Integration or Black Power?

Integration politics experienced a postcolonial crisis in the late 1960s. This was a crisis driven by the simultaneous and inter‐related eruption of Powellism and Black Power. This article uses the crisis of integration politics to show the Powellite conjuncture from its other side, as it played out in the reconstitution of black British politics. It shows how black activists responded to the rise of Powellism by demanding that the politics of integration be either abandoned or reframed, to more fully shake out the colonial inheritances that lurked within it. The integration proposed by the postwar project of race relations was problematic from its inception; Black Power used Powell's intervention to expose these problems and demand change.     

Negotiating a New Social Contract for Work: An Online,Distributed Approach

A massive open online course (MOOC) entitled “Shaping the Future of Work” (offered through MITx, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology's online learning division) has been the context for a multiparty simulation designed to produce classroom negotiation results that will have social impacts. After running the course in the MOOC context three times and in face‐to‐face settings eight times, we noticed that key themes emerged. Participants have brought their own workforce perspectives to their simulation roles as employers, worker representatives, elected officials, and educators. They have called for reciprocal agreements centered on fair treatment and representation in the workplace, improved organizational performance, investments in skills and capabilities, aligned rewards and benefits for workers, and work–life balance in communities. We continue to use the simulation in the classroom and are exploring ways to expand its use. In the meantime, in this article, we discuss how the insights gleaned from this simulation could be used to crystallize and advance a new social contract at a time when the public policies, institutions, and organizational practices governing employment relations have not kept up with the dramatic changes taking place in the workforce, nature of work, and overall economy.     

Looking beyond the economy: Pussy Riot and the Kremlin's voting coalition

The arrest of the protest punk band Pussy Riot (PR) in March 2012 and the subsequent prosecution of three band members pose a significant puzzle for political science. Although PR's performances presented a coherent alternative to the Putin regime's image of Russian reality, it was unlikely that the discordant music and crude lyrics of their art protest would inspire Russian society to take to the streets. Yet, the regime mounted a very visible prosecution against the three young women. We argue that the trial marked a shift in the Kremlin's strategy to shape state–society relations. In the face of declining economic conditions and social unrest, the PR trial encapsulated the Kremlin's renewed focus on three related mechanisms to insure social support: coercion, alliance building, and symbolic politics. The PR trial afforded the Kremlin an important opportunity to simultaneously redefine its loyal constituency, secure the Church–state relationship, and stigmatize the opposition.     

Workers,state, and development in Brazil: powers of labour,chains of value

This paper examines the significance of landscape and memory in peasant–state relations in Eritrea since independence in the early 1990s. During this period, people were being resettled around cultivable land in the western lowlands as a means of recuperating land and society after prolonged warfare. Projects of statemaking in Eritrea, involving both refugee resettlement and agrarian development, have drawn from a national narrative of lost fertility and deforestation caused by generations of colonial extraction and violence. This paper explores how shared memories of environmental change, an ecological nostalgia, become a means through which people from diverse ethno-linguistic, religious, and regional backgrounds come together to imagine a collective future based in creating livelihood from farm land. However, as people reclaim remembered landscapes and face the challenges of rebuilding communities and livelihoods during a time of tense political and economic change, their ideas of a shared future diverge from state-led projects of nation-building. This article argues that ecological nostalgia legitimises state interventions into rural livelihoods but also provides a means for people to speak and critique the state under conditions of increasing fear and silencing.     

两岸投资争端解决机制的制度创新及其完善

投资争端解决机制是《海峡两岸投资保障和促进协议》（简称《两岸投资协议》）中体现两岸特色的重要制度创新之一。相较于传统双边投资协议中的投资争端解决机制而言,两岸投资争端解决机制除了引入两岸私人投资争端解决方式,还规定了投资者与投资所在地一方投资争端的协调、协处和调解等多元化机制,实现了单方规定的协议化和国际实践的两岸化,从而有效降低了两岸投资争端的“泛政治化”风险。未来,应进一步完善两岸投资补偿争端的调解程序,确保调解协议的法律约束力和执行力。     

连横《台湾通史》论析：基于学术史的考察

连横一生以搜集、记录、整理、保存、研究台湾历史和文化为职志,著述颇丰,尤以《台湾通史》名世。纵观《台湾通史》的出版史和相关研究的学术史,实与近代以来中国历史进程相契合,其独特的学术价值和现实意义也逐步彰显。20世纪90年代以来,海峡两岸的《台湾通史》研究均进入新的发展阶段,无论视角还是视野、方法还是理论,特别是在学术性或学理性上,都有显著的推进和拓展。     

