Browsing by Subject "political science"

In this introduction to the special issue, we review the various debates spurred by Esping-Andersen's The Three Worlds of Welfare Capitalism. Tracing its impact since the book's publication in 1990, we show that Three Worlds continues to be the point of reference for comparative welfare state research. A content analysis of articles in the Journal of European Social Policy citing the book indicates that Three Worlds may even have obtained a paradigmatic status and that its claims and findings are often taken for granted rather than challenged. We conclude that Three Worlds has become a classic that is likely to continue to have a major influence on welfare state research in its next 25?years.

The Futurist movement marked a crucial rupture within European literature and art. For all its political and cultural contradictions, Italian Futurism called into question all aspects of literary and artistic production, from the sacrality and eternalness of the work of art to the privileged role of the artist and the passivity of the reader and the spectator.

The post-war period saw the rise of the multinational enterprise (MNE). This new phenomenon drew increasing attention from academia, trade unions, governments and the wider public, often evoking fears about seemingly powerful businesses operating across countries and beyond control. Against the background of these impressions and more general crises (e.g., oil shock, inflation and rising unemployment), international organisations like the United Nations (UN), the International Labour Organization (ILO) and the Organisation of Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) launched comprehensive inquiries to grasp the nature of the new phenomenon. The ensuing reports concluded that MNEs were neither good nor bad per se but constituted a dilemma. They could be instrumental in promoting economic and social development, while at the same time they could abuse their powers in fields such as taxation, employment and their relations to foreign governments. The UN reports recommended the creation of a code of conduct which would stress the positive role and put a check on corporate misbehaviour. The UN was the first to pursue such a code but was soon torn between the diverging views of developed and developing countries. The OECD, which at the beginning of the debate had been reluctant towards a code, stepped in and adopted the 1976 Guidelines for Multinational Enterprises, the first code of conduct to emerge. The Guidelines were the result of an internal trade-off: minimum ethical standards for MNEs in turn for investment-friendly government responsibilities. The UN negotiations, by contrast, dragged on and were abandoned by the early 1990s. Nevertheless, the MNE dilemma and the code debate established or "codified" the very idea that MNEs had moral responsibilities vis-à-vis government and society. This idea has survived until the late 1990s and 2000s when another wave of international standards of corporate conduct-now called corporate social responsibility (CSR)-emerged.

In lieu of an abstract, here a short extract from the introduction: ... when using the term “critical” in CES (Critical Entrepreneurship Studies), we have in mind research which deliber- ately goes against the grain of functionalism and its deterministic view of human nature, reality and research, with the aim of opening up space to critique the canon of accepted knowledge and to create the conditions for rearticulating entrepreneurship in light of issues pertaining to freedom, emancipation or societal production. We seek to challenge and destabilise existing knowledge to open up new and different understandings that may change society for the bet- ter; we seek to critique in order to create. In this way, CES can be thought of as a double move- ment which critically engages with the mainstream of entrepreneurship only in order to break it open so that novel possibilities, be they practical or conceptual, can take flight. As we write this text, research that challenges the mainstream of entrepreneurship research clearly outnumbers studies which set out to rearticulate entrepreneurship as a society-creating force whose broader effects have emancipatory purchase, not merely economic utility. To carve out the unique poten- tial of CES, we would like to sketch out, if only tangentially, different strands and research tradi- tions which bear relevance for a critical understanding of entrepreneurship.

This article suggests that various dimensions of the larger project of global governance are incoherent and illegitimate. Three dimensions of global governance - the provision of global public goods; processes of transnational regulation; and efforts to spread universal human rights - are examined and found to be deficient in terms of the ability of affected populations to participate in decisions over value trade-offs. Citizens' rights to participation in democratic processes often have been diminished as the locus of political decision making has shifted: on the one hand, to institutions beyond the territorial borders of the nation state; on the other, away from political institutions and towards "global civil society," which seems oddly intolerant of diversity. But if global governance is anti-pluralist and disenfranchising, it risks devolving into an imperial project. Hence, the paper concludes with a plea for a return to international politics as a control on the threat of empire.

Digital health interventions (DHIs) have the potential to help the growing number of chronic disease patients better manage their everyday lives. However, guidelines for the systematic development of DHIs are still scarce. The current work has, therefore, the objective to propose a framework for the design and evaluation of DHIs (DEDHI). The DEDHI framework is meant to support both researchers and practitioners alike from early conceptual DHI models to large-scale implementations of DHIs in the healthcare market.