Art Attacks

Far from being a matter incidental to policy, the attack on art bespeaks a more generalizable array of tactics for managing populations, while the notion that art itself bears the agency to launch an offensive, references far greater political stakes than are conventionally attributed to the esthetic domain. Policy-whether it be fiscal, domestic, military or cultural, aspires to a concrete performativity. The various government positions that authorize official pronouncements desire their words to fulfill the action they seek in the world. Even where such public pronouncements in the role of policy lack the force of law, they seek compellence by their efforts to render to world just as they say so. As arts policy makes itself increasingly manifest, its greatest ambition will be to transform policy matters from an account of what is done to us, to one that traces how artists make themselves and their worlds.     

Der Europ?ische Gerichtshof als Motor der Integration: Eine akteursbezogene Erkl?rung

For nearly five decades, the European Court of Justice (ECJ) has developed a decisively pro-European case law and has become the ??engine of integration??. Institutional explanations shed light on the Court??s room for manoevre. They have to be complemented by actor-centered explanations that shed light on the judges?? motives of action. The explanation offered by the following paper is unfolded in two steps. In the first one, the article describes idiosyncrasies of the European law discourse that already shaped the judges before they were appointed. The analysis of the idiosyncrasies corresponds to a scepticism towards the idea of national sovereignty, a belief in the necessity of creative and idealist, law-augmenting judges and a dominance of output-oriented legitimization strategies. In a second step, the article shows that in the sociological sense the ECJ judges constitute a group. While the individual judges share an understanding of the aims and functions of European law, the group develops its own identity and grants status to those who perform successful actions with respect to the common integration agenda. This explanation is more realistic than ??rational choice?? explanations which point to the direct and personal benefits that judges derive from their pro-European case law.     

South Africa: capital accumulation and violence

This article analyses the conditions of capital accumulation in South Africa, and seeks to explain the authoritarian and racially discriminatory features of the South African social structure in terms of (a) the specific historical processes of change (mercantile colonial conquest, primitive accumulation in mining and farming) and (b) the specific features of contemporary capitalism, notably the capital-intensive structure of industry. The authoritarianism embodied, for example, in the extra-economic coercion of black labour is seen as reflecting the circumstances of the struggle between capital and labour under conditions where capital-labour contradictions exist alongside the contradiction between South African capitalism and the ‘dependent’ societies it has preserved/recreated. The implications of this situation for strategies of socialist change are briefly evaluated.     

基础设施网络整合与跨区域治理——“哈大齐”工业走廊与松花江水污染案例分析

在全球化和信息化背景下,区域管理正在从传统的都市区(Metropolitan)管理过渡到巨型都市区(Megapolitan)或者城市走廊(City Corridor)的管理.从社会技术系统(Societal-techno System)视角,将区域管理作为一个涉众系统(Multi-actor System)考虑,研究物理系统与社会网络之间的交互作用,通过研究基础设施网络和跨区域治理关系,探索涉众系统情境下的政策制定模型.采用理论分析和案例研究相结合的方法,利用哈大齐工业走廊案例和松花江水污染案例进行了研究.结果发现,基础设施整合具有嵌入性特征;基础设施整合和专业化分工网络的形成,是跨区域治理的基础,所形成的城市网络,其核心功能体现在"分散的集中化"上,以保证有效的基础设施整合、分工网络的形成和提供高级生产者服务;在跨区域治理政策制定中,应该采用自上而下和自下而上组合的基于规则和过程的涉众情境下的政策制定过程,以实现社会、政府和市场之间的均衡.     

Globalization and institutional competitiveness

Only dead institutions do not change and only rarely do institutions change by themselves. To maintain performing institutions takes institutional entrepreneurs who are willing to take risks and who possess the capacity and the talent to innovate. A regulation discourse, in contrast to a marketization discourse, would not picture the relationship between globalization and institutional change as a deterministic one. Rather, it would expect that all kinds of actors play a large number of different roles in the course of ongoing institutional change. The result of such complex institutional change, at the level of welfare states, multinational businesses, public administration, and training systems, to mention just a few of the empirical areas covered in this special issue, cannot be fully understood by applying an overly rigid, static, and dualistic approach to modern capitalist economies. The concept of institutional competitiveness, on the contrary, allows for institutional entrepreneurship and institutional hybrids constituting pulsating polities.