Suchergebnisse

The expansion of social welfare in advanced capitalist countries following the Second World War has been phenomenal. Concomitant to this is the mushrooming of comparative social research devoted to the analysis of welfare states. The central question in comparative policy discourse has been the search for the determinants of social welfare development. There is no consensus over the structural determinants for welfare efforts. However, the literature on comparative social policy has identified a significant number of variables which spur social policy development: industrialization, urbanization, modernization, working‐class mobilization, union strength, state and its particular structure, open economy, diffusion, military spending, and national ideology (Wilensky & Lebeaux, 1965; Wilensky, 1975; Uusitalo, 1984; Wilensky, 1985; Flora, 1987; O'Conner, 1988; Esping‐Andersen, 1990; Pierson, 1991; Wong & Daley, 1991; Janoski & Hicks, 1994).

In December 1927 delegates to the XV Party Congress of the Soviet Union adopted the slogan, "Face toward Production." Over the next five years, as the Party embarked on a massive effort to industrialize the country and collectivize agriculture, this slogan came to define policy in every area of life. The Party daily exhorted the people to speed up production, increase the harvest, reconstruct agriculture. Workers erected behemoths of heavy industry as artists emblazoned the image of belching smokestacks everywhere, symbols not of pollution but of the transformative promise of industrialization. Stalin and his supporters purged the unions, the planning agencies and the Party of "rightists" who were seen as obstacles to the new tempos of production and the collectivization of agriculture.

Ernest Gellner's theory of nationalism, as presented in Thought and Change (1965) & Nations and Nationalism (1983), is sketched, criticized, qualified, & defended. Gellner offers an explicitly functionalist argument in which industrialization explains the genesis & maintenance of nationalism. Gellner's theory is defended against many inferior theories that either fail to provide the analytic distinction between nations & nationalism, or fail to account for the relations between power, education, & cultural community. The primary defect of Gellner's theory is its largely apolitical nature. Successful nation-building depends much more on political innovation, & is more intimately linked to democratization, than Gellner allows. The political doctrine of nationalism is defended against the criticisms that it is either dangerous or meaningless & argued to be compatible with liberal, democratic consciousness. 44 References. H. von Rautenfeld

The "decline" of the British economy has been stated by many people and has been described since the Seventies as de-industrialization. The left often sees the main culprits in the financial enterprises in London's city centre. But a closer investigation shows a more differentiated picture: many British enterprises use the City's international network for their own global expansion. As a result UK-located industry has declined, UK-based capital has been comparatively successful in global competition. An alternative concept of the left can therefore not just consist of a nation-state-centered industrial policy and a regulation of the City. Moreover, the task is to reject the logic of international competition and the attempt to subordinate the market to social needs. (Prokla /FUB)

The industrialization of shipping, a process which accelerated rapidly between the 1870s and 1910s, induced and accompanied dramatic changes in European and American port cities. Never before or since have so few cities on both sides of the Atlantic concentrated such a large proportion of the world's commerce. Thanks to the expansion of shipping, the great port cities of the Atlantic world acquired a significant manufacturing sector, including shipbuilding, and met the needs of their growing population for food and energy supplies. The reduction of freight rates and the expansion of shipping capacity and services brought considerable benefits to the urban economy. But the growth of shipping was also a factor in waves of migration, environmental and public health problems, traffic congestion, substandard housing, strikes, and conflict over strategies for development.

After almost five decades of industrialization—characterized, on the one hand, by considerable state intervention and, on the other, by protectionist import-substituting policies in domestic capital formation—in the early 1980s Turkey ostensibly entered a new era of export-led economic growth. Since 1960, the Turkish democracy has experienced a series of crises with astonishingly regular ten-year cycles of recurrence. The 1980 military intervention, however, brought about a radical attempt to restructure the economy, hardly comparable with the rather gradual changes in its recent economic history. Its ten years of experimentation with economic liberalization and structural adjustment provide us today with an adequate record to identify and discuss at least the salient features of this period by comparing the performance of the economy in different years.

