Obecnie niewiele miejsca poświęca się w opracowaniach historycznoliterackich nurtowi Nowego Dziennikarstwa. Szczególnie w Polsce czytelnik lub badacz rzadko ma okazję dostrzec to zjawisko. W Stanach Zjednoczonych w latach sześćdziesiątych i siedemdziesiątych cieszyło się ono dużą popularnością i wzbudzało ogromne zainteresowanie. Wielu Nowych Dziennikarzy zdobyło sławę i miano celebrytów. W Polsce autorzy reprezentujący owe dziennikarstwo są mało znani, a ich twórczość tylko sporadycznie pojawia się w księgarniach. Powodem takiej sytuacji może być obawa tłumaczy i wydawców przed ograniczeniami związanymi z nieznajomością kontekstu kulturowego i polityczno-historycznego tekstów. Uważam, że jeśli taki jest powód niewielkiej popularności tego nurtu w Polsce, to należałoby zachęcić do sięgnięcia po lekturę dzieł takich kronikarzy jak Tom Wolfe czy Hunter Thompson. Bowiem twórczość autorów Nowego Dziennikarstwa dostarcza czytelnikowi ogromnej wiedzy o sytuacji politycznej, społecznej i kulturowej Ameryki drugiej połowy XX wieku, wyjaśnia przedstawione wydarzenia i obszernie je komentuje. Teksty Nowych Dziennikarzy wpisują się także w dyskusję nad tym jaką rolę tekst dziennikarski odgrywa w dostarczaniu wiedzy o świecie i interpretowaniu rzeczywistości. W mojej książce pragnę dowieść, że teksty z nurtu Nowego Dziennikarstwa są szczególnie ważnym źródłem wiedzy o kontrkulturze lat sześćdziesiątych. Fakt ten jest często ignorowany w badaniach kontrkultury, które skupiają się najczęściej tylko na analizie dokumentów historycznych i socjologicznych a zapominają o, w równej mierze ważnych, literackich reprezentacjach epoki lat sześćdziesiątych. Lata sześćdziesiąte w Stanach Zjednoczonych były erą burzliwych przemian społecznych, masowych rozruchów, antywietnamskich protestów, rewolucji seksualnej, zamachów politycznych, strajków studenckich, demonstracji, które wstrząsały Amerykanami. Nie byli oni w stanie zrozumieć tempa przemian oraz wydarzeń, których byli świadkami. W tym okresie zamordowano prezydenta Stanów Zjednoczonych, Johna Kennedy'ego, zastrzelono Martina Luthera Kinga, represjonowano walczącą o swobody życiowe część społeczności amerykańskiej. Codziennością stało się uczestniczenie w masowych pogrzebach ciał przywożonych z Wietnamu żołnierzy. Dziennikarze i reportażyści próbowali wytłumaczyć ludziom skomplikowaną naturę otaczającej ich rzeczywistości. By sytuację unaocznić, przedstawić zrozumiale i wyczerpująco musieli zastosować nowe sposoby i metody obrazowania i przedstawiania świata. Zmienili dotychczasowe środki wyrazu, użyli narracji, monologu wewnętrznego, dialogu, bogatych opisów świata, nadali koloryt widzianym obrazom. Tak powstało jedno z ciekawszych zjawisk literackich tamtej epoki – Nowe Dziennikarstwo, którego twórcy odpowiadali na zapotrzebowania społeczne analizując i komentując ważne wydarzenia polityczne i kulturalne Ameryki. Rysując skomplikowaną rzeczywistość Nowi Dziennikarze stworzyli reportażowo-literacki styl, zawierający socjologiczne i historyczne walory. Żywiołowo relacjonowali także rozwijającą się kulturę popularną, byli głównymi kronikarzami kontrkultury i czasów hippisowskich. Przede wszystkim jednak Nowe Dziennikarstwo i jego twórcy okazali się wspaniałymi charakteryzatorami jednostek. Poprzez opis zachowań postaci, ich sposobu mówienia, stylu ubierania, miejsc zamieszkania, charakteru wykonywanych przez nie prac dawali obraz ówczesnego społeczeństwa kontestującego. Celem niniejszej książki jest analiza wybranych tekstów Nowego Dziennikarstwa, która pozwala lepiej zrozumieć kontrkulturę i obyczaje Ameryki lat sześćdziesiątych, scharakteryzować ówczesną sytuację, oraz umożliwić dostrzeżenie wszystkiego w jaskrawych i wyraźnych kolorach. Kluczem do analizy stała się teoria nowego historyzmu, który przywrócił dziełom literackim kontekst historyczny, nie traktując tekstu jako autonomicznego tworu, a osadzając go w kontekście kulturowym. Literatura bowiem przekazuje społeczne, polityczne i kulturowe nastroje, ukazując ducha danej epoki. Nowi historycyści postrzegają ją jako źródło historyczne, odzwierciedlające realną rzeczywistość. Chcąc przedstawić nieodzowny kontekst do analizy kontrkultury, próbuję w rozdziale pierwszym przedstawić tło historyczne buntu i udział w nim prekursorów – hipsterów i bitników. Dalej zmierzam do przedstawienia wybuchu rebelii hippisowskiej w latach sześćdziesiątych, opisuję również społeczne i kulturowe przyczyny powstania kontrkultury, analizuję wydarzenia, które doprowadziły do upadku ruchu hippisowskiego. W rozdziale drugim skupiam się na okolicznościach narodzin i charakterystyce Nowego Dziennikarstwa, przedstawiam jego prekursorów, ich twórczość oraz głosy krytyki. Wskazuję też na fakt podniesienia rangi dziennikarstwa i przyczynienia się do jego rozwoju i rozpowszechnienia. W rozdziale trzecim zajmuję się genezą wymienionych niżej tekstów i przedstawiam sylwetki ich autorów. W drugiej części książki analizuję poszczególne powieści i artykuły prasowe Nowego Dziennikarstwa, które w całości skupiają się na ruchu hippisowskim i jego upadku. Analiza obejmuje powieści: Próbę kwasu w elektrycznej oranżadzie (1968) Toma Wolfa, Lęk i odrazę w Las Vegas (1971) Huntera Thompsona, esej Joan Didion Slouching Towards Bethlehem (1968), artykuły Richarda Goldsteina: Psychedelic Psell (1967), The Catcher In the Haight (1967), Love: A Groovy Idea While He Lasted (1967), San Francisco Bray (1967) oraz artykuły Huntera Thompsona: Why Boys Will Be Girls (1967), The 'Hashbury' Is the Capital of the Hippies (1967), The Hippies (1967). W książce wykorzystuję również do analizy fragmenty Hell's Angels. Anioły piekieł (1966) Huntera Thompsona, The Armies of the Night (1968) Normana Mailera, Loose Change (1977) Sary Davidson oraz We Are The People Our Parents Warned Us Against (1968) Nicholasa Von Hoffmana. Głównymi kryteriami wyboru tekstów były kontrkulturowe treści w nich zawarte oraz przynależność ich autorów do nurtu Nowego Dziennikarstwa. Analiza wspomnianych tekstów pozwala na scalenie i szerokie zobrazowanie integralnych elementów kontrkultury. W mojej książce opisuję rolę kontrkulturowych liderów, którzy w ogromnej mierze przyczynili się do rozszerzenia ruchu hippisowskiego i propagowania idei kontestacyjnych. Wskazuję na używanie środków poszerzających świadomość jako nieodłączną część buntu lat sześćdziesiątych. Opisuję hippisowskie komuny, życie w atmosferze wolnej miłości i rewolucji seksualnej. Analizuję komuny jako alternatywny sposób życia oraz jako formy protestu przeciw establishmentowi. Ukazuję rolę muzyki, tekstów piosenek, wydarzeń muzycznych i muzycznych idoli w czasach kontrkultury. W dalszej części książki omawiam czynniki, które w późnych latach sześćdziesiątych doprowadziły do upadku kontrkultury. Analiza kończy się zobrazowaniem komercjalizacji ruchu hippisowskiego, schyłku dekady lat sześćdziesiątych, upadku kontrkultury i koncepcji "American Dream". Śmiem twierdzić, że teksty, które wyszły spod pióra Nowych Dziennikarzy nie są dziś jedynie kulturowym artefaktem. Są bogatym źródłem wiedzy na temat kontrkultury lat sześćdziesiątych oraz częścią dziejów Stanów Zjednoczonych. Przedziwne i często zdumiewające wydarzenia, opisywane przez autorów, mogą stanowić źródło silnych i głębokich przemyśleń. Są jednocześnie jak ożywczy wiatr, który otwiera okiennice okna i pozwala na szersze, wyraźniejsze widzenie świata i jego spraw, oglądanych dotychczas tylko przez szparę owych okiennic. Szeroko otwarte okno jest metaforą odbierania świata widzianego nie wyłącznie przez "szkiełko i oko", ale wzbogaconego uczuciami Nowych Dziennikarzy, ich świeżym spojrzeniem, ich młodymi opiniami, interpretacją, dziennikarską swobodą i swadą. Należy podkreślić, że teksty Nowych Dziennikarzy są ważną i nierozerwalną częścią historii, stanowią dokumenty, które powinny być traktowane na równi z tekstami czysto literackimi, historycznymi i socjologicznymi. 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The Kamagayan Comprehensive Care Center (KC3) clients report being very satisfied with the comprehensive package of health services offered under the BCP and they feel welcome and accepted at the KC3. Community members in Kamagayan, including family members of the KC3 clients, also praise the service as an excellent intervention. Virtually all key stakeholders interviewed noted that the KC3 team had performed especially well in building trust between clients and their health service providers, families, and community. In that sense, community-based advocacy efforts were successful at generating an enabling environment for service delivery. The KC3 clients, family members, and community representatives also appreciated efforts from the KC3 team to promote demand reduction through counseling, Narcotics Anonymous (NA) sessions, and privileged access to the Argao Treatment and Rehabilitation Center (TRC). There is great demand and genuine interest among the KC3 clients and patients' clients to become peer educators and provide support to PWID. The professionalization of PWID through peer educator roles has also reportedly reduced stigma and discrimination and increased acceptance of PWID in the community. Should services for PWID be scaled up in Cebu and beyond, recruiting a workforce of peer educators should not be a critical challenge, an important lesson learned for future harm reduction projects in the Philippines.
The painted biography of the patron saint of the church of St. Demetrius in the complex of the Patriarchate of Peć is preserved in the middle zone of the nave. Following the northern wall, with episodes inspired by the texts of the Passion of Saint Demetrius, the cycle continues on the south wall, where two of the former four representations remain, namely: The Dormition of Demetrius and Saint Demetrius Saves Thessaloniki from the Enemy. Both scenes have been partially damaged, with the lower parts painted over during the restoration in the second decade of the 17th century. The Dormition of Saint Demetrius. The Dormition of Saint Demetrius is painted in the southeast corner of the nave. The beginning of the legend is legible. Two more compositions with the same iconography have been preserved. One is a miniature in the Menologion in Oxford (MS. Gr. th. f. 1, fol. 55) (c. 1330-35), and the other is a severely damaged fresco in King Marko's Monastery (1376/77, the Republic of North Macedonia). The iconographic scheme of the service over the body of the deceased is well known in medieval art. Since the Passio texts describe Demetrius' martyrdom, scholars have questioned the source and meaning of the scene. At first, they thought that it illustrated Bishop Eusebius praying before the relics of St. Demetriusto save Thessaloniki from the Enemy, according to the description from the 14th homily of the First Book of Miracula. Later, the assumption was made, accepted to this day, that it was the death/entombment of the saint. The textual prototype was found in the sticheron of the patriarch Germanus on the celebration day of Saint Demetrius, from where this theme entered the iconography. Recently, the scene was interpreted as a liturgical ceremony over the saint's tomb in the Thessaloniki church. Knowing the circumstances in which it was created could contribute to a better understanding of the topic. The representation of the dead Demetrius is associated with the reform of the cult after the appearance of the myron, at the beginning of the 11th century at the latest. This is evidenced by reliquaries and enkolpia for myron and/or blood of the saint (11th/12th-14th centuries), which copy the appearance of a myron-gushing tomb. They are characterized by a double lid with superimposed figures of Saint Demetrius. On the outer cover Demetrius is in the orante pose -which has been interpreted as a sarcophagus, while the inside shows a dead saint - that is, a representation ofthe saint's myron-exuding body relic. The myron-gushing tomb received its equivalent in painting, as well, sublimated through the representation of the tomb with the reclining figure of Demetrius in the orante pose. Two paintings are known, both of which are sometimes erroneously cited among scholarsand preserved in Serbian art as the Entombment of Saint Demetrius (in the southern chapel of the Church of Our Lady of Ljeviš, 1309-13, in Kosovo and Metohija, and, as part of the scene The vision of angels of an illustrious and Demetrius' refusal to abandon Thessaloniki, 1335-48 in Dečani, Kosovo and Metohija). Along with this theme, the iconography of the service over Demetrius' relics was also formed. At this time, a legend appeared that, by order of Emperor Maximian, Demetrius' body was thrown into a well under the Thessaloniki Basilica, connected to the crypt or "lower church". Perhaps the changed cult brought more novelties, which could have influenced the appearance of new iconography, yet this question still remains open to debate. The service over the saint's body is officiated by archbishops surrounded by singers, led by a choirmaster and a young kanonarchos, all distinguished by headpieces known as skaranikon. The rest of the entourage were identified as believers or Christians who buried the saint, that is, young noblemen, but in fact they were members of minor order. The building in the background is most often identified as the famous ciborium from the Thessaloniki Basilica, which was a cult centre during the early Christian period. Although the fresco in Peć is unique compared to the other preserved representations, in which the tomb is shown with an open ciborium-baldachin, they are also considered to convey a realistic image of a contemporary tomb. This testifies to the impossibility of reaching a reliable conclusion about the closeness of the painted and real construction, where at the time of the creation of the fresco, the centre of the cult was no longer a ciborium, but a myron-gushing tomb. Saint Demetrius Saves Thessaloniki from the Enemy. The last preserved fresco, from whose inscription the name of Demetrius can be read, illustrates the miracle of the defense of Thessaloniki against the enemy. The event is described in the 14th homily of the First Book of Miracula. The majority of researchers have accepted the opinion that homilies 13-15 describe the attack of the army of Avars and Slavs on Thessaloniki that took place in 586, although a similar event in 597 cannot be ruled out. The iconographic scheme of the fresco in Peć comes right after the text. In the cycles of the Middle Ages, only two more compositions with Demetrius saving Thessaloniki from the enemy have been preserved. In terms of concept, and despite the differences in the processing of details, the fresco in Peć is close to the depiction in Dečani (1335-48). In previous research, the inscription on the fresco in Dečani attracted more attention than the iconography, with the explanation that it was about saving Thessaloniki from the Kumans. This gave scholars a reason for different interpretations of the meaning of the illustration, although it is most likely that it is the very event mentioned in the inscription, for the artistic articulation of which the iconography created according to a much older source was used. The composition on the reliquary in Vatoped, with the enemy's cavalry under the city walls behind which the saint is using the spear to defeat the barbarian, will not be repeated. Searching for the source is made difficult by the fact that no text was written, hence the opinions of scholars about the meaning of the scene are dissonant, although most believe that it is about the defense of Thessaloniki against the siege of the Avars and the Slavs. The walls within which the sacred building is located represent a long-established ideogram for the city, identified as the place of events - Thessaloniki with the Basilica of Saint Demetrius. The hagiography of Saint Demetrius was painted in the nave of the church of the same name in the Patriarchate of Peć, following the practice that prevailed in the 14th century. So far, it has not been a specific research topic, nor has it been discussed in the context of known cycles. About 13 artistic biographies of saints created at the end of the 13th and in the 14th century in the Byzantine, Serbian and Bulgarian art, along with individual representations of certain themes, have been published by scholars, to varying degrees. Despite the fact that the cycles are mostly incompletely preserved, as well as that part of the frescoes in Peć was partially or completely restored in the second decade of the 17th century, which raises the question of the original iconography, certain conclusions can be drawn about its concept and the iconography of individual scenes. Six out of the former eight scenes remain, according to which the Peć cycle belongs to the longer redaction. Being a complex ensemble, it consists of compositions based on the life of the saint, concentrated on the North wall of the nave of the church, and scenes of miracles on the opposite wall, of which only one remains, along with a composition of a special theme with the representation of the Dormition of St. Demetrius. Hagiographic scenes illustrate the most significant events from the texts of the Passion representing an indispensable part of the cycle. Scenes of miracles were painted less often, so the miraculous saving of Thessaloniki from the enemy is preserved in three cycles only. The theme of help in a specific situation has most likely surpassed its source over time, becoming an allusion to the enemies of Christians, and the proof of the miraculous protection of Demetrius as the holy warrior, not only when it comes to Thessaloniki, but war in general. Hence it is not surprising that it was included in the cycle, for now it can be said with confidence, in the 14th century. Since the legend has not been preserved, the question remains whether there was a deeper motive for illustrating this event in the church in Peć. The scene with the representation of the Dormition of St. Demetrius, and the rarely shown one, known from three medieval cycles, remain of unclear origin, but its source should probably be sought in cult practice of the 14th century. This episode, together with the Passion of St. Demetrius, is prominently placed next to the altar partition, which is why the cycle began in the northwest corner of the nave. The general language of Byzantine iconography was used to shape the compositions. Certain frescoes from Peć show similarities with preserved illustrations of the same outline, but they are mostly unique. Iconographically, St. Demetrius blessing St. Nestor and St. Nestor killing Lyus stand out, bearing the caveat in mind that this is a composition that undoubtedly underwent some changes during the copying process. As a whole, the illustrations from Peć represent a unique accomplishment, the closest analogies of which can be found on the monuments of the 14th century created in the Serbian art. Probably at this time there were certain changes in the cycle, primarily following the cult and way of honouring saints, with a greater tendency towards narration as a general trend in the art of this time. Finally, it is necessary to refer to two more cycles. The first one, in poor condition, was created in the church of Saint Demetrius in the village of Leivadi in Crete (1315/16), whose painting is strongly influenced by Western art. The iconography of the scene of the Passion of Saint Demetrius, with the saint with his back turned and falling to his knees receiving a spear blow from a soldier in Western armor, bears no resemblance to the Byzantine tradition. The second cycle was recently discovered in the chapel of the Dodorka monastery in Georgia's Davitgareji Desert (late 12th-early 13th century). Some of the compositions possess the iconography not found anywhere (St. Demetrius drops an honorary regalia before Emperor Maximian and the Martyrdom of St. Demetrius, with the dismembered body of the saint, while his chlamys is in the foreground), i.e., it shows details that do not appear or are rare in Byzantine painting (Saint Demetrius blessing Saint Nestor - both of them standing, and Nestor is unarmed, and Saint Nestor kills Lyus - with a young Christian fighter plunging a spear into the body of a fallen gladiator, in the arena without manganese and without the figure of the emperor in the lodge). The Dodorka cycle has no parallels in Georgian and Byzantine art. Significant iconographic peculiarities, and the fact that the appearance of the frescoes was dictated by a local source (Georgian version of the Passion from the 11th century) and specific needs (the emphasis on the chlamys as a relic of Demetrius), complicate the questions of the model for its iconography and the connection with Byzantine art, but even more so - issues of time and place of origin of the cycle of St. Demetrius.
