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Author: V. Trappman
Publisher: Springer
Published: 2013-05-07
Total Pages: 285
ISBN-13: 1137303654
DOWNLOAD EBOOKThrough the prism of 'Nowa Huta', a landmark of socialist industrialization, Trappmann challenges the one-sided account of Poland as a successful transition case and reveals the ambivalent role of the European Union in economic restructuring. An exemplary, suggestive case of multi-level analysis research.
Author: Johan Norberg
Publisher: Cato Institute
Published: 2003
Total Pages: 348
ISBN-13: 9781930865464
DOWNLOAD EBOOKMarshalling facts and the latest research findings, the author systematically refutes the adversaries of globalization, markets, and progress. This book will change the debate on globalization in this country and make believers of skeptics.
Author: Victoria Goddard
Publisher: Routledge
Published: 2015-01-30
Total Pages: 210
ISBN-13: 1317745221
DOWNLOAD EBOOKThroughout history and in every geographical location, the rise and fall of industry, which impact the fate of large populations, are tied to the development and cultural entanglement of particular models that are articulated with political power. Models are understood as knowledge devices – expert, theoretical, practical and commonsense – that are embedded in cultural and social environments and designed through struggles at various scales. This book results from the collaboration of an interdisciplinary team bringing together specialists in anthropology, geography, sociology, economics, political science, mathematics and engineering around the theme of ‘Models and their Effects on Development Paths’. Based on empirical research conducted on the heavy industries, Industry and Work in Contemporary Capitalism addresses how models that inform the organization of work and production and are created by powerful actors may diverge from, overlap with, or contradict the models articulated by less powerful actors on the ground, and how they are connected across material and cultural spaces. Careful observation of industrial work and production as they unfold in and across specific localities and affects people’s livelihoods is complemented by analysis of how models circulate, through which channels of power, which institutional entities, which political connections. This volume explores an extensive theoretical terrain and a number of empirical cases that show, from different perspectives, how ideas about the economy, about work and industry, materialize in specific practices and interventions that affect people’s livelihoods.
Author: Katharina Bluhm
Publisher: Routledge
Published: 2013-09-23
Total Pages: 301
ISBN-13: 1136023445
DOWNLOAD EBOOKBusiness leaders exert extraordinary influence on institution building in market economies but they think and act within institutional settings. This book combines both an elite approach with a varieties-of-capitalism approach. Comparing Poland, Hungary and East and West Germany, we perceive the transformations in East Central Europe and in Germany after 1989 as being intertwined. Based on a joint survey, this book seeks to measure the level of the convergence of ideas among European business leaders, assuming it to be more extensive than the institutional convergence expected under the dominance of neoliberal discourse. Analyzing the institutional framework, organizational features like size, ownership and labour relations, and subjective characteristics like age, social origin, career patterns and attitudes of the recent business elites, we found significant differences between countries and the types of organization. The growing importance of economic degrees and internationalization shows astonishingly little explanatory power on the views of business leaders. The idea of a coordinated market economy is still relatively widespread among Germans, while their Hungarian and Polish counterparts are more likely to display a minimalist view of corporate responsibility to society and adverse attitudes towards employee representation. However, their attitudes frequently tend to be inconsistent, which mirrors the mixed type of capitalism in East Central Europe.
Author: Kate Bedford
Publisher: Oxford University Press
Published: 2019-09-26
Total Pages: 353
ISBN-13: 0192583875
DOWNLOAD EBOOKCasinos are often used by political economists, and popular commentators, to think critically about capitalism. Bingo - an equal chance numbers game played in many parts of the world - is overlooked in these conversations about gambling and political economy. Bingo Capitalism challenges that omission by asking what bingo in England and Wales can teach us about capitalism and the regulation of everyday gambling economies. The book draws on official records of parliamentary debate, case law, regulations and in-depth interviews with both bingo players and workers to offer the first socio-legal account of this globally significant and immensely popular pastime. It explores the legal and political history of bingo and how gender shapes, and is shaped by, diverse state rules on gambling. It also sheds light on the regulation of workers, players, products, places, and technologies. In so doing it adds a vital new dimension to accounts of UK gambling law and regulation. Through Bingo Capitalism, Bedford makes a key theoretical contribution to our understanding of the relationship between gambling and political economy, showing the role of the state in supporting and then eclipsing environments where gambling played a key role as mutual aid. In centring the regulatory entanglement between vernacular play forms, self-organised membership activity, and corporate leisure experiences, she offers a fresh vision of gambling law from the everyday perspective of bingo.