A reply to a comment by Scott Bennett on Neal's article (see abstracts 9706780 & 9706808, respectively) on multinational corporations. It is maintained that opening developing economics to the world market is worth the price because development of this caliber includes social peacemaking & democracy building. It is suggested that "enrichment of the people" is a term to describe rising incomes that result from this progress. The negative effects of Western media & the problems of free trade & industrialization are concluded to be counteracted by the positive impacts of investment-based development & the possibility of sustainable economic growth. The importance of national leaders in promoting their own markets to establish a functioning democratic economy is emphasized. Steps toward globalization are deemed nothing less than pragmatic for developing countries. S. Hansen

Among the various methodological prescriptions of Anthony Giddens, perhaps the most useful for labor history are his advisories on social change, on the anxieties and tensions attending a society's transition from one geographical scale to another. Labor's experience in the United States offers a case in point. The nation's transformation from a preindustrial to an industrial society entailed, in addition to the inexorables of accelerated urbanization, industrial expansion, and market extension, certain fundamental changes in the conditions of labor. Industrialization restructured the geography of labor markets, revised principles of wage determination, fomented sectarian division in the ranks of labor, and soured the relations between labor and capital. These structural changes led, in turn, to the inevitable responses of, among others, worker combination, protest, industrial violence, and a splintering in the ranks of labor.

Suburban communities have experienced a radical transformation in the past century, and now they are where most Americans live. This chaper summarizes the historical evolution of the modern suburb, presents the major suburban theories, and reviews the empirical evidence on the suburban form and social structure. We discuss the suburbanization process in the context of urban decline and change. Finally we review the suburban crisis that has developed after decades of rapid population growth and industrialization. The challenges facing today's suburbs include political fragmentation in regional governance, a growth revolt by local residents, a declining quality of community life, and a lack of affordable housing. The response to the suburban crisis by governments, business, and local residents will affect future suburban growth and suburban form.

According to the Okishio theorem, profit-maximizing firms will not introduce new techniques which, when adopted by all firms, reduce the rate of profit. This paper presents a simple model which shows that this conclusion need not hold under imperfect competition. The model excludes working-class pressures for increased real wages - the supply of labor is infinitely elastic at a given money wage rate - and it is assumed that firms aim to maximize profits. It is shown that, if the economy starts from an initial position with a low organic composition, then the rate of profit will fall. Asymptotically, the profit rate approaches a long-run equilibrium value, but the model may explain some of the observed decline in profitability during the early stages of industrialization.

The causes of the political tumult in Eastern Europe in 1989 are examined, & possible strategies by which Romania can secure a stable position in the new economic & social formation of Eastern Europe are offered. The demise of several communist regimes is attributed to their failure to understand that industrialization through technology does not produce an ever increasing working class with complete solidarity; rather, it spurs social differentiation of productive forces. To rectify this misunderstanding & to cope with an uncertain future, it is suggested that Romania adopt the economic policy of South Korea & the social policy of Austria, ie, develop an economic base founded on high technology, microelectronics, & computers, & enhance productive capacities that are regulated by market forces, with the distribution of the national wealth controlled by the state. W. Howard

This article discusses the reversal of development in Argentina. It argues that this country switched developmental tracks: from being a "land of recent settlement," it became an underdeveloped society. This shift was the unintended consequence of two policies that were institutionalized in the postwar period: autarkic industrialization, and a corporatist system of labor relations. The author claims that these policies were a response by the state elite to a perceived revolutionary threat, that this fear of revolution was unrealistic, and that these policies had the effects they did because of the "modern" characteristics of Argentina. The peculiar pattern of Argentine development could not have been understood by either modernization and dependency approaches, and thus this case calls into question the basic assumptions of these theories of development.

Americans lack a sense of the state for many understandable historical reasons. Yet, the specific organizational forms that state activities have taken in the US from the time of the Constitution to the present have profoundly affected the social cleavages that have gained political expression & influenced the sorts of public policies that governments have -- & have not -- implemented. As an alternative or supplement to theoretical perspectives emphasizing the causal primacy of industrialization, national values, or SC politics, this state-society perspective can illuminate patterns of US social policy, from distributive social benefits in the nineteenth century to bifurcations between social insurance & public assistance since the New Deal. These US polity patterns are contrasted with the more comprehensive & nationally uniform policies characteristic of certain Western European welfare states. 55 References. HA