The Winter of Discontent Thirty Years On

Thirty years on, and in the context of our own crisis, it is perhaps useful to take stock of the last Winter of Discontent. The industrial strife that beset the Callaghan government in the winter of 1978/79 was seen at the time as a key factor in Labour's defeat in the general election of 1979; but its legacy is considerable and its significance enduring. These four themed essays come from a public seminar at the British Academy to mark the thirtieth anniversary of the Winter of Discontent. Colin Hay argues that the Winter of Discontent was, in key respects, a manufactured crisis lived, experienced and responded to through a very particular construction of the events that is difficult to reconcile with the evidence itself. Reponses by Lords Baker, Lea and Lipsey follow and the section concludes with a transcribed and edited version of the lively discussion which ensued.     

金融危机中的佛教担当

在金融危机愈演愈烈之时,2009年春节佛教寺院相对于往年香火更旺。经济危机下的中国人也需要宗教的抚慰。佛教可以从教义、修持、仪轨和慈善活动等方面发挥作用,帮助人们化解因金融危机而造成的精神压力和心理问题,促进社会的稳定与和谐发展。     

高校学生工作新闻发言人危机处理的媒体应对策略

近年来,高校危机事件频发,引起了社会各方的广泛关注。危机事件如果处理不当,高校多年来建立起来的良好形象会因此受到重创。高校学生工作新闻发言人要掌控学生工作条线的危机事件,谙熟新闻媒体建构与再现危机事件的基本原理与方法,在集体把关的基础上采取相应的危机处理与媒体应对策略。     

金融危机下中东欧转型模式再评估

新兴市场国家经济与政治体制转型是转型问题研究的焦点,而中东欧国家的转型模式也作为一个范例持续得到来自理论和实证研究上的关注.本研究以金融危机发生、演化为背景,旨在检测金融危机背景下中东欧国家的整体经济表现与金融市场表现,并通过分析对国际学术界公认的"转型优等生"中东欧国家的转型模式进行再评估和反思.     

Privatised Keynesianism: An Unacknowledged Policy Regime

There have now been two successive policy regimes since the Second World War that have temporarily succeeded in reconciling the uncertainties and instabilities of a capitalist economy with democracy's need for stability for people's lives and capitalism's own need for confident mass consumers. The first of these was the system of public demand management generally known as Keynesianism. The second was not, as has often been thought, a neo-liberal turn to pure markets, but a system of markets alongside extensive housing and other debt among low- and medium-income people linked to unregulated derivatives markets. It was a form of privatised Keynesianism. This combination reconciled capitalism's problem, but in a way that eventually proved unsustainable. After its collapse there is debate over what will succeed it. Most likely is an attempt to re-create it on a basis of corporate social responsibility.     

Headlong into the Polanyian Dilemma: The Impact of Middle-Class Moral Panic on the British Government's Response to the Sub-prime Crisis

This article focuses on the discursive construction in Britain of a middle-class moral panic occasioned by the distress caused to self-styled 'responsible mortgage borrowers' by falling house prices. In the context of the move towards asset-based welfare the sub-prime crisis manifested itself most obviously in the popular consciousness as a threat to housing market wealth. The Labour government used the political space opened up by the narrative of middle-class moral panic in order to protect banks' balance sheets from the consequences of their own failed investments in mortgage-backed securities. The ensuing arrangements immunised banks from the implications of market self-regulation in the first-phase response to the sub-prime crisis while simultaneously allowing them to continue to impose the experience of market self-regulation on their customers. An increasingly asymmetric approach to banking regulation has arisen analogous to that which Karl Polanyi associated with the contradictory co-existence of market and non-market forms.     

金融危机中避免失业减少裁员之策——德国的对策

金融危机席卷全球,各国面临着同样的问题:经济萎缩,产量下滑,就业困难。德国劳动法框架内避免或者减少裁员的做法主要是:在工作量减少时,采取放弃加班,减少使用劳务派遣工,消耗时间账户的盈余,预支年休假,实行短时工作制或者减时减薪等措施。在无法避免裁员时,通过制定"社会计划",给予失业金救济金,以减少对员工的不利影响。     

美国工会应对经济危机的政策措施及启示

经济危机给美国工人阶级带来重大影响。美国工会视危机为创新工会工作和发展工会的大好时机,积极从国家层面和地区层面上采取措施积极应对经济危机以保护工人权益,虽然在宏观上收效甚微,但是其在地区层面上采取的策略和方法收效较好,值得我国工会借鉴。     

Dodging the bullet: How crises trigger technocrat‐led governments

Governments led by nonpartisan, ‘technocratic’ prime ministers are a rare phenomenon in parliamentary democracies, but have become more frequent since the late 1980s. This article focuses on the factors that lead to the formation of such cabinets. It posits that parliamentary parties with the chance to win the prime ministerial post will only relinquish it during political and economic crises that drastically increase the electoral costs of ruling and limit policy returns from governing. Statistical analyses of 469 government formations in 29 European democracies between 1977 and 2013 suggest that political scandals and economic recessions are major drivers of the occurrence of technocratic prime ministers. Meanwhile, neither presidential powers nor party system fragmentation and polarisation have any independent effect. The findings suggest that parties strategically choose technocrat‐led governments to shift blame and re‐establish their credibility and that of their policies in the face of crises that de‐legitimise their rule.     

Fiscal Policy Learning from Crisis: Comparative Analysis of the Baltic Countries

The experience of a major crisis is often expected to lead to policy learning but the empirical evidence about this is limited. The goal of the paper is to explore comparatively whether the crisis of 2008–2010 has led to fiscal policy learning by civil servants in the three Baltic countries. Despite some differences in the crisis experience, the finance ministry officials in all three countries have identified the same lesson from the crisis: fiscal policy should be counter-cyclical and help to stabilize the economy. The paper also discusses how various factors have influenced policy learning, including the acknowledgment of failure, blame shifting, and analytical tractability.