Author: Martin LengwilerPublisher:
ISBN:
Category :
Languages : en
Pages :
Book Description
Rezension Von Matthieu Leimgruber: Solidarity Without the State? Business and the Shaping of the Swiss Welfare State, 1890-2000
Author: Martin LengwilerThe European Social Model under Pressure
Author: Romana CarejaPublisher: Springer
ISBN: 3658270438
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 633
Book Description
The European Social Model is at a crossroad. Although from the 1990s onwards, the threat of an imminent crisis shaped much of the rhetoric surrounding the future of the welfare state, disagreement within the academic community remains. What is however increasingly clear is that with the global financial crisis and the Euro crisis that followed it, the challenges the European Social Model faces have become more acute and demand action. This volume launches a multifaceted inquiry into these challenges. Each contribution, written by renowned scholars in their fields, represents an in-depth exploration of issues that cut to the core of current political, economic and social processes. They are an invitation to the seasoned scholars as well as to the beginning students of social sciences, public administration or journalism to engage with, by now, a large body of scholarship, to accompany the authors in their endeavours to seek an explanation to burning questions and start their own inquiries.
The Politics of Welfare State Reform in Continental Europe
Author: Silja HäusermannPublisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 1139485903
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 305
Book Description
This book challenges existing theories of welfare state change by analyzing pension reforms in France, Germany, and Switzerland between 1970 and 2004. It explains why all three countries were able to adopt far-reaching reforms, adapting their pension regimes to both financial austerity and new social risks. In a radical departure from the neo-institutionalist emphasis on policy stability, the book argues that socio-structural change has led to a multidimensional pension reform agenda. A variety of cross-cutting lines of political conflict, emerging from the transition to a post-industrial economy, allowed governments to engage in strategies of political exchange and coalition-building, fostering broad cross-class coalitions in support of major reform packages. Methodologically, the book proposes a novel strategy to analyze lines of conflict, configurations of political actors, and coalitional dynamics over time. This strategy combines quantitative analyses of actor configurations based on coded policy positions with in-depth case studies.
The Appeal of Insurance
Author: Geoffrey Wilson ClarkPublisher: University of Toronto Press
ISBN: 1442640650
Category : Business & Economics
Languages : en
Pages : 265
Book Description
'The Appeal of Insurance is an excellent collection that reflects a growing interest in insurance research within the social sciences. Clearly written and accessible to a variety of audiences, this is a volume of world-class scholarship.'-Luis Lobo-Guerrero, School of Politics, International Relations, and Philosophy, Keele University In the marketing of its products, the insurance industry has always depended on a considerable dose of moral exhortation and enlightened appeal. The Appeal of Insurance traces the ways in which insurance over the past three centuries, perhaps more than any other business, has grown in concert with a clientele largely of its own making. Faced with a public that has preferred to avoid confronting the certainty of fatality or the probabilities of catastrophe, insurance promoters have had to create a demand for their products, first, by persuading the public to see the world as ruled less by divine judgments and more by statistical patterns, and second, by proclaiming a moral imperative of hedging against death and disaster by the prudential recourse to insurance. The essays presented here examine the history of insurance as a process of negotiation between the embedded social, legal, and cultural norms out of which the practice of insurance grew, and the new arrangements and sensibilities that insurance itself helped bring into being. Today, insurance is a global economic colossus and a fixture in the developed countries of the world. But neither the financial clout of the insurance industry nor its ubiquity conveys the full measure of its social and political influence. The insurance industry has in fact become a primary agent of discipline and control over public and private behaviours by imposing upon them the criterion of insurability. By tracing the boundaries of acceptable (and compensated) from unacceptable (and uncompensated) risk, insurers directly or indirectly govern people, products, and markets, and by this process become one of the most powerful and pervasive agents of social and economic control. Geoffrey Clark is a professor in the Department of History at the State University of New York at Potsdam. Gregory Anderson is the former Associate Head of the Business School at the University of Salford. Christian Thomann is a senior fellow at the Centre for Risk and Insurance at Leibniz University, Hanover. J.-Matthias Graf Von Der Schulenburg is the Director of the Centre for Risk and Insurance at Leibniz University, Hanover.
