In Politics in Hard Times, Peter Gourevitch explores the common political factors that shape economic policy choices. He focuses on three periods of economic crisis--1873-1896, 1929-1949, and 1971 to the present--and compares policy choices made in Britain, France, Germany, Sweden, and the United States.
Why does corporate governance--front page news with the collapse of Enron, WorldCom, and Parmalat--vary so dramatically around the world? This book explains how politics shapes corporate governance--how managers, shareholders, and workers jockey for advantage in setting the rules by which companies are run, and for whom they are run. It combines a clear theoretical model on this political interaction, with statistical evidence from thirty-nine countries of Europe, Asia, Africa, and North and South America and detailed narratives of country cases. This book differs sharply from most treatments by explaining differences in minority shareholder protections and ownership concentration among countries in terms of the interaction of economic preferences and political institutions. It explores in particular the crucial role of pension plans and financial intermediaries in shaping political preferences for different rules of corporate governance. The countries examined sort into two distinct groups: diffuse shareholding by external investors who pick a board that monitors the managers, and concentrated blockholding by insiders who monitor managers directly. Examining the political coalitions that form among or across management, owners, and workers, the authors find that certain coalitions encourage policies that promote diffuse shareholding, while other coalitions yield blockholding-oriented policies. Political institutions influence the probability of one coalition defeating another.
First published in 1980, Paris and the Provinces explores why reforms of central-local relations in France have been so ineffectual. Professor Gourevitch discovers the cause in party politics and personal rivalries. The struggle for dominance among different parties (Gaullists, Communists, Socialists, Christian Democrats, Independents and others) and individuals (De Gaulle, Giscard, Chirac, Mitterand, Marchais, etc.) has influenced virtually every aspect of institutional reform, from the creation of the regional administration and delineation of its powers to the delegation of specific responsibilities to cities and towns. Conflict over the mechanisms that link local life to the national government is by no means limited to France. This book closely examines comparable events in Italy and analyses the factors that differentiate the strength of ‘ethnically’ based challenges to central authority in Britain, Spain, Belgium, Yugoslavia and Canada, from the relative weakness of such challenges in France, Italy and Germany. By evaluating the territorial distribution between the capital and the countryside as both an influence on and an object of policy, Paris and the Provinces contributes significantly to understanding the connections between party politics and policy formation and will be of interest to students of political science, government, and public policy.
First published in 1984. This book represents a major study of union responses to the economic crisis of the 1970s and 1980s. Abjuring governmental or managerial outlooks, it argues that unions, as representatives of essential producer groups, would be central to the renegotiation of the economic world. The work also stresses the importance of situating union responses to the crisis within the socio-historical evolution of their political economies during the rise and decline of the post-war economic boom. The Social Democratic affiliation of unions in Britain, West Germany and Sweden make them particularly comparable. This title will be of interest to students of politics and economics.
John Maynard Keynes once observed that the "ideas of economists and political philosophers, both when they are right and when they are wrong, are more powerful than is commonly understood." The contributors to this volume take that assertion seriously. In a full-scale study of the impact of Keynesian doctrines across nations, their essays trace the reception accorded Keynesian ideas, initially during the 1930s and then in the years after World War II, in a wide range of nations, including Britain, the United States, France, Germany, Italy, Japan, and Scandinavia. The contributors review the latest historical evidence to explain why some nations embraced Keynesian policies while others did not. At a time of growing interest in comparative public policy-making, they examine the central issue of how and why particular ideas acquire influence over policy and politics. Based on three years of collaborative research for the Social Science Research Council, the volume takes up central themes in contemporary economics, political science, and history. The contributors are Christopher S. Allen, Marcello de Cecco, Peter Alexis Gourevitch, Eleanor M. Hadley, Peter A. Hall, Albert O. Hirschman, Harold James, Bradford A. Lee, Jukka Pekkarinen, Pierre Rosanvallon, Walter S. Salant, Margaret Weir, and Donald Winch.