IntroductionThe Report that the AIB has decided to publish starting from this year aims at presenting, even if synthetically, the main characteristics of an overview of Italian libraries, each time pointing out the questions, tendencies and some of the events that are of most interest to those who are interested in the development of the library service in our country.When it is proposed to describe a national picture of the situation of the libraries of the various types (public, university, state, scholastic, ecclesiastic, private, etc.) one finds oneself before the almost total absence of comparable and trustworthy organic information. Using the various sources available, it is possible to estimate with a certain approximation that the over 15,000 Italian libraries (in which approximately 20,000 people work) possess almost 200 million documents, that they acquire annually almost 7 million books, that their annual users are little less than 10 million and the loans made are around 65 million. It is believed that in the year 2001 the running costs exceeded 1000 billion lire, of which a little more than 10% were destined to the purchase of documents.LegislationThe year 2001 was rich in new details with regard to the sector of legislation for libraries. This was also due to the effect of the constitutional reforms and the new scenarios relative to the responsibilities and federalist arrangement of the State.Regulations of particular importance for libraries and indirectly linked to the overall institutional situation are those contained in the law of 28 December 2001, no. 448 (finance law 2002). This prescribes that the management of services aimed at the improvement of the public use and development of the artistic patrimony (and therefore also of the state libraries) can be entrusted to subjects other than those of the state. It also introduces an art. 113 bis in the sole text of the laws on the organization of local bodies (legislative decree 18 August 2000, no. 267), on the basis of which "local public services without industrial importance are managed through direct entrusting to: a) institutions; b) special businesses, including consortiums; c) joint-stock companies" and only as a residual solution (paragraph 2) "is economic management permitted when, due to the small dimensions or the characteristics of the service, it is not opportune to proceed to entrusting it to subjects as described in paragraph 1". Awaited on many sides as the chance to respond to a number of the age-old problems that have afflicted the sector of state public libraries for decades, the new organization regulations of the Ministry for cultural and artistic heritage, issued with the Presidential Decree of 29 December 2000, no. 441, actually only indicate, without solving, some fundamental questions that regard the sector, postponing their settlement, without any time limits, to subsequent second degree regulations.As regards the more strictly library themes of interest, the necessity to solve the problems of the legal deposit drove the AIB to revive the bill proposal, which had already been discussed and had arrived at the threshold of final approval in Parliament in the 13th legislature.During the year 2001, moreover, the European Parliament and the European Union Council finally approved the Directive 2001/29/CE, that aims at integrating the laws of the member countries regarding reproduction rights, rights of communication of works to the public and distribution rights, in reference to those works, on every kind of medium, including digital medium, subject to authors' rights. Art. 5 provides the faculty of member states to order exceptions and limitations to the above mentioned rights, to guarantee the right balance between authors' rights and other social interests. This article furthermore contains the "exceptions" that are to the advantage of libraries or of didactics and scientific research.Cooperation and consortiumsThe last two years have shown considerable progress in the field of cooperation activities, confirming also in Italy the current tendencies at international level. These developments generally - but with different nuances - regard various types of libraries and involve different sectors of activity, from those already established (such as cataloguing and purchases) to emerging activities, more directly linked with the diffusion of Internet (management and development of digital resources, etc.).Access to information and the development of electronic collections are surely the areas that are most involved in the new cooperation initiatives. The university sector is that which demonstrates most vitality in this area, but a certain recent enterprise of state and public libraries should be noted. The initiatives promoted by two large university computer consortiums should also be mentioned: the Cilea and Caspur.The CiBit project for digitalisation, archiving and networking, with a special research interface for Italian literature texts should be noted.In Italian universities, as in other developed countries, the idea of creating alternative models of academic electronic publishing is being increasingly encouraged: in this field mention must be made of the initiative of the University of Florence with the Firenze University Press project.On-line cataloguesThe catalogues of Italian libraries available through Internet number 420. For the year 2001 growth stabilized around 15% and mainly regarded the local body systems, the libraries of which cover municipal or provincial areas.The Italian university OPACs (On line Public Access Catalog) form approximately 40% of the total.National Library Service (SBN) and national projectsIn the last two years the SBN network has been established as the largest public network of libraries in Italy, both due to the number of libraries participating and to the considerable increase in the information in the catalogue: at the end of the year 2001 the libraries numbered approximately 1400, the size of the national collective catalogue was 5,500,000 titles (corresponding to approximately 12 million localizations, that is mentions of the presence of the works in the participating libraries). Daily hits, also as a result of the availability on Internet of the catalogue, are currently on average 160,000 on weekdays, with high points on some days of over 200,000 hits.Other cooperation projects are underway in the field of antique books and manuscripts.The Anagrafe delle biblioteche italiane (Registry of Italian libraries) data base, it too available for consultation on Internet, provides an instrument of general information on the patrimonies, services to the public and specializations of approximately 12,500 libraries.But it is "SBN on line" that has really marked a further step forward towards the improvement of the services: from a single access point, with identical modalities, users can consult catalogues of different institutions (libraries, archives, museums); they can compile a bibliography according to their own specific requirements by integrating information sources; they can also locate documents and ask for them on loan or in reproduced form.Formation, occupation and professionItaly also considers university formation as the basis for the initial preparation of librarians. In the nineties especially, the degree course in Preservation of Cultural Heritage was a source of considerable attraction among young people and in the year 2000/01 it ended up having over 23,000 students registered in the 17 universities offering the course as well as almost 3,000 registered in various related diploma courses (Operators of Cultural Heritage), for a total of 26,339 students. As a whole this is a small sector with respect to all university education (1.6% of the total of students, 2% of those enrolled, 0.6% of those graduated or having obtained diplomas), but a large group with respect to the degree or diploma "arts" group into which it is statistically inserted (16% of those registered, 23% of those enrolled and 7% of those graduated or having obtained diplomas).In the year 2000/01, the first year of the "3+2" university reform, among the 42 first level degree classes, that in Sciences of Cultural Heritage is at the 12th place as regards number of enrolled (9079) and is generally in the first place among the characteristic courses in the Arts Faculty (in the order Arts, Sciences and technologies of figurative arts, of music, entertainment and fashion, Philosophy, Historical Sciences). Sixty-six percent of the students in the degree courses in the archive-library field are female.As a whole the number of students registered is certainly greatly increased with the new courses (9079 enrolled in 2001/02 as against the 5920 of the previous year, +53%). The current offer is of 71 courses in 41 universities: among these, 9 (in a like number of universities) are specifically dedicated to the formation of librarians and archivists, while 33, 2 of which by distance-learning, have a general nature (18 with a specialization for librarians and archivists), and 29 regard other specific sectors (artistic, archaeological, musical, etc., heritage ). Overall, there are therefore at least 27 courses aimed at the formation of librarians, in 26 universities and with locations in 25 different cities.Those who graduated in Cultural Heritage have up to now obtained rapid and effective insertion into the world of work, initially above all with assistance initiatives or contract jobs but also with permanent employment, demonstrating among other things their capacity to temporarily or permanently exploit employment opportunities even in related fields (publishing, multimedia production, Web services, communications, etc.).Generally speaking, the offer of long-term employment in public administration is about 180 positions per year. The main employers are the local bodies, with 64%, followed by the Universities with 27%. Absent for years now is the Ministry for Cultural Heritage (except for two small competitions in 1998 and 1999); some offers come from the sector of research (institutions of the CNR and other bodies, for 7% in the three-year period under consideration), and exceptionally from other public bodies.From the point of view of geographic distribution, the vast majority of the jobs offered is in the North (72%, as against 11% in the Centre and 17% in the South and in the islands), and the percentage exceeds 80% for places in the local bodies: about half of the jobs offered by Italian local bodies are in the region of Lombardy; this is followed at a great distance by Emilia Romagna and then the Veneto region. In the universities, the distribution is a little less unbalanced, again with Lombardy in the first place but with a good offer also in regions of the Centre (Lazio) or of the South (Campania, Puglia).The offer of contract employment or with assistance positions is very active, both through competitions and screening for contract jobs in public administrations and through the search for assistants by service companies, mainly in the field of cataloguing, and of library structures: we can consider that through these forms of selection approximately 300 persons per year find temporary employment.The Italian Libraries Association and the Professional RegisterAn indicator of the dynamism of the profession is given also by the activity of the Italian Libraries Association (AIB) which, during the year 2000 extended to include all twenty Italian regions and considerably increased its number of members: 4407 members (+2% with respect to the previous year). This shows a much larger and clearer growth than that of employment in the sector, which therefore testifies to a greater group thrust, of "self-recognition" and identification, while a considerable number of occasional registrations remain: these are not renewed with any continuity.Since 1998, the AIB manages the Italian Professional Register of librarians, a private register that was established along the lines indicated by the European directives on the recognition of professional titles and by the bills on the unrecognised professions presented in the last legislatures but not yet approved. On 31 December 2001 the Register had 566 qualified librarians enrolled, 160 of which enrolled during the last year.The following persons co-operated to this work: Giovanni Solimine (Introduction); Luca Bellingeri, Gianni Lazzari (Law); Anna Maria Mandillo (Law, SBN and national projects); Gabriele Mazzitelli, Serafina Spinelli (Academic library systems); Tommaso Giordano (Cooperation and consortia); Antonella De Robbio (Italian OPACs); Vanni Bertini (Automation systems in Italy); Alberto Petrucciani (Training, employment and profession). ; Hanno collaborato alla redazione del Rapporto: Giovanni Solimine (Introduzione); Luca Bellingeri, Gianni Lazzari (Legislazione); Anna Maria Mandillo (Legislazione, SBN e progetti nazionali); Gabriele Mazzitelli, Serafina Spinelli (Sistemi bibliotecari di ateneo); Tommaso Giordano (Cooperazione e consorzi); Antonella De Robbio (OPAC italiani); Vanni Bertini (Sistemi di automazione in Italia); Alberto Petrucciani (Formazione, occupazione e professione).
La historia es una disciplina incómoda para los filósofos de las ciencias sociales. Piénsese en la respuesta a la pregunta: ¿es posible encontrar leyes del desarrollo histórico de las sociedades? K. Popper creía que no y afirmaba que la creencia en dicha posibilidad era la fuente de los totalitarismos del siglo XX. Eso afirmaba en"The poverty of historicism" en 1957. Unos años antes Carl Gustav Hempel creía haber encontrado la fórmula básica para expresar una explicación en términos científicos a través de la formulación de leyes en un estilo nomológico deductivo (ver HEMPEL, 2005). Y creía que dicha fórmula también se aplicaba a la historia. En el campo de la sociología fue George Homans quien dio impulso a las ideas de filósofos como C. G. Hempel y R. Braithwaite quienes creían que era posible llegar a teorías deductivas de la misma naturaleza tanto en las ciencias naturales como en las ciencias sociales (ver HOMANS, 1970). A mediados de la década pasada, Philip S. Gorsky publica un provocador artículo en "Sociological Methodology" con el título "The poverty of deductivism" y retoma la vieja discusión sobre el lugar de la historia en la teorización en ciencias sociales (GORSKY, 2004). Lo hace, afirmando exactamente la tesis contraria a Popper: las ciencias sociales no son más que historia.Como señala Thomas Smith, el estudio de la historia es particularmente importante en la investigación en Relaciones Internacionales:"As either political backdrop or behavioral laboratory, history is never far removed from International theory and research. When theory is constructed from the bottom up, history provides the building blocks. When theory is constructed from the top down, history serves to test or falsify theoretical concepts. Case studies are focused, comparative historical analyses. The learning and institutionalist literature is explicitly historical and evolutionary. When quantitatively oriented researchers speak of 'events data' or 'data making', they are referring to historical representations abstracted from a welter of evidence. Normative theorists stress the historical context of moral action. Marxist theorists seek to uncover the hidden histories upon which international theory is founded, while postmodernists point out privileged views of the past that have shaped the discipline. (…) Formal theory, including game theory is perhaps the most ahistorical of theoretical approaches, yet increasingly it too is being put to the historical test". (SMITH, 1999, 8)La investigación histórica y el problema de la explicaciónEn el presente artículo retomaremos las ideas de uno de los sociólogos vivos más interesantes del siglo XX: Arthur L. Stinchcombe (1) (de aquí en más ALS). Al hacerlo pretendemos presentar una discusión del tema que está a medio camino entre las pretensiones deductivistas y el relativismo histórico. Al mismo tiempo pretendemos aportar elementos que apuntan a mostrar lo fructífero de la obra de investigadores que le dan una importancia clave a la historia en ciencias sociales.Antes de comenzar la exposición creemos importante dejar sentado que sentimos una profunda admiración por las ideas de ambos "bandos": aquellos que defienden el proyecto de que los resultados de la investigación deberían poder ser generalizables como la de aquellos que defienden que la investigación social debe explicar hechos históricos singulares e irrepetibles. Creemos que la postura de Stinchcombe busca un término medio mediante el cual, la investigación social se nutra de la particularidad histórica sin renunciar a encontrar generalizaciones aplicables más allá de los casos concretos que formaron parte del estudio realizado.Abordaremos el libro que ALS especialmente escribió sobre teoría social e historia y que se llama "Theoretical methods in social history" de 1978. En este libro Stinchcombe comienza a delinear una perspectiva sobre la explicación en ciencias sociales que hoy en día es una corriente ya instalada en el panorama de las mismas. Me refiero a la perspectiva analítica, la cual se nutre del pensamiento de cientistas sociales provenientes de diversas disciplinas como la economía (T. Schelling) o la sociología (R. Boudon, P. Hedström), así como de la filosofía (J. Elster, P. Manicas, W. Salmon) (2). La idea de mecanismo social como base de una explicación en términos científicos aparece delineada con claridad en la siguiente cita de Peter Hedström:"A social mechanism, as defined here, is a constellation of entities and activities that are linked to one another in such a way that they regularly bring about a particular type of outcome. We explain an observed phenomenon by referring to the social mechanism by which such a phenomenon is regularly brought about". (HEDSTRÖM, 2005, 11)La idea de "mecanismo" tiene una clara inspiración en el individualismo metodológico, la perspectiva según la cual toda explicación de un hecho social en términos agregados (como puede ser la civilización capitalista, la revolución rusa o las recientes revueltas en medio oriente) debe remitirse en última instancia a individuos y sus acciones. Para expresarlo en términos actuales, toda explicación en ciencias sociales debe tener micro fundamentos (LITTLE, 1991). Más allá de esta especificación, la idea de la existencia de un "mecanismo" vinculante entre causa y efecto pretende ser una alternativa a dos formas tradicionales de abordar la causalidad en ciencia: la explicación en términos nomológico - deductivos (covering law model) y la explicación en términos estadísticos. ¿Qué tiene de diferente la idea de mecanismo? Para entender su singularidad repasaremos en los siguientes excursos los principales elementos de las dos teorías rivales (covering law model y explicación estadística).Excurso 1. Covering law model: Carl Gustav HempelActualmente se reconoce en filosofía de la ciencia que el trabajo de C. G. Hempel sobre la explicación científica es la piedra angular de la discusión sobre la materia en la segunda mitad del siglo XX (SALMON 2006, MANICAS, 2006). Según W. Salmon el artículo original de Hempel con Paul Oppenheim de 1948 "is the fountainhead from which the vast bulk of subsequent philosophical work on scientific explanation has flowed –directly or indirectly" (SALMON, 2006, 8).Más allá de sus aciertos y errores hay que conocer el argumento de Hempel para adentrarse en la discusión contemporánea sobre qué es explicar en ciencia.En su formulación inicial, Hempel establece que una explicación científica adquiere la forma de un argumento deductivo con sus premisas y su conclusión. Supongamos que queremos explicar un cierto evento E. Dar respuesta a la pregunta ¿por qué E ocurre? implicaría subsumir el evento E en alguna ley general. Es decir, E queda explicado cuando su ocurrencia se deduce de ciertas leyes conocidas y de determinadas condiciones en las cuales el evento se produce. La explicación de un evento adquiere la forma de un silogismo en el cual una de las premisas establece al menos una ley general, otra premisa refiere a ciertas condiciones iniciales (ambas constituyen el explanans) y la conclusión es el evento que quiere ser explicado (explanandum). Se posee una explicación cuando el explanandum es una consecuencia lógica del set de premisas que constituyen el explanans.Esta idea puede representarse de la siguiente forma:Si ocurre A entonces ocurre B (la forma de una ley general)A ocurre (refiere a las condiciones iniciales o "relevantes") --- Por lo tanto, ocurre B (evento a ser explicado o explanandum)Esta explicación que está formulada para leyes universales también puede formularse de manera probabilística con lo cual tenemos un tipo de explicación que abarca procesos de pensamiento de tipo inductivo o estadístico (para profundizar en esta posibilidad ver MANICAS 2006; SALMON, 2006; HEDSTRÖM 2005).La debilidad habitualmente criticada a este modelo de la explicación científica es que no es suficientemente restrictivo como para eliminar explicaciones obvias o superficiales. Veamos un ejemplo conocido de este tipo de crítica al modelo de Hempel que aparece en Manicas (2006); Salmon, (2006) y Hedström (2005):Nadie que tome píldoras anticonceptivas en forma regular queda embarazadoPedro toma píldoras anticonceptivas regularmente --- Por tanto, Pedro no ha quedado embarazadoEl problema denunciado por los críticos de Hempel es que el covering law model está construido en términos de un argumento lógico en vez de estar construido en términos de causas y sus "poderes" para la producción de eventos ("poderes" o "capacidades" que hay que dilucidar teóricamente). La consecuencia que tiene esta deficiencia es que explicaciones incorrectas (como la presentada en el silogismo previo) deberían ser admitidas si se sigue estrictamente la propuesta del covering law model. En palabras de Hedström: "The fact to be explained can be logically derived from the premises –both of which can be assumed to be true- but the explanation is nevertheless incorrect because it refers to the wrong causal mechanisms" (HEDSTRÖM, 2005, 16).Veremos en la presentación de las ideas de Stinchcombe sobre la investigación histórica, que en éste tipo de perspectiva analítica no solo importa señalar que dos fenómenos aparecen juntos o uno sucede al otro sino que es necesario establecer por qué eso ocurre de determinada manera y en determinadas circunstancias. Precisamente, para Stinchcombe la investigación histórica es una fuente ineludible para descubrir y probar los mecanismos por los cuales determinadas causas producen determinados efectos.Excurso 2. La explicación estadísticaLa explicación estadística en su formulación tradicional está vinculada a la idea de "correlación" o "dependencia robusta". Si en el covering law model la explicación de un fenómeno implica que se posee una teoría desarrollada capaz de subsumir el fenómeno en sus leyes, el modelo estadístico desconfía de las teorías generales y se dirige a la constatación inductiva de regularidades. Esto es, a la asociación de dos fenómenos lo cual implica, en términos estadísticos, que los valores de dos variables tienden a variar en forma conjunta. Hay una sutileza a tener en cuenta cuando se aborda la explicación estadística: la asociación o correlación entre dos variables no necesariamente implica que una sea la causa de la otra, aunque sí es un indicador de que puede haber una relación de tipo causal. X e Y pueden tener una asociación robusta pero puede suceder que ambas sean un efecto de Z con lo cual la relación entre X e Y es espúrea (en términos llanos: se trata de una falsa relación de causalidad). Si bien siempre existe este riesgo también hay formas de controlar la espuriedad de la relación entre X e Y manteniendo constantes los valores de otras variables y observando qué ocurre con la relación original entre X e Y. De aquí viene uno de los pilares de la explicación estadística: una relación es robusta (y por tanto podemos creer que existiría una relación de causalidad entre ambas) si dicha relación al ser controlada por otras relaciones se mantiene firme.Hay dos problemas con este tipo de explicación. En primer lugar, no es posible controlar una relación entre dos variables mediante todas las posibles variables que podrían oficiar como control. En segundo lugar, constatar una regularidad no implica explicar porqué ocurre dicha regularidad. Ya desde Hume sabemos que la causalidad no es observable y este es un problema con mucha investigación orientada a la búsqueda de explicaciones meramente estadísticas. Por ejemplo, durante mucho tiempo se insistió en la importancia de la educación de la madre como predictor del nivel académico alcanzado por los hijos. Esta afirmación provenía de la constatación de una relación robusta entre el nivel educativo alcanzado por la madre y los resultados académicos de los niños. Ahora bien, ¿por qué ocurre este fenómeno? ¿Se trata de una transmisión de conocimiento desde la madre hacia el hijo? ¿Es debido a que una mayor educación en la madre hace que ésta sea más sensible a la evolución educativa de sus hijos e intervenga para componer problemas en la misma? La investigación estadística es muy útil para explorar la pertinencia de hipótesis alternativas como las planteadas recién, pero no es la herramienta capaz de generar por sí misma explicaciones de los fenómenos. En última instancia, la explicación de las relaciones es una cuestión de teoría, es decir, de una perspectiva teórica capaz de develar los mecanismos por los cuales un cierto fenómeno influye sobre otro. Esta es la principal crítica que desde tiendas "analíticas" se hace al tipo de investigación que confía exclusivamente en la detección y control de regularidades.Una propuesta heterodoxa para la investigación históricaEn "Theoretical Methods in Social History" ALS cuestiona tanto la investigación histórica cuantitativa sin una orientación teórica como la idea deductivista de emplear la investigación histórica sólo para validar teorías. Para ALS la investigación histórica es útil para construir teorías. En sus propias palabras:"Our object has been to analyze how generality can be wrested from historical facts" (1978, 115). El desacuerdo con el deductivismo no pasa por negar que un objetivo del trabajo científico sea elaborar y trabajar con conceptos generales, sino en la metodología para construir dichos conceptos. Por su parte, ALS también se separa de la perspectiva que niega la posibilidad de generalizar a partir del estudio de la historia, "the Nietszche – Dilthey side of epistemology" tal como le llama el autor. ALS afirma que los conceptos deben poder captar la singularidad de los hechos y que esto es clave para construir conceptos generales con alto potencial de ingresar en sentencias causales fructíferas.Para ALS la "gran teoría" (como el marxismo o el estructural funcionalismo) solo sirve como un punto de partida: nos facilita ciertos conceptos que nos ayudan a determinar por donde comenzaremos a observar el fenómeno de interés. En definitiva, las grandes teorías pueden mostrar coherencia lógica, pero no necesariamente ser capaces de explicar de forma coherente una secuencia empírica de eventos.La investigación histórica permite avanzar en la teorización aportando precisamente la clase de ajuste "a los hechos" que toda buena teoría debería tener. Este ajuste hace que la teoría tenga un mayor caudal explicativo. ALS explica su idea con suma claridad en el siguiente párrafo:"Concepts are things that capture aspects of the facts for a theory; they are the lexicon that the grammar of theory turns into general sentences about the world.The argument is that the power and fruitfulness of those sentences is determined by the realism and exactness of the lexicon of concepts, and not by the theoretical grammar. The problem of eliminating false sentences by research, the traditional problem of epistemology, is not as problematic as the problem of having sentences interesting enough to be worth accepting or rejecting. And this is determined by whether or not our concepts capture those aspects of reality that enter into powerful and fruitful causal sentences". (1978, 115) (énfasis agregado M.B.)