Histories of Productivity
Author: Peter-Paul BanzigerPublisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1315522764
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 210
Book Description
Global issues such as climate change and the aftermath of the 2008 financial crisis have spurred interest in thinking about the history of the modern economy that goes beyond disciplinary economic history. This book contributes to the cultural history of capitalism and its different regimes of productivity by pursuing the perspective of body history and by providing a global scope. Throughout modernity, the body served as a fundamental, albeit essentially changing, linchpin for both the organization of economic practices and for intellectual reflections on the economy. In particular, it was the pivotal interface to render notions of economic productivity intelligible. The book explores this central thesis in a range of case studies, drawing on source material from West Africa, Europe, Mexico, and the US. Framed by a theoretically informed introduction, which also provides a conceptual history of notions of productivity, and by an afterword that brings the approaches explored in this volume into dialogue with scholarship inspired by Marx and Foucault, the individual chapters tackle the concept of productivity from a wide array of angles, each illuminating the promises and problems of a cultural take on the history of economic productivity.
Commodity Trading, Globalization and the Colonial World
Author: Christof DejungPublisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1317296192
Category : Business & Economics
Languages : en
Pages : 378
Book Description
Commodity Trading, Globalization and the Colonial World: Spinning the Web of the Global Market provides a new perspective on economic globalization in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Instead of understanding the emergence of global markets as a mere result of supply and demand or as the effect of imperial politics, this book focuses on a global trading firm as an exemplary case of the actors responsible for conducting economic transactions in a multicultural business world. The study focuses on the Swiss merchant house Volkart Bros., which was one of the most important trading houses in British India after the late nineteenth century and became one of the biggest cotton and coffee traders in the world after decolonization. The book examines the following questions: How could European merchants establish business contacts with members of the mercantile elite from India, China or Latin America? What role did a shared mercantile culture play for establishing relations of trust? How did global business change with the construction of telegraph lines and railways and the development of economic institutions such as merchant banks and commodity exchanges? And what was the connection between the business interests of transnationally operating capitalists and the territorial aspirations of national and imperial governments? Based on a five-year-long research endeavor and the examination of 24 public and private archives in seven countries and on three continents, Commodity Trading, Globalization and the Colonial World: Spinning the Web of the Global Market goes well beyond a mere company history as it highlights the relationship between multinationally operating firms and colonial governments, and the role of business culture in establishing notions of trust, both within the firm and between economic actors in different parts of the world. It thus provides a cutting-edge history of globalization from a micro-perspective. Following an actor-theoretical perspective, the book maintains that the global market that came into being in the nineteenth century can be perceived as the consequence of the interaction of various actors. Merchants, peasants, colonial bureaucrats and industrialists were all involved in spinning the individual threads of this commercial web. By connecting established approaches from business history with recent scholarship in the fields of global and colonial history, Commodity Trading, Globalization and the Colonial World: Spinning the Web of the Global Market offers a new perspective on the emergence of global enterprise and provides an important addition to the history of imperialism and economic globalization.
Solidarity Without the State?
Author: Matthieu LeimgruberPublisher:
ISBN: 9780511388101
Category : Business & Economics
Languages : en
Pages : 332
Book Description
The Politics of Welfare State Reform in Continental Europe
Author: Silja HäusermannPublisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 0521192722
Category : Business & Economics
Languages : en
Pages : 305
Book Description
This book demonstrates that political exchange and coalition building have become the key ingredients for continental European pension reform.
Interactive Governance
Author: Jacob TorfingPublisher: Oxford University Press on Demand
ISBN: 0199596751
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 284
Book Description
It is, however, often used to mean a variety of different things.
Globalizing Social Rights
Author: S. KottPublisher: Springer
ISBN: 1137291966
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 349
Book Description
Based on the case of the ILO, both as an actor and driver of international social policy, this collection explores the internationalization process of social rights, in a number of national and international contexts. This collection brings together a variety of new scholarship by a group of highly qualified and internationally renowned scholars.