The origins of severance pay in unemployment compensation: a comparative analysis

ABSTRACT

This article contributes to an under-developed field in the social policy literature through an analysis of the origins of severance pay (SP)/redundancy pay schemes and, more specifically, their first designs in nine countries—Canada, the United Kingdom, Germany, Austria, France, Italy, Sweden, Spain, and Portugal. It has two objectives: first, to identify the key actors who shaped the design of the first SP schemes; second, to explain variations in terms of their mode of regulation, generosity and coverage. By building on the state-centric and power-resource perspectives, it identifies the conditions under which the state had an autonomous role vis-à-vis organized labour in SP reforms and the circumstances under which organized labour was the main actor. When the state was the key actor, it preferred legislation for the regulation of SP either to legitimize its apparatus in a ‘revolutionary’/‘potentially revolutionary’ context or to facilitate structural transformations of the economy in a ‘reformist’ context. When organized labour was the key actor, its preference was to regulate SP through ‘only collective bargaining’ or ‘legislation’, subject to the degree of unionization. Lastly, the paper argues that key actors (the state or organized labour) took into account the distributive structure of existing UI schemes when designing the coverage and generosity structure of the first SP schemes during the post-war era.     

“Gendering” European security: policy changes,reform coalitions and opposition in the OSCE

The Organisation for Security and Co-operation in Europe (OSCE) has rarely been considered in scholarship on gender and security, even though it was one of the regional security organisations whose gender policy predated the United Nations Security Council’s call for more international attention to issues related to women, peace and security in October 2000. Based on an analysis of official OSCE documents and on semi-structured interviews, we trace the integration of gender issues in the OSCE and explore the rationale behind and the challenges associated with it. We identify two phases of gender policy change in the OSCE and show how the integration of UNSCR 1325 brought about an expansion of OSCE gender policy from an exclusive focus on “soft” security issues towards increased inclusion of gender in the area of “hard” security. Drawing on historical and feminist institutionalism, we argue that reform coalitions were crucial for the policy changes in the OSCE but that they encountered institutional and ideational barriers, which hampered implementation of the gender policy. In light of rising opposition, our analysis warns of a backlash that might jeopardise current achievements.     

A tale in stone and bronze: old/new strategies for political mobilization in the Republic of Macedonia

The redesign of Skopje’s main square and the wider central area in the last six years has been a top priority of the Macedonian government. The project, called Skopje 2014, provoked intense domestic debate and controversy as well as international reaction and concern. Although officials say that project’s aim is to unify ethnic Macedonians, it has produced several lines of political, intra-ethnic/interethnic as well as intra-cultural/intercultural divisions in the fragile Macedonian society. The aim of the paper is to offer reflections about its mobilizing potential among ethnic Macedonians in a set of social, economic, and political contexts. In that sense, four areas of mobilization are suggested: (1) around new identity markers; (2) around the name dispute and against threats (real or imagined) to the ethnic and national identity; (3) against the internal Other, that is, the ethnic Albanian community, as well as critics of these identity politics; and (4) in reaction to the global financial crisis and problems within the EU.     

‘Whichever way you turn,there is the face of God’ diaspora,memory, and historiography from the margin in The Moor’s Account by Laila Lalami

In The Moor’s Account, Laila Lalami dares to dust off the archive of official history that passed over the testimonies of a Moroccan slave during the Discovery Age. This paper explores the way the slave capitalizes on historiography to reconstruct the Western monolithic history. In so doing, the re-constructor’s memory performs a number of roles. It registers the history of the European conquest of La Florida using micro narrative frameworks that highlight salient differences from the official record. Besides, the diasporic memory that the present novel advocates has the intention to mark a difference of the silenced subjectivity from the supremacist histories through a transnational matching of homeland with diaspora. This transnationalism is coupled with a look forward to circumvent the essentialism implied in the monologic narratives. In shuttling between the past, present, and future, memory espouses cosmopolitanism as an alternative to the fundamentalism which threatens people’s cultural diversity.     

