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Individualisation has become an ambiguous, but defining feature of late modern societies and while it is in part characterised by an increase in individual autonomy and a sense of liberation, individuals are equally required to negotiate a fragmented, pluralised and ambiguous social order by themselves. This book sheds light on the processes and nature of contemporary individualisation, specifically exploring the manner in which it unfolds under conditions of contemporary network capitalism. With attention to the modern workplace, where the individual and the organisation meet directly, but also in the wider community, Individualisation at Work reveals individualisation to become an ideological and ambiguous process of liberation, as conditions of marketisation and corporatisation transform the emancipatory qualities and motivations that define individualisation into a means for the coordination and reproduction of systemic imperatives, which are realised by individuals' qualities and capacities for self-realisation. A rigorous theoretical study, illustrated with interview material gathered amongst managers from internationally operating corporations, this book will appeal to sociologists with interests in work and organisations and the theory of contemporary modernity.

Globally, the corporatisation of local public services has gained substantive momentum over the past decades. However, there is a research gap concerning the functioning of governance bodies, particularly boards, in municipally owned corporations as hybrid organisations. In this study, analysing German municipally owned corporations, we investigate the relationship between supervisory board efficacy, as attributed by chief executive officers, and perceived organisational performance. We do not find a direct relationship; instead, we find evidence for a 'catalyser' relationship: board efficacy alleviates managerial role dilemmas, thus removing obstacles to organisational performance. The results imply that particular attention needs to be paid to the enhancement of competencies of board members and their collaboration. Limitations are outlined. Points for practitioners • 'Good governance' of hybrid organisations requires effective boards, which – albeit indirectly – ultimately result in better corporate performance. • Board efficacy alleviates managerial role dilemmas, thus removing obstacles to performance. • The results imply that particular attention needs to be paid to the enhancement of competencies of board members and their collaboration.

AbstractFrom 1995, Australian governments pursued efficiency benefits arising from significant structural reforms in the Electricity Supply Industry, including corporatisation and regulation of network monopolies, and introduction of competition for generators and for retailers. The restructure was motivated by the ideology of New Public Management and influenced by the field of neoliberal economics. More than two decades later, prices paid for electricity by residential and commercial customers have escalated sharply, resulting in sustained anger from all consumers. The Australian Competition and Consumer Commission Chair has admitted that 'The National Electricity Market is largely broken'. This article documents the reduction in public access to information about electricity supply, the fragmentation in responsibility and accountability for consumer outcomes, and the consequences of these changes for transparency, industry operation, and retail electricity prices. New research enabled the creation of a database of Queensland energy production, consumption, and prices; this facilitated a fresh analysis of Queensland electricity sector performance since the restructure of electricity supply.

The pursuit of greater efficiency in a time of austerity in the past decade has led UK local governments to deliver local services in a new way: using subsidiary companies, many of them taking the form of conventional, non-profit enterprises, rather than outsourcing to private enterprises. The practice has energised service innovation by motivating these new corporate managers to act in entrepreneurial ways alien to the ethos of the civil servants whose work they superseded. It is called "corporatisation", rather than "privatisation". However, the rapid spread of the practice has outpaced both our theoretical appreciation of the issues and raised a series of practical concerns about the potential for conflicts of interest and the loss of control. This paper examines the small but growing literature about this phenomenon. Using a combination of theories from corporate governance and ethics, as well as documents from the public policy arena, it develops an agenda for research that will explore the varieties of approach to both the value creation and the governance of this new development.

L'analyse de la mise en oeuvre du Programme de Paiement pour Services Environnementaux (PSA) nous permet de saisir un processus de corporatisation, à travers la monopolisation des fonctions des acteurs participant à l'implémentation par les ingénieurs forestiers ainsi que l'organisation interne de cette nouvelle profession qui connaît un processus de croissance de sa légitimité. Malgré les programmes d'ajustements structurels mis en oeuvre durant les décennies 1980-1990 qui ont conduit le Costa Rica à l'affaiblissement de l'Etat, à la déréglementation et au transfert des activités publiques au secteur privé, le PPSA reste une forme de régulation étatique de la conservation privée, ce qui témoigne des résistances de l'Etat Costaricien et de sa capacité à perdurer mais aussi à se transformer. L'Etat voit à la fois ses formes d'action évoluer, à travers la délégation de compétences étatiques de mise en oeuvre à des acteurs privés ainsi que ses missions, ce qui nous permet de nous interroger sur le passage d'un Etat Providence à un Etat régulateur.

