Crisis has become such a ubiquitous word that its discriminatory power is diminished across various disciplines. It challenges the word-concept relationship inasmuch as it is associated with a host of partner words that imbue crisis with divergent meanings. Not least, it stretches between major upheavals and minor disturbances, often employed with calculating or rhetorical dramatic effect. This article explores both professional and vernacular usages of "crisis" and notes the distinction between theories of crisis and ideologies of crisis. It then turns to examining two domains closely linked to the language of crisis: Marxist analyses of capitalism, and legitimation problems. The latter is explored particularly through Seymour Martin Lipset and Jürgen Habermas. The role of crisis as filtered through different ideological families is indicated. Finally, the relationship between the tipping-point connotations of crisis and the finality drive of political decisions is considered.
An influential body of scholarship in political science has investigated the impact of economic crisis on various political outcomes. The vast majority of these studies rely on annual growth rates (AGR) to specify economic crisis. I argue that this canonical approach comes with several logical shortcomings. It leads to misguided impressions of crisis severity; it makes no distinction between rapid expansion years and rapid recovery years; and it disregards the financial dimension of economic crises. I present and discuss three alternative approaches of measuring economic crisis, imported from economics: economic shocks, economic slumps, and measures of financial crises. Examples from the regime instability literature demonstrate that these alternative crisis measurements provide results that are theoretically more nuanced and empirically more robust. On this basis, the article encourages researchers to pay more attention to the way they measure economic crisis in general and to supplement the AGR approach with alternative crisis measures in particular.
The article addresses the relationship between the civilizational crisis and urban crises that cities have experienced in recent decades. In the West, it went from the urban crisis, located in the social economic system and political legitimacy, to the "disappearance of cities", in which the community has ceased to be founded in the proximity or local population density. In Latin America, the urban crisis of the twentieth century in Europe and the United States is rather the normal situation of its cities, and the civilizational crisis has worsened this situation, characterized by informality and the lack of adequate housing. ; El artículo aborda la relación entre la crisis civilizatoria y las crisis urbanas que las ciudades han experimentado en las últimas décadas. En Occidente se pasó de la crisis urbana, ubicada en el sistema económico social y la legitimidad política, a la "desaparición de las ciudades", en la cual la comunidad ha dejado de estar fundada en la proximidad o la densidad demográfica local. En América Latina, la crisis urbana del siglo XX en Europa y Estados Unidos resulta más bien la situación normal de sus ciudades, y la crisis civilizatoria ha empeorado esta situación, caracterizada por la informalidad y la carencia de viviendas adecuadas.
The enormous financial and economic crisis unfolding in December 2008, combined with other urgent issues that can only be solved on a global level – the energy, food and climate crises – is a potential turning point toward an alternative system, perhaps another paradigm. But the actual form this will take is still unknown. Will it be a system based on global justice and sustainable development? Or will we fall back into a struggle of all against all, which is already happening in the fray of global society? Academics, NGOs and policymakers from the development cooperation field could and should seize the opportunities that the current wave of hope and high expectations offers. Although development aid is increasingly ill-equipped to tackle the problems that count, wider global answers and cross-border actions and responses are increasingly important. It is in this global realm that the big chances lie for real changes for the world's poor, for the millions affected by violent conflict and for the planet at large.
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I'm returning to the question of whether American values have changed: specifically, whether there's been a move towards money and careers and away from personal relationships. Following a suggestion from Claude Fischer, I looked at the World Values Survey. Starting in 1990, it has a series of questions asking how important various things are in your life: very important, rather important, not very important, or not at all important. People are asked about family, friends, leisure time, politics, work and religion. The average ratings in the United States:Religion and work have clearly declined, while the others don't show any clear trend. In 1990, family ranked first, then friends and work almost tied, then leisure and religion almost tied, then politics far behind. Now it's family, friends, leisure, work, religion, politics. Whatever you think about the decline in ratings of religion and work, people aren't turning away from personal relationships.Part of the reason I am interested in this issue is that many people say that the problems in American politics today reflect problems in society. There are many variants of this analysis, but the idea that people have become more focused on themselves is a popular one. Nicholas Kristof offered another one the other day--that they result from stagnation or decline in working-class standards of living--so while I'm at it I'll look at his evidence. Kristof says: "Average weekly nonsupervisory wages, a metric for blue-collar earnings, were actually higher in 1969 (adjusted for inflation) than they were this year." He doesn't link to his source, just says it's from the Bureau of Labor Statistics, but I tried to reconstruct it from the Federal Reserve Economic Data. He's right--in fact, average weekly nonsupervisory earnings are lower then they were in 1965. There's been an increase in part-time work since the `1960s, which is related to increased labor force participation by women, so I also show the figures for real hourly wages. They give a more optimistic picture, but still say that there's been essentially no progress since 1973. However, there are actually two offsetting periods of change: a decline from the early 1970s until the mid-1990s and a pretty steady increase since that time. So any reaction to economic distress should have occurred in the 1980s or 1990s, not in the last few years. Of course, these figures aren't definitive, but they're what Kristof uses.So what is the problem? I agree with another New York Times columnist, David French, that it's primarily one of political leadership. Of course, that raises the question of why the quality of political leadership has declined. I've had several posts that touch on that issue, but haven't addressed it directly--I'll do that in the near future.
In: Fragouli , E & Kolonia , M 2016 , ' Managing crisis or crisis in crisis management? The influence of crisis on Greek and foreign companies that operate in Greece ' Hellenic Open Business Administration Journal , vol 2 , no. 2 , pp. 61-100 .
The austerity packages that have been implemented in Greece since 2010 have been a factor causing political and social turbulence in the country. The present study investigates the influence of crisis on companies that operate in Greece and examines how this has been managed till now. An empirical study to a sample of employees working in Greek and foreign companies that operate in Greece demonstrates the preparedness or lack of preparedness of these companies and the implementation of possible crisis management plans and policies during the Greek economic crisis. The findings indicate that most of the Greek companies were not prepared and do not manage the crisis successfully. Foreign companies have managed the stressful situation more successfully. The paper suggests that crisis management requires strategic actions to be taken towards a desirable resolution to the problem. Managers have to develop organizational systems and be able to detect early warning signals and enable them to be better prepared for crisis events. This study has also shown that a crisis in managing crisis situation is possible to happen, when companies and corporate management teams do not develop crisis management plans on time.
For a movement that emerged to spotlight the crisis of liberal democracy, it did not take long for the Occupy Movement to find itself embroiled in its own democratic crisis. Occupy's story has exposed just how central or constitutive crises are to democracy. But is crisis such a deleterious thing? Though scholars of democracy have customarily given it a bad name, should we consider democracies to be in trouble when they are met with crisis, when they themselves create a crisis? According to the three volumes reviewed in this article, crises can have the potential to hamper and destroy democracies, but they can also possess the uncanny capacity to reinvigorate them. For scholars of democracy - whether they choose to define 'democracy' using a liberal, participatory, deliberative, or some other paradigm - it is perhaps this latter interpretation of crisis that may provide the best way to grapple with what comes next for democracy post-Occupy. Adapted from the source document.