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191. Flexible Markets, Stable Societies?

Author:
Wolfgang Streeck
Publication Date:
06-2008
Content Type:
Working Paper
Institution:
Max Planck Institute for the Study of Societies
Abstract:
The dissolution of the standard employment relationship since the 1970s has been paralleled by a destabilization of family relations. The paper, which is a slightly revised version of a plenary lecture at the 2008 Meeting of the German Sociological Association, discusses possible connections between the rise of more flexible labor market and family structures, and explores how they might tie in with the declining birth rate. The co-evolution of labor markets and family relations can be explained by both the attractions and the constraints of free markets. The current shift toward a new social policy aimed at increasing fertility is presented as an example of how expanding market relations and the uncertainty to which they give rise in personal life cause demands for state intervention. The logic seems remarkably similar to that of the current banking crisis, where the liberation of financial markets from traditional constraints and the progressive commodification of money have ultimately issued in irresistible pressures on the state to step in and restore the social commons of stable expectations and mutual confidence. In both cases, and perhaps generally, capitalism seems to imply a need for a public power capable of creating substitutes for social relations invaded by market relations and as a consequence losing their capacity to perform some of their previous functions.
Topic:
Government, Markets, Political Economy, and Political Theory
Political Geography:
Germany

192. Der kollektive "Buddenbrooks-Effekt"

Author:
Christoph Deutschmann
Publication Date:
05-2008
Content Type:
Working Paper
Institution:
Max Planck Institute for the Study of Societies
Abstract:
The paper views the current financial crisis in light of long-term structural socioeconomic changes in advanced industrial societies. In Western Europe, the United States and Japan, the period of economic prosperity after the Second World War led to a remarkable accumulation of wealth among the middle class that had surprisingly little effect on the substantial fortunes of the wealthiest upper class. This affluence gave rise to pension and investment funds emerging as a new type of collective actor in global financial markets, while the economy was marked by increasing instability, declining growth rates and financial crises. The paper tries to clarify the interconnections between these phenomena using the framework of a multilevel analysis that culminates in a model I call the “collective Buddenbrooks effect” (“Buddenbrooks” being a family saga by Thomas Mann): Structural upward social mobility will lead to an increasing imbalance in capital markets, since the volume of financial assets looking for profitable investment will rise as the social reservoir of solvent debtors and promising investment opportunities decline. Advanced industrial economies are thus characterized by a bias towards capital export and excessive financial liquidity, with the well-known consequences of low economic growth rates and the danger of speculative bubbles on global capital markets. The middle class that originally benefitted from postwar prosperity is negatively affected, too. I argue that the current crisis cannot be understood sufficiently without taking this structural socioeconomic background into account.
Topic:
Economics, International Political Economy, International Trade and Finance, Political Economy, and Political Theory
Political Geography:
United States, Japan, and Europe

193. Economic Sociology and Political Economy: A Programmatic Perspective

Author:
Jens Beckert and Wolfgang Streeck
Publication Date:
04-2008
Content Type:
Working Paper
Institution:
Max Planck Institute for the Study of Societies
Abstract:
The paper presents some of the ideas underlying the current research program of the Max Planck Institute for the Study of Societies (MPIfG). It begins with a discussion of how the institute's programmatic orientation has evolved since it was founded in 1984. Programmatic change over the years involved (1) recognition of a secular decline in the capacity of the nation-state to organize and guarantee social order, and of the growing significance of self-regulating, “free” national and international markets for social life; (2) increased attention to issues of meaning and to “culture” and cultural symbolism, as well as to normative questions; (3) a gradual shift in emphasis from policy to politics; and (4) more explicit recognition of history and of the historicity of the questions posed and the observations analyzed in social science. The second part of the paper argues that Gesellschaftsforschung today is most appropriately conceived as the study of the economy and society of contemporary capitalism. It is suggested that the most promising approach is close cooperation between the scholarly traditions of political economy and economic sociology, with the former standing to benefit from a more explicit micro-foundation in a sociological theory of action and the latter from more systematic consideration of politics and the state. Third, the paper shows how the approach that has evolved at the MPIfG differs from mainstream economic sociology, from the so-called new institutional economics, and from behavioral economics. The paper concludes by enumerating four subject areas that are likely to be of particular importance for research at the MPIfG: (1) the nature of rational-economic action, (2) the constitution of markets, (3) the emergence and change of institutions, and (4) the relationship between capitalism and democracy.
Topic:
Economics, International Political Economy, Political Economy, and Political Theory

