Japan’s ‘pro-nuclear civil society’: Power in the analysis of social capital and civil society

ABSTRACT

Civil society research can be categorized into a school in the tradition of Gramsci focusing on social movements and a Tocquevillean school focusing on associations and social capital. The author reviews both schools’ research on the Japanese case and analyses a number of pro-nuclear citizen groups built up by the Japanese nuclear industry. The author analyses their financial data and historical development to demonstrate that they have been built up as countermovement by the nuclear industry. The author traces their mobilization processes to criticize the social capital approach. In Japanese political science, traditionally a dense web of hierarchical associations and ties of obligation have been seen as enforcing clientelism and top-down political control. This makes Japan an interesting case for the social capital approach. Social capital researchers have reinterpreted hierarchical networks as indicators of a strong civil society. Taking into account Bourdieu’s notion of social capital challenges this view and supports arguments of state influence forwarded by parts of the Gramscian school.     

Public relations,passive aggression and critical social auditing: reflections on organisational inaction in stakeholder engagement

This article explores issues associated with organisational governance in the context of stakeholder engagement. It argues that both public relations (PR) research and practice have yet to address systematically the challenges inherent in this area, particularly how organisations exert power over stakeholders. Prompted by a consideration of the situational theory of power put forward by the sociologist Steven Lukes, it introduces the concept of passive aggression to PR practice. This is cited as an example of a wider phenomenon, which the author calls dark dialogue. The insights generated by these perspectives are used to highlight how theoretical approaches in the PR field that seek to understand and promote the role of dialogue in organisational‐stakeholder relations face an empirical challenge. This insight is then used to highlight the limitations of what has been traditionally termed as social auditing. It is suggested that PR and social auditing practice share the same blind spots when it comes to assessing how organisations exercise power and behave towards their stakeholders. The article goes on to advocate collaboration between PR professionals and academics to practically address these issues through a reconfigured social auditing process. It ends by suggesting that action research provides a methodological framework through which these theory‐practice interactions can be facilitated productively. Copyright © 2014 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Brigalow bondage: Rural women and the arts

‘The arts’ is a field of activity and power which has traditionally been associated with ‘great men'; women have typically been represented as having only tenuous links with the field. However, in regional and rural areas, women are by far the major arts participants, organisers and educators, and tend to operate not as individuals, but as members of arts groups. Possibly as a corollary, while arts in rural areas recruits substantial community participation, the activity apparently receives little media coverage or support from governments or corporations, relative to other recreational activities.

In this paper I will discuss ‘the arts’ as a social practice, with its own internal rules and logic, and explore the social location of arts beyond the metropolis. To this end I will outline the results of my research to date in the field of arts in Central Queensland, drawing on policy statements and on interviews with (mainly women) rural art practitioners. The paper examines whether the logic of the field of arts changes when it is moved from the city to the bush, and discusses to what extent this can be attributed to the social position of women in rural communities. It attempts to engage with social relations in regional Queensland, and the incommensurability of the public and private spheres. That is, women arts practitioners are actively engaged in a public activity—dealing with funding, public relations and policy implementation—yet are perceived (and, typically, perceive themselves) to be operating largely within the private sphere. This suggests that modes of representation have greater material effects than empirical ‘realities’.     

Social policy, freedom and individuality

Contemporary social policy lacks an account of the ends it serves. The reason for this is a laissez-faire policy regime where property right overwhelms the right of each individual to be a self-determining person. Laissez-faire policy creates a scarcity of public resources where a universalistic social policy cannot be afforded. A narrowly targeted social policy designed for the poor prevails: it is one where the poor are subject to state coercion. In the more expansive social policy associated with social democracy, the outcome of equality is championed but there is no coherent account of how this end can be reconciled with achieving freedom. The universal idea of the self-determining person is the basis of a rationale for social policy. Thus the end that social policy should serve is the development and sustaining of an individual who has the set of capabilities that he or she requires to be free in the sense of self-determining.     

PUBLIC MANAGEMENT OR PUBLIC ADMINISTRATION?

Abstract: The debate over managerialism has been the most controversial issue in Australian public administration journals in recent years. Although most articles have been critical, there have been responses in favour of the changes by senior public servants. One unfortunate consequence of this debate has been the appearance of a gap between academic public administration and public service practice.
This paper argues that, from several angles, the work now carried out by public services is management rather than administration. It argues that managerialism is a long-overdue reform to a model which has outlived its usefulness. The traditional model of public administration was an irrelevance for many years; it was never efficient or effective and deserved to be replaced. However, public management does not necessarily mean the widespread and uncritical adoption of practices from the private sector. What it should mean is that a distinctive public management needs to be developed. This should take account of the differences between the sectors, but still recognise that the work being done by public servants is now managerial rather than administrative.     

