新时代“工会坚持自觉接受党的领导”再探析

党的十八大以来,习近平同志反复强调：“中国共产党的领导是中国特色社会主义最本质的特 征。”“坚持党的领导”作为习近平新时代中国特色社会主义思想的重要内容之一,有着重要指导意义,为新 时代工运事业指明了方向。工会为什么要坚持党的领导,可以从理论、历史和现实三个视角加以考察分析;工 会怎样坚持党的领导,则需要辩证地处理好坚持党对工会的领导与工会独立自主地开展工作之间的关系,处理 好工会组织“公转”与“自转”的关系。     

Senkt New Public Management die Verwaltungsausgaben in den Schweizer Kantonen? Eine empirische Analyse über zwei Dekaden

In light of the growing public spending in many regions of the world, this study scrutinizes relevant determinants of core public administration expenditure at the cantonal level in Switzerland, focusing particularly on New Public Management (NPM) reforms. The empirical study comprises all 26 cantons in the period from 1993 through 2014 and uses both cross‐sectional and longitudinal analytical methods. In addition to NPM, we control for various variables related to political parties, institutions, socioeconomics and culture. The results show no clear relationship between NPM reforms and expenditure, although such reforms were often intended to cut costs. Our explanation for this finding is that NPM as a concept is rather inconsistent. Various control variables are either positively or negatively related with expenditure. All in all, our findings suggest that public expenditure is still mostly determined by politics and can only be influenced by administrative reforms within certain narrow limits.     

A Comparative Study of Denmark and New Zealand’s National Health Targets

This paper investigates the influence of nationally imposed health targets on current management control practices in New Zealand and Denmark. It reveals how variants of New Public Management (NPM), arising from specific historical socio-political contexts, rise to the challenge of national differences. The study finds that both nations are challenged to ensure data registration procedures produce valid and comparable performance measures. Denmark’s reliance on a single efficiency measure of health sector performance reflects a historic socio-political context that reduces the feasibility of additional measures whereas New Zealand’s context enables the government to impose a more extensive range of health targets.     

Public Services after Austerity: Zombies,Suez or Collaboration?

Public services—in the UK and elsewhere—are under considerable pressure, not just from austerity, but also from a variety of social, demographic and technological changes (in effect ‘austerity plus’). In this context, three broad options are open to policy‐makers: continue with tried‐and‐tested approaches while spending less money, which in the UK means a reliance on ‘New Public Management’ (NPM); withdraw completely from certain public services; or develop new approaches to public administration. We argue that all of these approaches have been attempted in recent years, but it is the final option that is most interesting and potentially the most beneficial. In this article, we examine experiments with these new approaches in responding to ‘austerity plus’. In particular, we examine various attempts at ‘collaboration’ in public services and discuss the risks associated with them. We conclude by setting out the extent to which policy‐makers have moved beyond NPM and suggesting some of the benefits that this could bring.     

“Value Grabbing”: A Political Ecology of Rent

This paper aims to redress the under-appreciated significance of rent for political ecological analysis. We introduce the notion of value grabbing, defined as the appropriation of (surplus) value through rent. A concept that is analytically distinct from accumulation, rent is both a social relation and a distributional process that is increasingly central to the reproduction of contemporary capitalism. Emphasis is placed on the “grabbing” of value in order to shed light on the processes at work by which surplus value is distributed unevenly between different classes and fractions of classes. A focus on rent within political ecology, we argue, can help us distinguish between two organically related but analytically distinct “moments”: (a) the creation of property rights that establish rent relations and (b) the struggle over the appropriation and distribution of surplus value generated by the rent relation itself. We explore some of the implications of this perspective for understanding new forms of socio-ecological struggles and their varied relations to the state. We maintain that a value-grabbing perspective has far-reaching consequences for political ecology, as it provides a sharp conceptual tool for situating a wide range of socio-ecological conflicts and movements as class struggles over value appropriation and distribution.     

