Reality and historicity: economy and dialectics in Marxism ∗

On 1 July 1997, the Basil Law of the Hong Kong Special Administrative Region (HKSAR) will be enacted in accordance with the Constitution of the People's Republic of China. Articles 107 and 108 of the Basic Law, the so-called balanced budget and low tax policy articles, are the two most controversial articles of the Chapter on Economy. The manifest purpose of these two articles is to constrain the spending and taxing power of the HKSAR in order to prohibit elected members of the Legislative Council from turning Hong Kong into a welfare state, and they have been justified by some ostensibly using Buchanan's concept of fiscal constitution. This paper examines the justification and effects of incorporating elements of fiscal constitution in the Basic Law, focusing particularly on the income redistribution effect. The paper concludes that policy articles grounded on the philosophy of fiscal constitution should not have been included.     

Party Systems and Social Policy: A Historical Comparison of Italy and Germany

The article shows how the development of social policy in Italy and Germany was influenced by their respective party systems. Its focus is on the differences between systems of unemployment protection in the two countries after World War II. Due to many similarities between the two states, in particular the dominant presence of Christian democratic parties in both national governments at the time, this divergence cannot be adequately explained by standard theories. The article shows that it is crucial to take the widely different party systems into account: seven parties and ideological polarisation in Italy as opposed to three parties and moderate ideological differences in Germany. These generated different political dynamics and, consequently, different policy output.     

Transformation or Bureaucratization? The changing role of community representation in local strategic partnerships in England

Abstract

The debate about the need to build social capital and to engage local communities in public policy has become a central issue in many advanced liberal societies and developing countries. In many countries new forms of governance have emerged out of a growing realization that representative democracy by itself is no longer sufficient. One of the most significant public policy trends in the United Kingdom has been the involvement of community organizations and their members in the delivery of national policy, mediated through local systems of governance and management. One such policy area is urban regeneration. Central Government now requires local authorities in England to set up Local Strategic Partnerships (LSPs) to bring together stakeholders who can prepare Community Strategies and deliver social and economic programmes which target areas of deprivation. This paper reviews the key institutional processes which must be addressed, such as representation, accountability and transformation. It then investigates three very different examples of LSPs based on interviews with key representatives. The paper concludes that political commitments to community engagement in civil society are always mediated through existing institutional arrangements. Thus attempts to change deep-seated political structures and power relationships require a commitment to increase representation as well as to transform the practices and repertoires of deliberation and action.     

The Puzzling Lack of a Social Dilemma

Among theories dealing with welfare state policy development, theories of social dilemmas and of key actor-group influence over government policy formation are increasingly holding sway. These theories emphasise that few would risk being unilateral contributors to the systems without any compensating elements. Thus, selective, means-testing systems or stingy universal systems in which some citizens 'contribute' while others 'receive' may risk being regarded as unfair in the eyes of the contributors in spite of the redistributive intentions. The degree of welfare state programme 'fairness' and reciprocity would, then, explain the degree of support for the welfare state. However, by using data from the United Kingdom and Sweden, this article will, first, claim that the social dilemma research turns a blind eye to the fact that public opinion in general as well as key groups appears to be able to yield its support even when welfare states contain distinctly selective elements and low-compensation universal programmes. Second, the article will elaborate on the confusion surrounding welfare state taxonomies as one plausible reason for why social dilemma theories may risk missing the target. Finally, the article will elaborate on the future of the welfare state as we know it. The main points are that given the fact that the welfare states in the two countries really already are conglomerates of different types of welfare programmes and, given a weak relationship between key groups and policy formation, the most likely future for the welfare state is that policies will continue to follow mixed paths.     

Body Idiom in Platform Events: Media Representation and the Hegemony of the Vicarious Conversation

Taking a comparative approach to critical semiotics, I describe reciprocal relations between media representation of body idiom in platform events and the interaction order of social relations among people in Hong Kong. I argue that two conflicting representations of body idiom vie for supremacy in the former colony, in broadcast television as well as in print media, business, government and education. These can be related to monofocal and polyfocal platform formats. The predominant semiotic representation of the postural presentation of self in international media, the monofocal platform format, grows out of what we call the Utilitarian Discourse System, and is in a problematic dialectical relationship with Hong Kong and other societies. This model of the monologue is articulated by Dale Carnegie in his 1937 book How to Win Friends and Influence People, which advocates establishing and maintaining eye contact and a friendly manner. On the part of the audience, it requires accepting the fiction of a dialogue that is in fact vicarious. I argue that this acceptance evolved in Europe during the Enlightenment in what Foucault described as the disciplines of panopticism, but did not evolve in Hong Kong or China. I sketch the historical development of Hong Kong media and society in an attempt to explain the disjunction between media representation and interaction order, and conclude that critical social semiotics can make a contribution in disentangling these disparate interaction orders and media representations of body idiom.     