Democratization as an emancipative process: The neglected role of mass motivations

Abstract.  Despite major differences, prevailing approaches in democratization research have one thing in common: they downplay the role of mass attitudes. This article criticizes the neglect of mass attitudes, arguing that it ignores the very essence of democratization. In light of human development theory, democratization is essentially an emancipative process, for it manifests human freedom by empowering people with civil and political rights. From this premise, the author concludes that democratization should be driven by emancipative forces in the population and that these forces are reflected in particular mass attitudes: liberty aspirations. Based on evidence from the Values Surveys, the analyses show that more widespread liberty aspirations facilitate progress and impede regress in the process of democratization. No other indicator – including GDP/capita and social capital – outperforms the effect of liberty aspirations on democratization. The article concludes that human development theory is useful because its emphasis on people empowerment highlights something that has been ignored in the democratization literature: emancipative motivational forces in the population.     

Revenue allocation and the stability of the Nigerian Federation 1960-1980

Since 1960 a succession of different formulae have been used to allocate revenue under Nigeria's constitutions. This article reviews the formulae used and suggests ways in which they have contributed to the stability of the federation. The author then argues that in the 1980's the revenue allocation system should take more account of the need to reduce economic and social disparities in the different geographical areas of the country and so safeguard in the longer term the political stability of this federation.     

Philosophy,Social Hope and Democratic Criticism: Critical Theory for a Global Age

Abstract

The attempt to connect philosophy and social hope has been one of the key distinguishing features of critical theory as a tradition of enquiry. This connection has been questioned forcefully from the perspective of a post-philosophical pragmatism, as articulated by Rorty. In this article I consider two strategies that have been adopted by critical theorists in seeking to reject Rorty's suggestion that we should abandon the attempt to ground social hope in philosophical reason. We consider argumentative strategies of the philosophical anthropologist and of the rational proceduralist. Once the exchanges between Rorty and these two strands of critical theory have been reconstructed and assessed, an alternative perspective emerges. It is argued that philosophical reasoning best helps to sustain social hope in a rapidly changing world when we consider it in terms of the practice of democratic criticism.     

建立社保基金投资管理体系的战略思考

我国社保基金的投资管理一直处于十分混乱状态:沉淀于地方省市的1600多亿缴费余额统账混用,没有统一的投资管理策略,回报率低下,存在巨大的金融风险;“全国社保基金”投资策略不尽合理;中央政府不得不额外每年财政转移予以专项补助。将上述三块资源统筹考虑,提出将账户基金、统筹基金、储备基金分离出来,为其设计了不同的投资策略与制度:账户基金应实施完全的资本市场的投资;储备基金应完全走向国际资本市场;统筹基金增值保值问题是个世界性难题,提出应首先完成省级统筹,实行“三离开”的投资原则,并首次提出须避免和谨防“东亚化”的投资倾向,吸取东亚的教训,应为其设立三个投资管理体系。为配合上述投资体系的建立,提出了调整社保缴费比例的设想,认为这个基本框架既符合国际惯例,又符合具体国情,具有中国特色;既有制度创新,又为未来诸如地方开放地方债市等发展留下了空间;既保持了职工收入替代率没有降低,又增强了社保制度的财政可持续性;同时还减轻了国家的财政负担。     

Prologue: the riddle of race

ABSTRACT

Bernard explores the myth of racelessness as it is currently circulating in American social discourse. The election of the first black American president has unleashed the term across the cultural landscape, from the mainstream media to the classrooms in which she teaches African American literature. Students use the term as a twenty-first-century incarnation of the civil rights-era concept of colour blindness. But racelessness does not represent an aspiration for equality as much as it represents an ambition to turn away from the realities of difference. It is code for a common ambition to avoid the realities of institutional racial inequalities, as well as personal experiences of cultural difference. The myth of racelessness intersects uncomfortably with current academic discourse that promotes the view of race as a social construction. Scientifically proven and irrefutably true, this discourse does not allow any room for the social experience of race and racial difference as it is lived by everyone every day, whether we like it or not. The election of President Barack Obama is a portal on to this current confusion about the concept of race, specifically, and blackness, in particular. Many pundits have speculated that Obama would not have been electable if he had had dark skin, if he were irrefutably black, in colour and culture. The fact that he himself has elected to call himself ‘black’ serves as the platform of Bernard's essay on the case of race in the United States.     

‘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.     