Wisconsin Institutionalism: John R. Commons and His Students

This paper seeks to provide a close examination of the nature and history of the institutional economics that developed at the University of Wisconsin. There has been a significant amount of work done on the thinking of John R. Commons, but much less on the history of Wisconsin institutionalism more generally. The paper proceeds through an examination of the development of the Department of Economics at Wisconsin from the time of the hiring of Richard T. Ely in 1892; the faculty hired to the Department from the early 1900s through to Commons's retirement in 1933; the program of instruction offered, particularly in the late 1920s when the full complement of institutionalist faculty were present; and the areas of study and later careers of Commons's graduate students. It is argued that although Ely played a role in the development of Wisconsin institutionalism, it was Commons who became the center of graduate student work, and that the Department only took on its decidedly institutionalist character after the hiring of Commons and a number of his students as faculty. The program of study in the late 1920s was very heavily institutionalist in character with Commons providing a core course on value and valuation, and a notable emphasis in the fields of public utilities, labor economics, and statistics. Very little instruction was provided in neoclassical theory. Many of Commons's students went on to notable careers in the academic world or public service or both. Wisconsin students were heavily involved in labor legislation issues, and in the development and administration of social security. But a number of Commons's students went into academic careers, and many produced large numbers of PhD students themselves. The decline of Wisconsin-style institutionalism after World War II was not, as has been suggested, a result of Commons's students moving largely into non-academic careers, but of many other factors, including the rise of Keynesian economics, and the migration of what had been much of Wisconsin institutionalism into new schools of industrial relations.     

Dismissal of strikers and industrial disputes: the 1985–1987 strike and mass sackings at Silentnight

The 1985–1987 dispute at Silentnight bed factories in the north of England was an exceptionally long and bitter strike, lasting for 20 months from June 1985 until February 1987. A total of 346 workers were sacked for taking part in the strike, which gained a high profile with remarkable levels of support and solidarity action, largely due to its emblematic status as an extreme example of punitive treatment of workers taking industrial action in the period immediately following the defeat of the miners in 1984/1985. Workers took lawful strike action in 1985 over the non-implementation of agreed pay rises and compulsory redundancies counter to an existing agreement between the firm and the union, with the company responding to the dispute with mass dismissals. Pickets were maintained at the two factories in question for nearly two years, with the strikers gaining wide-ranging support from across the labour movement, but the company stood firm against the dismissed strikers who were ultimately defeated. Based on archival research and interviews with participants in the strike, the article analyses in detail how the dispute was sustained for so long, the legal context and the weakness of legal protections for strikers in the period, and the widespread political mobilisation and networks of support and solidarity that arose around the strike and in opposition to the policies of the Conservative government of the day.     

“We feel that our strength is on the factory floor”: Dualism,shop-floor power,and labor law reform in late apartheid South Africa

ABSTRACT

This article explores the transformation of South African labor relations during the 1980s. In 1979, prompted by new shop-floor militancy, the Wiehahn Commission recommended that black workers, previously excluded from state labor machinery, be permitted to join recognized trade unions. Most discussions of this shift in apartheid labor relations focus on the ensuing debate within the black unions, torn between preserving their independence or securing state legitimation. This article looks instead at the related debate about ‘levels of bargaining’: should emergent black unions demand to negotiate at the factory level, where they had secured shop-floor strength through organizing and democratic practice, or pursue the benefits of the corporatist bargaining structures that had long excluded them and had privileged white workers? The eventual drift towards corporatism, I argue, imprinted the character of the South African labor movement into the post-apartheid era. An understandable desire to wield influence at the level of the national political economy eroded the tradition of workers’ control, shop floor democracy, and struggle unionism that black unions had forged during the 1970s and 1980s.     

Labor radicalism and the local politics of Chinese exclusion: Mayor Jacob Weisbach and the Tacoma Chinese expulsion of 1885

ABSTRACT

The 1885 Chinese expulsion from Tacoma, Washington Territory highlights the importance of local political economy in shaping how a wider anti-Chinese movement played out in a particular community. Tacoma was a newly emerging city where white residents felt the threat of corporate domination in the form of the Northern Pacific Railroad. In this context, the city’s German immigrant mayor, Jacob Weisbach, could draw upon his longstanding labor radicalism to mobilize a broad anti-Chinese coalition that blurred the divide between white workers and the local business class. The result was the forceful removal of Chinese residents following a year-long campaign that culminated in mob action and became known as the ‘Tacoma Method’. This local violence in turn fed into ongoing national efforts to secure Chinese exclusion. Tacoma’s Chinese expulsion illustrates how radical labor traditions could be turned, under particular conditions, to the politics of racial repression even as the proponents of expulsion framed their efforts in terms of an egalitarian and democratic agenda. The participation of the Knights of Labor and other labor radicals in a politics exemplified by the Tacoma Method was accordingly tied to the larger racialized American state-building project as it unfolded in the late 19th Century.