Class dynamics and ideological construction in the struggle over fairness: a neo-Gramscian examination of the Fairtrade initiative

This paper develops a neo-Gramscian conceptual framework in order to examine the ideological constructs and political dynamics that frame the day-to-day workings of the certification-based Fairtrade initiative. To accomplish this goal, the paper resorts to the notion of a ‘comprehensive concept of control’, which accounts for the main ideological elements that constitute the Fairtrade vision of the world. The analysis of these imaginaries is complemented with an examination of the concrete ways in which they have been institutionalized in the Fairtrade system and the specific power relations between class fractions they promote. This is followed by an exploration of the way in which Fairtrade articulates the contradictory interests of a variety of class fractions, bringing them together under the shared objective of advancing the situation of small producers and workers in the global South. The paper finishes with a reflection on the main limitations inherent to Fairtrade’s concept of control and the political dynamics it entails.     

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。     

女性“第二轮班”现象真的存在吗 —— 基于女性教育、职业和收入特征的实证研究

本研究借助国家统计局和妇女联合会的调查数据,对比了中国不同性别城镇劳动者在有酬劳动 时间和家务劳动时间分配上的差异特征,并利用面板数据模型验证了影响女性群体时间选择偏好的主要因素。 结果表明,在中国女性城镇劳动力者中,显著存在着“第二轮班”现象,即不仅参与有酬劳动,而且负担了很 大比重的无酬家务劳动。同时,教育、职业和收入等因素对不同性别劳动者时间分配有一定程度的影响。     

“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.     

Organizational Citizenship Levels of Physicians in Public Hospitals

The aim of this study is to define organizational citizenship levels of physicians working in public hospitals. The population of the study consists of the physicians employed in the hospitals run by the Ministry of Health in Istanbul. The Organizational Citizenship Level Scale was used for the collection of data. It was found that the participants’ organizational citizenship levels were the highest in the “conscience” subsection and the lowest in the “praising the organization” subsection. Findings of this study provide clear information for the decision-makers and hospital managers in developing working conditions of physicians in public hospitals.     

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.     

Does China’s middle class prefer (liberal) democracy?

Many surveys show that China’s political regime, under the Chinese Communist Party’s authoritarian rules, enjoys a high level of public support. However, it is still uncertain whether China’s emerging middle class will become the “agent of democratization” as suggested by modernization theory. Using the data of Asian Barometer Survey conducted in China in 2011, this article demonstrates that the relationship between class identity and preference for liberal democracy in China may be inverted U-shaped. The Chinese middle class shows a higher preference to features of liberal democratic regimes than its counterparts of the lower- and upper-class. Members of the Chinese middle class also tend to regard democracy as the best form of government. Thus, the middle class has the potential to initiate democratization in China if the Chinese government fails to keep satisfying the middle class’ quest for economic well-being and protection of property rights.     

Measuring and managing ‘state fragility’: the production of statistics by the World Bank,Timor-Leste and the g7+

Indicators are currently being widely used in international policy making to substantiate analyses and justify decisions on the basis of their alleged scientific objectivity. This article analyses the role of indicators and statistics in the labelling and managing of ‘fragile states’, examining the powerful consequences of these classifications but also discussing the untraceable nature of numbers and the difficulties in attributing ownership of numerical claims and assigning responsibility for their many unforeseen impacts. Focusing on the education sector in Timor-Leste and on the World Bank’s Country Policy and Institutional Assessment (cpia) programme, the article shows how accountability and ownership are negotiated within the context of the g7+ group of self-labelled ‘fragile states’, encouraging an examination of the power relations involved.     

How representative are brics?

The five countries known as brics, while not homogeneous in interests, values, and policy preferences, do have a common interest in checking US/Western power and influence through collaboration with non-Western powers. They vary considerably but all are ahead of other developing countries on population, military power, economic weight, geopolitical clout, and global reach and engagement. They are unrepresentative of the typical developing country in terms of interest, capacity, and resources, but they can represent the interests and goals of developing countries as a group on those issues for which the North–South division is salient. The diversity within brics, their differences from other developing countries, and their potential to reflect and represent the global South are explored with respect to climate change, finance, trade, aid, human rights and intervention, and development. It remains unclear whether brics can morph from a countervailing economic grouping to a powerful political alternative.