Memory and forgetting: examining the treatment of traumatic historical memory in Grave of the Fireflies and The Wind Rises

Within Japanese popular culture, manga and anime have played a significant role in mediating responses to the outcome of the Pacific War. Miyazaki Hayao's (possibly) final feature-length film, The Wind Rises, has been an important addition to the preceding body of popular media ‘texts’ that raise such themes. This article aims to address the question of how far cinematic animation can reasonably be obliged to follow the kinds of historiographical concerns that inevitably arise when engaging with Japan's militarist past. To answer this question, considerable space is devoted to examining the historical context of what others have done in the post-war period and integrate that commentary into an analysis of how the works of Takahata Isao and Miyazaki Hayao fit amongst a succession of creative works that have been co-opted in the reshaping of historical perceptions of the Japanese at war amongst the Japanese themselves. This will also require some incidental discussion of methodological issues that arise when dealing with such cases as vehicles for understanding transformations in historical consciousness. Ultimately it is argued that Miyazaki does indeed make an important contribution to the commentary on the Japanese war experience, although it must, perhaps unavoidably, be on highly personal terms so far as The Wind Rises is concerned.     

Black geographies of struggle and pleasure in Nona Faustine’s White Shoes

In Nona Faustine’s photo series of self-portraits, White Shoes, the artist’s body becomes the agent in exposing the instability of racialized historical geography. Faustine revisits New York City’s landmarks to address what is missing or made invisible: a slave ship, a fugitive woman’s rebirth, or African burial grounds. Making herself visible where she is supposed to remain invisible, she highlights the unacknowledged connection between national wealth, nationalism, geography, and black labor. She discloses the topography of her travels as a changeable terrain, where one slips from the national iconic to ambiguous and finally, to the sacred. I suggest that Faustine doesn’t seek to democratize the extant historical maps, but to shift the terms of reading the city’s geography. She lifts the boundaries between the polarized pathways of knowing – the secularized and the sacred, the living and the dead, the verifiable and the missing. This shift is also made possible by the medium of photography and a feminist turn towards pleasures in one’s body. As Faustine comes to terms with the psychic and cultural inheritance of the diaspora, she moves from the collective body of pain towards black women’s pleasure in their own bodies without purging the history of sexual trauma.     

隐私的历史考察和思考

隐私是一个动态、发展的概念,其内容不是一成不变的,而是随着社会政治、经济、文化的发展和人们隐私意识的提高,其内涵不断丰富,外延不断扩展。政治上,公私领域的划分是其存在和发展的前提;经济上,生产力和科学技术的发展为其存在和发展提供了物质基础;心理上,人们对本能、自我保护和自我实现的需要为其存在和发展创造了动力;文化上,不同的文化传统使其存在和发展更具多样性。隐私是一种事实状态,不等同于隐私权的客体,更不等同于隐私权。     

论人工智能赋值国家治理:方法、视角与维度

赋值是智能政治学的重要研究课题,赋值研究是智能政治学的重要分析方法.人工智能赋值国家治理,从分析视角来看,表现为人工智能科学、人工智能技术、人工智能形态和人工智能体对国家治理的多重赋值和多源性影响作用.从分析维度来讲,表现为人工智能从赋益、赋义、赋能、赋权、赋则和赋责等多维度影响作用或赋值国家治理,甚至推动国家治理从"...     

论历史文献中的石刻文献

自殷商时代算起,到清代末年为止,我国古代石刻文献的制作已有三千多年的历史。石刻文献中蕴藏着丰富的原始资料,具有极高的学术价值。利用石刻文献,既可以补充传世文献的缺略,又可以订正传世文献的讹误。中国的石刻文献,主要有灵石刻辞、摩崖刻辞、器物刻辞、墓葬刻辞等四个来源。石刻文献的分类工作,应本着“辨章学术、考镜源流”的原则,类目体系的设置应同时具有两方面的作用:一是能够全面而又准确地反映出石刻文献本身所具有的学术价值,二是能够便于人们方便快捷而又充分有效地利用这些资料来从事研究工作。在研究石刻文献的过程中,既要阐释石刻文献的思想内容,也要揭示石刻文献的形制特征与行文惯例。     

乡土文学的“大题目“:略论20年代乡土文学对鲁迅的继承

２０年代乡土小说主流地位的确立和基本特征的形成,一个重要的原因在于它紧紧抓住了改造国民性文化批判的大题目。这个大题目的抓取和展开是在鲁迅的影响下进行的,具体表现于题材和主题的转换,文化视界的拓展,国民心态的揭示,民俗文化的批判等四个方面。