¿Qué método de abordaje propone ALS para investigar un fenómeno histórico y poder teorizar a partir de él? En su forma más sencilla se compone de cuatro pasos.Tomar una secuencia de hechos claramente delimitada en el tiempoObservar la secuencia de hechos a partir de algún concepto general(tomado de teorías previas) con un foco preciso: tratar de vincular una serie de hechos que están conectados a dicha noción general como causa y efecto.Tratar de componer dicha secuencia de hechos en una teoría causalque pueda explicar la secuencia de interés.Probar los conceptos a partir de su capacidad para generar analogíasA continuación retomaremos cada uno de los pasos planteados por ALS para abordar un objeto de estudio histórico. Nos proponemos mostrar la originalidad de su perspectiva.Tomar una secuencia de hechos claramente delimitada en el tiempoUn gran problema de las grandes teorías de la historia como el marxismo o la teoría de la modernización es que trabajan con largo períodos. Este abordaje lleva al investigador a darle prioridad a los aspectos narrativos de la gran secuencia histórica antes que a la formalización de una secuencia causal capaz de mostrar la conexión entre los fenómenos. El marxismo, la teoría de la concentración del poder político (de Jouvenel) y la teoría de la modernización todas tratan de explicar el transcurso desde el siglo XV al siglo XX apelando a algún mecanismo "maestro" que opera a través de la historia y cuyos efectos son acumulativos. Para el marxismo ese mecanismo está en los conflictos que surgen a partir de la propiedad de los medios de producción, para de Jouvenel está en la concentración de poder en los gobiernos centrales, para la teoría de la modernización está en los procesos de diferenciación. ¿Cómo podemos hacer para establecer cuál mecanismo es el más importante en la generación del mundo moderno?Para ALS, la única forma de hacerlo es investigar una secuencia relevante de acontecimientos históricos de moderada extensión que permita (a partir de la riqueza y profundidad que brinda un contexto específico) probar que el mecanismo explicativo "maestro" puede postularse como variable exógena. Es decir, oficia como causa del output final sin ser afectado por cambios en las variables que integran el modelo.Observar una secuencia de hechos históricos y tratar de componer dicha secuencia en una teoría causalLos pasos 2 y 3 son clave en la exposición de ALS porque es en el proceso de ajustar una secuencia de hechos en una cadena de causas y efectos cuando "emergen" los mecanismos explicativos más fructíferos. ALS afirma que los buenos historiadores que tienen una inclinación teorética, no importando el paradigma del cual parten, pueden llegar a descubrir similares mecanismos teóricos. ¿Por qué? "Por que han mirado los hechos" nos diría el autor. Vinculado a este punto, el autor plantea la siguiente paradoja (la cual intenta resolver en el capítulo 2 del libro de referencia):"De Tocqueville's theory of revolution is almost completely unanticipated in conservative thought, Trotsky's theory of the Russian Revolution almost completely unanticipated in Marxist thought; they are very similar, and both are probably basically true". (1978, 5)La teoría de la revolución que puede extraerse de los escritos de de Tocqueville (sobre la revolución francesa) y de Trotsky (sobre la revolución rusa) son muy parecidas ya que recaen en similares mecanismos explicativos. ¿Cómo es esto posible? Para ALS es posible porque ambos historiadores construyen teorías adecuadas a la secuencia de hechos que quieren explicar y dado que estos hechos son análogos un resultado posible es que las teorías también lo sean. Sin duda, es un argumento fuerte y dedicaremos unos breves párrafos a mostrar la pertinencia del análisis de ALS. Pero antes, es importante que resaltemos la riqueza del pensamiento del autor. Contra toda intuición previa, ALS nos dice que dos investigadores que políticamente se ubican en las antípodas piensan igual cuando trabajan como teóricos de la sociedad. ¿No es acaso una buena prueba de la importancia de "razonar los hechos" ésta que nos ofrece ALS?Sin ser exhaustivos repasaremos un mecanismo explicativo del quiebre revolucionario que –según ALS- aparece teorizado de la misma manera en Trotsky y de Tocqueville.El mecanismo básico del cambio revolucionario que abordan de manera muy similar Trotsky y de Tocqueville es el relativo a la crisis de la autoridad tradicional. Toda revolución implica un cambio de autoridad. Por ello, para ambos autores (Trotsky y de Tocqueville) la reflexión sobre cuáles son los elementos que propician en un sistema social este cambio, es un punto clave en su explicación de la revolución.A ambos les interesa la decadencia de la autoridad real y se concentran en los mecanismos que permiten mantener o que son capaces de erosionar la legitimidad de dicha autoridad.Ambos autores apuntan a conceptos que permitan dar cuenta de qué condiciones favorecen en las masas la formación de la creencia en la posibilidad de una alternativa a la autoridad instituida. Ambos niegan que la privación sea por sí sola capaz de movilizar a los grupos sociales que forman parte del conflicto. Antes que por las condiciones de vida de la población se preocupan por problemas tales como la percepción de injusticia como motor de un proceso de extrañamiento entre los grupos sociales, lo cual genera un contexto que estimula (aunque no sea causa directa) el proceso revolucionario. Como puede verse, ambos autores remiten su explicación a mecanismos que operan a través de individuos. Por tanto, ambos tienen una posición encuadrada dentro del individualismo metodológico.Ambos intentan dar cuenta de un cambio cognitivo en la población que va desde el respeto a la autoridad hacia el activo cuestionamiento de la legitimidad de la autoridad instituida. Este cambio, para ambos autores, no depende exclusivamente de las condiciones de vida (factores estructurales de la situación). Es fruto de un cambio cognitivo en el cual es clave la deslegitimación de la autoridad, la posibilidad de imaginar una alternativa y la evaluación de que dicha alternativa tiene posibilidades de triunfar.Un elemento central de la legitimidad de una autoridad está en su efectividad en el cumplimiento de los fines para los cuales ha sido creada: "effectiveness, especially in services to the public, legitimates authority, and ineffectiveness makes the privileges of authority galling" (1978, 35).Ambos autores intentan explicar cómo ciertos patrones sociales, ciertas prácticas de gobierno y ciertos eventos históricos provocan una distribución desigual de la fé en los propósitos de la autoridad instituida y en la percepción de su efectividad al ser comparada con la efectividad de sus posibles alternativas. El foco del análisis de ambos autores está en los procesos cognitivos (3), fundamentalmente comparativos, que producen deslegitimación de la autoridad. Esta es una lección muy valiosa que surge de la investigación de Trotsky y de Tocqueville sobre los procesos revolucionarios: determinar contra qué es comparada la autoridad instituida (por parte de los grupos sociales que desafían o participan, activa o pasivamente, del derrocamiento de la autoridad establecida).En definitiva, tanto Trotsky como de Tocqueville extraen de sus respectivas investigaciones históricas, mecanismos que operan a nivel de la cognición de los actores y es a partir de estos procesos de cambio que dan una explicación de la particular secuencia de hechos que concluye en el quiebre abrupto de vastos esquemas absolutos de poder. "They are all directed at the problem of explaining the decay of authority, they all have something to do with people forming purposes and believing, or not believing, that particular social organs are effective in pursuing those purposes, and they have to do with the perception of possibilities". (1978, 40)"The gradual spreading of the conviction that perhaps a better alternative is really possible (…) is what both Trotsky and de Tocqueville see as the basic psychological process of undermining the traditional authority". (1978, 40)Así como Trotsky y de Tocqueville enfatizan en los mecanismos que estimulan el proceso revolucionario, también son capaces de encontrar en sus investigaciones, los mecanismos que desestimulan dicho proceso. Para ambos autores, por ejemplo, la discusión pública y la participación de los diferentes grupos sociales en la elaboración de la política tienden a no erosionar la legitimidad de las autoridades instituidas. Este tipo de mecanismo impide que se dispare un proceso de enajenación respecto a la autoridad y quienes la ejercen.Probar los conceptos a partir de su capacidad para generar analogíasAhora bien, ¿cómo es posible saber si la teoría a la que se ha llegado es promisoria? Para ALS, una teoría es "fuerte" cuando los mecanismos causales que emplea para explicar un fenómeno son válidos para explicar diferentes instancias históricas concretas. Es decir, cuando nos permite realizar analogías.La analogía es un típico producto de la investigación empírica. Considerar a dos objetos como similares (los predicados que A y B tienen en común y que los diferencian de un tercer objeto C) surge de una comparación minuciosa entre los objetos. Para ello hay que investigar (puesto que hay que hacer comparaciones). Una vez que tenemos un concepto que separa a dos objetos de otros, tenemos en potencia un concepto con alta capacidad para poder ingresar en sentencias causales. ¿Por qué? Porque podemos presumir que la analogía encontrada es causa de comportamientos similares entre A y B, comportamiento que en otros objetos adquiere valores diferentes.En la medida en que ALS defiende la estrategia de investigar series de eventos históricos de moderada extensión, el hallazgo de analogías fructíferas a nivel del comportamiento de los actores (individuales o corporativos) tiene mayor probabilidad de emerger durante el trabajo de investigación mismo. Ya que el estudio cuidadoso de la historia le ofrece al investigador un campo "rico" en posibilidades para hallar fenómenos análogos (fenómenos en los cuales los mismos mecanismos producen similares resultados). Por tanto, el estudio de la historia para ALS es una fábrica de conceptos con mayor potencial explicativo que el pensamiento teórico en abstracto, desarraigado. Es más fructífero construir conceptos a partir de la elaboración de analogías históricamente situadas que elaborarlos en abstracto sin un "teatro de operaciones" que pueda ayudar al investigador.Esto no implica un llamado al inductivismo ingenuo, "it is about the use of facts to improve ideas, to make them richer, more flexible, more powerful" (1978, 24).Un ejemplo de razonamiento por analogía tomado de Letras InternacionalesPara ejemplificar el método propuesto por ALS tomaremos un análisis realizado en Letras Internacionales por Javier Bonilla en editorial correspondiente al número 100 de la revista. En dicho editorial Bonilla aborda el problema de los "fundamentalismos islámicos" y su explicación en tanto fenómeno político. Dice acerca de los mismos:"Si hoy alguien quiere creer que los talibanes afganos, así como la miríada de grupos más o menos afines, autónomos o apoyados por distintos estados, son sólo "fundamentalistas islámicos" que, indignados por la irrespetuosa fuerza de la globalización generada en Occidente, han optado por defender su identidad religiosa y cultural, estará seguramente en todo su derecho. Pero tendrá inevitablemente que explicar dos cosas.La primera: ¿como se "defiende" la pureza del Islam mediante el expediente de aplicar 200 azotes y ejecutar de tres tiros en la cabeza en la plaza pública a una viuda encinta?. Si esta metodología no es la forma misma de instaurar el Terror para controlar a la población por el ejercicio del Terror mismo, no imaginamos un mecanismo mejor.La segunda: ¿por qué razones, tanto el 'modus operandi' de la exhibición pública del Terror, como el sistemático recurso al desmentido propagandístico cínicamente reñido con las evidencias que utilizan los talibanes, resultan ser prácticamente idénticos a los métodos de Lenin, de Hitler, de Mussolini, de Stalin, de Enver Hoxha, de Tito, de Pol Pot, de Castro o de Kim Jong-il , entre otros ?"(4).Este razonamiento puede ser tomado como un ejemplo de aplicación de la propuesta de ALS respecto a las analogías. Veamos la propuesta del editorialista en términos sencillos:Todo régimen político que es análogo a otro régimen político en el ejercicio del terror en forma pública es también análogo en no aceptar ninguna limitación ética, en la intención de imponer su relato y lograr sus fines (5). En consecuencia, una forma de conceptualizar qué es el régimen talibán es hacerlo formar parte del mismo conjunto que integran la Alemania nazi o la Unión Soviética bajo Stalin.Estas analogías son muy valiosas cuando nos enfrentamos a la explicación de un fenómeno político. En primer lugar, implican una conceptualización que recorre un camino que podríamos llamar "bottom – up". En el sentido que parte desde características observables del régimen y asciende en la conceptualización de las mismas (el camino inverso es despreocuparse de las características observables y aplicar apresuradamente una categoría teórica tomando al régimen como un vago ejemplo de la misma). En segundo lugar, apunta a clasificar las características observadas en alguna categoría análoga y ya conocida de régimen político. Esto permite ahondar en el estudio del fenómeno contemporáneo al menos con una herramienta desarrollada como punto de partida. La comparación minuciosa nos dirá si nuestro punto de partida es el correcto o no. En tercer lugar, nos permite eludir explicaciones aparentemente poderosas como aquella que hace del florecimiento de fundamentalismos la consecuencia de una misteriosa fuerza llamada "globalización" (nunca definida con precisión y desprovista de todo anclaje individual). Eludir este tipo de explicaciones basadas en grandes abstracciones es muy importante aunque los cientistas sociales solemos ser adictos a ellas. Conceptos como "globalización" o "modernidad líquida" son adictivos porque nos transmiten la sensación de que podemos explicar casi cualquier cosa con ellos. Sin embargo, su problema es que la inconsistencia de la definición de los mismos y su nulo anclaje en la actividad concreta de individuos no nos permiten esclarecer cómo es que esa fuerza llamada "globalización" genera aquellos fenómenos que queremos explicar. La utilización indiscriminada de estos conceptos nos hace sentir que al menos tenemos una explicación, aunque no se tenga la más mínima idea de cómo es que opera el explanans en el mundo concreto de los individuos que hacen o dejan de hacer determinadas cosas y con ello producen resultados a nivel colectivo.(1) Arthur L. Stinchcombe (1933) es actualmente profesor emérito en el Departamento de Sociología en Northwestern University. Previamente enseñó en Johns Hopkins, Berkeley, University of Chicago y University of Arizona. En su carrera se destacan tanto sus contribuciones al área de la metodología como de la construcción de teorías en ciencias sociales. Ha escrito más de 12 libros en muy distintas áreas como desarrollo agrícola, organización industrial y educación. Su segundo libro es un clásico en el área de la construcción de teorías y se llama precisamente "Constructing social theories", publicado originalmente en 1968. Dicho libro ha sido traducido al español. Ganó a lo largo de su carrera muchos premios, destacamos los más recientes: en 2004 Distinguished Career Prize, American Sociological Association; en 2007 Lazarsfeld Award for career contribution of methodology, ASA Methods Section. Una excelente entrevista en la que puede leerse sobre su trabajo de investigación hasta finales de la década de 1980 está en Swedberg (1990, ver bibliografía).(2) La lista no es exhaustiva. Pueden consultarse tres antologías de exponentes de la corriente analítica en las siguientes referencias especificadas en la bibliografía de este artículo: Hedström y Silverberg 1998, Hedström y Bearman, 2009 y Noguera et. Al., 2006.(3) Proceso cognitivo que se produce a nivel de los individuos que forman parte de los grupos en conflicto.(4) Disponible en:http://www.ort.edu.uy/facs/boletininternacionales/contenidos/100/editorialbonilla100.html(5) No aceptar limitaciones y pretender una sumisión total es una de las virtudes del concepto de totalitarismo que permiten diferenciar este tipo de régimen de otros que pueden ser similares en algún aspecto. Pablo Brum escribe: "Hitchens acota que totalitarismo 'is a useful term, because it separates 'ordinary' forms of despotism –those which merely exact obedience from their subjects- from the absolutist systems which demand that citizens become wholly subjects and surrender their private lives and personalities entirely to the state, or to the supreme leader'" (BRUM, 2011). *Profesor de Fundamentos de la Investigación Social, Métodos de investigación y Taller de Monografía.Depto de Estudios InternacionalesFACS – ORT Uruguay(ma.baudean@gmail.com). BIBLIOGRAFÍABRAITHWAITE, Richard. 1965 [1953]. La explicación científica. Madrid, Tecnos.BRUM, Pablo. 2011. El Impacto del Totalitarismo en el Siglo XX. Documento de Investigación Nº 62. Montevideo, FACS-ORT.GORSKY, Philip S. 2004. The Poverty of Deductivism: A Constructive Realist Model of Sociological Explanation. En: Sociological Methodology, 2005.HEDSTRÖM, Peter; SWEDBERG, Richard. 1998. Social Mechanisms. An analytical approach to social theory. New York, Cambridge University Press.HEDSTRÖM, Peter. 2005. Dissecting the Social. On the Principles of Analytical Sociology. New York, Cambridge University Press.HEDSTRÖM P., BEARMAN, P. (Editors). 2009. The Oxford Handbook of Analytical Sociology. USA, Oxford University Press.HEMPEL, Carl G. 2005 [1965]. La explicación científica. Estudios sobre la filosofía de la ciencia. Barcelona, Paidós.HOMANS, George C. 1970. Naturaleza de la ciencia social. Buenos Aires, Eudeba.LITTLE, Daniel. 1991. Varieties of social explanation: An Introduction to the Philosophy of Social Science.Colorado: Westview Press.MANICAS, Peter. 2006. A realist philosophy of social science. Explanation and Understanding. New York, Cambridge University Press.Analytical Sociological Theory Papers. En: Papers Revista de Sociología (número especial), 80, 2006, p. 1-307.POPPER, Karl. 1969 [1957]. The poverty of historicism. London, Routledge.SALMON, Wesley. 2006 [1989]. Four decades of scientific explanation. USA, University of Pittsburgh Press.SMITH, Thomas W. 1999. History and International Relations. London, Routledge.STINCHCOMBE, Arthur L. 1978. Theoretical methods in social history. New York, Academic Press.SWEDBERG, Richard. 1990. Economics and sociology. Redefining their boundaries: conversations with economists and sociologists. New Jersey, Princeton University Press.
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John M. Hobson on Eurocentrism, Historical Sociology and the Curious Case of Postcolonialism
International Relations, it is widely recognized, is a Western discipline, albeit one that claims to speak for global conditions. What does that mean are these regional origins in and by themselves a stake in power politics? This Eurocentrism is often taken as a point of departure for denouncing mainstream approaches by self-proclaimed critical and postcolonialist approaches to IR. John Hobson stages a more radical attack on Eurocentrism, in which western critical theories, too, are complicit in the perpetuation of a dominantly western outlook. In this extensive Talk, Hobson, among others, expounds his understanding of Eurocentrism, discusses the imperative to historicize IR, and sketches the outline of possible venues of emancipation from our provincial predicament.
Print version of this Talk (pdf)
What is, according to you, the biggest challenge / principal debate in current International Relations? What is your position or answer to this challenge / in this debate?
In my view, there are two principal inter-related challenges that face IR. The first is the need to deal with the critique that the discipline is constructed on Eurocentric foundations. This matters both for critical and conventional IR. The latter insists that it works according to value-free positivistic/scientifistic principles. But if it is skewed by an underlying Western-centric bias, as I have contended in my work, then the positivist mantra turns out to constitute a smokescreen or veil behind which lies the dark Eurocentric face of conventional IR. And of course, if Eurocentrism in various forms infects much of critical IR, then it jeopardizes its critical credentials and risks falling back into problem-solving theory. For these reasons, then, I feel that the critique of Eurocentric IR and international political economy (IPE) poses nothing short of an intellectually existential challenge to these disciplines.
The second inter-related challenge is that if we accept that the discipline is essentially Eurocentric then we need to reconstruct IR's foundations on a non-Eurocentric basis and then advance an alternative non-Eurocentric research agenda and empirical analysis of the international system and the global political economy. This is a straightforward challenge vis-à-vis conventional IR/IPE theory but it is more problematic so far as critical IR/IPE is concerned (which is why my answer is somewhat extended). The more postmodern wing of the discipline would view with inherent skepticism any attempt to reconstruct some kind of (albeit alternative) grand narrative. And the postmodern postcolonialists would likely concur. It is at this point that the thorniest issue emerges in the context of postcolonial IR theory. For however hard this is to say, I feel that simply proclaiming the Eurocentric foundations of the discipline does not hole its constituent theories deep beneath the waterline; a claim that abrades with the view of most postcolonialists who view Eurocentrism as inherently illegitimate either because it renders it imperialist (which I view as problematic since there are significant strands of anti-imperialist Eurocentrism and scientific racism) or because they conflate Eurocentrism with the unacceptable politics of (scientific) racism (which I also find problematic notwithstanding the point that there are all manner of overlaps and synergies between these two generic Western-centric discourses, all of which is explained in my 2012 book, The Eurocentric Conception of World Politics). The key point—one which will undoubtedly get me into a lot of trouble with postcolonialists—is that I feel we need to recognize that in the end Eurocentric IR (and IPE) theory constitutes a stand-point approach, just like any other, and its merits or de-merits can ultimately only be evaluated against the empirical record, past and present (notwithstanding the points that I find Eurocentrism to be deeply biased and that what I find so deeply galling about it is its dismissive 'put-down' modus operandi of all things non-Western, wherein all non-Western achievements are dismissed outright, alongside the simultaneous (re)presentation of everything that the West does as progressive and/or pioneering).
So the second principal challenge facing the discipline—one which will no less get me into trouble with many postmodern/poststructuralist thinkers—is the need to reconstruct an alternative non-Eurocentric set of disciplinary foundations, which can then generate fresh empirical narratives of the international system and the global political economy. For my view is that only by offering an alternative research agenda and empirical analysis of the world economy can IR and IPE be set free from their extant Eurocentric straitjackets and the Sisyphean prison within which they remain confined, wherein IR and IPE scholars simply re-present or recycle tired old Eurocentric mantras and tropes in new clothing ad infinitum. For if nothing else, the absence of an alternative reconstruction and empirical analysis means that IR and IPE scholars are most likely simply to default to, or retreat back into, their Eurocentric comfort zone. Accordingly, then, the battle between Eurocentrism and non-Eurocentrism needs to be taken to the empirical field and away from the high and rarified intellectually mountainous terrain of metanarratival sparring contests.
How did you arrive at where you currently are in your thinking about International Relations?
