banking: France and Eastern Germany Compared
Authors: Culpepper Pepper D.
Published: March 2007

Research on employer coordination in the advanced capitalist countries has focused almost exclusively on the manufacturing sector, even though the service sector is responsible for most employment growth. This article considers organizational change in the service sector, comparing structurally similar networks of public savings banks in France and eastern Germany. It finds that the capacities of peak associations to circulate information widely among members, and to develop strategies that allow associational expertise to be combined with local knowledge, help overcome managerial uncertainty during organizational restructuring.
Internal Labour Markets and Equal Opportunities: Women's Position in Banks in European Countries
Authors: Rubery Jill
Published: March 2007

The relationship between `internal labour markets' and the employment position of women has not been systematically analysed. Do internal labour markets contribute to discrimination by restricting employment opportunities to insiders or do they provide a form of shelter from discrimination and an opportunity for advancement? This paper explores these issues through an examination of European banking. The issues are complicated by the wide variety of forms of internal labour markets; the differential impact of internal labour markets on different groups of women; the strong influence of country-specific factors in determining employment practices and their impact upon women's employment position and prospects; and the problems of making comparisons at the sectoral level across countries. The article concludes that more research is required to unravel the complexities of the interactions between employment forms and practices and equal opportunities.
Gradual Retirement: Lessons from the Nordic Countries and the Netherlands
Authors: Delsen Lei
Published: March 2007

Over the past two decades, labourforce participation rates of older workers decreased in all OECD countries. Early retirement and disability are the most important explanations. The central question addressed in this article is the role part-time employment for older workers (gradual retirement) can play in reversing this downward trend, by reducing the number of early withdrawals from the labourforce, thus easing future financial problems resulting from demographic changes. This article considers what can be learned from experience and policies in Denmark, Finland, The Netherlands and Sweden.
How the Social Partners View Direct Participation: A Comparative Study of 15 European Countries
Authors: Regalia Ida
Published: March 2007

In international discussion of new developments in industrial relations at the workplace there is general agreement on the importance of direct employee participation in the organization of work. This article reports some of the results of a wide-ranging study conducted as part of a project initiated by the European Foundation in Dublin. It analyses the position of the organized industrial relations actors in the 15 countries of the European Union. Its focus is on how they understand the concept of direct participation and how they assess the impact of new participative programmes on company performance, work organization and working conditions, and the established system of workplace industrial relations.
Circumventing Trade Unions in Hungary: Old and New Channels of Wage Bargaining
Authors: Neumann Laszlo
Published: March 2007

This article examines continuities in the marginalization of trade unions in Hungary. Beneath the surface of party-led, bureaucratic organizations of the `command economy', strong groups of workers engaged in informal wage bargaining with management. In the 1980s a special internal contracting system offered core workers the opportunity to carry out collective wage negotiations, circumventing the formal trade union channels of representation. In the post-communist era, rights of union organization and collective bargaining are formally assured, but these institutions are not the main determinants of wages, hours, terms and conditions of employment. In particular, after privatization some former state enterprises introduced Employee Share Ownership Programmes. Employees who are share-owners gain higher income through dividends and enjoy better job security and preferential terms and conditions of employment. In these companies, distinctions between core and periphery are now disguised as property relations, displaying surprising similarities to the 1980s.
Management Views of European Works Councils: A Preliminary Survey of Japanese Multinationals
Authors: Nakano Satoshi
Published: March 2007

This article analyses the views of European Works Councils expressed by senior managers of Japanese multinational companies. It reports the results of a survey conducted in 1998, in which a substantial majority of managers gave a fairly favourable overall evaluation of the institution. However, many felt that it would give employees unrealistic expectations, that the financial costs were a burden for companies and that its constitution implied a mismatch with decentralized corporate structure. A majority thought that it would not seriously affect corporate decision-making or companies' competitive edge.
The Spatialization of Metric Time
Authors: Nguyen Dan Thu
Published: March 2007

In this paper, I address the entrenchment of metric time in the West wherein clock time came to measure not only the surface of bodies but also the space of human activity. I trace two specific sets of practices which both reflected and propelled this increasing spatialization of time: the conquest and demarcation of territories and oceans in the first instance; and, in the second, labouring activities and the discipline of private life. The questions which this paper raises, finally, relate to the political and ethical configurations in such a temporal regime.
Guest Editor's Introduction
Authors: Hernadi Paul
Published: March 2007

