Governance in a Globalizing World

ABSTRACT

The capacity of a governance system to act and the integrity of its actions are increasingly recognized as foundations to society’s advancement and development. Globalization influences on governance, particularly its administrative side, are creating new needs and demands. Even when the outcome of globalization is debatable, its impact on today’s public managers clearly calls for expansion of their intellectual horizons and refinement of their operational skills. Managers must improve their communication and negotiation skills, conform to higher standards of accountability, transparency, and ethics, and master the complex new technologies within e-government. In fostering reform, public institutions must rely on their own internal learning processes while adapting to international standards and practices. The lesson: Within the still-unfolding global conditions, systems of governance everywhere have a choice of adapting or losing the game.     

Islam Is a European Religion

To the shock of the world, the mild‐mannered Swiss have acted the most radically of any European country out of fear of Muslim immigrants by banning minarets. Was this a blow against tolerance, or for it? Is Islam a European religion, or is Europe a Christian club? Meanwhile, as Turkey becomes more confident in its regional power and Muslim identity it is shaking up some old friends. In this section, two of Europe's most prominent Muslim voices, the foreign minister of Sweden and a top Turkish official try to sort it out.     

Globalizing Corporate Environmentalism? Convergence and Heterogeneity in Indian Industry

What explains the recent emergence of corporate environmentalism in developing countries? Why have certain firms surpassed others in greening their activities? This article situates the uneven dynamics of corporate greening within a theoretical framework of convergence, firm specificity, and heterogeneity. Through a comparative analysis of firms in three sectors—automobiles, steel, and power—of the Indian economy during the past two decades, I show that corporate greening is rooted in processes of growing international political engagement, market integration, and transnational social communication. Together, these processes have unleashed various economic and sociological convergence dynamics, which have led firms in India to adopt more environmentally sound innovations and performances increasingly similar to those found in many developed countries. Yet firms’ connectedness to external pressures fostering “upward” convergence varies, as do their internal capabilities to respond to them. Heterogeneity in these internal and external variables, and the firm-specific strategies linking them, accounts for much of the unevenness in patterns of corporate environmentalism observed in India.     

Globalizing Time and Space: Temporal and Spatial Considerations in Discourses of Globalization

Globalization discourse is concerned with the effects of spatial change—changes in the shape, scale and extensity or social processes—and the effects of temporal change—particularly changes to, or away from, modernity. By drawing together both axes of change, globalization discourse suggests a way of navigating this tension. However, it is argued here that most globalization theories accord primacy to one of these axes, which results in them being conflated. As a result, globalization theories are often presented in highly systemic terms and downplay the diversity of social processes.     

Secularizing Religion: Hindu Extremism as a Modernist Discourse

In this article, I suggest that Hindu nationalism, like many other religious extremist ideologies, is a modern discourse rooted in modern categories such as a homogenous national identity, objective science and history, hyper-masculinity, and secularism. To demonstrate the above claims, I undertake a close analysis of the writings of V.D. Savarkar, a key founder of "Hindutva" or Hindu nationalism. I show how he retools Hinduism by removing all aspects of religiosity/piety while replacing it with a primarily political-secular identity that places an exclusive Hindu nation at the center.     

Street Foods: Traditional Microenterprise in a Modernizing World

Action-research projects focused on poor women both collect information and design interventions to improve their livelihood. This approach is illustrated by studying street food vendors in Iloilo, Philippines. Findings document the importance of street foods as a source of income and of food. Interventions to improve both safe food handling and income were proposed and tested in Iloilo and Manila; a revisit after a decade shows their long-term impact on the vendors. Overall, this and six other studies comprising the street food project influenced policy changes by municipal, national, and international agencies and organizations. The conclusions challenge theoretical assumptions held by economists concerning the informal sector and by feminists regarding the family.     

Facing a Post‐American World

American‐led globalization has enabled the third great powershift of the last five hundred years—the “rise of the rest” following on the rise of the West and then the rise of the US as the dominant power in the West. When China, India, Brazil, Turkey and the rest sit at the table of global power with the West what will the world order look like? Will it be post‐American? Will it be culturally non‐Western, but play by the same rules of an open international order laid down by the American's after World War II? In the following pages, leading American and Asian intellectuals ponder these questions.     