Another way of asking this question would be: what influenced you to become a non-Eurocentric thinker? I get asked this question a lot, especially by non-white people. A good deal of this is related to my life-experience, much of which is sub-conscious of course and both too personal and too detailed to openly reflect upon here (sorry!) More objectively, the initial impetus came around 1999 when I came across a book on Max Weber by the well-respected Weberian scholar, Bryan Turner, in which he argued inter alia that Weber's sociology had Orientalist properties; none of which had occurred to me before. Following this up further I became convinced that Weber was indeed Eurocentric, as was Marx. More importantly, I came to see this as a huge problem that infected not just Marx and Weber but pretty much all of historical sociology (which was reinforced in my mind when I came to read James Blaut's books, The Colonizer's Model of the World (find it here), and Eight Eurocentric Historians). So I set out to develop an alternative non-Eurocentric approach to world history and historical sociology as a counter (which resulted in my 2004 book, The Eastern Origins of Western Civilisation).
Two further key IR texts that I became aware of were L.H.M. Ling's seminal 2002 book, Postcolonial International Relations and Naeem Inayatullah and David Blaney's equally brilliant 2004 book International Relations and the Problem of Difference, both of which led me to explore further the Eurocentric nature of IR and later IPE. But it would be remiss of me not to mention the influence of Albert Paolini; a wonderful colleague whom I had the pleasure to know at La Trobe University in Melbourne back in the early 1990s before his exceedingly unfortunate and premature death (and who, I must say, was way ahead of the game compared to me in terms of developing the critique of Eurocentrism in IR (see his book, Navigating Modernity (1997)). However, it would be unfair to the many others who have influenced me in countless ways to single out only these books and writers, though I hope you'll forgive me for not mentioning them so as to avoid providing yet another overly extended answer!
What would a student need to become a specialist in IR or understand the world in a global way?
This is an excellent but very challenging question and I want to try and make a succinct answer (though I shall build on it in some of the answers I will provide later on). The essential argument I make about 'thinking inter-culturally' is that while the more liberal side of the discipline thinks that its cosmopolitanism does just this, its Eurocentrism actually prevents it from fulfilling this. Because ultimately, cosmopolitanism wants to impose a Western standard of civilization upon the world, thereby advancing cultural monism rather than cultural pluralism. And this is merely the loudest expression of a spectre that haunts much of the discipline. But I guess that in the end, to achieve genuine cultural pluralism and to think inter-culturally requires us to take seriously how other non-Western peoples think of what their cultures comprise and what it means to them, and how their societies and states work along such lines. Dismissing them, as Eurocentrism always does, as inferior, backward and regressive denies this requirement outright. Interestingly, my great grandfather, J.A. Hobson flirted with this idea in his book, Imperialism: A Study (though this has largely escaped the notice of most people since few have read the more important second part of that book where all this is considered). But this is merely a first step, for as I will explain later on in the interview, ultimately thinking inter-culturally requires an analysis of the dialogical inter-connections and mutual co-constitutive relations between West and non-West which, in turn, presupposes not merely the presence of Western agency but also that of non-Western agency in the making of world politics and the global political economy.
All of which is clearly a massive challenge and I am certainly not advocating that the discipline of IR engage in deep ethnographical study and that it should morph into anthropology. And in any case I think that there are things we can do more generally to transcend Eurocentrism while learning more about the other side of the Eurocentric frontier without going to this extreme. I shall talk about such conceptual moves later on in this interview. One such theoretical move that I talk about later is the need to engage historical sociology (albeit from a non-Eurocentric perspective) or, more precisely global historical sociology. Again, though, I'm not advocating that the discipline should morph into historical sociology. And I'm aware that one of the biggest obstacles to IR making inroads into historical sociology is the sheer size of the task that this requires. It has always come naturally to me because that is where I came from before I joined the IR academic community. But there is quite a bit of historical sociology of IR out there now so I do think it possible for new PhD students to enter this fold. All of this said, though, I'm unsure if I have answered your question adequately.
The west is often seen as the source of globalization and innovation, which have historically radiated outwards in a process without seeming endpoint. What is wrong with this picture, and, perhaps more interestingly, why does it remain so pervasive?
In essence I believe this familiar picture—one which is embraced by conventional and many critical IR/IPE and globalization theorists—is wrong because this linear Western narrative brackets out all the many inputs that the non-West has made (which returns me to the point made a moment ago concerning the dialogical relations that have long existed between West and non-West). In my aforementioned 2004 book I argued that the West did not rise to modernity as a result of its own exceptional rational institutions and culture but was significantly enabled by many non-Western achievements and inventions which were borrowed and sometimes appropriated by the West. In short, without the Rest there might be no modern West. Moreover, while the West has been the principal actor in globalization since 1945, the globalization that preceded it (i.e., between 1492 and c.1830) was non-Western-led (as was the process of Afro-Eurasian regionalization that occurred between c.600 and 1492 out of which post-1492 globalization emerged). And even after 1945 I believe that non-Western actors have played various roles in shaping both globalization and the West, all of which are elided in the standard Eurocentric linear Western narrative of globalization.
But why has this image remained so persistent? This is potentially a massive question though it is a very important one for sure. Conventional theorists are most likely to disagree outright with my alternative picture in part because they are entirely comfortable with the notion that the 'West is best' and that the West single-handedly created capitalism, the sovereign inter-state system and the global economy. Critical theorists are rather more problematic to summarize here. But one that springs to mind is the type of argument that Immanuel Wallerstein (Theory Talk #13) made in a1997 article, in which he insisted that it be an imperative to hold the West accountable for everything that goes on in the world economy so that we can prosecute its crimes against the world. Arguments that bring non-Western agency in, as I seek to do, he dismisses as deflecting focus away from the West and thereby diluting the nature of the crimes that the West has imparted and therefore serves merely to weaken the case for the critical prosecution. I fundamentally disagree with him for reasons that I shan't go into here (but will touch upon below). But in my view it is (or should be) a key debate-in-the-making not least because I suspect that many other critical theorists might agree with him and, more importantly, because it brings fundamentally into question of what Eurocentrism is and of what the antidote to it comprises. Either way, though, critical theorists, at least in my view, often buy into the Western linear narrative, albeit not by celebrating the West but by critiquing it. All of which means that both conventional and many critical IR scholars effectively maintain the hegemony of Eurocentrism in the discipline though for diametrically opposed reasons; and which, at the risk of sounding paranoid, suggests a deeply subliminal conspiracy against the introduction of non-Eurocentrism.
Nevertheless one final but rather obvious point remains. For the biggest reason why Eurocentrism persists is because it makes Westerners feel good about themselves. And at the risk of sounding like sour grapes (notwithstanding very decent sales for my non-Eurocentric books), I have been struck by the fact that there seems to be an insatiable appetite—particularly among the Western public readership—for high profile Eurocentric books that celebrate and glorify Western civilization; though, to be brutally frank, many of these rarely add anything new to that which has been said countless times in the last 50 years, if not 200—notwithstanding Ricardo Duchesne's recent avowedly Eurocentric book The Uniqueness of Western Civilization as constituting a rare exception in this regard. All of which means that writing non-Eurocentric books is unlikely to get your name onto the bestseller list (though granted, the same is true for many of the Eurocentric books that have been written!)
International theory and political theory originates mainly from Europe, but makes universal claims about the nature of politics. How does international theory betray its situated roots and how do these roots matter for how we should think about theory?
I'm not sure that I can answer this question in the space allowed but I'll try and get to the broad-brush take-home point. I guess that when thinking about modern IR theory we can find those theorists who in effect advocate a normative Western imperialist posture even if they claim to be doing otherwise. Robert Gilpin's work on hegemonic stability theory is perhaps the clearest example in this respect. Anglo-Saxon hegemony, he claims, is non-imperialist because it always seeks to help the rest of the world, not exploit it. But the exercise of hegemony, it turns out, returns us to the old 19th century trope of the civilizing mission where Western practices and principles are transferred and imposed on non-Western societies in order to culturally convert them along Western lines. And this in turn issues from the assumption that the British and American interests are not selfish but are universal. This mantra is there too in Robert Keohane's (Theory Talk #9) book, After Hegemony, where cultural conversion of non-Western societies to a neoliberal standard of civilization by the international financial institutions through structural adjustment is approved of; an argument that is developed much more expansively in his later work on humanitarian intervention. And this trope forms the basis of cosmopolitan humanitarian interventionist theory more generally, where state reconstruction, which is imposed once military intervention has finished, is all about re-creating Western political and economic institutions across the world. I don't doubt for a moment the sincerity of the arguments that these authors make. But they can make them only because they believe that the Western interest is truly the universal. In such ways, then, IR betrays its roots.
Ultimately, Western IR theory constructs a hierarchical conception of the world with the West standing atop and from there we receive an image of a procession or sliding scale of gradated sovereignties in the non-Western world. For much of IR theory that has neo-imperialist normative underpinnings, it is this construction which legitimizes Western intervention in the non-Western world, thereby reproducing the legal conception of the (imperialist) standard of civilization that underpinned late 19th century positive law. Nevertheless, there has been a significant strand of anti-imperialist Eurocentrism within international theory (and before it a strand of anti-imperialist scientific racism, as in the likes of Charles HenryPearson and LothropStoddard). But once again, as we find in Samuel Huntington's famous 1996 book, The Clash of Civilizations—which comprises a modern equivalent of Lothrop Stoddard's Eugenicist texts, The Rising Tideof Color (1920) and Clashing Tides of Color (1935)—the West is held up as the highest expression of civilization, with non-Western societies viewed as socially inferior such that the West's mandate is not to imperially intervene across the world but to renew its uniquely Western civilized culture in the face of regressive and rampant non-Western regions and countries (particularly Middle Eastern Islam and Confucian China). Hedley Bull's anti-imperialist English School argument provides a complementary variant here because, he argues, it is the refusal of non-Western states to become Western wherein the source of the (unacceptable) instability of the global international society ultimately stems. All of which, as you allude to in your question, rests on the conflation of the Western interest with the universal. It is for this reason, then, that the cardinal principle of critical non-Eurocentrism comprises the need to undertake deep (self) reflexivity and to remain constantly vigilant to Eurocentric slippages.
In turn, this returns me to the point I made before: that IR theory does not think inter-culturally because it denies the validity of non-Western cultures. Because it does so, then it ultimately denies the full sovereignty of non-Western states. For one of the trappings of sovereignty is what Gerry Simpson usefully refers to as 'existential equality', or 'cultural self-determination'. It seems clear to me that the majority of IR theory effectively denies the sovereignty of non-Western states because it rejects cultural pluralism and hence cultural self-determination as a function of its intolerant Eurocentric monism. The biggest ironies that emerge here, however, are two-fold; or what I call the twin self-delusions of IR. First, while conventional IR theory proclaims its positivist, value free credentials that sit comfortably with cultural pluralist tolerance, nevertheless as I argued in my answer to your first question, this positivist mantra turns out to constitute a smokescreen or veil behind which lies the face of intolerant Eurocentric cultural monism. And second, it means that while IR proclaims that its subject matter comprises the objective analysis of the international system which focuses on anarchy and the sovereign state, nevertheless it turns out that what it is really all about is narrating an analysis of Western hierarchy and the 'hyper-sovereignty' of Western states versus the 'conditional sovereignty/gradated sovereignty' of non-Western states.
Linking your work to Lizée's as a critique of extrapolating 'universals' on the basis of narrow (Western) experiences, Patrick Jackson (Theory Talk #44) wrote as follows: 'Perhaps the cure for the disease that Hobson and Lizée diagnose is a rethinking of what "theory" means beyond empirical generalizations, so that future international theorists can avoid the sins of the past.' What is your conception of what theory is or should be?
As noted already, I am all in favor of developing non-Eurocentric theory. To sketch this out in the most generic terms I begin with the proposition that Eurocentric IR/IPE theory is monological, producing a reductive narrative in which only the West talks and acts. It is essentially a 'winner/loser' paradigm that proclaims the non-West as the loser or is always on the receiving end of that which the West does, thereby ensuring that central analytical focus is accorded to the hyper-agency of the Western winner. And its conception of agency is based on having predominant power. We find this problem particularly within much of critical IR theory, where because the West is dominant so it qualifies as having (hyper) agency while the subordinate position of the non-West means that it has little or no agency. In turn, particularly within conventional IR and IPE we encounter a substantialist ontology, where the West is thought to occupy a distinct and autonomous domain. From there everything else follows. And even in parts of critical IR and IPE where relationalism holds greater sway we often find that the West still occupies the center of intellectual gravity in the world.
My preference is for a fully relationalist approach which replaces the monologism of Eurocentrism and its reification of the West with the aforementioned conception of dialogism that brings the non-West into the discussion while simultaneously focusing on the mutually constitutive relations between Western and non-Western actors. It also allows for the agency of the non-West alongside the West's agency (even though clearly after c.1830 the West has been the dominant actor). This in effect replaces Eurocentrism's either/or problematique with a both/and logic, enabling us to reveal a space in which non-Western agency plays important roles without losing focus of Western agency, even when it takes a dominant form as it did after c.1830. In this way then, to reply to Wallerstein's argument discussed earlier, one does not have to dilute the critique of the West when bringing non-Western agency in for both can be situated alongside each other. While I could of course say much more here, these conceptual moves are paramount to me and inform the basis of my empirical work on the international system and the global political economy.
All in all, IR theory needs to take a fully global conception of agency much more seriously; structuralist theory in its many guises is necessary but is ultimately insufficient since it diminishes or dismisses outright the prospect or existence of non-Western agency. Moreover, I seek to blend materialism and non-materialism, which means that neither constructivism nor poststructuralism can quite get us over the line. Even so, blending materialism and non-materialism is not an especially hard task to achieve though IR's preferred ontologically reductionist stance certainly makes this a counter-intuitive proposition.
You combine historical sociology with international relations. What promises does this interdisciplinary approach hold? Why do we need historical sociologies of IR?
Following on from my previous answer I argue that a relationalist non-Eurocentric historical sociology of IR is able to problematize the entities that IR takes for granted—states, anarchy (as well as societies and civilizations)—in order to reveal them, to quote from the marvelous introduction that Julian Go and George Lawson have written for their forthcoming edited volume Global Historical Sociology, as 'entities in motion'. Indeed such entities are never quite complete but change through time. Here it is worth quoting Go and Lawson further, where they argue that
'social forms are "entities-in-motion": they are produced, reproduced, and breakdown through the agency of historically situated actors. Such entities-in-motion, whether they are states, empires, or civilizations often appear to be static entities with certain pre-determined identities and interests. But the relational premise, and perhaps promise, of GHS is its attempt to denaturalize such entities by holding them up to historical scrutiny'.
It is precisely this global historical sociological problematique that underpins the approach that I develop in a forthcoming book, provisionally entitled Reorient International Political Economy where inter alia, I show how many of the major processes of the global economy are never complete but are constantly mutating as they are shaped by the multiple interactions of Western and non-Western actors. To take the origins of capitalism or globalization as an example, I show how these have taken not a Western linear trajectory but a highly discontinuous path as West and non-West have interacted in complex ways.
A good number of IR historical sociologists have focused specifically on particular historical issues—especially that of the rise of the sovereign state in Europe. Such analyses have in my view proven to be extremely valuable because they allow us to puncture some of the myths that surround 'Westphalia' that populate standard or conventional IR reportage (particularly that found in undergraduate text-books). But ultimately I feel that the greatest worth of the historical sociology of IR project lies in using history (understood in historical-sociological terms rather than according to traditional historians' precepts) as a means of problematizing our understanding of the present international system and global political economy. Thus, for me, historical sociology is ultimately important because it can disrupt our understanding and explanations of the present. And I believe that this kind of inter-disciplinarity can bear considerable fruit (notwithstanding the difficulty that this task poses for IR scholars).
You famously criticized IR's Eurocentrism and argued for the need for inter-cultural thinking. What is inter-cultural thinking and how can it benefit IR?
As I already discussed what inter-cultural thinking is a bit before, I shall consider how it might benefit IR and indeed the world in various ways. First, if the rise of the West into modernity owes much of this achievement to the help provided by non-Western ideas, institutions and technologies, then acknowledging this debt could go a long way to healing the wounds that the West has inflicted upon the non-West's sense of self-esteem. Moreover, the hubristic claim ushered in by Eurocentrism, that the West made it to the top all by itself and that the very societies which helped it get there are then immediately denounced as inferior and uncivilized, significantly furnishes the West with the imperialist mandate to intervene and remake non-Western societies in the image of the West. So in essence, the help that the once-more advanced non-Western societies that the West benefited from is rewarded by 150 years of imperial punishment! Of course, IR scholars do not really study the rise of the West, but it is implicit in so much of what they write about. So acknowledging this debt could challenge the West's self-appointed mandate to remake the world in its own image as well as problematize many of the historical assumptions that lie either explicitly or implicitly within IR.
Second, and flowing on from the previous point, thinking inter-culturally means recognizing the manifold roles that the non-West has played in shaping the rise of Western capitalism and the sovereign state system as well as the global economy, as I have just argued, but also appreciating their societies and cultures on their own terms rather than simply dismissing them as unfit for purpose in the modern world. Less Western Messianism and Western hubris, more global understanding and empathy, is ultimately what I'm calling for. But none of this is possible while Eurocentrism remains the go-to modus operandi of IR and IPE. And this is important for IR not least because significant parts of it have informed Western policy, most especially US foreign policy.
Third, a key benefit that inter-cultural thinking could bring to IR is that while the discipline presumes that it furnishes objective analyses of the international system, the upshot of my claim that the discipline is founded on Eurocentrism is that all the discipline is really doing is finding ways to reaffirm the importance of Western civilization in world politics, defending it and often celebrating it, rather than learning or discovering new things about the world and world politics. I believe that only a non-Eurocentric approach can deliver that which IR thinks it's doing already but isn't.
You've said that 'what makes an argument [institutionally] Eurocentric…lies with the nature of the categories that are deployed to understand development. And these ultimately comprise the perceived degree of 'rationality' that is embodied within the political, economic, ideological, and social institutions of a given society.' In order to think inter-culturally, does IR needs new conceptions of rationality, or standards other than rationality altogether?
What an extremely interesting and perceptive question which has really got me thinking! Again, it's something that I've been aware of in the recesses of my mind but have never really thought through. Certainly the essence of Eurocentrism lies in the reification of Western rationality (or what Max Weber called Zweckrationalität) and its simultaneous denial to non-Western societies. But what with all the revelations that have happened in Britain in the last decade, where a seemingly never ending series of fraudulent practices have been uncovered within British public life—whether it be MPs' expenses scandals, banking scandals, newspaper scandals and the like—then one really wonders about the extent to which the West operates according to the properties of Zweck-rationality that Weber proclaimed it to have. Corruption and fraud happen in the West but clearly they are much more hidden than in those instances where it occurs in non-Western countries (notwithstanding the revelations mentioned a moment ago). But if one were to open the lid of many large Western companies, for example, and delve inside one might well find all sorts of 'rationality-compromising' or 'rationality-denial' practices going on. To mention just two obvious examples: first, promotions are often tainted by personal linkages rather than always founded on merit; and second, managers often mark out and protect their own personal position/territory even when it (frequently) goes against the 'rational' interests of the said organization.
To return to your question, then, one could conclude that many Western institutions are far less rational than Eurocentrism proclaims, which in turn would challenge the foundations of Eurocentrism. Of course, corruption and fraud are not unique to the West, but it is the West that proclaims its unique 'rational standard of civilization'. Whether, therefore, we need to abandon the term (Zweck) rationality on the grounds that it is an impossibly conceived ideal type remains the question. Right now I don't have an answer though I'll be happy to mull over this in the coming years.
You've written that engaging with the East 'creates a genuinely global history' and articulate a 'dream wherein the peoples of the Earth can finally sit down at the table of global humanity and communicate as equal partners'. Do you consciously operate with an 'ontology' of 'peoples' and 'civilizations' as opposed to 'individuals'? How do you conceive of the relationship between global humanity and plural peoplehood? Is there an underlying philosophical or anthropological view that you are drawing on in these and similar passages?
Certainly I prefer to think of peoples and even of civilizations rather than individuals and states, though I'll confess right now that dealing theoretically with civilizations and articulating them as units of analysis is extraordinarily challenging. At the moment I leave this side of things to better people than me, such as Peter Katzenstein (Theory Talk #15) and his recentpioneering work on civilizations. The term 'global humanity' concerns me insofar as it is often a politically-loaded term, particularly within cosmopolitanism, where its underbelly comprises the desire to define a single civilizational identity (i.e., a Western one) for 'global humanity'. In essence, cosmopolitanism effectively advances the conception of a 'provincial (i.e., Western) humanity' that masquerades as the global. So I prefer the notion of plural peoplehood, so as to allow for difference. I wouldn't say that I am operating according to a particular philosophical view although it strikes me that such a notion is embodied in Johann Gottfried Herder's work which, on that dimension at least, I am attracted to. But to be honest, this is generally something that I have not explored though it is something that I've thought that I'd like to research for a future book (notwithstanding the point that I'll need to finish the book that I have started first!).
In your reply toErik Ringmar, you draw on psychoanalytic metaphors to discuss the benefits of overcoming Eurocentrism, writing that, 'Eurocentrism leads to the repression and sublimation of the Other in the Self. Thus, doing away with Eurocentrism can end the socio-psychological angst and alienation that necessarily occurs through such sublimation.' How do you envision what we now call the West (or Europe) after its socio-psychological transformation? What does a world after angst and alienation look like? Is it possible, and is that the goal you think IR theory should aim at?