PurposeThe aim of this paper is to provide new evidence on the effect of changes in public enterprises' (PEs) management on their economic performance.Design/methodology/approachThe approach is case study type and relies on comparative efficiency literature. The paper identifies relevant changes in the organisational status of a large state‐owned group during a period of 20 years; next it measures its annual efficiency indicators, and then evaluates to what extent the observed changes in economic performance can be attributable to the corresponding management reforms carried out.FindingsIt is found that the "corporatisation" (the public entity becoming a limited company) did not produce a significant improvement in its economic performance, even though the change involved a substantial increase in the company's autonomy. This is a finding which is contrary to what is expected from the reading of business economics literature, since corporatisation is considered to be one of the most relevant changes in organisational status of a PE. In contrast, the second relevant organisational change here analysed (1996) when both principal and agent (CEO) were replaced, appears to have really produced an improvement in efficiency indicators. Therefore, the change of both principal and agent seems to have been a determining element to put into effect the possibilities of more company autonomy which were established five years earlier, and including in these possibilities more freedom on output pricing policies.Research limitations/implicationsWhen analysing performance improvements brought about by a change in organisational status of a PE, a maturing period should be taken into account, for company efficiency to actually improve. Besides, for longitudinal assessment of company efficiency aimed at evaluating an "event's impact", it would be convenient to rely more on economic efficiency indicators than on productive efficiency indicators if we are concerned with company competitiveness.Practical implicationsBetter knowledge of the conditions for a PE's organisational status change should actually be effective in order to improve its efficiency. As one relevant condition, we argue that a given time span should be allowed for some changes in the attitudes and practices of the public company managers as far as the ways of managing and running the company are concerned.Originality/valueThis paper adds to the comparatively scarce literature available of in‐depth longitudinal analysis of the impact of management reforms on PEs, and it is the first in‐depth study of the impact of organizational status changes on efficiency of a large Spanish PE which still pertains to the public sector.

"In cities around the world, digital technologies are utilized to manage city services and infrastructures, govern urban life, solve urban issues, and to drive local and regional economies. While "smart city" advocates are keen to promote the benefits of smart urbanism - increased efficiency, sustainability, resilience, competitiveness, safety and security - critics point to the negative effects, such as the production of technocratic governance, the corporatisation of urban services, technological lock-ins, privacy harms, and vulnerability to cyberattack. This book, through a range of international case studies, suggests social, political and practical interventions that would enable more equitable and just smart cities, reaping the benefits of smart city initiatives while minimizing some of their perils. Included are case studies from Ireland, the United States of America, Colombia, The Netherlands, Singapore, India and the United Kingdom. These essays discuss a range of issues including political economy, citizenship, standards, testbedding, urban regeneration, ethics, surveillance, privacy and cybersecurity. This book will be of interest to urban policymakers, as well as researchers in Regional Studies and Urban Planning"--

The structure of veterinary medicine is changing rapidly from that of traditional small privately owned practices to one of corporate franchises, often positioned within retail outlets. Accompanying this trend has been the increasing presence of women, such that they now dominate clinical practice. To what extent are these two issues, increasing feminisation and corporatisation, linked? Since the mid-1990s, corporate providers have largely displaced the traditional self-employed practice ownership/partnership model. This has informed a blame discourse whereby feminisation is associated with industry restructuring given women's alleged preferences for predictable, flexible corporate employment, plus a lack of entrepreneurial ambition towards practice ownership. Drawing upon in-depth semi-structured interviews with women veterinary surgeons and key industry stakeholders, we critically analyse such arguments. We illustrate that diverse notions of corporate masculinity, operating in parallel with the entrepreneurial masculinity of traditional practice, generate this blame discourse and underpin women's limited progression into self-employed practice ownership. This has implications for the future structure of the profession and the careers of forthcoming generations of veterinary surgeons.

In recent years, Italian legislation seems to have accomplished a 'corporatisation' of collective bargaining in response to employers' demands, without the filter of national collective bargaining. Article 8 of Law No. 148/2011 made it possible to deviate from legislative provisions and industry-wide collective bargaining on a wide range of topics. The Legislative Decrees implementing the Jobs Act in 2015 have gone even further, allowing the possibility of a different regulation both through different levels of collective bargaining and through individual agreements. Faced with these changes in the balance of power, collective bargaining has been weakened. Nevertheless, a number of national sectoral agreements have provided for ambitious efforts to establish a new relationship between the levels of collective bargaining or the mechanisms of collective agreements, as well as to re-regulate forms of workers' representation. As these national agreements are based on the voluntary compliance of workers' organisations and employers' associations, their implementation and enforcement in order to be effective will need to be accompanied by a re-establishment of the role of collective bargaining.