We rely on NGOs to monitor the ethical practices of governments and for-profit firms and to undertake many humanitarian tasks that public and private actors will not do. While we are critical of public and private sector failures, we do not reflect enough on the credibility of the NGOs which take their place. Can we be sure that products NGOs label as child-labor free are in fact so, that the coffee labeled as 'fair trade' is farmed in sustainable ways, or that the working conditions monitored by NGOs are safe and that the wages are reasonable? Can we know that humanitarian organizations are, in fact, using our donations to alleviate human suffering rather than pursuing other goals? This book explores the problems of establishing the credibility of NGO activities as they monitor working conditions, human rights and elections and provide finance through microcredit institutions, development aid and emergency assistance.
Why does corporate governance--front page news with the collapse of Enron, WorldCom, and Parmalat--vary so dramatically around the world? This book explains how politics shapes corporate governance--how managers, shareholders, and workers jockey for advantage in setting the rules by which companies are run, and for whom they are run. It combines a clear theoretical model on this political interaction, with statistical evidence from thirty-nine countries of Europe, Asia, Africa, and North and South America and detailed narratives of country cases. This book differs sharply from most treatments by explaining differences in minority shareholder protections and ownership concentration among countries in terms of the interaction of economic preferences and political institutions. It explores in particular the crucial role of pension plans and financial intermediaries in shaping political preferences for different rules of corporate governance. The countries examined sort into two distinct groups: diffuse shareholding by external investors who pick a board that monitors the managers, and concentrated blockholding by insiders who monitor managers directly. Examining the political coalitions that form among or across management, owners, and workers, the authors find that certain coalitions encourage policies that promote diffuse shareholding, while other coalitions yield blockholding-oriented policies. Political institutions influence the probability of one coalition defeating another.
John Maynard Keynes once observed that the "ideas of economists and political philosophers, both when they are right and when they are wrong, are more powerful than is commonly understood." The contributors to this volume take that assertion seriously. In a full-scale study of the impact of Keynesian doctrines across nations, their essays trace the reception accorded Keynesian ideas, initially during the 1930s and then in the years after World War II, in a wide range of nations, including Britain, the United States, France, Germany, Italy, Japan, and Scandinavia. The contributors review the latest historical evidence to explain why some nations embraced Keynesian policies while others did not. At a time of growing interest in comparative public policy-making, they examine the central issue of how and why particular ideas acquire influence over policy and politics. Based on three years of collaborative research for the Social Science Research Council, the volume takes up central themes in contemporary economics, political science, and history. The contributors are Christopher S. Allen, Marcello de Cecco, Peter Alexis Gourevitch, Eleanor M. Hadley, Peter A. Hall, Albert O. Hirschman, Harold James, Bradford A. Lee, Jukka Pekkarinen, Pierre Rosanvallon, Walter S. Salant, Margaret Weir, and Donald Winch.
This book addresses the historical and contemporary involvement of Chinese Americans from diverse walks of life in U.S.-China relations. The contributors present new evidence and fresh perspectives on familiar and unfamiliar national and transnational networks - including families, businesspersons, community newspapers, students, lobbyists, philanthropists, and scientists - and consider the likely future impact of such contacts on the most important bilateral relationship at the start of the new millennium. The volume makes a multidisciplinary contribution to understanding the extensive and vital roles and promise of Chinese Americans at this critical juncture in U.S.-China relations, and to revealing the importance of migrants as actors in contemporary global politics. The assessments shared by the contributors suggest that the nature and scope of the Chinese American involvement, particularly in global civil society networks, increasingly will determine the outcome of state-to-state relations between the United States and the PRC.
Using phenomenology to uncover the implicit logic in personal love, sexual love, and hatred, Peter Hadreas provides new insights into the uniqueness of the beloved and offers fresh explanations for some of the worst outbreaks of violence and hatred in modern times. Topics discussed include the value and subjectivity of personal love, nudity and the temporality of sexual love, the connection between personal, sexual love, and the incest taboo, the development of group-focused hatred from individual focused hatred, and prejudicial discrimination. The work encompasses analysis of philosophers and writers from ancient times through to the present day and examines such episodes as the Oklahoma City Federal Building bombing and the Columbine High School massacre.