Zur Theorie der Interessenvermittlung: Ein Netzwerkansatz dargestellt am Beispiel der Gemeinsamen Europäischen Agrarpolitik

Recent policy network studies contribute significantly to the theory of interest mediation. Despite this contribution policy network approaches still contain major theoretical deficiencies and a lack of empirical application can be observed. In this context a typology of systems of interest mediation is theoretically derived on the basis of new developments in the political exchange theory (Pappi/Henning 1998a). Analogously to the typology of economic markets, the typology corresponds to the social organization of political exchange in policy networks. Further, it is demonstrated that in contrast to conclusions found in the literature no general correspondence of specific types of interest mediation and policy-outcomes in terms of weak versus strong states, efficient versus inefficient economic policies and biased versus unbiased mediation of societies interests can be expected. In the empirical part of the paper the typology is applied to the European Common Agricultural Policy (CAP) using policy network data. In particular, a block model analysis is applied aggregating a set of multiple network relations among a multitude of public and private actors operating in the CAP to identify whether the overall social macro structure corresponds to national clientelism or supranational pluralism.     

The Local Legitimacy of Peacekeepers

ABSTRACT

Recent scholarship and policy doctrine alike have identified local legitimacy as an important ‘success factor’ in peacekeeping – but like many such calls for greater attention to local dynamics, it is often unclear what local legitimacy actually means, how to analyse it, what causal processes are at work, and what might obstruct the operationalization of well-intentioned policy recommendations for peacekeepers to seek local legitimacy. This article aims to bring clarity to the complex concept of local legitimacy, including the ways in which insights drawn from legitimacy theory developed in very different social contexts can be adapted to the realities of the conflict societies into which peacekeepers deploy. First, it examines what it means to locate the legitimacy of peace operations at the local level, rather than the international. Second, it clarifies the causal links between peacekeepers’ legitimacy and their effectiveness, reviewing scholarship on local legitimacy and its adaptation of broader legitimacy theory. Third, it identifies three important reasons that locally legitimizing peacekeepers is so difficult in practice, distinguishing between the difficulties derived from the particular features of conflict societies and those derived from the institutional characteristics of peace operations.     

‘Telling our Way of Life': Modes of Mediating Social Life in German and Polish Primary-School Textbooks

The events of 1989-1991 in Central and Eastern Europe brought political and economic changes to the post-Communist societies, which required them to redraw the social and psychological maps of their countries and carried with them the promise of partaking in the 'Western way of life'. The introduction of liberalised ideologies, both at the official level and in most of the freed media, also had to be translated into the countries' education systems. New textbooks that would accommodate the new social and political realities had to be written. We are interested in this article in whether and how these new realities are reflected in primary-school teaching materials. For this paper, our analysis will focus on data from two current textbooks that are used in German and Polish primary schools, respectively. We shall be focusing particularly upon those units of the book aimed at defining or describing realities. Taking into account both linguistic and visual modes of representation, we are interested in revealing the 'way of life', the lived ideologies, constructed in these textbooks.     

Productivist Welfare Capitalism: Social Policy in East Asia

The article engages with the literature on the 'East Asian welfare model' by using Esping-Andersen's 'worlds of welfare capitalism' approach to analyze social policy in the region. It describes the main features of a productivist world of welfare capitalism that stands alongside Esping-Andersen's conservative, liberal and social democratic worlds. It then shows that Japan, Hong Kong, Singapore, South Korea and Taiwan are all part of this world, though they divide into sub-groups within it. To account for productivist welfare capitalism in East Asia, the article focuses particularly on bureaucratic politics at the unit level, and on a range of key shaping factors at the system level. It closes by considering the implications of East Asian experience for comparative social policy analysis.     

