A Review of: “Media Democracy: How the Media Colonize Politics,by Thomas Meyer with Lew Hinchman”

This study assesses the importance of paid advertising. Drawing from observations and interviews with ad creators and campaign managers, it describes, analyzes, and evaluates what the candidates did and why in the 1992 New Hampshire presidential primary election. Specifically, the study examines the importance of initial ads, consistency in ads, and the use of negative ads. It demonstrates that candidates flooded the airwaves with 30‐second ads, spending well in excess of overall spending limits on advertising alone. Ad innovations in 1992 were as follows: heavy New Hampshire and Boston time buying, an attack strategy against an incumbent president, an informercial to raise money, distributed videotapes, interactive video appeals, and half‐hour programs. Candidates who advertised early and stayed consistent in their imagery did better than candidates who advertised later and created multiple images and varied ads.     

加快农村集体建设用地管理制度创新探析

伴随中国城镇化迅猛发展,大中城市周边集体建设用地已经成为城镇化的主要区域。全国各地的集体建设用地流转试验为新型城镇化背景下转变增长方式、完善土地管理机制提供了宝贵经验。该文在总结各地集体建设用地流转试验基础上,提出在大中城市周边区域率先建立统一的集体建设用地流转制度,促进城市周边区域经济社会统筹协调发展的目标,并就完善集体经济组织主体地位,发挥政府引导、协调、管理和监督职能,鼓励、扶持产业支撑,深化城镇社会保障和就业体制改革,加快公共服务均等化改革和城乡综合管理体制创新等问题提出具体建议。     

Business as usual

The tech stock crash of 2000 discredited the new economy as business model. This article introduces a journal special issue which takes up the challenge of putting new economy developments into this post-crash perspective and establishing long-run continuities, without discounting the importance of what happened. This article opens the debate by highlighting two themes in the articles that are collected together in the special issue: first, it discusses what was and is the new economy in the USA; second, it examines the relevance and resonance of the new economy in Europe.     

The normalizing role of rationalist assumptions in the institutional embedding of neoliberalism

The political economy of Britain over the past three decades provides an interesting example of the consolidation, normalization and institutionalization of a new economic paradigm – neoliberalism. As such, it serves as a potentially instructive focus for debate both about the conditions under which economic paradigms are replaced and consolidated and the evolution of such paradigms through the process of institutionalization. In this paper I suggest that the institutionalization of this new economic paradigm has been associated with the shift from a normative to a normalized and necessitarian neoliberalism. I examine the role played by rationalist assumptions in this extended process of normalization-institutionalization. After presenting a stylized account of the evolution of British neoliberalism, I show how New Labour's monetary policy regime is the heir to the legacy of monetarism and its agenda of labour-market reform is the heir to Thatcherism's supply-side economics. I suggest that the time-inconsistency thesis and the business school globalization thesis have played an equivalent role, for New Labour, to that played for the new right by monetarism and supply-side economics in legitimating neoliberalism. In this way neoliberalism has been normalized. In the final sections of the paper I reflect on the implications of the normalized and necessitarian character of neoliberalism in Britain for its contestability and for democratic economic governance more broadly.     

Family history,identity, and public history: writing a history of The Benevolent Society in its 200th year

Abstract

Since 2011, the authors have worked together on outputs associated with the bicentenary of The Benevolent Society of New South Wales, Australia's oldest charity, established in 1813. This article focuses on one of those outputs—a project making use of family histories of clients of The Benevolent Society's Asylum, in the second half of the nineteenth century, to reveal the histories of these families in colonial New South Wales. The project also involves an exploration of the many different ways in which contemporary Australians are active agents in the creation of historical knowledge when practicing family history.     