Epistemic Communities, Constructivism and International Environmental Politics brings together 25 years of publications by Peter M. Haas. The book examines how the world has changed significantly over the last 100 years, discusses the need for new, constructivist scholarship to understand the dynamics of world politics, and highlights the role played by transnational networks of professional experts in global governance. Combining an intellectual history of epistemic communities with theoretical arguments and empirical studies of global environmental conferences, as well as international organizations and comparative studies of international environmental regimes, this book presents a broad picture of social learning on the global scale. In addition to detailing the changes in the international system since the Industrial Revolution, Haas discusses the technical nature of global environmental threats. Providing a critical reading of discourses about environmental security, this book explores governance efforts to deal with global climate change, international pollution control, stratospheric ozone, and European acid rain. With a new general introduction and the addition of introductory pieces for each section, this collection offers a retrospective overview of the author’s work and is essential reading for students and scholars of environmental politics, international relations and global politics.
The growth of shareholder value has been a major change in Western economies since the 1980s. This growth has reignited debates concerning relations between investors and managers. This book argues that investors are more than passive providers of finance, on whose behalf managers seek to maximize shareholder returns. Instead, many investors directly influence management practice, through investor engagement. The book examines the role of institutional investors and private equityfirms, two types of investors with overlapping but different reasons for engagement. Questions addressed include: What are the incentives, and disincentives, for investment engagement? How is investor engagement organized? What areas of management practice are of particular concern to investors? Thediscussion shows in detail how private equity firms play a major role in developing new companies, beyond the provision of finance, especially in the IT, biotechnology, and pharmaceutical sectors.The discussion is primarily based on British and US research. The debate has wider international relevance, because there are strong pressures for establishing shareholder value as the international 'norm' for systems of corporate governance. Following a detailed discussion of Germany, the authors conclude that there is no inevitable trend to shareholder value: shareholder value depends upon complementary institutional arrangements in national business systems, which are far from universal. Thebook concludes with a critical analysis of the justifications for shareholder value and investor engagement, highlighting the weaknesses of both efficiency and equity justifications.
Conflict between labor and capital reflects the competitive and conflict-laden relations within the working class itself, Peter Swenson maintains. Fair Shares examines the internal conflicts of organized labor regarding distribution of wages in order to explain both union leaders' market-structuring objectives in the "political economy", and their imperative to shape and fulfill workers' notions of pay fairness in the "moral economy". Swenson develops an innovative theoretical approach to labor politics through a detailed comparative analysis of union centralization and collective bargaining in Sweden and Germany since the turn of the century. To create solidarity and overcome workers' opposition to centralized control of the labor movement, Swenson argues, union leaders depend heavily on moral appeals concerning fair pair distribution and on success in fulfilling workers' expectation of fairness. Swenson interprets union politics as the attempt to overcome what he calls the "wage policy trilemma
Innovation in information and production technologies is creating benefits and disruption, profoundly altering how firms and markets perform. Digital DNA provides an in depth examination of the opportunities and challenges in the fast-changing global economy and lays out strategies that countries and the international community should embrace to promote robust growth while addressing the risks of this digital upheaval. Wisely guiding the transformation in innovation is a major challenge for global prosperity that affects everyone. Peter Cowhey and Jonathan Aronson demonstrate how the digital revolution is transforming the business models of high tech industries but also of traditional agricultural, manufacturing, and service sector firms. The rapidity of change combines with the uncertainty of winners and losers to create political and economic tensions over how to adapt public policies to new technological and market surprises. The logic of the policy trade-offs confronting society, and the political economy of practical decision-making is explored through three developments: The rise of Cloud Computing and trans-border data flows; international collaboration to reduce cybersecurity risks; and the consequences of different national standards of digital privacy protection. The most appropriate global strategies will recognize that a significant diversity in individual national policies is inevitable. However, because digital technologies operate across national boundaries there is also a need for a common international baseline of policy fundamentals to facilitate "quasi-convergence" of these national policies. Cowhey and Aronson's examination of these dynamic developments lead to a measured proposal for authoritative "soft rules" that requires governments to create policies that achieve certain objectives, but leaves the specific design to national discretion. These rules should embrace mechanisms to work with expert multi-stakeholder organizations to facilitate the implementation of formal agreements, enhance their political legitimacy and technical expertise, and build flexible learning into the governance regime. The result will be greater convergence of national policies and the space for the new innovation system to flourish.