Corporate Social Responsibility: A New Signifier? An Analysis of Business Ethics and Good Business Practice

The subject of this article is the increasing commitment declared by business enterprises to ethical business practices and corporate social responsibility. It is approached using Jean Baudrillard's analysis of the way 'signifiers' are attached to products in advanced capitalist society. In such societies signifiers are split off from signifieds and their referents (commodities). The main linguistic form is not the symbol, as in previous social settings, but the signal. Since the linguistic elements are fragmented, signifiers are able to 'float' in the social space and be combined with the signifieds and referents at will. Thus, the producers often emphasise not the use value of the commodities in their advertisement but instead randomly attach various qualities to commodities irrespective of their functionality or material utility. In this article the development of corporate social responsibility is seen as such a signifier and the implications thereof for the late-modern Global Political Economy are discussed.     

Two European Images of Non-European Rule ∗

Functionalist anthropology in its study of African societies and orientalism in its study of Islamic history present two different and contrasting images of political systems. The anthropological picture of African societies is one of rule by consent when ruler and ruled are bound by ties of mutuality and interdependence, while Western students of Islamic history have emphasised the cleavage between governor and governed, the arbitrary despotism of the former and the passive acquiescence of the latter. These differing images can be seen in relation to the emergence of the two disciplines at different points in the history of the European encounter with the societies in question. Islamic societies were encountered at an earlier period as powerful adversaries. The sources for their scholarly study were primarily philological and historical. European anthropology encountered African societies as subjugated dependencies primarily studied by means of field-work. The two images are intrinsically related to European ideological orientations in their differing contexts of contact.     

Public Service and Commercial Broadcasting: Impacts on Politics and Society

This article provides an accessible overview of the growing research literature on the impact of public service and commercial broadcasting and highlights its main implications for policy discussions about the future of public service broadcasting in Western societies. It shows that the populations of countries with public service broad‐ and narrowcasting are better informed about government and politics, are more trusting of other people, have more positive civic attitudes, have greater confidence in democratic institutions and are more likely to engage in democratic politics. Moreover, levels of social trust are higher in countries which have a significant public service element in their media systems, even among individuals who do not habitually watch public TV channels. The article ends with a brief discussion of the implications of this research for the future of public broadcasting in the Western world.     

The Rise of the Genotocracy

This article examines whether meritocracy is an effective device for legitimising socioeconomic inequality. It looks at two ways in which it could be said to do that—by allocating wealth and prestige according to merit, and by creating opportunities for those born in low income families—and concludes that the first only creates the appearance of fairness (an argument made persuasively by John Rawls) and the second is a largely unfulfilled promise. The author asks whether the low levels of social mobility in Britain and America are because they have not yet become fully-fledged meritocracies, or because they have, and considers Richard Herrnstein and Charles Murray’s argument in The Bell Curve that meritocratic societies have a tendency to degenerate into genetically-based caste systems. It examines the research by Dalton Conley, Jason Fletcher and Benjamin Domingue on this point, which shows that genetic assortative mating declined over the course of the twentieth century, and tentatively concludes that Herrnstein and Murray were wrong—that flatlining social mobility is a bug, not a feature, of meritocratic societies.     

A welfare model for selecting indicators of national development

The purpose of the paper is to present a frame of reference for selecting social indicators on the basis of values inherent in the concept of social welfare. It is assumed that these values can be captured by the terms Having, Loving and Being. A scheme for selecting indicators of comparative relevance is presented by cross-tabulating the basic value categories with a second set of categories here called elements of society. The point of departure is a conception of national societies as systems in which there are inputs, outputs, and a structure through which inputs and feedbacks flow. The inputs and outputs on the different value-dimensions can be assessed through measures of central tendencies whereas structure can be described through dispersion parameters and correlations.Paper presented at the ISSC Workshop on Models and Indicators of National Development in Rio de Janeiro, May 9–14, 1972.     

East asia and cross-Taiwan strait relations

The evolution of the Taiwan issue has been closely linked to the interaction of China and other countries including Japan, Russia, and especially the United States. It is important to examine the great power interaction in East Asia and its effect on the cross-strait relations. Japanese policy toward the Taiwan issue will be a critical indicator of the nature of Sino-Japanese relations. One issue is Japan’s expanding role in the U.S.-Japanese security relations and the implication of such relations for East Asian security. Russia has consistently supported Beijing’s policy on Taiwan. Since the return of Hong Kong to China on July 1, 1997, the policy of “one country, two systems” has been put into practice. If Hong Kong can continue to enjoy a high degree of autonomy and prosperity, valuable lessons might be gained for resolving issues in cross-Taiwan Strait relations.     