Another massively challenging and fascinating question, let me have a go. Since you raised the issue of socio-psychological/psycho-analytical theory (though it is something that I am no expert on), it has always struck me that Eurocentrism itself is not simply a construct designed to advance Western power and Western capitalist interests in the world. This seems too mechanistic. For recall that it was a series of largely independent sojourners, travel-writers, novelists, journalists and others rather than capitalists who played such an important role in constructing Eurocentrism. Something more seems to be at play. One can think of the battles between 'Mods and Rockers' or Skinheads and heavy metal fans in Britain in the 1960s and 1970s, who detested each other simply because they held different identities and prized different cultural values. Most importantly, I feel, the constant need to denounce, put down and dismiss the Other as inferior seems reminiscent of those kinds of people we sometimes meet who, in constantly putting down others to falsely elevate themselves to a position of superiority, ultimately reveals merely their own insecurities. The same issues, of course, underpin racism and Eurocentrism. The West rose to prominence in my view as a late-developer and having got to the top it very quickly came to view its duty as one of punishing all others for being different – all done, of course, in the name of helping or civilizing the very 'global humanity' that had done so much to help the West rise to the top in the first place! And to want to culturally convert everyone in the world according to the Western standard of civilization seems to be symptomatic of a deeply insecure mindset. A secure person or society for that matter does not feel threatened by, but openly embraces, difference.
Can we move beyond this stand-off given that such a mentality has been hard-wired within Western culture for at least three centuries? And ten if you count the sometimes terse relations between Europe and Middle Eastern Islam that emerged after 1095! We need to move beyond an identity that is based only on putting others down. It's 'bad karma' and, like all bad karma, damages the Western self, not just the non-Western other. But to transcend this identity-formation process requires us to do away with logocentrism; clearly a very big task. Nevertheless, that is exactly what my writings are all about. And it is something that I think IR theory needs to strive to achieve. Because IR theory is to an extent performative then I live in the hope, at least, that such a mentality might, just might somehow seep into international public life, though if it were to happen I strongly suspect that I would not be around to see it. Still, your question—what would a world beyond Eurocentrism look like?—though very important is nevertheless perhaps too difficult to answer without seeming like a hopeless idealist… other than to say that it could be rather better than the current one.
You write that 'IPE should aim to be an über-discipline, drawing on a wide range of disciplines in order to craft a knowledge base that refuses to become lost in disciplinary over-specialization and the depressing academic narcissism of disciplinary methodological differentiation and exclusion.' Why do you prefer that IPE should be the überdiscipline, instead of IR (or something else altogether), with IPE as a subset?
My degree was in Political Economy, my Masters in Political Sociology and my PhD in Historical Sociology and (International) Political Economy. Despite the fact that the majority of my academic career to date has been in IR research, I have always returned at various points to my old haunting ground, IPE (as I have most recently). I have always found IR a little alienating for its reification of politics, divorced from political economy. I'm not a Marxist, but I share in the view that political economy, if not always directly underpinning developments and events in the international system is, however, never far away.
The quote that you took for this question came from the end of my 2-part article that came out in the 20th anniversary edition of Review of International Political Economy. This was partly responding to Benjamin Cohen's (Theory Talk #17) 2008 seminal book, International Political Economy: A Intellectual History. One of the challenges that I issued to my IPE readership, echoing Cohen, is the need for IPE to return to 'thinking big' (in large part as a reaction to the massive contraction of the discipline's boundaries that has been effected by third wave American IPE, which labors under the intellectual hegemony of Open Economy Politics). In that context, then, I argued that IPE needs to expand its boundaries outwards not only to allow big or macro-scale issues to return to the discipline's research agenda but also to incorporate insight from other disciplines. For in my view IPE has the potential to blend the insights of many other disciplines that can in turn transcend the sometimes myopic or tunnel-vision-based nature of their particular constituent specialisms.
One of the implications of 'thinking big' is that IPE should be able to cover much of that which IR does… and more. Like Susan Strange, who expressed her exasperation with IR for its exclusion of politico-economic matters, so I feel that the solution lies not with IR colonizing IPE (which is not likely for the foreseeable future!) but with IPE expanding its currently narrow remit. If it could achieve this it could become the 'über-discipline', or the 'master discipline', of the Social Sciences, notwithstanding the point that my postcolonial and feminist friends will no doubt upbraid me for using such terrible terms!
Final question. Beyond the East outside the West, Greece is now being remade as the 'East' within the West, with a range of measures applied to it that had hitherto been the preserve for the 'East' or Global South. How can your work help to make sense of the stakes?
Your question reminds me of a similar one that I was asked in an interview for Cumhurieyet Strateji Magazine concerning Turkey's ongoing efforts to join the EU, the essence of my answer comprising: 'be careful what you wish for'. One of the things that I have felt uneasy about is the way, as I see it (and I might not be quite right in saying this), that European Studies (as a sub-discipline) sometimes appears as rather self-affirming, thereby reflecting the core self-congratulatory modus operandi of the EU. I am not anti-European or in any way ashamed to be Western (as some of my critics might think). But I'm deeply uneasy about the EU project, specifically in terms of its desire to expand outwards, not to mention inwards as we are seeing in the case of Greece today. For this has the whiff of the old civilizing mission that had supposedly been put to rest back at the time of the origins of the European Economic Community. Although Greece is a member of the EU (notwithstanding its non-European roots), it seems clear that what is going on today is a process of intensified internal colonization under the hegemony of Germany, wherein Greece is subjected to the German standard of civilization. All of which brings into question the self-glorification of the self-proclaimed 'socially progressive' EU project. And to return to my discussion of Turkey I recognize that candidate countries have their reasons for wanting to join the EU. But I guess that what my work is ultimately about is restoring a sense of dignity to non-Western peoples, in the absence of which they will continue to self-deprecate and live in angst in the long cold shadow of the West. All of which brings me back to the answers I made to quite a few of the earlier questions. So I would like to close by saying how much I have enjoyed answering your extremely well-informed questions and to thank you most sincerely for inviting me to address them.
Professor Hobson gained his PhD from the LSE (1991), joined the University of Sheffield as Reader and is currently Professor of Politics and International Relations. Previously he taught at La Trobe University, Melbourne (1991–97) and the University of Sydney (1997–2004). His main research interest concerns the area of inter-civilizational relations and everyday political economy in the context of globalization, past and present. His work is principally involved in carrying forward the critique of Eurocentrism in World History/Historical Sociology, and International Relations.
Related links
Faculty Profile at the University of Sheffield Read Hobson's The Postcolonial Paradox of Eastern Agency (Perceptions 2014) here (pdf) Read Hobson's Is critical theory always for the white West and for Western imperialism? (Review of International Studies 2007) here (pdf)
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The videos and speeches of the Bradley prize winners are up. My video here (Grumpy in a tux!), also the speech which I reproduce below. All the videos and speeches here (Betsy DeVos and Nina Shea) My previous interview with Rick Graeber, head of the Bradley foundation. Bradley also made a nice introduction video with photos from my childhood and early career. (A link here to the introduction video and speech together.) And to avoid us spending all our talks on thanking people, they had us write out a separate thanks. That seems not to be up yet, but I include mine below. I am very thankful, humbled to be included in such august company, and not so boorish that I would not have spent my whole talk without mentioning that, absent the separate opportunity to say so. Bradley prize remarks (i.e. condense three decades of policy writing into 10 minutes): Creeping stagnation ought to be recognized as the central economic issue of our time. Economic growth since 2000 has fallen almost by half compared with the last half of the 20th Century. The average American's income is already a quarter less than under the previous trend. If this trend continues, lost growth in fifty years will total three times today's economy. No economic issue — inflation, recession, trade, climate, income diversity — comes close to such numbers.Growth is not just more stuff, it's vastly better goods and services; it's health, environment, education, and culture; it's defense, social programs, and repaying government debt.Why are we stagnating? In my view, the answer is simple: America has the people, the ideas, and the investment capital to grow. We just can't get the permits. We are a great Gulliver, tied down by miles of Lilliputian red tape. How much more can the US grow? Looking around the world, we see that even slightly better institutions produce large improvements in living standards. US taxes and regulations are only a bit less onerous than those in Canada and the UK, but US per capita income is 40% greater. Bigger improvements have enormous effects. US per capita income is 350% greater than Mexico's and 950% greater than India's. Unless you think the US is already perfect, there is a lot we can do. How can we improve the US economy? I offer four examples.I don't need to tell you how dysfunctional health care and insurance are. Just look at your latest absurd bill. There is no reason that health care cannot be provided in the same way as lawyering, accounting, architecture, construction, airplane travel, car repair, or any complex personal service. Let a brutally competitive market offer us better service at lower prices. There is no reason that health insurance cannot function at least as well as life, car, property, or other insurance. It's easy to address standard objections, such as preexisting conditions, asymmetric information, and so on.How did we get in this mess? There are two original sins. First, in order to get around wage controls during WWII, the government allowed a tax deduction for employer-based group plans, but not for portable insurance. Thus preexisting conditions were born: if you lose your job, you lose health insurance. Patch after patch then led to the current mess. Second, the government wants to provide health care to poor people, but without visibly taxing and spending a lot. So, the government forces hospitals to treat poor people below cost, and recoup the money by overcharging everyone else. But an overcharge cannot stand competition, so the government protects hospitals and insurers from competition. You'll know health care is competitive when, rather than hide prices, hospitals spam us with offers as airlines and cell phone companies do. There is no reason why everyone's health care and insurance must be so screwed up to help the poor. A bit of taxing and spending instead — budgeted, appropriated, visible — would not stymie competition and innovation. Example 2: Banking offers plenty of room for improvement. In 1933, the US suffered a great bank run. Our government responded with deposit insurance. Guaranteeing deposits stops runs, but it's like sending your brother-in-law to Las Vegas with your credit card, what we economists call an "incentive for risk taking." The government piled on regulations to try to stop banks from taking risks. The banks got around the regulations, new crises erupted, new guarantees and regulations followed. This spring, the regulatory juggernaut failed to detect simple interest rate risk, and Silicon Valley Bank had a run, followed by others. The Fed and FDIC bailed out depositors and promised more rules. This system is fundamentally broken. The answer: Deposits should flow to accounts backed by reserves at the Fed, or short-term treasuries. Banks should get money for risky loans by issuing stock or long term debt that can't run. We can end private-sector financial crises forever, with next to no regulation. There is a lesson in these stories. If we want to improve regulations, we can't just bemoan them. We must understand how they emerged. As in health and banking, a regulatory mess often emerges from a continual patchwork, in which each step is a roughly sensible repair of the previous regulation's dysfunction. The little old lady swallowed a fly, a spider to catch the fly, and so on. Now horse is on the menu. Only a start-from-scratch reform will work.Much regulation protects politically influential businesses, workers, and other constituencies from the disruptions of growth. Responsive democracies give people what they want, good and hard. And in return, regulation extorts political support from those beneficiaries. We have to fix the regulatory structure, to give growth a seat at the table. Economists are somewhat at fault too. They are taught to look at every problem, diagnose "market failure," and advocate new rules to be implemented by an omniscient, benevolent planner. But we do not live in a free market. When you see a problem, look first for the regulation that caused it.Example 3: Taxes are a mess, with high marginal rates that discourage work, investment and production; disappointing revenue; and massive, wasteful complexity. How can the government raise revenue while doing the least damage to the economy? A uniform consumption tax is the clear answer. Tax money when people spend it. When earnings are saved, invested, plowed into businesses that produce goods and services and employ people, leave them alone.Example 4: Bad incentives are again the unsung central problem of our social programs. Roughly speaking, from zero to about sixty thousand dollars of income, if you earn an extra dollar, you lose a dollar of benefits. Fix the incentives, and more people will get ahead in life. We will also better help the truly needy, and the budget.Some more general points unite these stories:Focus on incentives. Politics and punditry are consumed with taking from A to give to B. Incentives are far more important for economic growth, and we can say something objective about them. Find the question. Politics and punditry usually advance answers without stating the question, or shop around for questions to justify the same old answers. Most people who disagree with the consumption tax really have different goals than funding the government with minimum economic damage. Well, what do you want the tax system to do? State the question, let's find the best answer to the question, and we can make a lot of progress.Look at the whole system. Tax disincentives come from the total difference between the value your additional work creates and what you can consume as a result. Between these lie payroll, income, excise, property, estate, sales, and corporate taxes, and more, at the federal, state, and local level. Greg Mankiw figured his all-in marginal tax rate at 90%, and even he left out sales, property, and a few more taxes. Social-program disincentives come from the combined phaseout of food stamps, housing subsidies, medicaid or Obamacare subsidies, disability payments, tax credits, and so on, down to low-income parking passes. And look at taxes and social programs together. A flat tax that finances checks to worthy people is very progressive government, if you want that. Looking at an individual tax or program for its disincentives or progressivity is silly. The list goes on. Horrible public education, labor laws, licensing laws, zoning, building and planning restrictions, immigration restrictions, regulatory barriers, endless lawsuits, prevailing-wage and domestic-content rules, are all sand in the productivity gears. Oh, and I haven't even gotten to money and inflation yet! And that just fixes our current economy. Long-term growth comes from new ideas. Many economists say we have run out of ideas; growth is ending; slice the pie. I look out the window and I see factory-built mini nuclear power plants that the Nuclear Regulatory Commission is strangling; I see a historic breakthrough in artificial intelligence, facing an outcry for the government to stop it. I see advances in biology that portend much better health and longevity, but good luck getting FDA approval or increasingly politicized research funding.Many conservatives disparage this "incentive economics" as outdated and boring. That attitude is utterly wrong. Incentives, and the freedom, rights, and rule of law that preserve incentives, remain the key to tremendous and widespread prosperity. And it is hard work to understand and fix the incentives behind today's problems.Yes, supply is less glamorous than stimulus. "Fix regulations" is a tougher slogan than "free money for voters." Efficiency requires detailed reform in every agency and market, the Marie-Kondo approach to our civic life. But it's possible. And we don't need to reform all the dinosaurs. As we have seen with telephones, airlines, and taxis, we just need to allow new competitors, to allow the buds of freedom to grow.Many people ask, "How can we get leaders to listen?" That's the wrong question. Believe in democracy, not bending the emperor's ear. Take action. My fellow prizewinners have grabbed the levers of influence that belong to citizens of our free society, and done hard work of reforming its institutions. And ideas matter. The Hoover Institution motto is "ideas defining a free society." The Bradley Foundation tonight celebrates good ideas, and is devoted to spreading them. When voters, media, the chattering classes, and institutions of civil society understand, advance and apply these ideas, politicians will swiftly follow. Notes:Growth: Real GDP 1950:I was $2186 billion, and per capita $14500; in 2000:I, $12935 and per capita $45983; in 2022:IV, $20182 and per capita 60376. From these numbers, average log real GDP growth 1950-2000 was 3.56% From 2000-2002, 1.96%. In per capita terms, 2.31% and 1.20%. (2.31-1.20)x22 = 24.4. Cross-country comparison: Calculations based on purchasing-power-adjusted GDP per capita: US $69,287, Canada $52,790, UK $50,890, Mexico $19,587, India $7,242. Source: https://data.worldbank.org/indicator/NY.GDP.PCAP.PP.CD The PPP adjustment tries to take account that some things are cheaper in other countries. Converting at the exchange rate produces even larger differences. US $70.248, Canada $51,987, UK $46,510, Mexico $10,065, India $2,256. Source: https://data.worldbank.org/indicator/NY.GDP.PCAP.CDMankiw: http://www.nytimes.com/2010/10/10/business/economy/10view.htmlThanksI have been fortunate to benefit from the effort, time, wisdom and affection of so many people, and many institutions that supported their efforts.Of course it starts with my parents, Eric and Lydia Cochrane. They expected children to think and speak at the family dinner table. They exposed me to different cultures, on the south side of Chicago and in Italy, sometimes beyond my desires. They set an example by how they lived: They steadfastly followed their intellectual pursuits with extreme honesty. They treated people with a radical egalitarianism. And then left me alone to pursue my own passions. I was lucky to learn from some extraordinary and dedicated teachers, at the Ancona Montessori School, the U of C Lab school, Italian public schools, and Kenwood high school. There, in an inner city public school, Arlene Gordon (Math), Judith Stein (English) Walter Sherrill (Chemistry) and especially Joel Hofslund (Physics) gave me absolutely first rate experience. Thanks also to Ed Shands' patient coaching of our swim team. I moved on to MIT to study physics. This was more impersonal, and a difficult time for me, but as it turned out a superb education in the kind of mathematical modeling essential to economics. I went on to study economics at the University of California at Berkeley. Faculty took PhD teaching seriously, not just of their own research, and I soaked it up. I thank especially my advisers, Roger Craine, Tom Rothermberg, and George Akerlof. Many of their lessons are vivid today, but like my parents they provided only gentle guidance and feedback on my own imperfect quests. I was supremely luck to land a job at the University of Chicago. I learned a tremendous amount in the wide open collegial atmosphere at Chicago, thanks in large part to Lars Hansen and Gene Fama, but also colleagues too numerous to mention in this short space. Generations of MBA and PhD students also pushed me hard to understand economics and became lifelong friends and colleagues. At just the right moment Hoover came calling, allowing me the time and institutional support to blossom as a public intellectual and commenter as well as an academic. A special thanks to John Raisin for that. No man is an island. The world of ideas is a conversation. Everything I know has been shaped by teachers, friends, colleagues, collaborators, students, journal editors, referees, and others who took the time and effort to help me think about things. Many small interactions have had a crucial effect on my life. A coffee conversation at a conference with John Campbell resulted in our best known academic paper. A lunch conversation with Luigi Zingales produced my first public writing during the financial crisis. As a result, Amity Shlaes invited me to a conference. Howard Dickman, then at the Wall Street Journal, liked my presentation and asked, "Why don't you write opeds for us?" I answered, "Why don't you stop rejecting them?" My oped career was born. And so forth. I thank these and many more, and lady luck who put us together. Of course my greatest thanks go to my wonderful wife, Elizabeth Fama. We met the night I returned to Chicago. It was love at first sight. We were engaged on the second date. She has been my best friend and constant companion ever since, though marriage to a passionate researcher, busy teacher and lover of time consuming sports cannot have been easy. Together we raised four amazing children, Sally, Eric, Jean, and Lake, who fill my heart with love, and now that they are grown a bit of nostalgia.