Private law has long been the focus of efforts to explain wider developments of law in an era of globalisation. As consumer transactions and corporate activities continue to develop with scant regard to legal and national boundaries, private law theorists have begun to sketch and conceptualise the possible architecture of a transnational legal theory. Drawing a detailed map of the mixed regulatory landscape of 'hard' and 'soft' laws, official, unofficial, direct and indirect modes of regulation, rules, recommendations and principles as well as exploring the concept of governance through disclosure and transparency, this book develops a theoretical framework of transnational legal regulation. Rough Consensus and Running Code describes and analyses different law-making regimes currently observable in the transnational arena. Its core aim is to reassess the transnational regulation of consumer contracts and corporate governance in light of a dramatic proliferation of rule-creators and compliance mechanisms that can no longer be clearly associated with either the 'state' or the 'market'. The chosen examples from two of the most dynamic legal fields in the transnational arena today serve as backdrops for a comprehensive legal theoretical inquiry into the changing institutional and normative landscape of legal norm-creation.
It is hubris to claim answers to unanswerable questions. Such questions, however--as part of their burden and worth--must still be asked, investigated, and contemplated. How there can be a loving, all-powerful God and a world stymied by suffering and evil is one of the unanswerable questions we must all struggle to answer, even as our responses are closer to gasps, silences, and further questions. More importantly, how and whether one articulates a response will have deep, lasting repercussions for any belief in God and in our judgments upon one another. Throughout this wide-ranging, interdisciplinary work, Peter Admirand draws upon his extensive research and background in theology and testimonial literature, trauma and genocide studies, cultural studies, philosophy of religion, interreligious studies, and systematic theology. As David Burrell writes in the Foreword: ". . .[T]he work's intricate structure, organization, and development will lead us to appreciate that the best one can settle for is a fractured faith built on a fractured theodicy, expressed in a language explicitly fragmented, pluralist, and broken.
Walmart is the largest employer in the world. It encompasses nearly 1 percent of the entire American workforce—young adults, parents, formerly incarcerated people, retirees. Walmart also presents one possible future of work—Walmartism—in which the arbitrary authority of managers mixes with a hyperrationalized, centrally controlled bureaucracy in ways that curtail workers’ ability to control their working conditions and their lives. In Working for Respect, Adam Reich and Peter Bearman examine how workers make sense of their jobs at places like Walmart in order to consider the nature of contemporary low-wage work, as well as the obstacles and opportunities such workplaces present as sites of struggle for social and economic justice. They describe the life experiences that lead workers to Walmart and analyze the dynamics of the shop floor. As a part of the project, Reich and Bearman matched student activists with a nascent association of current and former Walmart associates: the Organization United for Respect at Walmart (OUR Walmart). They follow the efforts of this new partnership, considering the formation of collective identity and the relationship between social ties and social change. They show why traditional unions have been unable to organize service-sector workers in places like Walmart and offer provocative suggestions for new strategies and directions. Drawing on a wide array of methods, including participant-observation, oral history, big data, and the analysis of social networks, Working for Respect is a sophisticated reconsideration of the modern workplace that makes important contributions to debates on labor and inequality and the centrality of the experience of work in a fair economy.
Even as growing polarization and hyper-partisanship define society and politics at home, American leaders seem to agree on one thing: US military dominance abroad is essential for national security and international stability. This is despite an upswing in popular support for “doing less” overseas. What explains Washington’s blinkered view of its foreign policy options? Why is the pursuit of military primacy so deeply entrenched in America that alternative approaches have become unthinkable? The answer, argues Peter Harris, can be found at the level of domestic politics. The modern US state was built during World War II and the Cold War to support a globe-spanning and long-term effort to project military power abroad. This domestic order is hardwired to reject foreign policies of restraint or retrenchment. If the United States is ever to assume a more normal world role, it must first undergo a period of domestic reform, renewal, and realignment. This book explains what these domestic changes might look like – and how a grand strategy of restraint can be implemented from the inside out.