This essay provides a comprehensive overview of Henry Giroux's contribution over the years to critical thinking in education and beyond. It focuses primarily on Giroux's recent works concerning the changing nature of the State (from the social to the carceral and neoliberal state), the war against youth and children, the culture of militarisation, torture, the emergence of a 'new fascism', the corporatisation of schools and higher education and the need for intellectuals to extend their work beyond the confines of academia to engage as public intellectuals, as well as the roles of critical pedagogy and cultural studies in this regard. The article draws on a range of writings, including both academic and more 'public' writings from such outlets as Truthout and Counterpunch. While much of what is written presents a bleak picture of the current international socio-economic scenario, Giroux's work is infused with a sense of hope and agency. It is inspired by a view of a world not as it is now but as it can and should be. ; peer-reviewed

Le Québec, on le sait, a connu dans la deuxième moitié du XXe siècle un mouvement social et politique qui a radicalement transformé son échiquier politique, économique et social, de même que sa culture. Cette communication a pour but de présenter la difficulté d'émergence de nouvelles utopies dans le cadre du système qui en a résulté. La génération radicale des années 1960 et 1970 aura en effet laissé derrière elle des structures, une culture politique et un discours qui occupent l'espace social et laissent peu de place à l'innovation. Comment les nouvelles générations de militants radicaux y font-ils leur place? Comment se situent-ils face aux politiques et discours socio-démocrates issus de ce demi-siècle d'histoire québécoise et au virage néolibéral déjà bien entamé? Quels espaces peuvent-ils investir? Quels blocages rencontrent-ils? Voilà les questions auxquels cette communication tentera de répondre. Cette analyse sera ancrée dans un contexte régional et d'une analyse critique de l'approche néolibérale de la décentralisation du gouvernement et de la lente corporatisation de la société québécoise.

Privatisation has been an important tool of government policy in Australia and overseas in the last two decades. We explain recent contributions to research in privatisation, and apply a simple framework to ownership policy in a wide variety of Australian cases, including prisons, airports, Telstra, water and gas distribution, and ambulance services. The framework is not limited to these applications, and is aimed at providing a starting point for policy makers in their assessment of alternative ownership regimes. Our analysis is supportive of other authors, who have cast doubt on the wisdom of prison privatisation, and we extend this conclusion to ambulance services and the disposal of highly toxic waste. Application of our framework also suggests that Australian privatisations may have involved excessive separation of assets. The framework also provides a basis for arguing that a key monopoly component of Telstra—the 'wires' component—be kept in public ownership, and access auctioned to service providers. We consider the possible pitfalls of corporatisation policy, and argue that corporatised entities may operate to improve the appearance of success at the expense of the reality.

For the last two decades, Finnish universities have faced the implementation of new systems of control and undergone dramatic changes that have worsened academic working conditions – such as corporatisation and budget cuts. This article explores Finnish academics' experiences of university reforms with a special focus on the consequences it has had in terms of organisational socio-dynamics. We adapt Glynos and Howarth's logics of critical explanation and apply this theoretical framework to analyse the interviews of academics who, against their own will, did not have their contracts renewed. This approach describes, explains, and criticises the logics – which are social, political and fantasmatic – behind the existence, continuation, and transformation of practices that are very real. Our research findings suggest that there are situations in which experiences of opaque management may occur at university. Academics often found the decision-making processes to be unpredictable and ambiguous, leading to a precarious working atmosphere. Combining the logics approach with micro-level data analysis, we developed the concept of arbitrary management, offering new perspectives for understanding the mediation between social practices and structural reforms. This micro-political analysis provides a new take on how ideologies operate at university in an era of academic capitalism. ; peerReviewed

For the last two decades, Finnish universities have faced the implementation of new systems of control and undergone dramatic changes that have worsened academic working conditions–such as corporatisation and budget cuts. This article explores Finnish academics' experiences of university reforms with a special focus on the consequences it has had in terms of organisational socio-dynamics. We adapt Glynos and Howarth's logics of critical explanation and apply this theoretical framework to analyse the interviews of academics who, against their own will, did not have their contracts renewed. This approach describes, explains, and criticises the logics–which are social, political and fantasmatic–behind the existence, continuation, and transformation of practices that are very real. Our research findings suggest that there are situations in which experiences of opaque management may occur at university. Academics often found the decision-making processes to be unpredictable and ambiguous, leading to a precarious working atmosphere. Combining the logics approach with micro-level data analysis, we developed the concept of arbitrary management, offering new perspectives for understanding the mediation between social practices and structural reforms. This micro-political analysis provides a new take on how ideologies operate at university in an era of academic capitalism. ; publishedVersion ; Peer reviewed