Glatfelter, Charles H.; Oral History Collection To read the transcript and access the audio/video (if available) of this interview at the same time, first download the pdf of the transcript by clicking on the link at the top of this screen. The transcript will open in a separate window. Next, select the or option to the right of the screen to access the media player. Special Collections & College Archives Musselman Library Interview with Michael Birkner Interviewer: Rebecca Duffy Interview Date: November 22, 2013 Interview with Michael Birkner Rebecca Duffy, November 22, 2013 1 Rebecca Duffy: [Today is November 22, 2013. I am Rebecca Duffy and I will be interviewing Professor Michael Birkner in Special Collections at Gettysburg College's Musselman Library.] We will start with you as a student here, so that we can get some insight. I think that's really special that we have an alumnus [that is so accessible] from the 1970s. You graduated in 1972? Michael Birkner: Yes. Duffy: Did you start here in 1968 and go straight through the four years? Birkner: Yes, I did. Duffy: You were a History major. Did you have any other majors or minors? Birkner: Actually, I was a back-ended History major. I was a Political Science major for three years and I intended to go into political journalism. That was my interest. I was always a politics junkie, so it was a natural for me to be interested in that. If you know anything about American History from 1968 to 1972, you know it was a very tumultuous time. Being interested in history as it was being made was particularly attractive to me. But by the time I was finishing my junior year as a student I looked back and thought about what I had done in Political Science and what I still had to do and I wasn't impressed by the coherence of the Political Science major. Specifically, I also had been avoiding a particular faculty member who was terrible and who taught a required course in International Affairs. I thought about it and I said [to myself], "I don't want to take this person's course just for the sake of getting a major that I'm not even convinced is worth having. So I went over to see Dr. [Charles] Glatfelter. I said to him, "I realize I am a second semester junior, but I think I would rather major in history. Is that possible?" [Pause] I don't want to make myself out to be special, but the people in the History department knew me and I had taken courses in history because I had liked history. They [Norman Forness, George Fick, and Charles Glatfelter] pitched to me that I should switch majors and become a history major. The important thing was they said, "if you just take this and this and this, you have got your major." So I did. I had probably seven or eight courses in Political Science, but I didn't [think well enough of my 2 experience to] declare it a minor. I just left and became a History major and then wound up going on to graduate school. Duffy: What were some of the courses that you took in History while you were here? Birkner: Well, I won't go into all the details because that will bog you down, but I will say that the program in History at the time was Euro-centric. If you look at the catalogue you will see that there really was very little World History. You took courses on the western historical tradition, you took courses on the European and British history, and you took courses on American history. There was no Africanist in the department, there was no Latin Americanist, and there was no Middle Eastern person. We did have a person that did Asian history, but half of that person's courses were focused on American diplomatic history which was not unusual at that time. So, essentially outside of the West we actually had half of a person to do anything else in the world. It was a provincial kind of historical learning. I did take a course in Chinese history, but I cannot say I had a good grounding in anything more than the Western traditions. The other thing I can abstract for you about my experience is that I was again unusual in that my interests were American history, but I took more non-American history than American history. My attitude- and I think it was justifiable- was that if I went to graduate school in History, I would be doing almost all American history and why should I not have the opportunity now to get a little wider range. In retrospect now there are all kinds of ways I could have broadened my education in college [with]. I was not adventurous and the college wasn't particularly adventurous in its curriculum. When you think about it, the one smart thing I did was not do all of that American history when I was going to get [plenty of] it in graduate school. Duffy: That Professor that you had for Chinese history, was that Professor Stemen? Birkner: Yes, Roger Stemen. Duffy: He was in charge of anything East Asian, sometimes even Indian history, I think I noticed? 3 Birkner: He might have done that once and that was it. He wasn't really interested in Indian history. We had a woman named Janet Gemmill [whose maiden name was Powers], so [after her divorce] she is Janet Powers. She taught Indian Civilization, but for reasons I have never really understood- this is before my time as a faculty member -I think she and the History department were not on the same wavelength, so she didn't teach it through the History department, she taught it through IDS. Mr. Stemen was the Asianist. He came in 1961 and he was the first to teach that. Duffy: I noticed that. I also noticed that the courses at that time [during the 1960's primarily] were dual courses, such as 201 and 202. Were you required to take both of them if you took one? Birkner: No, but you are right, they were sequenced. I'm guessing a lot of that was because a good percentage of undergraduates in those days went on to social studies education. They probably wanted to fill out a card of having the 201, 202 of History. That wasn't anything that affected me as a student. That wasn't a requirement. [Pauses to collect thoughts] The only requirement where we had to go through both parts of the sequence were interdisciplinary courses called "Contemporary Civilization" and "Literary Foundations of Western Civilization." Duffy: What was required by the History department [when you were a student] was passing a few three hundred level courses, the Methods course and Senior Seminar, right? Birkner: Right. Duffy: So you completed all of those? Birkner: Absolutely. Duffy: Did you have Professor Glatfelter for Methods? Birkner: Absolutely, everybody took Methods with Dr. Glatfelter. Except for the semesters when he was on sabbatical, he was it. Duffy: What was that experience like? How would you have described it when you were in the class? 4 Birkner: Maybe, it was a lot like what you experience with me. However, Dr. Glatfelter was a very different personality than I am . He was very Germanic. He had been trained originally to be a high school social studies teacher. Now he was a very smart man and wound up getting a PhD from Johns Hopkins. You don't do that unless you have some brains. He was one of these people who went by categories--one, two, three- which is not the way I do things. His approach to teaching was not very exciting to me. Just to give you an example of the way he taught Methods, one-third of the course he lectured about the historiography of Western Civilization, the writing of the history of the West from Herodotus until the Progressive Era in the early 20th century. Each day he would come in for seventy-five minutes and lecture about Herodotus or Livy or Gibbon or Voltaire- who was a historian not a very good one, but a historian [none the less]- [hand motions and voice indicating droning on], Prescott and Parkman and Bancroft. Your first big paper in the course was to read three of these historians--one from the Ancient World, one from Early Modern Europe and one from the 18th or 191h century--and write a comparative [paper]. He did that every semester. I benefited from it, though I have not read those historians since. But [in general] this was dull. The second part of the course was more "Nuts and Bolts." That's where he talked about doing footnotes and bibliographies and reference books. Of course [this was] the pre-computer age so he would bring in a cart and show you reference books. Again, it wasn't too exciting. The third part of the course was the "Philosophy of History'' in which he would talk about a range of things from why we do history to the discourses of history. It was very conservative. As I may have said in class, we read one article about Oral History and he basically said, "I made you read this because it is possible this may be interesting, but it is also possible that it may just be a fad." We didn't do anything more with that. We did the same thing with Psychohistory; maybe we read an article on it. Now Psychohistory came and went really, it is not much today talked about. But he was not an adventurous person. So why is it that he is remembered? Because Dr. Glatfelter had extremely high standards and he challenged you to be the best that you could be. He was a very demanding task-master. 5 When you handed in a paper, he read every line and corrected every line. You got away with nothing. He was a person of tremendous integrity and he wanted you to be. That's what really affected me the most, to be honest with you. The specifics of what he was teaching didn't grab me much, but his ethos, that's what really grabbed me. I don't know what students think about me, but I would guess I am considered "old school" and that's okay, because you need to authentic. Dr. Glatfelter was authentic. And I like to think I am. Some students probably think it is good and some maybe think I am too hard [and demand too much work]. Again, I don't know what the word on the street is, but you've got to be what you are as long as you're nice and fair and all those things- some [professors] can be mean and that's not a good thing [chuckles], but I don't think I am that! [In the end] I think I took away [Dr. Glatfelter's] sensibility about doing history and that has always had an impact on me- [even] forty years on. If you talk to other graduates, I bet you would get similar responses. Duffy: That he was a challenging teacher, but certainly worth it in the end for [the experiences] you get out of it? Birkner: Yeah, sure. Duffy: More than [simply] as a historian? Birkner: [Thoughtful] Yeah, absolutely. [Pauses to collect thoughts] He and I were colleagues for a year when I was back in the late seventies teaching here. When he retired [in 1989], I took his job. We became close [friends] and for the last 24 years of his life- he died in February [2013]- we did a lot of things together. For [many] years I brought him into the Methods class to talk to the students about a specific project or brought the students down to Weidensalllobby to talk with him if they had questions about a particular topic. He was wonderful. Duffy: What was that like when you first came back here having Professor Glatfelter and I can't remember exactly who was still here then who had been here when you were a studentBirkner: Everyone 6 Duffy: Everyone? Birkner: Everybody. Duffy: [So then,] what was that department dynamic like when you joined, having your old professors [as colleagues]? Birkner: . As a student was I was very close with faculty, more close than I think [most] students are today. Just to give you an example, there was no Specialty Dining in those days, there was the Bullet Hole- [though] it was in a different part of the CUB- and there was a group of about 8-10 faculty that ate there every day and talked politics- remember, it's a very interesting time- and they talked campus business as well. They invited me to eat lunch with them. So, I ate lunch in the Bullet Hole every day with the faculty. Now, you say you already know a creepy amount of information about me, but one thing [is that] I belonged to a fraternity. The fraternity I belonged to only ate dinner together in our house; we didn't eat breakfast or lunch together. We were on our own for lunch. Most of my fraternity brothers after class went back to the house and ate lunch together; probably watched Jeopardy or something and just hung out. I never did. I always went to the Bullet Hole and ate lunch with the faculty. Secondly, I was the editor of the Gettysburgian. At the time newspapers were different then they are now. They were really newspapers as opposed to mostly opinion. [Pauses to collect thoughts] The paper [during my years in college] was well respected. So, faculty members wrote for it, faculty members called me up. I had a kind of elevated sense of myself. To answer your question, it wasn't a hard transition to come back in 1978 to teach because people had always treated me collegially as opposed to say you were simply a student. Duffy: As a subordinate71 Birkner: Yeah, well [Pauses to collect thoughts] I hope I don't treat you [quite] like that. We all have different roles to play. It was an easy transition is the short of it. 1 Intended to say something which more conveyed the mentor-student relationship 7 Duffy: What about the transition that we started to talk about before- when you took over the Methods class? What was that like? Did you see that you wanted to make a lot of changes? Did you make them right away? Birkner: That's a good question. Dr. Glatfelter was not a controlling person, but on the other hand he was a very "tracked" person. As I said there wasn't a lot of change [over time] . I was hired, in some measure, because [members of the History department] felt the Methods course was an important course and they felt that I would be the person who could make it matter in the future. When I came back, Dr. Glatfelter said [something like], "You do what you want with the Methods course, but here's the way I do it." The first year I tried to teach it along the track he laid out. I used some different books, but I basically had the same structure he had. I was bored teaching it! Teaching about Medieval historians and giving students bits and pieces about historians -I could see that nothing was going to stick with them. I just said [to myself], "I can't do this!" That's when I said to myself, "this course is going to need re-tooling." That's how you have more or less greater extent what you are experiencing [this semester in Methods]. Dr. Glatfelter was the one who had the three projects and I have three projects, but he never would have assigned an Oral History! Here's the other interesting thing, he didn't assign any manuscript, original material research because we didn't have an archive for the students to work in! We really couldn't do a lot of that. Dr. Glatfelter's laboratory was the Adams County Historical Society where he was the director. He never had the students [go there]. I was surprised about this because we could have done that. We had an archive [at the college]; it just wasn't a place where you could work. He could have assigned us to have stuff to work on and under controlled conditions we could have done it. He just never did it. The part that really surprised me was that here he is the director of the Adams County Historical Society, which has tons of great [material] to work on. I've used it many times in my Methods class- just not this semester because they have had some difficulties moving out of the old Schmucker building [and into a much smaller facility]. So, one of the things I said was that 8 were going to start doing this! What I did [was encourage the creation of a facility for storing a working with archival material on Gettysburg College's campus]. I had something to do with the fact that this [special collections research room] exists because [as department chair] I was able to get a very unusual bequest which had not originally been directed to Gettysburg College. I was able to convince Homer Rosenberger's executor [Attorney William Duck of Waynesboro, PA] that Gettysburg College would be the place to house the Rosenberger Collection, with the idea we would get his estate. The money we got from that estate allowed Robin Wagner, the library director, to hypothecate into other money which enabled them to build this room- which is an enormous asset to students of history, and not just in Methods. Plus we have all of these great internships etc. which we didn't have before that. So, [to go back for a second] in 1990-1991, which was my second year here, I revamped the course really along the lines of what you are taking now. Duffy: So has it not changed so much in the past few decades? What would you say has changed? Birkner: What has changed in part is that the discourses in history have grown increasingly focused on anthropology. The opportunity for students to do more intensive work in Special Collections has probably been the biggest change. They can do much more in Special Collections than they could when I first started teaching here. The idea is always to give students opportunity to work with the stuff of history and be historians rather than just write about [secondary works]. I'm a little off sync with some of my colleagues who are so emphatic that what students need to learn is historiography and what I think is what students need to learn is to feel confident about doing history and that means doing it, instead of writing about historians doing it. I want you to do it. Now, of course the two are not mutually exclusive. You should learn that history is an evolving discipline and there is always an on-going dialogue -that's of course important. But to me, for the Methods course, what's really important- if I can put it this way- is to get your hands dirty doing it, [for example] have that one-on-one experience doing an Oral History with a senior citizen; it will stick with you for a long time. 9 Duffy: Definitely. I think I have noticed that. I feel like I live in Special Collections sometimes! Birkner: And that's a great thing because it is your laboratory! You may have friends that are Environmental Science majors, they're working in a lab. Your lab is right here. Duffy: [Pauses] [So then,] If we could just go back one moment to when you were a student and there weren't as many opportunities [to research in-depth on campus]. I know the senior seminar was molded into a course throughout the sixties Uust before and during your time here as a student]. so I was wondering about your experience in the senior seminar and how you were able to do the research you needed to do [without the facilities here]? Birkner: That's a good question; I think it was only in the late 1960s that they developed the senior seminar more or less the way we know it. Until then, students had to take comprehensive exams and they also wrote a senior thesis, [but there was no senior seminar]. The problem with that program is number one: camps terrify students. A high percentage of the students were not capable of engaging them very effectively, which depressed the faculty. [Further], the quality of the senior theses was generally pretty low, in part because there was little faculty supervision. If you have say forty seniors who are majors and you've got the faculty you have, they just weren't [able to] give the time to the students on an independent study basis to do the senior thesis. So that is when they came up with the seminar notion. As far as being able to do the research- it was unusual for you to be able to spend time doing anything original. Today, more and more of our students [are doing original research]. I was talking to Lincoln Fitch the other day, he's a senior and he is doing his senior thesis on Reconstruction and he's going down to the Library of Congress and working with the papers there and he is making some interesting finds. We wouldn't have thought of that because nobody was encouraging us to do that. I wrote my senior thesis on Christian Humanism in England in the early 16th century. I read a lot of first-hand accounts, they were printed, but they were still primary sources. I read secondary sources about the Humanist movement, which is part of the Renaissance, as it affected life in England. 10 Duffy: So you feel that students now have a better opportunity to delve in deeper? Birkner: Yeah. The other thing that should be emphasized is that our faculty are more "teacher-scholars" or "scholar-teachers" than was the case in the sixties when their primary emphasis was on teaching. Again, you can't draw with too broad a brush because Dr. Glatfelter was always doing scholarship of a kind. He was very productive, but his focus tended to be narrow--on Adams or York counties or religions of York and maybe Pennsylvania. Few people in the department were pursuing active research agendas because they didn't have the same emphasis on scholarship and mentoring students as scholars as we have today. I think having a teaching faculty that is also a scholarly faculty is going to make for better mentors at the senior level or any level. Think about someone like David Wemer, who is a senior History major and just won a prize for the best paper by an undergraduate in the United States. [The prize was sponsored by the American Historical Association.] It was published in a student scholarly journal. What a great recognition for Gettysburg College. He is an exceedingly talented person, but having someone like Dr. Bowman advising him and mentoring him made it [possible]. I mentored three students [over the past several years] who were [George C. Marshall] Scholars. Each was invited down, at my nomination, to become an undergraduate fellow in Lexington, Virginia [under the auspices of] the George C. Marshall Foundation. Each of them did outstanding work and each was recognized for that work. By coincidence, I had lunch today with one of those students. He was a History major and now works as an archivist for the CIA and wanted to come back and talk to me about graduate school. That kind of mentoring I don't think would have happened forty years ago. [However,] I have a certain reputation in the field, I know people, I know what my students are doing and I can then recommend them. The sad thing with the Marshall Program is that they blew through all their money. So, after the program existed for four or five years they ran out of money and I can't recommend students to it anymore because it doesn't exist. The two other students who I recommended for it and got accepted, 11 one is now working on his PhD in Cold War History at Ohio State and the other one is doing a PhD in Early American History at William and Mary, so clearly they moved on and did good things. Duffy: So you would say that the faculty dynamic today- [a group made up of a dozen or so] individuals each scholars and, I would say talented, teachers is creating these opportunities for students? Birkner: I think it enhances and enriches the environment for our History students; hence, it gives them an extra boost toward having a valuable college experience. Dr. Glatfelter had the right standards and the right spirit. But I think that what we have today, is not only that among most of our faculty -I wouldn't say everyone does because Dr. Glatfelter was pretty much the top of the line in that- but they are committed on both the teaching and scholarly side and that's good modeling for students. When you are a senior taking a seminar you will be asked to attend a seminar session in which you will read a faculty member's paper in advance and then go in and hear that faculty member describe how he or she got into writing that paper and then you will be able to ask questions of that member about it. We do that every semester. That's a bit of modeling. You can see what the faculty member does and say to yourself, "Maybe that's how I can do it." That didn't exist forty years ago. We do a lot more stuff you would take for granted, but didn't exist then. Such as, Career Night, Grad School Night, bringing in alumni who are successful in the field of history to talk, the Justin DeWitt Lecture. How about two student journals? The Civil War Journal and The Gettysburg Journal of History again didn't exist forty or even, fifteen years ago, but they do now. That's how David [Wemer] got this national recognition, because he published his article in the History journal. [Earlier today] I was talking to Sam Cooper-Wall today about his thesis for me and I was saying how he really had potential to publish it or expand it as his master's thesis. "Don't forget," he said, "I published it in the Gettysburg Historical Journal." That's right, he did. That's the kind of thing that gives you value added. 12 Duffy: I guess my last question is just going back, once again in a more comparative way, you said the time that you were here was a very [tumultuous] time. Did the faculty use any of those current issues as teaching moments in the classroom? Birkner: Not really. I think one faculty member who taught American Cultural History picked up on environmental issues, which was one of the pieces of the puzzle in the late sixties. Earth Day started when I was college student. He tried to connect Post- Civil War environmentalism, Darwinism, with the new environmental ethic of the late sixties- early seventies. I thought that was good, but he was the only [one]. Professor Stemen, who taught Chinese history, was teaching at the very time that Nixon made his initiative to open doors to China, and he would mention it, but it wasn't integral to the teaching. We were aware of it. I think people made a definite effort not to politicize the classroom. It's not a good idea for teachers at any level to voice their ideas about politics to students. So, that didn't happen really. People were very focused on the subject matter. Duffy: I think that is about it for the questions that I have- Birkner: I think that the one piece of this you are not getting is the student side. You don't want to assume that everything is always [better each year]. I think, today, our students are more sophisticated in many ways about history. You are much more cosmopolitan and you are much more adventurous than our generation in many respects. Just think about that fact that students take courses in fields I never took courses in because they weren't even there, but nobody is afraid to take a course in Middle Eastern history or Australian history or African history. [Today's] students are interested. That's a very good sign. On the other side ofthe coin, I wouldn't disparage students from the late Sixties who were, like me, first generation college students who had a hunger for education and were willing to work hard . . , , There were a lot of people in that circumstance. So, the students were a little bit more aggressive for their education in the late sSxties. Now I will tell you also, that when I came back in the late Seventies the students were not what I remembered them being. They were very self-focused and 13 [pauses to collect thoughts] uninterested it seems to me in the same kinds of issues I had been interested in in college, so that was a little bit of a disappointment. Duffy: I read that I think in one of the oral histories with Professor Glatfelter. He had realized a shift around the mid-Seventies. [He noticed] students were changing what they wanted out of school and how they felt about school. So, I think he saw as well, a decline in the level of learning or [rather] interest in learning. Birkner: I think this is not just a Gettysburg story. Duffy: Right. Birkner: I think it would [have been the case] at you name the place. I remember when I taught my first class at the University of Virginia. This is almost hilarious in a way because I taught a course in [19]74 at the University of Virginia as a grad student. It was a seminar and we read a book on the Sixties. The kids were all like [Raises voice, indicates excitement], "What were the sixties like? What were the sixties like?" and I was thinking [Chuckling between words], "Whoa, whoa!" [To them] It was like "what was World War One like?" It was 1974 and I thought, "Whoa, how quickly the gestalt of the times changes." So, what Glatfelter noticed is certainly what I noticed. Now, particular students, of course, were terrific. They are wonderful and friends of mine now, but the mentality [gestalt] of the campus was very different. Just as an example, the fraternity that I was in had disappeared by the time I came back to teach because it was a more alternative, non-conformist fraternity [and there was no market for that at Gettysburg after 1975]. We didn't do hazing and hell week. We invited the faculty to our parties and they came. Duffy: [Laughs] Birkner: Seriously! It was kind of an admixture of fraternalism, but not the dopey stuff. Obviously, to each his own, but I never had a use for anything [like that]. I remember Dr. Glatfelter- he was not a funny man- but I remember one of the funniest things he ever said. I once said, "Charlie, I know when 14 you were a student at Gettysburg College they still had traditions during orientation where they would punish [underclass] students [for infractions of the rules]. They would cut men's hair off, make women wear side-boards over their front and back with their hometown and phone number on it." Duffy: [Laughs] Birkner: Oh yeah, absolutely! And I said to him, "What if you had ever been brought up by the Tribunal for some infraction when you were a first year student?" Without missing a beat he said to me, "I know exactly what would have happened. I would have packed up my suitcase and gone home because I wouldn't have put up with that nonsense for one second!" That was Charlie. I can't claim that I was as individualistic as he was. For all I know I would have accepted [hazing], but it was nice to find a home [in a fraternity] where it really wasn't practiced. But by the late seventies students weren't into that. They didn't want an alternative fraternity, they wanted a gung-ho fraternity experience. Again, that's okay. I would wish that a fraternity like the one I was in would exist again today because I think there is something to be learned from living in a house with people from different backgrounds [with] different values in some cases. Learning how to live together, learning how to keep a place up [is important]. I don't regret for one minute that I did that. I also had a [fine] experience in that I was a free agent to do what I wanted. Duffy: You got to go to lunch! Birkner: Yeah, I got to go to lunch and I got to eat dinner with my fraternity brothers and party with them and make those horrible road trips down to Wilson College. You did the things that college students do, but you also did it on a slightly different track. When I came back in the late eighties the college was in transition. It had become by then a more national institution, so students were coming from a larger swath of the country, which was a good thing. [It reflected] a more cosmopolitan view. [The population] was still very white, not as diverse as it is today, but moving in the right direction, I think. I would honestly say that your generation of students on the whole is a lot more fun to teach than 15 any generation I have taught before. Just take for example class yesterday on the "Cat Massacre." You are willing to buy into reading something challenging, thinking about it and then talking about it. To me that is learning. But that wasn't really the pedagogy [in the 1960s and 1970s] and when the transition was made a lot of students just wouldn't buy into it because they were [satisfied] being more passive. Learning should be active. It seems to me we have got that buy in from our majors and more generally, too. Hopefully, what you do in my class and your other history classes carries over into Poli Sci and the other courses you are taking, because again, why should it not? [From here we continue to talk for the next few minutes about the intersections between disciplines in the case of myself and my partner Ryan, as well as the possibilities of support from the government for public history and the National Park Service]. 16