Post-Industrial Changes in Policy Style

The article discusses central characteristics of the way in which western democracies formulate their public policy. This is done by presenting a preliminary typology of policy styles. An attempt is made to classify some European countries according to their dominant policy style as well as according to changes in this respect during the post-industrial period. Overcrowding and unconventional participation are identified as two important factors behind this development. The essay, which is mainly based on British and Swedish data, concludes with a discussion of the question of whether societies are able to exercise any choice in determining their policy style.     

Immigrant influx and generational politics: A comparative case study of Hong Kong and Taiwan

Studies have long shown the existence of an age gap in voting behavior. We argue that the influx of immigrants can influence the size of this gap. Young people can become more apprehensive toward immigrants than older people because of the former's greater exposure to more competition from immigrants in the labor market and susceptibility to anti-immigrant sentiments in society. The age gap in attitudes toward immigrants can carry over to vote choice. We illustrate our argument with a comparative study of Hong Kong and Taiwan. While the two societies share many similarities, Hong Kong has experienced a significantly larger influx of immigrants from mainland China. Based on two election surveys in 2016, we find a distinct generational gap in attitudes toward immigrants in Hong Kong, but not in Taiwan. The age gap in Hong Kong also manifests itself in electoral support of China-resisting political parties.     

Human Ecology and Public Policy: Overcoming the Hegemony of Economics

The thinking of those with the power to formulate and implement public policy is now almost totally dominated by the so-called science of economics. While efforts have been made to supplement or modify economics to make it less brutal or less environmentally blind, here it is suggested that economics is so fundamentally flawed and that it so completely dominates the culture of late modern capitalism (or postmodernity) that a new master human science is required to displace it and provide an alternative co-ordinating framework for research and for defining reality. This could then provide an alternative basis for formulating public policy. It is argued that if human ecology is to fill this role, it must be developed on consistently anti-reductionist foundations, and that such a social science would totally reorient public policy from a domain for power elites to a domain for genuinely democratic societies to define and control their destinies.     

The institutional structuring of innovation policy coordination: theory and evidence from East Asia

This article suggests that variations in the dominant pattern of innovation policy coordination can be analysed and understood effectively by dividing innovation and other complementary socio-economic policies into low-complexity and high-complexity tasks. The effective implementation of these two sets of policy tasks that differ in the extent, nature and intractability of collective action problems confronting the coordination process hinges on the strength of two sociopolitical institutions: bureaucratic organizational structures and interactive governing arrangements. While bureaucratic organizational structures are better suited to delivering low-complexity tasks, interactive governing arrangements are more effective in resolving high-complexity policy problems. They interact differently across political economies to structure the management of coordination challenges and thus give rise to divergent patterns of innovation policy-making. The comparative analysis of innovation policy coordination between Hong Kong and Singapore over the past two decades lends strong support to the central theoretical propositions of the article.

     

Building peaceful citizens? Nation-building in divided societies

ABSTRACT

Interventions aimed at citizenship formation and nation-building in divided and post-conflict societies place great emphasis on promoting and entrenching peace as a cornerstone of economic development and statehood. Such efforts are multi-scalar, encompassing interventions to build democratic institutions and responsible citizens with the pursuit and maintenance of peace at the heart of these ideals. Dominant international pedagogies and policies for liberal-peace-building in divided societies can be used to maintain existing power relations and hierarchies, and may prevent the realization of social (and other forms of) justice while stifling dissent and criticism through exhortations to patriotism, unity, civility, and nation-building. Thus, the ‘goodness’ of peace makes this concept particularly useful as a technique of governance. However, ‘peace’ can also be reworked to suit counter-hegemonic political purposes that open up rather than shut down the question of what peace means. Through an exploration of contestations around the notion of ‘peace’ and its deployment in efforts to promote particular foreign policy agendas we highlight the incongruities in civil society actors’ approaches to peace, and their efforts to achieve sometimes conflicting aims, within divided societies.