As natural organisms, social role-players and personal selves, human beings exist at the intersections of objective, intersubjective and subjective times. Postmodern life in particular invites being experienced as occurring at the temporal crossroads of a heterochronous world. Time as such may be impossible to define, but temporal phenomena are linked through various kinds of family resemblance. Theoretical awareness of the multiplicity of times should aim at improving the practical coordination of different rhythms pulsating through our bodies, minds, societies and environments.
Changes in Working Hours in Germany
Authors: Garhammer Manfred
Published: March 2007

How does `flexibilization' of working times affect the everyday life and social contacts of gainfully employed people? This article attempts to answer this question by reporting on a representative survey carried out from 1991-2 in West Germany. Persons with regular working times are compared with those who have shift and weekend work, tele-home-work and new working time models. This time budget study (based on a whole week and 24-hour periods, respectively) reports on the changing nature of daily and weekly rhythms and their importance for social contacts. Finally, the implications of this study for working time policies are examined.
Sociological Theory and the Space-Time Dimension of Social Systems
Authors: Domingues José Maurício
Published: March 2007

This article identifies the traditional Newtonian-Kantian definition of time and space in sociology and argues that, although certain important steps have been taken to overcome this outdated view, these novel perspectives have remained undeveloped as regards social systems. Accordingly, an approach is proposed that centres on the space-time dimension of social systems and their variable configuration. The article introduces the notions of `collective subjectivity' and `collective causality' so as to surpass the view of agents as atoms that move in homogeneous time and space. A critical assessment is thereby provided of the main recent contributions to this topic in sociological theory.
The Double Myth of Flexibilization
Authors: Breedveld Koen
Published: March 2007

Advocates of the flexibilization of working time argue that many people are already accustomed to working evenings, nights and weekends, and that flexibilization will improve people's control over time. In this article, these two assertions are put to trial. For this, the author relies on time-budget data that were gathered in The Netherlands between 1975 and 1995. The analyses indicate that even in 1995 most work is still being performed `from 9 to 5'. As regards time-sovereignty, it appears that control over working time is related more to levels of education than to working atypical hours.
Ethical Objections to Humanitarian Intervention
Authors: ATACK IAIN
Published: March 2007

Armed humanitarian intervention, or the use of military force to protect the fundamental human rights of the citizens of another state, has become increasingly prominent in debates about the role of ethics in international affairs. Ethical objections to such intervention focus on two issues in particular: the violation of national sovereignty and the use of armed force with the concomitant loss of life and human suffering entailed. Some proponents of humanitarian intervention argue that if intervention occurs in accordance with international law, its threat to both state sovereignty and human life will be minimized. However, the requirement of UN Security Council authorization has become increasingly difficult to satisfy. International humanitarian intervention to stop gross human rights abuses can perhaps be supported as the fulfilment of the just cause criterion of just war theory. The danger inherent in this sort of argument is that it implies a conflict between legality and morality that weakens the already precarious jurisdiction of international law. The anti-militarist or pacifist critique of armed humanitarian intervention, with its focus on a non-consequentialist approach to the value of human life and its concern with processes of militarization, provides a further normative challenge to armed humanitarian intervention.
Outlook: Intervention, Sovereignty and the Responsibility to Protect: Experiences from ICISS
Authors: THAKUR RAMESH
Published: March 2007

This article highlights the main achievement of the Report of the International Commission on Intervention and State Sovereignty (ICISS): the establishment of the foundations for a new normative and operational consensus on the role of military intervention for humanitarian purposes. Most significantly, the report moves beyond the political debates and conceptual histories surrounding the polarized notions of military intervention and state sovereignty, and introduces the concept of the `responsibility to protect' to bridge the polemical-political divide. This concept encapsulates the growing necessity for the norm of non-intervention to yield to the principle of international responsibility to protect foreign populations under threat of mass killings and ethnic cleansing, where these populations' governments are either complicit or ineffectual. The ideas contained in the report are based on a spectrum of philosophical principles relevant to different actors, from the more general principles of the responsibility to prevent conflict and to rebuild peace, to the more specific threshold criteria and cautionary principles - right authority and due process - to ensure the ethical legitimacy of intervention on the basis of the responsibility to protect. The article concludes with some reflections on the role of the UN and leading powers in the implementation of this framework, and the usefulness of the precautionary principle to avoid irreversible humanitarian atrocities.
`The Utility of Human Security': Which Humans? What Security? A Reply to Thomas & Tow
Authors: BELLAMY ALEX J. , McDONALD MATT
Published: March 2007