194. Industrial Relations Today: Reining in Flexibility

Author:
Wolfgang Streeck
Publication Date:
03-2008
Content Type:
Working Paper
Institution:
Max Planck Institute for the Study of Societies
Abstract:
The paper was presented as a keynote lecture at the 10th anniversary of the Amsterdam Institute for Advanced Labour Studies (AIAS) in April 2008. It surveys the trajectory of scholarly work on labor after 1945, from its initial emphasis on rights of industrial and social citizenship to its present preoccupation with “flexibility” and “flexicurity”. It recalls the dissolution of the “Fordist” compromise in the 1970s and the subsequent gradual expansion of markets as the dominant mechanism for the allocation of life chances and the governance of society. Marketization encountered surprisingly little resistance, in real life as in the evolving conceptual apparatus of scholarly work. Liberalization proceeded and continues to proceed regardless of the social dislocations it causes, on a scale wholly unimaginable and indeed unacceptable under the postwar settlement. The paper ends with speculation on what if at all might be the forces today that could trigger a Polanyian counter-movement to the progress of capitalist social and economic relations. In particular it discusses whether demographic change, in terms of both a declining birth rate and increasing life expectancy, might bring about a new wave of market-containing social policy.
Topic:
International Political Economy, International Trade and Finance, Markets, Political Economy, and Political Theory

195. Women in the European Parliament: effects of the voting system, strategies and political resources. The case of the French delegation.

Author:
Willy Beauvallet and Sébastien Michon
Publication Date:
10-2008
Content Type:
Working Paper
Institution:
Centre for European Political Sociology
Abstract:
This article aims to provide elements to explain the feminisation of French MEPs. While the voting system should be taken into account, its effects can only be understood in relation with two elements: on the one hand, the position of the European Parliament in the French political field; on the other, the specific configuration of social and political struggles of the public space in 1990s France. Within this framework, gender constitutes a political resource that is more valuable in the European Parliament than in the national parliament; as a result, women who are less politically professionalised are promoted. They turn towards forms of parliamentary “goodwill” and strategies of over-involvement in European political roles. The relative specificity of the postures they adopt within the institution does not have to do with a hypothetical “feminine nature”, but with a set of sociopolitical processes.
Topic:
Democratization, Gender Issues, Political Economy, and Political Theory
Political Geography:
Europe and France

196. Cultural policy in France - Genesis of a public policy category

Author:
Vincent Dubois
Publication Date:
10-2008
Content Type:
Working Paper
Institution:
Centre for European Political Sociology
Abstract:
This paper is a partial translation of a book published in French, which puts forward a socio-historical analysis of the relationships between cultural and political/bureaucratic field. This analysis sheds light on the conditions of the emergence, shaping and institutionalisation of a State policy regarding culture in France, from the late 19th to the 20th century. In this perspective, what is now called “cultural policy” is considered as the product of the history of power struggles, wherein the main stakes are the legitimate definition of culture and the definition of the legitimate functions of the State. The historical comparison reveals that these power struggles have long hindered the shaping of a “cultural policy”, which only took place starting in the early 1960s. It also shows that the persistence of these issues led to an “institutionalisation of vagueness” of a policy whose object could still not be precisely defined by the late 20th century. This research thus contributes to the history and sociology of the cultural field, as well as of the State and State intervention. By analysing the conditions and limits of a State definition of culture, it also sheds light on the modes of expression of the State's symbolic violence. The notion of category of public intervention developed used in the context of this research is embedded in the elaboration of a broader framework of analysis, aiming to account for socio-historical processes of institutionalisation of groups, relational structures, representations and constitutive normative frameworks of what is called a policy.
Topic:
Conflict Prevention, Government, Political Economy, and Political Theory
Political Geography:
France