高校旅游管理专业的实习教学探讨

随着我国旅游教育事业的快速发展,旅游管理本科层次的在校生迅速增加,如何确保旅游管理专业本科生的实习质量,提高实习效果,已成为影响旅游管理专业本科生综合素质的主要因素之一。从社会、学校、旅游相关行业和学生自身四个方面系统地分析了制约旅游管理本科生实习效果的原因,并对如何提高旅游专业本科生实习效果的途径进行了有益探讨。     

The persecution of German Romanies: the case of Osnabrück, 1933–46

Studies of racial persecution in Germany, particularly during the Nazi period, now appear on almost a daily basis, so that every victimized minority has received attention. Antisemitism remains the main focus of research but the Romanies have now begun to attract scholars. While historians have studied Jews in virtually every location and over short time periods, they have tended to examine the situation of the Romanies at the national level using a longer time frame, recognizing the continuities of racial persecution that link the Nazi years with the rest of the twentieth century. Panayi brings out these longer-term patterns by focusing on the case of Osnabrück. He begins with an account of the historiography of Romanies at both the local and national level, and contrasts this with the general attention that German history of the first half of the twentieth century, especially the Third Reich, has received. The narrative then moves on to use the limited information available on the Osnabrück Romanies to carry out a detailed examination of the realities of their everyday life and the attitudes of the authorities towards them in the town between 1933 and 1946. Panayi’s study falls into the German social history approach of Alltagsgeschichte, which uses the specific to draw out the realities of the general national picture.     

Judicial Use of Foreign Law in Human Rights Cases: Illegitimate and Unacceptable Practice?

The use of foreign law by national courts when deciding cases that concern fundamental rights has provoked a debate on the legitimacy of the judiciary to resort to this practice. Indeed, many arguments have been made by legal scholars to support the proposition that judges should not take account of unincorporated international human rights instruments or the decisions of foreign courts when they decide cases that concern fundamental rights. This article puts these arguments to scrutiny, and discusses whether this judicial practice should be resorted to.     

Alasdair MacIntyre: Social Practices, Marxism and Ethical Anti-Capitalism

Alasdair MacIntyre's concept of social practice sits at the core of his account of the virtue-fostering forms of resistance to capitalism, liberalism and the modern (un)democratic state. However, while this concept was articulated, in part, as a response to perceived weaknesses with Marx's analysis of working-class revolutionary praxis, and although MacIntyre has criticised Marx for the paucity of his theorisation of such practice, he has himself only gestured towards concrete instances of his alternative. This essay engages with one of these examples: MacIntyre's suggestion that Welsh mining communities in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries should be numbered among those modern communities within which the virtues have flourished. I explore some of the ramifications of this example for MacIntyre's broader ethical theory through the lens of a discussion of the continuities and breaks between his youthful Marxism and his more mature thought. I suggest that this example problematises his concept of practice in a way that implies a space for reconciliation between his mature thought and his earlier Marxism.     

‘Walking in two worlds’: A qualitative review of income management in Cape York

The Cape York Welfare Reform (CYWR) initiative aims to reduce ‘passive dependence’ on welfare and restore ‘positive social norms’ to revitalise cultural and social networks and support economic engagement in Indigenous communities in the Cape York Region of Australia. Critics of the initiative and, in particular, its income management (IM) policies have associated it with a broader neoliberal reform agenda that delineates social ‘problems’ from their historical and structural context. This paper discusses key qualitative findings from a strategic review of CYWR, paying particular attention to the ways in which Cape York IM (CYIM) straddles both Indigenous and settler social norms, while perpetuating neoliberal conceptualisations of welfare ‘dependency’. We situate these findings within the existing literature on Australia's other IM models and also consider them in relation to subsequent government responses to the review and associated policies. We argue that CYIM represents a unique initiative, the subtle nuances of which have been largely ignored or misunderstood by critics. Further, we conclude that any extension or revision of this initiative should be considered with respect to deep and wide-ranging consultation of the Indigenous communities subject to CYWR. However, such consultation has not been the standard practice in Australian contexts.     

The ‘dialectical’ theory of conservatism

ABSTRACT

Recently, James Alexander has proposed a ‘dialectical definition’ of conservatism which, he believes, goes beyond ‘dispositional’ definitions, such as those proposed by Brennan and Hamlin, and by Martin Beckstein, which are ‘incomplete’.¹ Alexander argues that, by focusing on conservative responses to ‘ruptures’ of continuity, his expanded account exposes the ‘fundamentally contradictory’ nature of conservative thought.² This article offers a critique of Alexander’s ‘dialectical definition’ of conservatism, highlighting its inconsistency with the ideological content long agreed by conservative political thinkers, and with the historical realities of conservative political practice. But it also shows that there is a valuable and rightful place for a political ‘dialectic’ as part of a theory of conservatism that is more consistent with the history of conservative thought and practice. It is a dialectic with many historical precedents in political theory, two of which are examined in detail: (1) the earliest, found in Plato’s Statesman; and (2) an innovative and particularly useful formulation of it to be found in the political philosophy of R. G. Collingwood.