Thomas & Tow's evaluation of the utility of human security is an important contribution to an ongoing debate about what security is and for whom security should be provided. In particular, the authors' engagement with the human security agenda is important given the centrality of this approach to recent attempts to rethink security. This article argues, however, that Thomas & Tow's approach to the human security agenda is problematic for two central reasons. First, their attempt to narrow security to make this approach amenable to state policymakers risks reifying the sources of insecurity for individuals everywhere. Second, the conception of human security they put forward appears largely inconsistent with the normative concerns inherent in the human security agenda.
Millennium Urbanism - Discursive Planning
Authors: Pløger John
Published: March 2007

For many years there has been substantial urban political and economic interest in exploiting the use of cultural and aesthetic planning in order to improve the position of cities, within an expanding inter-urban competition. Built environments, places and spaces, have been regenerated in order to exploit their aesthetic, cultural, and historical significance so as to enhance commercial, consumption and public value, either for their citizens and/or tourists and capital. To date, discussions on urban planning have mostly ignored the fact that this ‘millennium urbanism’ also requires a lot of ‘discursive planning’, especially about the production of a place-identity and an urban imaginary. Discursive planning means staging the social meaning of urban space through texts, photographs, and visual signs. Aesthetic urban planning is not only about creating ambient surroundings, but also creating images, symbolic representations, and fantasies discursively using books and advertising, newspapers and television, research, and political agendas. These discursive practices are used to signify an identifiable and/or imaginary place-identity to form a sense of place or feeling of belonging to place. The article first discusses the theoretical relationship between discursive planning and representational space. The ‘how’ of discursive planning will be exemplified using the Environmental City Programme in Oslo, Norway as a case-study. I conclude by discussing how this form of urban planning needs a reflexive and semiotic community.
Cross-Border Plant Closures in Context: Some Evidence from the UK
Authors: Watts H. Doug
Published: March 2007

Cross-border closures are defined as arising when a firm ceases production of a commodity in one EU country but maintains production of the same commodity in another EU country. Analysis of a new data set drawn from a comprehensive review of press reports for the years 1995-9 shows that the number of UK plant closures associated with cross-border closures within the EU is surprisingly small.
Catalonia and the ‘Idea of Europe’
Authors: Giordano Benito , Roller Elisa
Published: March 2007

This paper focuses upon the region (nation) of Catalonia, Spain and in particular upon the ways in which Catalan political parties have ‘Europeanized’ their discourse, viewing Europe both as an alternative institutional channel to promote their objectives and as an example to follow of socioeconomic and political modernization. After reviewing some of the reasons that account for the increased importance of subnationalism in the EU, the paper considers the contours of the Catalan political system. Following this there is a detailed discussion of the ways in which the main political parties in Catalonia employ the issue of European integration in their political rhetoric. By way of conclusion, the paper considers the differing reasons behind each of the parties’ position on Catalonia’s role within the process of European integration.
US Transnationals and the Irish Software Industry
Authors: Coe Neil
Published: March 2007

The attraction of foreign direct investment (FDI) is increasingly a key economic development strategy for many countries in the EU. With FDI becoming more prevalent in producer service sectors, this article considers the example of non-market based investment in the computer services and, in particular, the software sector. Although the emergence of offshore data processing and programming are well chronicled, as software becomes increasingly standardized, international divisions of labour are also developing within the leading producers of standardized software packages. By the judicious targeting of FDI since the mid-1980s, Ireland, and in particular Dublin County, has developed into one of the leading centres for software package production in Europe. Many of the market-leading US companies have now established plants in Ireland, from which they manufacture and localize their products for the various European markets. This article will critically examine the role and nature of the overseas software sector in Ireland, with particular emphasis on the quality and stability of these investments. It would appear that while the promotional evidence and data may exaggerate the strategic importance of the Irish software industry, the nature of FDI in this sector is of a higher quality than previous rounds of manufacturing investment in Ireland.