Governmental Corruption and Social Change in New Zealand: Using Scenarios, 1950–2020

New Zealand has long enjoyed a reputation as a country with a corruption-free state sector, and ranks very highly on the Transparency International's Corruption Perceptions Index (meaning its corruption levels are perceived to be extremely low). However, there is prima facie evidence to suggest that this situation may be changing, not dramatically but significantly. While the state sector changes of the 1980s and early 1990s may be having some impact on this shift, it also has to be understood in the context of wider societal changes, which are probably more decisive. After some brief conceptual clarification, the article presents three scenarios sketching past (1950s/1960s), present (1990s–2006) and future (2006–2020) social and governmental conditions thought to be relevant to corruption levels.     

Risk,Reflexivity and Sub-politics: Environmental Politics in Hong Kong

Increasing attention has been drawn to the risk posed by air pollution, a risk that has wide-ranging effects (on the environment, health, the economy, culture, urban design and politics). New environmental movements and political agendas have emerged in the past 10 years. A growing number of social groups have been formed to express their concerns and challenge established laws and rules. This paper will borrow Ulrich Beck's concepts of risk, reflexivity and sub-politics to analyse the new social movement that addresses air quality in Hong Kong. While previous environmental problems were considered manageable, air pollution is a risk that seems to defy solution. As a result of the institutional failure to deal with this risk, there has been a new alignment of interests and the emergence of a new form of politics—a sub-politics that leads to a sharing of power between established and informal politics, and the government and society. Although established political institutions have been receptive, altering the rules and increasing public participation, the extent of sub-politicization is still limited. This is due, in part, to the overall absence of reflexive self-regulation among individuals in the society, which might lead to a state of ‘disorganized irresponsibility’.     

Managing the Public Sector in Hong Kong: Trends and Adjustments

Public sector management in Hong Kong was initially designed to rule the territory as a British colony. A number of changes took place in the last quarter century before Hong Kong's reintegration with China and the nature of public sector management has transformed over this period. An overview of administrative principles and practices and an analysis of changes reveal trends that were influenced by both local and international factors. The framework of traditional public administration in the territory adapted effectively to embrace the principles of new public management without much difficulty. The global economic crisis compelled the government to revise its strategies to expand public spending and adopt a further reduced role in the provision of public services. New social, economic and political challenges are driving Hong Kong to adjust to the changing circumstances and trends, and four noticeable shifts can be identified. They include shifts from an administrative to a political executive, from job cuts to job creation, from financial restraint to increased spending, and from public to private sector provision of public services. The trends are driven by local and international forces as well as the progress of democratization and political awareness in Hong Kong.     

Changes in surveillance of regulatory enforcement progragrammes in Singapore

In recent years Myanmar underwent drastic political changes. While many see these changes as first tentative steps towards democratization, we argue that the current political transformation is not a deliberate process of liberalization, but a survival strategy of the military regime. Using arguments of the ‘new institutionalism’ as a theoretical foundation, this article explores the hypothesis that the high degree of professionalization of the Burmese military creates the incentive to institutionalize power-sharing among the ruling elite. Our empirical analysis finds evidence for both a highly professionalized military and institutions that by securing the military's continuing dominance serve the purpose of institutionalizing military power- sharing. These results imply that further democratization is unlikely as it must be initiated from within the still dominating military itself.     

Inspirational Cameos

Abstract

Utilizing a narrative approach emanating from a small research study, this paper presents inspirational cameos of ethnic minority women entrepreneurs. The focal point is Indian women entrepreneurs in New Zealand. The theoretical perspective of mixed embeddedness, where institutional structures and the entrepreneurs play out their stories in the complexity of the political, psychological, social, and economic arenas, forms the backdrop for this paper. By presenting inspirational cameos of ordinary women who have achieved entrepreneurial success against the saga of Indian immigration, this paper is in contrast to much of the prevailing literature which focuses on blocking and constraining factors in the life experiences of ethnic minority migrant women entrepreneurs. Such cameos can be positioned to serve as exemplars of and for ethnic minority migrant women, particularly in a world where many ethnic minority women and entrepreneurial educators are often unaware of ethnic minority role models.