Suchergebnisse

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 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.

Sanitary Crisis, Civilizational Crisis is the translation of Michel Maffesoli's Crise sanitaire, crise civilisationnelle. This paper can be taken as his pronouncement on the civilizational crisis that the COVID-19 pandemic acutely reveals. Maffesoli's text urges one to see beyond secondary causes or dramatic representations of the pandemic as a sanitary crisis, and to consider the primary, and tragic, causes of this event, understood as a crisis that marks the exhaustion of the logic of modernity. Following from a longstanding critique of the decadence of modernity and, by extension, of an "official society" ordered and controlled by an out-of-touch and morbid elite, Maffesoli makes unequivocally clear that this global pandemic is a direct consequence of a globalized progressivist, economicist, and utilitarian civilizational paradigm. The paper takes up the task of reflecting on how relationality, being-together, and being-with, can be thought in our current moment of civilizational crisis.

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.

It seems so clear, so clearly obvious: we are living in times of crisis: global health crisis (Covid- 19), environmental crisis (the fires), socio-economic crisis (intensifying inequalities), political crisis (the autocrats). These layers of crisis, protracted crisis - this is what we name 'times of crisis'. Amin Samman takes up this condition of our times. His focus is on what he calls "financial times" and his main concern is to illustrate how "we imagine and produce history in financial times" (Samman, 2019: ix).