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Ways and Means Committee Republicans recently introduced the American Families and Jobs Act, an economic tax package that addresses significant ongoing tax increases on domestic investment built into the 2017 Tax Cuts and Jobs Act. Most of the Republicans' major proposed changes in the American Families and Jobs Act expire after 2025, worsening current tax uncertainty and obscuring the necessary reforms' fiscal cost. Other than permanence, the American Families and Jobs Act could be significantly improved by adding Universal Savings Accounts for family savings flexibility and neutral cost recovery for currently excluded building investments. The proposed legislation includes a series of other reforms, many that are good and a few that are misguided. The package is comprised of three bills: the Tax Cuts for Working Families Act (H.R. 3936), the Small Business Jobs Act (H.R. 3937), and the Build It in America Act (H.R. 3938). Here is a brief summary of the most important provisions. Expensing. The central pro‐growth component of the package is the extension of full business expensing for R&D, equipment, and machinery. As I recently explained in a Cato brief, the normal tax rules require businesses to deduct their investment spending over time (between 3 and 39 years). Especially during times of high inflation, such as the current economic climate, these rules increase the after‐tax cost of new investments because the value of the associated tax deduction decreases over time. The 2017 Tax Cuts and Jobs Act temporarily fixed this problem by allowing businesses to fully deduct the cost of some new investments in the year they are made, called full expensing or 100 percent bonus depreciation. Beginning last year, companies started amortizing research expenses over five years, and beginning this year, equipment and other short‐lived investments lose 20 percent of their immediate expensing deduction each year through 2026. The American Families and Jobs Act would allow full expensing for short‐lived investments and R&D spending through 2025. It would also increase the expensing limit for small businesses to $2.5 million. By not extending full expensing to longer‐lived assets, such as structures, the legislation does not apply to a significant portion of annual business investment. The legislation could be improved by making the expensing changes permanent and including a neutral cost‐recovery system for structures, which provides a similar economic benefit as expensing by enabling businesses to index their write‐offs for inflation and time, such as in the CREATE JOBS Act. 1099 Fixes. The previously obscure 1099‑K form reports business transactions with a credit or debit card or online settlement platforms such as PayPal or Venmo. The American Rescue Plan Act of 2021 lowered the 1099‑K de minimis threshold from more than 200 transactions and $20,000 in total payments to a single $600 threshold. In 2022, the IRS delayed the implantation of this rule as it threatened to sweep as many as 20 million taxpayers into the costly and unnecessary new reporting system. The proposed legislation would repeal the 2021 change. The legislation also increases the general reporting threshold for other Form 1099 transactions from $600 to $5,000, indexed for future inflation. The current threshold is not indexed for inflation and has not been raised since 1954, when $600 was worth more than $6,500 in today's dollars. The higher thresholds will ease compliance burdens and lower administrative costs. Interest expense limitation. Beginning in 2022, the business interest deduction limit switches from 30 percent of earnings before interest, taxes, depreciation, and amortization (EBITDA) to a more restrictive definition of earnings before interest and taxes (EBIT). The tighter write‐off definition increases the cost of debt‐financed investments. The Republican legislation would maintain the pre‐2022 EBITDA base through 2025. Keeping taxes on investment from rising is an important goal, and using EBITDA follows international norms. However, policymakers should remember that the current treatment of interest in the tax code is neither uniform nor ideal and deserves a more holistic reform in the future. Expanded capital gains exclusion. Under current law (IRC Section 1202), individuals are allowed up to a 100 percent exclusion of $10 million of capital gains on qualified small business C corporation stock. The legislation would expand the exclusion by extending the preferential treatment to S corporations and phasing in the exclusion's benefit during the 5‑year mandatory holding period. Among other reasons, keeping capital gains taxes low is critical to spur "investment in startups and growth companies, particularly technology companies," as explained by Chris Edwards. The expansion of Section 1202 is a step in the right direction of a lower capital gains tax rate. However, Congress should ideally treat all types of investment equally, at one low or zero rate, instead of carving out specific types of investments for preferential treatment. Repeals select energy credits. The Inflation Reduction Act (IRA) included as much as $1.2 trillion in distorting energy market subsidies, intended to put Washington bureaucrats at the center of critical energy investment decisions. The Republican's proposal would repeal just 5 of more than 20 tax subsidies in the IRA. The bill repeals two energy credits that do not take effect until 2025 or later and three electric vehicle (EV) credits, leaving a more limited EV credit similar to pre‐IRA in place. All of the special‐interest IRA energy credits should be repealed. If left in the tax code, each new IRA credit will lead to the misallocation of investment, cronyism, and other costs that are almost always the result of targeted industrial subsidies. Temporary increase to standard deduction. The current‐law standard deduction for families is about $28,000 ($14,000, single) through 2025, when it gets cut in half as the 2017 tax cuts expire. The proposal would temporarily increase the standard deduction by $4,000 for married filers ($2,000, single) below $400,000 in earnings ($200,000 single) in 2024 and 2025. Congress should focus on making the current‐law standard deduction permanent instead of this $4,000 bonus that will increase the cost and complexity of the 2025 fiscal cliff. Moving more taxpayers off the complicated itemized tax system and to the standard deduction is a worthy goal. However, it should be done by limiting the value of specific deductions, such as those for state and local taxes or mortgage interest, instead of expanding the standard deduction. Alex Brill, Kyle Pomerleau, and Grant M. Seiter estimate that the temporarily larger deduction would lead to about 4.1 million more taxpayers relying on the standard deduction. The larger standard deduction would also mean more Americans are entirely exempt from paying any income tax and is not well‐targeted at other goals, such as inflation remediation. Rural Opportunity Zones. The 2017 Tax Cuts and Jobs Act created Opportunity Zones that offer lower tax rates on specific investments in designated low‐income Census Tracts. The proposed legislation would create a new Opportunity Zone designation targeted at poor, rural Census Tracts. As Joel Griffith and I detailed in 2019, 40 years of academic and government studies "consistently show place‐based development programs fail to increase employment, raise wages, or advance general economic opportunity for targeted residents." Despite limited data, the evidence from Opportunity Zones has largely confirmed that the targeted preferences primarily subsidized already‐in‐the‐works projects in wealthy areas. Adding new Opportunity Zones would be a mistake. Instead, Congress should lower the capital gains tax rate for everyone, to let private individuals instead of Congress determine the most productive locations for new investment. Land tax. The legislation would impose a 60 percent excise tax on the purchase of farmland by citizens of "countries of concern," such as China, Russia, and Iran. Scott Lincicome and Ilana Blumsack explain that "there's little current indication that foreign farmland purchases – even by Chinese entities – justify the type of broad‐based government restrictions that some in Congress are contemplating." They go on to show that combined, all foreigners own just 3.1 percent of private farmland in the United States, and China is not even in the top 10 countries that hold the most U.S. farmland. Narrowly tailored rules restricting foreign land purchases near military assets may be justified, but punitive taxes or other bans on land purchases from entire countries are misguided. The legislation makes other changes, such as repealing the superfund tax and addressing foreign tax credit regulations. Room For Improvement The most critical pieces of the pro‐growth economic tax package—full expensing for R&D, equipment, and machinery—address costly tax increases already making domestic investment more expensive. The proposal could be significantly improved by making these reforms permanent and adding neutral cost recovery for investments in structures. The legislation would also benefit from adding a Universal Savings Account, which would operate like retirement accounts but without restrictions on how taxpayers spend the funds. Additionally, several of the provisions are targeted capital gains tax cuts—Opportunity Zones and Section 1202—it would be best if the legislation simply cut the capital gains rate for all investments. The Joint Committee on Taxation estimates the bills would lower revenue by about $21 billion over ten years but, if made permanent, would be significantly more costly. Repealing all the IRA tax credits and curtailing itemized deductions instead of boosting the standard deduction would more than offset the lost revenue from critical pro‐growth tax reforms.
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The Fed's much-anticipated new monetary policy framework is now public. Fed Chairman Jerome Powell outlined the policy framework last week in Jackson Hole; you can view his speech here. Overall, I thought Powell's delivery was very good. While there's room for improvement, I think the new framework is a step in the right direction (George Selgin provides a good critique here). There were three things in Powell's speech that stuck out for me. I discuss these below. Shortfalls vs. DeviationsAt the 22:30 mark, Powell reports what may very well be the most substantive change to the monetary policy statement. Here, he states that the FOMC will now interpret important macroeconomic time-series like GDP and unemployment as exhibiting "shortfalls" instead of "deviations" from some ideal or "maximum" level (a frustratingly vague concept). The practical effect of this shift is to remove (or make less prominent) in the minds of FOMC members the idea that the economy is, or will soon be, "overheating" (i.e., embarked on an unsustainable path that can only end in misery for those most vulnerable to economic recession). The idea of "deviation from (some) trend" seems like a plausible description of the postwar U.S. up to the mid-1980s. Severe contractions were usually followed by equally robust recoveries. However, this representation seems to break down since the "great moderation" that began in the mid-1980s. Since then, economic recessions have not been followed by above-average growth. Instead, each recession seems better described as a "growth shortfall." We're not entirely sure what accounts from this cyclical asymmetry, but it seems consistent with Milton Friedman's "plucking model." I think we can expect a stream of research resurrecting this old idea (see here, for example). In any case, the upshot here is that, to the extent that "overheating" is no longer considered a serious threat, the FOMC will be less likely to implement "preemptive" policy rate hikes. This constitutes a tacit acknowledgement that the period leading up to "lift off" and what followed might have been handled better. As I wrote at the time (see my discussion here), standard Phillips Curve logic did not seem to support tightening (unemployment was above the estimated natural rate, inflation was below target, and inflation expectations were declining). But the Committee somehow talked itself into the need to "normalize," to act preemptively and not get caught "behind the curve." In fairness, monetary policy is always about balancing risks (in this case, the perceived risk of overheating). In the near future, less weight will be assigned to the risk of overheating. The Maximum Level of Employment At the 22:30 mark, Powell states "Of course, when employment is below its maximum level, as is so clearly the case now, we will actively seek to minimize that shortfall..." I have a hard time not interpreting "maximum" here as "socially desirable." I think most people would agree that the 2008 financial crisis caused employment to decline below its maximum level. The workers rendered idle in that episode constituted a social waste, and the Fed was right to loosen monetary policy to stimulate economic activity in the face of recessionary headwinds. But the recession induced by the C-19 is very different from standard recessions. This was laid out very clearly by St. Louis Fed President Jim Bullard on March 23, 2020: Expected U.S. Macroeconomic Performance during the Pandemic Adjustment Period. According to Bullard, the temporary removal of some workers from their jobs is not, in this case, a waste of resources. The decline in employment in this case should be viewed as an investment in public health. That is, the maximum level of employment declined and its recovery is driven mostly by the contagion dynamic (as well as improvements in social distancing protocols, masking, testing, treatments, etc.). The role of monetary policy here is to calm financial markets (which the Fed successfully accomplished in March) and to aid the fiscal authority with its income maintenance programs. In short, the primary monetary/fiscal policy objective here is to deliver insurance, not stimulus. Monetary stimulus is appropriate, however, to the extent that demand factors (e.g., individually rational, but a collectively irrational restraint on spending) are inhibiting the recovery dynamic. The evidence for this is usually assumed to be found in falling inflation and inflation expectations, and declining bond yields. And usually, this makes sense, because we usually assume that recessions are caused by collapses in aggregate demand (as in 2008-09). But what if the increase in the demand for money (safe assets in general) is driven by a collectively rational fear? We'd expect to see the exact same inflation and interest rate dynamic, but the role for stimulative monetary policy would be more difficult to justify (though the desirability for insurance remains). So, maybe it is not so clearly the case now that employment is below or, at least, far below its "maximum" level. Note that a significant part of the decline in aggregate employment is coming from the leisure and hospitality sector: Arguably, we do not want, at this stage of the pandemic, to promote the indoor dining experiences people enjoyed earlier this year. This activity will return slowly as economic fundamentals improve. The "full employment" level of employment in this sector is clearly below what it was in Jan 2020. But, to be fair, it is entirely possible, and perhaps even likely, that the level of employment even here is lower than the "full employment" level. It's very hard to tell by how much though. Average Inflation Targeting At the 24:00 mark, Powell explains how AIT will help anchor inflation expectations. Missing the inflation for a prolonged period of time will cause expectations to drift away from target and line up with the historical experience. This view of expectation formation is firmly rooted in the "adaptive expectations" tradition. That is, expectations are assumed to be formed by looking backward instead of forward. People sometimes claim that adaptive expectations are inconsistent with "rational" expectations. But this is not necessarily the case. In fact, it makes sense to use the historical record of inflation realizations to make inferences about the long-run inflation target if people are not sure of the monetary authority's true inflation target; see, for example, here: Monetary Policy Regimes and Beliefs. It's still not entirely clear to me whether FOMC members view AIT as a policy to pursue passively (i.e., let inflation creep up to and beyond target on its own) or actively (i.e., take explicit actions to promote an overshoot of inflation). If it's the former, then I'm on board with the idea. But if it's the latter, I am not. In particular, with the liquidity-trap-like conditions we're presently in, the Fed does not have the tools (or political will) to boost inflation persistently. It is likely to fail, just as the Bank of Japan failed. (I explain here why it's more difficult for a central bank to raise the inflation target than to lower it.) So, as I've advocated many times in the past, why not just declare 2% as a soft-ceiling and let fiscal policy do the rest? My view rests on the belief that missing the inflation target from below by 50bp over the past eight years is not a significant macroeconomic problem (especially given how crudely inflation is measured). The FOMC did view it as a problem, but mainly, it seems, because of the embarrassment associated with missing its target. "We are a central bank. We have an inflation target. Central banks are supposed to hit their inflation targets. We need to hit our inflation target to remain credible." This is why earlier FOMC statements emphasized the Fed's "symmetric" inflation target. That did not work and so now we have AIT which, I'm afraid, might not work either. Happily (for those who want to see higher inflation), Congress seems comfortable with the idea of producing large budget deficits into the foreseeable future. So, if we get higher inflation, it will largely be a fiscal phenomenon. The purpose of AIT is to accommodate any rise in inflation for the purpose of increasing inflation expectations and avoiding the specter of deflation (people often point to Japan as a case to avoid, by Japan seems to be doing fine as far as I can tell). There is the question of how the Fed would react should inflation rise sharply and persistently above 2%. Even if the event is unlikely, it would be good to state a contingency plan. In the past, the Fed could be expected to raise its policy rate sharply. But this event, should it transpire, will almost surely take place during an employment shortfall (since this is now the acknowledged new normal). The only prediction I'll make here is that the FOMC will have a lot of explaining to do in this event.
Questa tesi affronta il tema della sostenibilità in finanza che gioca un ruolo sempre più significativo nella performance finanziaria delle aziende: sono note le correlazioni positive e statisticamente significative tra le prestazioni ESG e le prestazioni finanziarie. L' obiettivo è approfondire uno dei tre criteri, la Governance, che altro non è che la struttura che abbraccia ogni questione in materia di finanza aziendale, per identificare le pratiche di governo societario che favoriscono sostenibilità e migliore redditività. I tre fattori contaminano l'intero sistema e per analizzarli è opportuno osservarli da due punti di vista principali: da una parte l'universo della finanza responsabile e dall'altra l'universo del business. Il Capitolo 1 si apre con una breve introduzione al mondo della finanza sostenibile, vengono approfonditi i criteri ESG e le strategie SRI. Successivamente entra nel cuore della trattazione con l'analisi del modello di Integrated Governance "A new model of governance for sustainability", ad oggi la ricerca più avanzata sul tema che è alla base di questa tesi e di tutti gli studi e le indagini in essa dibattuti. Nell'ecosistema impresa-società-ambiente l'azienda influenza la società che la circonda così come viene influenzata dagli stakeholder e diventa sempre più difficile danneggiare l'ambiente senza attirare l'attenzione negativa, con un danno di reputazione che riduca il capitale sociale. Lo studio dimostra che integrare la sostenibilità nella strategia aziendale presenta opportunità di innovazione e crescita. L'integrazione è necessaria per gestire rischi e creare un vantaggio competitivo, anche se implementare efficacemente una strategia in modo che risultino migliorate simultaneamente performance finanziaria ed ESG non è semplice: è fondamentale implementare processi e pratiche appropriati, con il coinvolgimento degli stakeholder, con misurazione e reporting delle prestazioni ESG e con una visione di lungo termine. Per questo nasce il modello di Integrated Governance, un ipotetico sistema che integra le questioni di sostenibilità per garantire la creazione di valore a lungo termine. Ogni azienda deve compiere un percorso di adattamento strutturato in tre fasi: dalla fase 1, nella quale la sostenibilità è fuori dell'agenda del CdA, si crea un percorso di transizione verso la fase 2, governance per la sostenibilità, tramite l'istituzione di comitati e il monitoraggio di indicatori che misurano i progressi rispetto alle iniziative. La fase 3, governance integrata, rappresenta lo schema da implementare nel quale il consiglio si assume la responsabilità di garantire una strategia sostenibile e viene assicurata la presenza di quattro caratteristiche imprescindibili: indipendenza a livello individuale, indipendenza di gruppo, retribuzione adeguata e investitori proprietari a lungo termine. Prendendo a riferimento questo modello, il presente lavoro prosegue nel Capitolo 2 a tratteggiare il quadro generale della corporate governance delle società quotate italiane, attraverso l'analisi delle società quotate sull'MTA effettuata da Consob. I risultati principali rilevano che in Italia il modello di controllo prevalente è quello familiare e frequentemente gli investitori istituzionali italiani sono azionisti rilevanti di imprese di piccole dimensioni e del settore industriale, mentre quelli esteri sono presenti in società finanziarie ed a elevata capitalizzazione. Cresce il numero di società che istituiscono comitati interni, multidisciplinari e strutturati in modo similare. Gli interlocker rappresentano il 23% del cda con maggiore presenza nelle grandi e medie imprese, ma rimangono una categoria di minoranza in consiglio. Il background professionale prevalente è di tipo manageriale, seguito da consulenti e professionisti, il livello di istruzione è inferiore nelle società a controllo familiare mentre nelle società controllate dallo Stato o da un istituto finanziario, gli amministratori sono più giovani e più istruiti. I membri delle società pubbliche sono più frequentemente donne e spesso accademiche, mentre nelle società finanziarie gli amministratori femminili sono meno frequenti, con buona presenza di stranieri e background manageriale più comune. La maggioranza degli emittenti riserva al genere femminile la quota di un terzo dei componenti del board: aumenta la quota di donne qualificate come indipendenti mentre si riduce il numero di casi in cui una donna ricopre la carica di ad, soprattutto nelle grandi aziende e nel settore dei servizi. L'età media è di 56,5 anni, ma tende a crescere nelle società Ftse Mib e nelle società finanziarie, viceversa scende nelle società di piccole dimensioni e nel settore servizi. Il Capitolo prosegue a delineare la situazione italiana attraverso l'indagine sul FtseMib Integrated Governance Index, lanciata nel 2016 da TopLegal ed ETicaNews, per conoscere il livello di "buon governo integrato" dei principali gruppi quotati italiani allo scopo di realizzare un indice quantitativo. Dai risultati della prima edizione emerge che esistono società lanciate nell'integrated reporting, tema noto e studiato da più funzioni aziendali, seppur con difficoltà nella gestione dei questionari e nella coordinazione. L'indice ha mostrato un notevole differenziale di punteggio tra settori e anche sui singoli ambiti di analisi c'è grande eterogeneità: nel comparto retribuzioni non viene raggiunto il punteggio pieno, nell'ambito dell'integrazione della sostenibilità solo due casi di pieno punteggio, e sul fronte dei comitati del board a livello di sostenibilità i punti sono molto bassi. Nel 2017 si registra un migliore feedback sulla governance integrata da parte delle aziende e un più alto engagement, con alcune società inizia un dialogo positivo, ma permangono realtà non interessate al progetto e altre con le quali non è stato stabilito un contatto. L'indice viene rivisto e corretto su alcune parti, emerge ancora grande eterogeneità e si confermano le tre posizioni di leadership. I risultati ottenuti nel 2018 invece dimostrano un passo in avanti nella partecipazione sul tema: aumentano i manager coinvolti nella sostenibilità, in particolare del Cfo, e l'Area ordinaria segna un miglioramento. Sull'indice complessivo pesa la parte finanza, introdotta nel 2017 e incrementata nel 2018, che riveste il tema centrale dell'Area Straordinaria. Il comitato di sostenibilità non è ancora la prassi per tutte le società che mostrano scelte eterogenee, risulta complesso l'esercizio sul presidio nel board di tutte le forme di valore, mentre migliora il legame tra remunerazione ed ESG. L'ultima indagine esaminata rivela il consolidamento della consapevolezza sulla governance ESG nel campione di riferimento e segnala un complessivo miglioramento dell'Index. Gli ESG iniziano ad essere percepiti come un tema trasversale alle funzioni aziendali ma per l'agenda del board sono ancora spesso una questione di reporting, policy e compliance. Il Capitolo 2 si chiude con l'approfondimento di due tematiche ritenute cruciali, ovvero la rappresentanza femminile nei Cda ed il ruolo della Direttiva Non Financial. Per quanto riguarda il primo approfondimento questo lavoro analizza i progressi globali verso un'eguale rappresentanza di genere nei CdA delle società attraverso lo studio Women on Boards di MSCI ESG Research, che rivela quanto siano lenti ma costanti i progressi verso l'obiettivo di rappresentanza femminile fissato a livello mondiale. Secondo le proiezioni del 2015 i componenti dell'indice avrebbero dovuto raggiungere il traguardo del 30% di rappresentanza femminile aggregata nel 2027. In base alle tendenze attuali invece le proiezioni sono state aggiornate e rivelano che dovremmo attendere fino al 2029. Ciò significa quindi che i progressi continuano ad avanzare lentamente, le donne occupano incarichi di amministratore ad un ritmo più lento rispetto a quanto. Circa il 21% delle società dell'indice ha ancora un board tutto maschile e sono localizzate in Asia, Cina, Giappone e Corea del Sud. Norvegia, Francia e Svezia aumentano la presenza femminile sopra al livello richiesto, insieme ad 'Australia e Nuova Zelanda. Gli Stati Uniti registrano progressi costanti toccando nuovi record di rappresentanza femminile. Nella suite C il livello è ancora basso ma aumentano i CFO donna, specialmente sui mercati emergenti. L'altro approfondimento riguarda lo sviluppo della rendicontazione non finanziaria: è sempre più pressante la richiesta da parte degli stakeholder di una maggiore trasparenza circa i rischi derivanti dall'attività d'impresa e sulla trasparenza delle informazioni di carattere non finanziario. Le aziende avvertono l'esigenza di definire la propria storia attraverso indicatori relativi alle politiche sociali e ambientali, per accrescere gli elementi della gestione, di natura qualitativa, quali la reputazione, la fiducia e il consenso. La Direttiva UE 2014/95 stabilisce nuovi standard minimi di reporting in relazione alla gestione del personale, al rispetto dei diritti umani e alla lotta alla corruzione. Mira ad introdurre e rafforzare comportamenti virtuosi e ha l'obiettivo di aumentare la trasparenza nella comunicazione di informazioni non finanziarie ed incrementare la fiducia degli investitori e degli stakeholder. Il Capitolo 3 entra nel merito della misurazione ed osservazione della correlazione tra performance finanziarie e integrazione ESG. È incentrato sullo studio di Banor SIM e del DIG del Politecnico di Milano sull'indice Stoxx® Europe 600. Emerge come i portafogli delle società con rating integrato registrano performance migliori rispetto al benchmark, mette in risalto come i portafogli delle società del con rating di governance performano meglio: il dato che vogliamo sottolineare è quello del parametro WOB, che consegue le performance migliori in assoluto. La tesi si chiude con l'esposizione di un case study di azienda che integra efficacemente i fattori esg all'interno del proprio modello di business, in linea con le best practices internazionali. È la migliore società italiana nel 2019 per corporate governance e integrazione dei fattori ESG nelle strategie aziendali, secondo l'IGI, dopo essere salita sul podio già nell'anno precedente.