197. The ambivalent politicisation of European communication

Author:
Jean-Michel UTARD
Publication Date:
10-2008
Content Type:
Working Paper
Institution:
Centre for European Political Sociology
Abstract:
This article analyses the political stakes of the EU's communication policy. The authors study the frictions between European institutions, mainly the Commission and Parliament, after the publication of the White Paper on a European Communication Policy, replacing them in the context of the representations, routines, and compromises that have historically structured the interinstitutional relationships about communication. This historical perspective enables them to show the long lasting and persistent attention of the European actors to the promotion of Europe, as well as the strength of logics of compromise on the politicisation of European communication.
Topic:
Political Economy, Politics, and Political Theory
Political Geography:
Europe

198. States and Rules, Norms and Interests

Author:
Ian Hurd
Publication Date:
11-2008
Content Type:
Working Paper
Institution:
Centre for International Peace and Security Studies
Abstract:
The conventional separation in IR theory between instrumental behavior and legitimated norms as explanations for state action has discouraged the study of phenomena that include both. As a result important practices including hypocrisy, norm violation, and the strategic reinterpretation of rules and laws are under-examined. The source of the problem is the idea of 'internalization' of external rules and norms, which has come to define the distinction between rationalism and constructivism in IR, and between the logics of appropriateness and of consequences. I argue that internalization is problematic for empirical research in IR because it eliminates the possibility of strategic thinking by states in relation to international norms and rules. It leaves no room for instrumentalism around norms and so cannot account for norm violation, the strategic manipulation of norms, and the productive process of norm innovation. This is a problem equally for rationalism and constructivism. I argue for an alternative model that focuses on the practice of invoking international norms and rules and show that this approach allows new insight into the agent-structure problem, the relation between states and rules in world politics, and the relation between rationalism and constructivism.
Topic:
International Relations, International Political Economy, Sovereignty, and Political Theory

199. Solidarism or Pluralism? Political Ideas of the American Union and the European Union

Author:
Robert Jackson
Publication Date:
02-2008
Content Type:
Working Paper
Institution:
Centre for International Peace and Security Studies
Abstract:
Writing in the late 18th century Edmund Burke characterized the British East India Company as "a state disguised as a merchant." What, in these terms, is the United States? Is it an empire disguised as a republic dis guised as a democracy? What is Canada? Is it an international system disguised as a confederation disguised as a federation? What, finally, is the European Union? It is somewhat ambiguous. But I shall argue that it is an international organization thinly disguised as a political community.
Topic:
International Relations, International Organization, and Political Theory
Political Geography:
United States, America, and Europe

200. Raymond Aron and the morality of realism

Author:
MURIELLE COZETTE
Publication Date:
12-2008
Content Type:
Working Paper
Institution:
Australian National University Department of International Relations
Abstract:
The realism school of thought in international relations is often accused of presenting politics as an autonomous sphere which does or should exclude ethical considerations, and of providing a tragic vision of politics which precludes any belief in progress. These accusations are particularly misplaced when applied to Raymond Aron, a leading classical realist whose insights are rarely investigated in the discipline. The article challenges the perception of Aron as a 'mainstream' classical realist and emphasises the distinctiveness of his formulation of realism by focusing on his views on ethics, politics and progress. It demonstrates that Aron promotes a 'morality of wisdom' which gives a central place to the defence of values alongside considerations of power. He also provides a definition of survival which stresses the importance of shared values for the existence of political communities, and consequently the need to uphold them even though ethical perfection cannot be achieved in the political sphere. Aron's ideas are finally underpinned by Kantian elements. Advocating not so much faith in a determined future, but rather hope sustained by reason, his realism provides a middle ground between moralism and cynicism. Aron therefore provides a very distinctive European version of realism which demonstrates the richness of realist arguments upon morality, politics and progress.
Topic:
International Relations, Government, International Political Economy, Politics, and Political Theory