A large and widening gap has opened between Western democracies' international ambitions and their domestic political capacity to support them. On issues ranging from immigration and international trade to national security, new political parties on the left and the right are rejecting the core foreign policy principles that Western governments have championed for over half a century. Much of the debate over the weakening of the Western liberal order has focused on recent changes: Donald Trump's presidency, Britain's vote to leave the European Union, and the surge of nationalist sentiment in France, Germany, and other Western democracies. In Geopolitics and Democracy, Peter Trubowitz and Brian Burgoon provide a powerful new explanation for the rise of anti-globalism in the West. Combining a novel theoretical framework and empirical strategy, Trubowitz and Burgoon show that support for globalism has been receding for 30 years in Western parties and legislatures. They trace the anti-globalist backlash to foreign policy decisions that mainstream parties and party elites made after the end of the Cold War. These decisions sought to globalize markets and pool sovereignty at the supranational level while applying neoliberal reforms to social protections and guarantees at home--a combination of policies that succeeded in expanding the Western liberal order, but at the cost of mounting public discontent and political fragmentation. At a time when problems of great power rivalry, spheres of influence, and reactionary nationalism have returned, Geopolitics and Democracy reveals how domestic support for international engagement during the long East-West geopolitical contest was contingent upon social protections within Western democracies. In the absence of a renewed commitment to those social purposes, Western democracies will struggle to find a collective grand strategy that their domestic publics will support.
Leo Strauss and his students have long been accused of mendacity, elitism, and militarism, but the Iraq War has prompted unprecedented levels of caustic and inaccurate denunciations. Inappropriate criticisms have issued from artists (Tim Robbins), politicians (Ron Paul), journalists (Joe Klein), and even highly lauded scholars such as Arthur Schlesinger, Jr., Gordon Wood, Douglas Massey, Stephen Holmes, Anne Norton, Shadia Drury, Sheldon Wolin, John Pocock, John Yolton, Nicholas Xenos, and Brian Leiter. In Straussophobia, Peter Minowitz provides a methodical and detailed critique of the major offenders, especially of Drury, who maintains that Strauss established a 'covert tyranny' that would keep the Western world 'mired in perpetual war.' In replying to such charges_and to various authors who belittle Strauss's contributions as a scholar_Minowitz highlights the imaginative yet meticulous manner in which Strauss interpreted Thucydides, Plato, Xenophon, Farabi, Machiavelli, Hobbes, Locke, and Carl Schmitt. Straussophobia also provides both a comprehensive assessment of Strauss's 1933 letter that commended 'fascist, authoritarian, and imperial' principles, and a compelling account of Strauss's influence, or lack of influence, on neoconservative promoters of the Iraq War (e.g., Paul Wolfowitz, Richard Perle, and Lewis Libby). The book likewise breaks new ground in employing diversity discourse to explain and combat the bigotry and buffoonery that pervade attacks against Strauss and Straussians_and in drawing on Strauss to illuminate the distortions that mar some widely-used arguments for affirmative action.
The limits of history -- Liberal society -- Civilized nations -- Moral persons -- Nation making -- Adam Smith, moral historian -- National destinies -- War and peace in the New World -- The North and the nation -- The South and the nation.
This book examines how neo-institutional statebuilding undercuts international policy agency. Post-Cold War interventions are marked by a peculiar paradox. From peace and statebuilding projects in war-shattered societies to World Bank development programmes in Africa, the scope of external regulation has grown consistently while international policymakers are finding it increasingly difficult to formulate a political project regarding the Global South. This book seeks to make sense of a contradictory situation in which international policymakers are doing more statebuilding than ever while knowing less about it. The study argues that the crisis of international agency is driven by the demise of reductionist liberal-universal knowledge. It critically explores neo-institutionalism as a dominant policy framework, bringing out how the failure of intervention paves the way for more comprehensive, context-sensitive and bottom-up engagement. As a precondition and side-effect of this expansive process, reductionist liberal-universal knowledge is deconstructed. Paradoxically, the more policymakers learn within a neo-institutional frame of reference, the less they positively know. Without this epistemic foundation, it becomes difficult to act purposively in the world and formulate instrumental policy. The study illustrates these conceptual insights with reference to the Merida Initiative, a U.S.-Mexican security agreement signed in 2007. Rethinking Neo-Institutional Statebuilding will be of much interest to students of statebuilding, international intervention, peace and conflict studies, Latin American politics and IR in general.
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