Rhetorical citizenship: studying the discursive crafting and enactment of citizenship

This article argues for the relevance of a rhetorical approach to the study of citizenship, proposing the concept of rhetorical citizenship as a term for a fourth dimension of citizenship and as a scholarly approach to the topic in addition to the dimensions of status, rights, and identity commonly recognized in the literature. We show how this view aligns with current views of the multidi Citizenship Studies mensionality of citizenship, explain our use of the term rhetoric, and illustrate the usefulness of a rhetorical approach in two examples. In close textual readings both examples – one vernacular, one elite – are shown to discursively craft and enact different notions of citizenship vis-a-vis the European refugee crisis. We conclude that a rhetorical perspective on public civic discourse is useful in virtue of its close attention to discursive creativity as well as to textual properties that may significantly, but often implicitly, affect citizens’ understanding of their own role in the polity, and further because it recognizes deep differences as inevitable while valorizing discourse across them.     

How China’s New Silk Road Threatens European Trade

For all the promises of mutually beneficial cooperation, Chinese policy documents about the New Silk Road, also called ‘One Belt, One Road’, mostly testify to a strong ambition to unlock foreign markets and support domestic firms in taking on foreign competitors. This confirms China’s shift from defensive mercantilism, which aims to protect the home market, towards offensive mercantilism, which seeks to gain market shares abroad. In a context of global economic stagnation, this comes as a major challenge to Europe. As China’s market share grows spectacularly in countries along the New Silk Road, key European member states have both lost market shares and even seen their exports shrink in absolute terms.     

The Blue (White and Red) Orchestra: a soundtrack for the country that never was

The aim of the paper is to go beyond the commonly accepted view of Sarajevo’s Plavi orkestar (The Blue Orchestra) as the 1980s “teen pop-rock sensation” and illuminate the less conspicuous, but nevertheless crucial, political dimension of the band’s music and visual aesthetics. This will be done by discussing several “pieces of the puzzle” essential to understanding the background to and motivations behind Plavi orkestar’s political engagement in the second half of the 1980s: (1) the “Sarajevo factor;” (2) the Sarajevo Pop-rock School and the New Primitives “poetics of the local;” (3) the generational Yugoslavism; (4) the New Partisans “poetics of the patriotic;” and (5) the post-New Partisans “hippie ethos.” The concluding section of the paper will reflect on Plavi orkestar’s resurgence in 1998 and explore the question of the band’s continuing resonance within the post-Yugoslav and post-socialist contexts. An argument underlying the discussion of all of these elements is that Plavi orkestar’s Yugoslavism of the 1980s is best understood as a soundtrack for the country that never was (i.e. a popular-cultural expression of what, from the viewpoint of a particular generational cohort and its location in the “Yugoslav socialist universe,” the community they thought of as their own ought to have been but never really was), and that the current value of this soundtrack lies in offering not only a particular window into the pre-post-socialist past but also in being a symbolic referent for a certain kind of retrospective utopia that gauges the realities of the post-socialist – that is, neo-liberal capitalist – present and, in so doing, figures as a “normative compass” for the life of dignified existence.     

LIP: a workers’ community facing globalization

The aim of this article is to show how at the beginning of the 1970s a community of workers in Besançon in France reacted to globalization. It deals with the culture of the working class in a French province, the level of organization of the community and how it reacted when ‘its’ factory was taken over by a multinational company. In seeking to understand this transformation and how the workers perceived it, it is crucial to investigate the changing role of the state. All these aspects will be developed in the sections below with the aim of better understanding the meaning of the strategy of workers’ resistance in the face of a change that affected the community, the sector of production, the region and, ultimately, the working class within the Western societies.     

Approaching the socialist factory and its workforce: considerations from fieldwork in (former) Yugoslavia

The socialist factory, as the ‘incubator’ of the new socialist (wo)man, is a productive entry point for the study of socialist modernization and its contradictions. By outlining some theoretical and methodological insights gathered through field-research in factories in former Yugoslavia, we seek to connect the state of labour history in the Balkans to recent breakthroughs made by labour historians of other socialist countries. The first part of this article sketches some of the specificities of the Yugoslav self-managed factory and its heterogeneous workforce. It presents the ambiguous relationship between workers and the factory and demonstrates the variety of life trajectories for workers in Yugoslav state-socialism (from model communists to alienated workers). The second part engages with the available sources for conducting research inside and outside the factory advocating an approach which combines factory and local archives, print media and oral history.