One can note that the issue of children rights has always been topical and while there is still plenty of complex topics to be studied, the author yet invites to return to the basics of the child's rights, and in particularly, to the need to protect the child's identity as a legal value. The purpose of the article, therefore, is to clarify the meaning of the child's right to identity enshrined in the international, and in particularly, the 1989 Convention on the Rights of the Child, and according Latvian legislation. With the assistance of a descriptive method in conjunction with a historical method the article marks the historical events of the last quarter of the 20th century leading to formation and contemporary understanding of the right to identity. Historical remarks are followed with a smooth transition into the analysis of the international and Latvian legal framework. The used sources among others include a number of international, European and Latvian legal acts, as well as accessible interpretative manuals, monographs, comments, transcripts and other sources for a better understanding of the contents of the legislation. The named analysis has been performed with the use of legal comparative, systemic and analytical research methods. ; anastasija.jumakova@gmail.com ; Latvijas Universitāte (University of Latvia, Latvia) ; Besson S., Enforcing the Child's Right to Know her Origins: Contrasting Approaches under the Convention on the Rights of the Child and the European Convention on Human Rights, "International Journal of Law, Policy and the Family" 2007, No. 21. ; Blair D.M.B., The Impact of Family Paradigms, Domestic Constitutions, and International Conventions on Disclosure of an Adopted Person's Identities and Heritage: A Comparative Examination, "Michigan Journal of International Law" 2001, Vol. 22. ; Blauwhoff R.J., Foundational facts, relative truths: A comparative law study on children's right to know their genetic origins, Antwerp 2009. ; Cerda J.S., The Draft Convention on the Rights of the Child: New Rights, "Human Rights Quarterly" 1990, vol. 12. ; Cohen C.P., Elasticity of Obligation and the Drafting of the Convention on the Rights of the Child, "Connecticut Journal of International Law" 1987, No. 71. ; Cohen C.P., Introductory Note to the United Nations Conventions on the Rights of the Child. "International Legal Materials" 1989. ; Danovskis E., Ruķers M., Lībiņa-Egner I., 96. Ikvienam ir tiesības uz privātās dzīves, mājokļa un korespondences neaizskaramību, [in:]: Latvijas Republikas Satversmes komentāri: VIII nodaļa Cilvēka pamattiesības, ed. R. Balodis, A. Endziņš, T. Jundzis et al, Rīga Latvijas Vēstnesis 2011. ; Heimerle N., International Law and Identity Rights for Adopted Children, "Adoption Quarterly" 2003, Vol. 7 (2). ; Hodgson D., The International Legal Protection of the Child's Right to a Legal Identity and the Problems of Statelessness, "International Journal of Law, Policy and the Family" 1993, Vol. 7 (2). ; Kovaļevska A., Personas tiesības uz savu attēlu, Valsts Cilvēktiesību birojs, 2005: http://providus.lv/article_files/1583/original/attel_tiesib.pdf?1332251075 (25.07.2020). ; Marshall J., Concealed Births, Adoption and Human Rights: Being Wary of Seeking to Open Windows into People's Soul, "Cambridge Law Journal" 2012, Vol. 71 (2). ; Marshall J., Personal freedom throughout Human Rights Law: Autonomy, Identity and Integrity under the European Convention on Human rights. International Studies in Human Rights, 2009. ; McCombs T., Gonzalez J. S., Right to Identity, International Human Rights Law Clinic, University of California, Berkeley School of Law 2007: http://scm.oas.org/pdfs/2007/CP19277.PDF (26.07.2020). ; O'Donovan K., "Real" mothers for Abandoned Children, "Law and Society Review" 2002, Vol. 36, No.2. ; Parra-Aranguren G., Explanatory Report on the 1993 Hague Intercountry Adoption Convention: https://www.hcch.net/en/publications-and-studies/details4/?pid=2279 (25.07.2020). ; Ronen Y., Redefining the Child's Right to Identity, "International Journal of Law and the Family" 2004, Vol. 18. ; Sants H.J., Genealogical Bewilderment in Children with Substitute Parents, "British Journal of Medical Psychology" 1964, Vol. 37. ; Scolnicov A., The Child's Right to Religious Freedom and Formation of Identity, "International Journal of Children's Rights" 2007, Vol. 15. ; Stewart G.A., Interpreting the Child's Right to Identity in the U.N. Convention on the Rights of the Child, "Family Law Quarterly" 1992-1993, Vol.26. ; van Bueren G., The International Law on the Rights of the Child, 1998. ; Wellisch E., Children Without Genealogy – A Problem of Adoption, "Mental Health" 1952, Vol. 13. ; Implementation Handbook For The Convention On The Rights Of The Child, United Nations Children's Fund 2007. ; Theory and Practice of the European Convention on Human Rights, edited by P. van Dijk, F. van Hoof, A. van Rijn, L. Zwaak and others, Antwerpen – Oxford Intersentia 2006. ; Judgement of ECHR of 29 April 2002 (Application no. 2346/02) in the case of Pretty v. United Kingdom. ; Convention for the Protection of Human Rights and Dignity of the Human Being with regard to the Application of Biology and Medicine: Convention on Human Rights and Biomedicine: https://www.coe.int/en/web/conventions/full-list/-/conventions/rms/090000168007cf98 (access: 26.07.2020). ; Convention on Protection of Children and Co-operation in Respect of Intercountry Adoption: https://www.hcch.net/en/instruments/conventions/full-text/?cid=69 (access: 25.07.2020). ; Convention on the Rights of the Child: https://www.ohchr.org/en/professionalinterest/pages/crc.aspx (access: 25.07.2020). ; International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights: https://www.ohchr.org/en/professionalinterest/pages/ccpr.aspx (access: 25.07.2020). ; Declaration of the Rights of the Child: http://www.un.org/cyberschoolbus/humanrights/resources/child.asp (access: 25.07.2020). ; Universal Declaration of Human Rights: https://www.ohchr.org/EN/UDHR/Documents/UDHR_Translations/eng.pdf (access: 25.07.2020). ; The Charter of Fundamental Rights of the European Union. Official Journal of the European Union, C 83/289, 30.3.2010. ; European Convention on the Adoption of Children (Revised): https://www.coe.int/en/web/conventions/full-list/-/conventions/rms/0900001680084823 (access: 26.07.2020). ; Council Directive 2004/83/EC of 29 April 2004 on minimum standards for the qualification and status of third country nationals or stateless persons as refugees or as persons who otherwise need international protection and the content of the protection granted. OJ L 304, 30.9.2004. ; Latvijas Republikas Satversme : LR likums. Latvijas Vēstnesis, 1993. 1.jūlijs, Nr. 43. English translation: The Constitution of the Republic of Latvia: https://likumi.lv/ta/en/en/id/57980-the-constitution-of-the-republic-of-latvia (access: 26.07.2020). ; Bērnu tiesību aizsardzības likums : LR likums. Latvijas Vēstnesis, 1998. 19. jūlijs, Nr.199/200. English translation: Law on the Protection of the Children's Rights: https://likumi.lv/ta/en/en/id/49096-law-on-the-protection-of-the-childrens-rights (access: 26.07.2020). ; Biometrijas datu apstrādes sistēmas likums : LR likums. Latvijas Vēstnesis, 2009. 10. jūnijs, Nr.90/4076. English translation: Biometric Data Processing System Law: https://likumi.lv/ta/en/en/id/193111-biometric-data-processing-system-law (access: 26.07.2020). ; Grozījumi Bērnu tiesību aizsardzības likumā : LR likums. Latvijas Vēstnesis, 2000. 28. marts, Nr.11/112. English translation: Amendments to the Law on the Protection of the Children's Rights. ; Latvijas Republikas Civillikums : LR likums. Valdības Vēstnesis, 1937. gada 20. februāris, Nr. 41; Ziņotājs, 1993. 10. jūnijs, Nr. 22. English translation: The Civil law of the Republic of Latvia: https://likumi.lv/ta/id/90223-civillikums-pirma-dala-gimenes-tiesibas (access: 26.07.2020). ; Likuma "Grozījumi Bērnu tiesību aizsardzības likumā" 1. lasījums. Latvijas Republikas 7. Saeimas rudens sesijas vienpadsmitā sēde. Saeimas arhīvs: http://www.saeima.lv/steno/1999/st2810.html (access: 26.07.2020). English translation: The first of review of the law "Amendments to the Law on the Protection of the Children's Rights". Eleventh sitting of the autumn session of the 7th Parliament of the Republic of Latvia; ; Likuma "Grozījumi Bērnu tiesību aizsardzības likumā" 2. lasījums. Latvijas Republikas 7. Saeimas rudens sesijas deviņpadsmitā sēde. Saeimas arhīvs: http://www.saeima.lv/steno/1999/st1612.html (access: 26.07.2020). English translation: The second of review of the law "Amendments to the Law on the Protection of the Children's Rights". Nineteenth sitting of the autumn session of the 7th Saeima of the Republic of Latvia. ; Likuma "Grozījumi Bērnu tiesību aizsardzības likumā" 3. lasījums. Latvijas Republikas 7. Saeimas ziemas sesijas vienpadsmitā sēde. Saeimas arhīvs: http://www.saeima.lv/steno/2000/st0903.html (access: 26.07.2020). English translation: The third of review of the law "Amendments to the Law on the Protection of the Children's Rights". Eleventh Session of the 7th Saeima of the Republic of Latvia ; Saeimas Cilvēktiesību un sabiedrisko lietu komisijas 1999.gada 30. novembra projekts 2. lasījumam "Priekšlikumi likumprojektam "Grozījumi Bērnu tiesību aizsardzības likumā"": http://helios-web.saeima.lv/bin/lasa?LP0381_2 (access: 12.06.2019). English translation: Draft of the Human Rights and Public Affairs Commission of the Parliament of November 30, 1999 for the Second Review "Proposals for the draft law "Amendments to the Law on the Protection of the Rights of the Child"". ; Explanatory Report on European Convention on the Adoption of Children, Treaty Office of Council of Europe: http://www.conventions.coe.int/Treaty/en/Reports/Html/058.htm (access: 26.07.2020). ; History of Argentina: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_Argentina (access: 25.07.2020). ; Working Group on Enforced or Involuntary Disappearances: http://www.ohchr.org/EN/Issues/Disappearances/Pages/DisappearancesIndex.aspx (access: 25.07.2020). ; 19 ; 1 ; 223 ; 244
Does a man who knits demonstrate courage? The question refers to the meanings attributed to knitting, which has traditionally been perceived as a female occupation performed in private space. In this article, referring to the past and the analysis of contemporary craft practice, I describe the process of deconstruction in this area. I am particularly interested in men knitting in public. The aim of my considerations is to analyze the difference between the meaning of what is male and female in knitting, and between hegemonic practice and subversive acts of deconstruction. ; Czy mężczyzna, który robi na drutach, wykazuje się dziś odwagą? Tak sformułowane pytanie odsyła do znaczeń przypisywanych dzierganiu, tradycyjnie postrzeganemu jako zajęcie kobiece, wykonywane w przestrzeni prywatnej. W ramach prezentowanego artykułu, odwołując się do przeszłości oraz w oparciu o analizę współczesnych praktyk rękodzielniczych, opisuję proces dekonstrukcji dokonujący się w tym obszarze. Szczególną uwagę poświęcam analizie aktywności mężczyzn, którzy robią na drutach publicznie, naruszając tym samym stabilność znaczeń rozpiętych pomiędzy tym, co męskie i niemęskie, pomiędzy praktyką hegemoniczną i subwersywnymi aktami jej kwestionowania. ; e.kepa@uwb.edu.pl ; Instytut Studiów Kulturowych, Uniwersytet w Białymstoku ; Anderson Eric (2015), Teoria męskości inkluzywnej, transl. Piotr Sobolczyk, "Teksty Drugie", no. 2, pp. 431–444. ; Anderson Eric, McGuire Rhidian (2010), Inclusive Masculinity Theory and the Gendered Politics of Men's Rugby, "Journal of Gender Studies", vol. 19, issue 3, pp. 249–261. ; Arcimowicz Krzysztof (2015), Współczesny ideał męskiego ciała – wybrane aspekty problematyki, "Acta Universitatis Lodziensis. 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A Comment on: "Birth of the Leviathan: Building States and Regimes in Medieval and Early Europe" by Thomas Ertman(Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 1997, 350 pp.)Understanding the origins of the modern state –and the different forms these political units eventually took- is a central enterprise in the discipline of political science. Relevant not only as a necessary first step in the development of several fields inside political science (e.g. how can we talk of an international, or better inter-state system, if we do not know where this concept of "inter-state" comes from?) but also for the contemporaneity of state-building in the 21st century. Pivotal as it is, the literature still has too many open-ended pathways and many more to discover. It is in this scenario that Thomas Ertman's Birth of the Leviathan appears as a very welcome contribution to the study of the origins of the Modern State.The problem Ertman poses is not entirely new. In his own words: "Why had some states developed in a constitutionalist direction during the formative centuries of European state-building, while others had become absolutist? And why had military pressures driven some states to construct effective, proto-modern bureaucracies, while others remained wedded to administrative methods that seemed highly dysfunctional?" (p. xi). The resemblance to the questions in which, to take a well-known example, Charles Tilly had been working on for a long time is strong. (1) Notwithstanding, three features stand out in the Birth of the Leviathan: a) the type of intra- and inter-state changes that the author discusses along the extended process of state-building (the time frame for the study is circa the fall of the Roman Empire and the French Revolution), b) the complexity of the theory proposed, and c) the impressive empirical research undertaken to support his theory.As Ertman's quote above suggests, the goal of the book is to explain why some states developed an absolutist regime while others came up with a constitutionalsystem. Moreover, and reaching to Max Weber's thought, the author also provides an answer to the diversity (divergence??) in the paths of state infrastructure –that is: why some states ended up with a modern bureaucratic administration while others remained, to their own detriment, with patrimonial systems. Thus four variables define the typology of states presented: patrimonial absolutism (France and Spain), bureaucratic constitutionalism (Great Britain), bureaucratic absolutism (Germany), and patrimonial constitutionalism (Poland and Hungary).There are two sets of dependent variables. The political regime on one side – i.e.absolutism and constitutionalism- respond to differences in the strength of representative institutions. Grosso modo, polities situated inside those territories characterized by large-scale and mostly unsuccessful experiments to install homogeneous political regimes during the Dark Ages will be more prone to an absolutist regime. (2) On the other hand, states on the periphery of these historical processes could "begin their state-building from zero" and thus were more prone to develop constitutional regimes with strong representative institutions that constrained royal power.The other dependent variable is the one concerning state-infrastructure. This can take the form of patrimonialism or bureaucracy. The core of the explanatory or independent variable would be that the states involved in early conflict (3) –"early" being defined as pre-1450- tended to build state infrastructures with "outmoded and even dysfunctional" institutional arrangements (most commonly office-holding and the grant of state functions, such as taxing, to private hands). On the contrary, latecomers to war were able to take a bureaucratic path for two reasons: a) they could benefit from the know-how and learn from the errors of states which had been involved in the expansion of the state-authority for a long time, and b) the exponential increase in the supply of personnel professionally trained to run state affairs. (4)A problem the author encounters is that this scheme cannot explain two of its four cases: bureaucratic-constitutionalism and constitutional-paternalism. Why did Great Britain follow the bureaucratic path given it was a clear case of early state-builder for war purposes? And why is it that Hungary and Poland, two cases of latecomers to war, ended up with patrimonial administrations? The explanation for this anomaly rests in the existence of strong representative institutions that influenced state infrastructure. In the case of Great Britain, redirecting the state in a bureaucratic path (against the attempts of interest groups to impose patrimonialism), in the cases of Hungary and Poland, acting as an agent of patrimonial administration.Let me offer some final comments (in an unjustly oversimplified manner) that follow from the reading. Ertman's book turns out to be a rigorous and intensely (with historical descriptions that might be too dense in some instances) researched study. His comprehension of the subtleties of state-building in modern Europe certainly surpass most of the work this reader has seen in the literature. While the work of a Charles Tilly analyzed the role of war, coercion, and capital in trying to explain why such different paths of state-building ended up with the same outcome -i.e. the nation-state- Ertman's book goes much deeper. The inclusion of the analysis of changes in the domestic structures is particularly welcome. In other words, where Tilly saw a path towards convergence in the form of the nation-state, Ertman disentangles a process that leads to the formation of critically different types of states. This divergence becomes particularly relevant when one reflects on the contemporaneity of this work, since it was not only the convergence in the nation state form, but also the stark differences –especially in state infrastructure- that defined and continue to define the European countries studied. (5)Some final thoughts, that would have to be more developed to do the author justice, will be irresponsibly thrown as questions for further consideration:The author seems to focus too much in the methods of resource extraction (e.g. taxing) without taking seriously the given pool of resources each territory had. A better consideration of this issue –for example benefiting from Tilly's hypothesis on the importance of cities as centers of capital and their interplay with central governments- might be a good idea (Was it the same for a King to have a Madrid than a Ghent?)What is the real role of war? The author measures the effectiveness of state administration by their fighting performance. But, is losing a war, let's say Jena, a valid yardstick to define efficient and inefficient administrations, or as in the case of Jena other things might be in play (Napoleon's mighty army)?Is it acceptable to have such a flexible theoretical model? Are not the explanatory variables modified to fit the cases, thus incurring in a grave methodological problem? In general, how heavy are the costs in parsimony of such a detailed and complex study?In any case, The Birth of the Leviathan is an essential study for anyone trying to understand where the central political unit in international relations comes from, and why has this institution differed, not only in its path –as Tilly tells us- but also in its final form. The interested reader should save some time to seriously engage in a dialogue with Ertman and his Birth of the Leviathan.(1) "What accounts for the great variation over time and space in the kinds of states that have prevailed in Europe since A.D. 990, and why did European states eventually converge on different variants of the national state? Why were the directions of change so similar and the paths so different?" Tilly, Charles, "Cities and States in Europe, 1000-1800"; Theory and Society, Vol. 18, No. 5, Special Issue on Cities and States in Europe, 1000-1800 (September, 1989, p.565). Nevertheless, there is one important distinction between these two questions that will be discussed at the end of this essay.(2) It is not completely clear though, at least to this reader, the logical explanation for this hypothesis. Is it that the post-Dark Ages and its failed attempts to impose working political systems (e.g. the Carolingian Empire) generated such a marked decentralization in the political landscape that the only viable solution for the Crowns was to try to impose a severe centralization over the aristocratic landlords? Or that such decentralization and the pattern of landlord aristocracy that followed were not compatible with the bicameral representative organizations (typical of constitutional regimes)? Or both? This is particularly troublesome since the author defines the variance in political regime as "a ruler who was relatively constrained (constitutionalism) or unconstrained (absolutism)" (p. 19).(3) Here the author wisely sticks to Tilly's maxim "War made the state and the state made war." (4) A phenomenon linked to the proliferation of the University as a social institution.(5) As the author remarks at the end of the book: "…patrimonial institutions can also have nagging long-term consequences. Despite the reforms of the 19th century, patron-client relations, lack of clear boundaries between politics and administration, and redistribution of public funds towards political insiders remain a serious problem in Spain, Portugal, France, and Italy…" p. 322. *Ph.D. StudentDepartment of Political ScienceUniversity of Pennsylvania.Profesor Depto. Estudios Internacionales. FACS - Universidad ORT Uruguay. MA en Estudios Internacionales, Universidad Torcuato Di TellaE-mail: gcastro@sas.upenn.edu
