Search results for "POLITICAL ECONOMY"
showing 10 items of 637 documents
How perceptions of immigrants trigger feelings of economic and cultural threats in two welfare states
2017
Better understanding of attitudes toward immigration is crucial to avoid misperception of immigration in the public debate. Through two identical online survey experiments applying morphed faces of non-Western immigrants and textual vignettes, the authors manipulate complexion, education, family background, and gender in Denmark and Germany. For women, an additional split in which half of the women wore a headscarf is performed. In both countries, highly skilled immigrants are preferred to low-skilled immigrants. Danes are more skeptical toward non-Western immigration than Germans. Essentially, less educated Danes are very critical of accepting non-Western immigrants in their country. It i…
The European Round Table of Industrialists and the restructuring of European higher education
2014
The restructuring of European higher education (EHE) since the 1980s is a widely studied subject. However, this paper argues that previous studies have paid insufficient attention to the role of transnational policy-making groups in this complex and multilevel process. This argument is supported by focusing on how the European Round Table of Industrialists (ERT) has participated in this restructuring since the mid-1980s. This paper's focus is especially in two ERT documents that were published in the 1980s. The main finding is that the current restructuring of EHE reflects interests of the ERT that represents the emerging transnational capitalist class (TCC) at European level.
Nationalisation, Localisation and Globalisation in Finnish Higher Education
2004
This article analyses and discusses the interplay between the social processes of nationalisation, localisation and globalisation in a single European nation state. The view of nationalisation put forward draws on a national case study based on historical and sociological research findings. The second part of the article presents a case study of the nature of globalisation and localisation in an average Finnish university. The article shows that nationalisation of Finnish higher education has created a cultural understanding of higher education institutions important for competition with other nations. As for localisation, on the one hand higher education institutions support their local co…
Despidos laborales. Fracturas sociales e identitarias
2008
The thousands of collective dismissals which have opened the beginning of the century in Spain do not just mean nearly two hundred thousand jobs (lots of them with a very long validity) and the same amount of broken life projects, but also ways of social reproduction, broken identities, institutions and social guarantees that crumble. Amazingly, these social upheavals often become eclipsed by discourses that appeal to economic considerations, the requirements of modernization or the requests of the logic of globalization. At this article, the consequences of the break of the social link intertwined along the second half of the twentieth century are investigated. For that, we have been rebui…
After the fall of the soviet union: the changing status of local governments in the republic of latvia
1999
When the Republic of Latvia gained its independence from the Soviet Union in 1991, one of Latvia's first priorities was to rebuild its system of local government. This article describes many of the problems local governments in Latvia faced after 50 years of communist rule. The article also discusses the new Latvian laws which changed the structure of local government in that country. Also discussed are Latvian central government institutions which impacted on local governments in general and local government finances in particular. The unique status of the Capitol City of Riga, Latvia's largest municipality is also reviewed in detail.
Can Culture Explain Culture?
2012
This article argues that cultural explanations can help explain local policy choices. Drawing on the New Political Culture theory, the article combines three models of cultural change to explain the level of spending on cultural policies in Norwegian municipalities. In total, 430 municipalities are studied, and the results show that cultural change variables improve the understanding of local policy choices. The finding here indicates that some elements of the New Political Culture, like women’s participation, seem to be able to travel without losing their content. However, to fully be able to comprehend the level of cultural change in the Nordic context, better measures are needed.
A Shift Towards Academic Capitalism in Finland
2013
Academic capitalism is currently a widely studied topic amongst higher education scholars, especially in the United States. This paper demonstrates that the theory of academic capitalism also provides a fruitful perspective for analysing the restructuring of Finnish higher education since the 1990s, although with reservations. It will be argued that many reforms in Finnish universities since the 1990s, and especially in the early 2000s, have integrated Finnish universities more tightly with the new knowledge-based economy. As some recent empirical studies indicate, activities and practices related to academic capitalism remain, however, unevenly distributed among different disciplines, and …
The State of the Unions
2021
What defines an economic region and distinguishes it from other spatial concepts? This fundamental question is addressed based on the dimensions of space, borders, action and time. An overview of the landscape of African Regional Economic Communities (RECs) follows. RECs are briefly portrayed, and the bewildering multitude of RECs is demystified to create a better understanding of the pattern of economic integration in Africa. The exercise is guided by a matrix of general-purpose versus functional/sectoral as well as effectual versus ineffectual/dormant economic unions. This analysis forms the basis for a critical discussion of the African Union’s practice of only granting official recognit…
Economic globalization and voter turnout in established democracies
2010
This paper asks whether international economic integration negatively affects electoral turnout. The theoretical model builds on the premise that economic integration constrains the ability of national governments to shape outcomes. Citizens are conscious of such constraints and take them into account when considering the costs and benefits of casting a vote in national elections. The result is a lower inclination to vote under conditions of high economic integration. Consequently, aggregate turnout is lower the more internationally integrated a national economy is. Analysis of aggregate data for parliamentary elections in 23 OECD democracies over the period 1965–2006 robustly supports this…
Migrants’ economic integration : problematising economic citizenship
2021
Labour market policies to include migrants in their host societies through strategic integration activities usually relate host country belonging to labour market success, commodifying citizenship. Labour market success, however, is not “belonging;” raising the question of whether “economic citizenship” is a misnomer. National citizenships embed territorial, social and ethnic hierarchies in unequal ways. Migrants at the moment of their mobility are outside these national solidarities, and thus are commodified, with their rights depending on their labour market value. Access to national citizenship rights is an important structuring element in segmenting globalizing labour markets. peerRevie…