Katherine Tonkiss,Migration and Identity in a Post-National World

Theories of Local Economic Development. Edited by Richard D. Bingham and Robert Meir. Newbury Park CA, Sage, 1993. Pp. 319. £20.50 pb.

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Resolving Conflict: Strategies for Local Government. Edited by Margaret S. Herrman. International City Management Association (P.O. Box 2011, Annapolis Junction, MD 20701, USA), 1994. $29.95.

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Urban Policy in Britain: The City, the State and the Market. By Rob Atkinson and Graham Moon. Macmillan, 1994. Pp.306. £35.00 hb, £11.99 pb.

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Normality is Hard Work—Trade Unions and the Politics of Community Care. By Mick Carpenter. London, Lawrence and Wishart, 1994 (published in association with UNISON). Pp.162. £14.99 pb.

Local Government in Britain (Sixth Edition). By TONY BYRNE. Penguin Books, 1994. Pp.665. £10.00 pb.

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Managing Your City or Town: A Reference Guide for the New Public Official. By Kenton G. Griffin. University Press of America, 1994. Pp.282 including appendices. $57.50 hb, $36.50 pb.

Community Profiling: Auditing Social Needs. By Murray Hawtin, Geraint Hughes and Janie Percy‐Smith. Open University Press, 1994. Pp.194. £12.00 pb.

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Competing for Quality: A Manager's Guide to Market Testing. By Lynton Barker. Longman, 1993. Pp.217. £35.00 pb.

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Gender Audit 1994. Engender, Scotland. Pp.81, A4 loose‐leaf format. £7.00 (individuals), £15 (institutions).(Available from Scottish Women's Aid, Edinburgh)

Cassell Multilingual Dictionary of Local Government and Business. Edited by Clive Leo McNeir. Cassell, London, 1993. Pp.xv + 222. £50.

A la Recherche du ‘local’. Edited by Albert Mabileau. Paris, L'Harmattan, 1993. Pp.232.

Le système local en France (2nd edition). By Albert Mabileau. Paris, Monchrestien, 1994. Pp.157. FF60.

Gouvernement local et politique urbaines: Actes du colloque international, Grenoble, 2–3 février 1993, Edited by Sylvie Biarez and Jean‐Yves Nevers. Cerat, Paris, 1993. Pp.557.

Ombudsmen in the Public Sector. By Mary Seneviratne. Open University Press, 1994. Pp.148. £15.23 pb, £40.00 hb.

The New American Political (Dis)order. By Robert A. Dahl et al. Institute of Governmental Studies Press, University of California, Berkeley, 1994. Pp.xii + 102. $10.95.

Entwicklungschancen deutscher Stadte ‐ Die Folgen der Vereinigung. D. Henckel, B. Grabow, B. Hollbach, Hartmut Usbeck, Heinz Niemann. Kohlhammer, Stuttgart, Berlin, Cologne/Deutsche Ver‐meinde Verlag, 1993. Pp.567. DM78.

French Politics Today. By Peter Morris. Manchester University Press, 1994. Pp.182. £29.99 hb, £8.99 pb.

Lobbying in the European Community. Edited by Sonia Mazey and J. Richardson. Oxford University Press, 1993. Pp.263. £30.00.

Single Market to Social Europe: European Community in the 1990s. By M. Wise and R. Gibb. Longman, 1993. Pp.356. £13.99.     

The Return of the Middle Kingdom in a Post-American World

Not long after the conclusion of the Beijing Summer Olympics in 2008, I was invited by my friend Eric Xu, an editor at Shanghai's largest paper, The Xinmin Evening News , to attend a seminar in Shanghai with some of China's top philosophers and scholars. They had gathered to assess the powershift in China's self-image and in global esteem as a result of such a successful execution of the games. The following short essay reports on their views and puts them in historical perspective.