Author: David Lane
Publisher: Routledge
Published: 2013-11-20
Total Pages: 399
ISBN-13: 1135008817
DOWNLOAD EBOOKDavid Lane outlines succinctly yet comprehensively the development and transformation of state socialism. While focussing on Russia and the countries of Eastern Europe, he also engages in a discussion of the Chinese path. In response to the changing social structure and external demands, he outlines different scenarios of reform. He contends that European state socialism did not collapse but was consciously dismantled. He brings out the West’s decisive support of the reform process and Gorbachev’s significant role in tipping the balance of political forces in favour of an emergent ascendant class. In the post-socialist period, he details developments in the economy and politics. He distinguishes different political and economic trajectories of countries of the former USSR, the New Member States of the European Union, and China; and he notes the attempts to promote further change through ‘coloured’ revolutions. The book provides a detailed account not only of the unequal impact of transformation on social inequality which has given rise to a privileged business and political class, but also how far the changes have fulfilled the promise of democracy promotion, wealth creation and human development. Finally, in the context of globalisation, the author considers possible future political and economic developments for Russia and China. Throughout the author, a leading expert in the field, brings to bear his deep knowledge of socialist countries, draws on his research on the former Soviet Union, and visits to nearly all the former state socialist countries, including China.
Author: Aleksandra Sznajder Lee
Publisher: University of Michigan Press
Published: 2016-05-18
Total Pages: 317
ISBN-13: 047212191X
DOWNLOAD EBOOKFocusing on the steel industry during the post-communist transition from 1989 through 2009, Aleksandra Sznajder Lee traces the transformation of flagship state enterprises in the Czech Republic, Poland, Romania, and Slovakia into the subsidiaries of large, international corporations. By analyzing this transformation at the three levels of enterprise, sector, and national-international nexus, she identifies the players—from international investors and European Union members to national labor unions and local industry managers—in the political economy of reform. Even in the midst of the transition to a capitalist, democratic system, Sznajder Lee finds, the state plays a key role in mediating between domestic vested interests and external pressures from international financial markets and institutions, on the one hand, and regional institutions on the other. Whereas state power may be employed to require domestic firms to operate as capitalists in the international market, it may also be used to shield enterprises from market pressures in order to promote the political and personal preferences of the elite. This book has broad implications for the political economy of reform because it illuminates the political determinants of privatization and the resources used to resist it. In addition, Sznajder Lee sheds new light on why some countries are more likely than others to be subject to external constraints, such as IMF conditionality, and how some allegedly pro-market reformers manage to maintain public ownership over certain industry sectors.
Author: Chris Hann
Publisher: Berghahn Books
Published: 2018-03-28
Total Pages: 384
ISBN-13: 1785336797
DOWNLOAD EBOOKBringing together ethnographic case studies of industrial labor from different parts of the world, Industrial Labor on the Margins of Capitalism explores the increasing casualization of workforces and the weakening power of organized labor. This division owes much to state policies and is reflected in local understandings of class. By exploring this relationship, these essays question the claim that neoliberal ideology has become the new ‘commonsense’ of our times and suggest various propositions about the conditions that create employment regimes based on flexible labor.
Author: Jason Struna
Publisher: Routledge
Published: 2016-03-17
Total Pages: 189
ISBN-13: 1317615077
DOWNLOAD EBOOKThe global capitalism perspective is a unique research program focused on understanding relatively recent developments in worldwide social, economic, and political practices related to globalization. At its core, it seeks to contextualize the rearticulation of nation-states and broad geographic regions into highly interdependent networks of production and distribution, and in so doing explain consequent changes in social relations within and between countries in the contemporary era. The present volume contributes to this effort by focusing on social class formation across borders via the processes and actors that make globalized capitalism possible. The essays presented here offer a wide range of emphases in terms of the particular lenses and evidence they use. They cover such topics as the emergence of a transnational capitalist class-based fascist regime responding to the structural crises of global capitalism as well as the links between global class formation and the US racial project as it relates to electoral politics and demographic changes in the US South. This book was published as a special issue of Globalizations.
Author: Dimitra Kofti
Publisher: Berghahn Books
Published: 2023-08-11
Total Pages: 263
ISBN-13: 1805390376
DOWNLOAD EBOOKBased on a long-term study of the everyday postsocialist politics of labour in the wider context of intense socio-economic transformation in Bulgaria, this book tells the story of the flexibilization of production, the precaritization of work, shifting managerial practices, and ways in which people with different employment statuses live and work together. The ethnography starts with the rapidly moving conveyor belt of a glass factory, where a variety of global and local forces and workers’ divisions meet, and analyses how inequalities are reproduced both at the production site and back home.
