Energy and social change: An historian's perspective

The dominant model for analyzing the relationship between energy and social change, the “technology assessment” model, is criticized for being technologically deterministic, over-ambitious and insensitive to the political and social context of technology development. Three “lessons from history” are offered:

1. A multiplicity of disciplines, world views and explanatory factors are required to fully understand the relationship between technology and social change.
2. The lack of historical understanding and explicative theory in this field call for modesty in attempts to quantify and predict social impacts.
3. More emphasis should be placed on developing an understanding of the process by which technology is developed and diffused through society.

     

Review of Norman Fairclough discourse and social change 1992

Discourse and Social Change Norman Fairclough Polity Press Cambridge 1992     

Enhancing democracy via bureaucracy: Senior managers' social identities and motivation for policy change

This article challenges the depiction of bureaucracy as a hurdle to democratic responsiveness. It proposes that senior civil servants' (SCSs) dual position as professionals and citizens may enhance government permeability to salient public agendas. Building on social identity theory, we argue that salient public agendas may arouse SCSs' social identification with in‐groups and thereby elicit their motivation for policy change within their task domain. Employing a mixed‐methods design, we analyze SCSs' social identification with the participants of the large‐scale social protests that took place in Israel during the summer of 2011, and their motivation for policy change in response to the protest agenda. We find that SCSs' social identification with the protesters enhanced their motivation for policy change. In addition, SCSs' perception of a conflict between responsiveness to the protest agenda and their organizational or professional identities shaped their preferences for policy solutions more than their motivation for policy change.     

Political change,urban services and social movements: Political participation and grass-roots politics in Metro Manila

Rapid urbanization in the Third World has become one of the most pressing developmental problems of today. Metro Manila, capital of the Philippines, for instance, grew from 300,000 inhabitants in 1903 to more than 8 million in 1980. The authorities were unable to cope with the gigantic socio-economic problems of such an explosive growth. As a consequence, the urban poor gradually developed their own strategies for improving their adverse living conditions. Social movements emerged, in order to press the government for a more responsive policy towards the needs of the poor. Although the activities of these social movements culminated in the late 60s and early 70s, the imposition of martial law on the Philippines in 1972 had highly negative repercussions on citizen'S participation and community organizing efforts. Since authoritarian regimes have been established in the majority of Third World countries, the article examines the following questions by elaborating on the Philippine experience: how urban social movements are able to exist under authoritarian regimes, whether they are able to contribute to an upgrading of urban services and to what extent they are able to be starting points for a democratization from the grass roots’ level. The findings are that, without a minimum of constitutional liberties and pluralism, urban social movements remain rather short-lived phenomena and that the improvement of services through urban social movements is bound to fail under a political climate of severe repression. Moreover, the suppression of reformist and participatory movements fuels political polarization.     

Targeting Benefits for Electoral Gain: Constituency Marginality and the Distribution of Grants to English Local Authorities

We model the spatial allocation of resources over constituencies as an optimization problem in which governing parties face uncertainty about voter preferences, but seek to increase their chances of getting re-elected. We show that a rational government should allocate extra resources to marginal constituencies and especially favour opposition-held marginals. We test this hypothesis on data about central government grants to larger English local authorities. We consider whether Conservative controlled and 'flagship' local authorities also benefit. Our empirical results suggest that the government allocated around £500 million more to local authorities containing marginal constituencies and around £155 million more to 'flagship' local authorities than they could have been expected to get on the criteria of social need and population.     

How political and social change will transform the EU public affairs industry

The EU public affairs industry is failing to recognise that political and social change is rendering its traditional approach to lobbying redundant. The key change is the growing importance of public opinion. Politicians are tending to follow rather than lead public opinion. The public is becoming more individualistic and more prone to emotional appeals. Pressure groups are increasingly setting the political agenda. The Internet is reinforcing all these trends and multiplying the number of political actors. To survive and prosper, public affairs practitioners need to adopt a strategic view of public affairs, which is aligned with companies' brand strategies. This view must be based on a holistic view of politics and recognition that winning public trust, acceptance and support is the prerequisite of successful lobbying. The emphasis will therefore shift away from traditional elite lobbying towards NGO‐style campaigning and mobilisation of public support. Copyright © 2003 Henry Stewart Publications     

Love,activism, and the possibility of radical social change in Mostar

ABSTRACT

This article reflects on the meanings and possibilities of social change in Mostar, a city more often associated with the seeming impossibility of eradicating ethno-national divisions and corruption that paralyses it. It focuses on the under-researched politics of grassroots activism by drawing on Hardt’s and Negri’s work on the political potential of ‘love’ to shape and propel radical politics. Overall, the article reveals the lack of a cohesive agenda of grassroots politics in Mostar, and asks whether love (that creates and sustains political movement) can educate, patiently, to the revolution.     

Rent-seeking and market structure: Comment

If the firms in an industry are to be successful in raising money to influence government, two conditions must be met: (1) there must be sufficient rents available from government decisions regarding that industry to make such expenditures worthwhile, and (2) the industry must be sufficiently concentrated to avoid a free-rider problem in fund-raising. This argument, though seemingly intuitively appealing, has been under recent empirical attack; this paper seeks to restore the parapets.