Lucio Baccaro/Konstantinos Papadakis (International Institute for Labour Studies, Switzerland)
Secondary Associations or Social Movements?
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The research on deliberative democracy is increasingly moving from the normative to the empirical plane, by trying to understand in what conditions deliberation is practically possible and how it can increase both the efficiency and equity of collective solutions.
Deliberation in practice is often depicted as a particular decision-making process in which social groups participate in the definition and resolution of public policy problems together with public bureaucracies.We call this approach the "secondary associations" view of deliberative politics.All potentially affected groups have, in theory, equal opportunity to get involved in the process and equal right to propose topics, formulate solutions, or critically discuss taken-for-granted approaches.This is the "democratic" aspect of applied deliberative democracy.The "deliberative" part is in the particular mechanism of coordination adopted by the parties.Collective solutions are reached by exchanging arguments based on principles or appeals to generalizable interests.The proposals that gain acceptance from all parties carry the day.This particular policy-making process is credited with both efficiency and equity advantages over alternative decision-making processes.As the argument goes, involvement of citizens and groups with detailed knowledge of problems and potential solutions generates more efficient solutions than top-down approaches.At the same time, participation of all affected groups guarantees that no interest worthy of protection is unduly disregarded.
Based on a review of the existing empirical literature on deliberative politics and on original research on South Africa, this paper critiques the secondary associations view.The kind of communication taking place in deliberative fora appears far from unconstrained.In fact, progress is made in these fora only to the extent that affected groups embrace or grow to accept a particular definition of the problem in question (e.g. unemployment or health risk).Eminently political, and therefore contested, problems are turned into technical problems requiring efficient solutions.Groups subscribing to systemically alternative views often self-select themselves out of the process.Also, there is very little evidence that the solutions reached in deliberative fora are systematically more informationally-efficient than those arrived at through alternative mechanisms (e.g. expert discussion).There is, however, evidence that the deliberative process increases the legitimacy of collective decisions adopted.This could be a worrisome indication of group cooption.Finally, the kind of processes taking place in deliberative fora are much closer to processes of integrative bargaining than to pure deliberation.This is, however, not necessarily at odds with normative literature on deliberation, which in some cases relaxes the strict consensus requirement.
In light of these findings, the paper proposes an alternative view of the role of groups in deliberative politics - a view that builds on Habermasian ideas of the relationship between civil society organizations and administrative power as developed by Habermas himself and other critical deliberative democrats like Dryzek.According to this view, the proper role of groups in deliberative politics is not necessarily that of participating in processes of public policy formation, nor that of seeking discursive accommodation of their particular views and positions with that of other groups.Social groups can at least as effectively serve the cause of deliberative democracy by remaining outside of the official circles of power and seeking to influence them indirectly.Groups do not seek to persuade each other, but seek to influence public opinion by forcefully asserting the issues, values, and interpretations that they believe should be binding for everybody.This view of deliberative politics is quite different from the gentlemen's club sometime featuring in normative deliberative democratic theories.The only normative requirement left is that of authenticity.Also, group action goes well beyond discourse in this alternative view and includes all other manifestations of authentic commitment and communication (e.g., demonstrations, mobilizations, hunger strikes etc.).This social movement-based view of deliberative politics acknowledges that differences are often irreconcilable and that attempts at resolving them discursively are either utopian or ideological.The best groups can do in these circumstances is to devise impartial procedures for adjudication.
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Michael R Baird (Dalhousie University, Canada)
E-mail: bairdm@mgmt.dal.ca
Does Ideology Matter?
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Economic theory suggests that institutions play a pivotal role in the economic growth and economic performance of a nation (North 1990). North (1981) suggests that a theory of institutions has three components: a theory of the state; a theory of property rights; and a theory of ideology. Several papers in economic growth theory have demonstrated the association between economic growth and performance and proxies for the state variable and proxies for the property rights variable (Barro 1991, Mankiw, Romer, and Weil 1993 and others). However no one has tested a proxy for a theory of ideology. The purpose of this paper is to empirically test the hypothesis that ideology is related to economic growth and economic performance. In this paper I argue that a nation's concept of who is a citizen is an adequate proxy for a nation's ideology. Using this proxy for ideology as a dummy variable, the paper runs a cross country economic growth regressions in the manner of Barro (1991) to test the association of ideology as represented by citizenship with economic growth and economic performance (capital accumulation).
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Grant Blank (American University, USA)
E-mail: grant.blank@acm.org
Toward a Sociological Theory of Choice
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The best-known theory of choice is neo-classical economics and it places special emphasis on prices. This paper develops an alternative, a sociological theory of choice. This theory is grounded in core issues in sociology: the study of status and hierarchy. Using restaurant reviews as a case study the paper shows how people use the hierarchies created by published reviews to help them make choices. The hierarchies supply audiences with information when price information is unavailable or uninformative. Price information is weakest for many cultural products and this is exactly where reviews and the sociology of choice are most important.
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Reinoud Bosch (European University Institute, Italy)
E-mail: rc.bosch@hccnet.nl
An Operational Socio-Economic Paradigm
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In this paper I present an operational socio-economic paradigm, which is to some extent consistent with and supplementary to the paradigm recently proposed by Amitai Etzioni in the Socio-Economic Review. It consists of a systematic method for the interpretation of theories and empirical findings, with a personal, action, and institutional level of analysis; the concept of power as a central analytical and causal concept; and a method for the interpretation of values, extending Shalom Schwartz's study of personal values to the action and institutional levels. An example of applying the paradigm is provided from the field of human resource management.
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Robert Boyer (CEPREMAP-ENS, France)
E-mail: robert.boyer@cepremap.cnrs.fr
The Institutional Complementarity: Concepts, Origins, Methods and Results for German
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One of the most challenging research agenda is probably the search for the factors explaining institutional change. Various research programs have converged towards a common hypothesis: both the inertia observed and the brusque shift from one configuration to another could be explained by the fact that different institutions do co-exist due to Institutional Complementarity (IC). This is the case for the research in terms of Comparative Institutional Analysis (CIA), Variety Of Capitalism (VOC) and Régulation Theory (RT). The purpose of the TWO sessions is precisely to investigate the current transformations of the German and the Japanese economies and examine whether the concept of IC is precise and powerful enough to enlighten the related transformations.
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Sanjoy Chakravorty (Temple University, USA)
E-mail: sanjoy@temple.edu
Toward a Social Theory of Income Distribution
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Knowledge and action are the two basic elements of human existence. Income generation has to be understood from the firmament of our understanding of how knowledge is acquired and how knowledge informs action. The strength of mainstream economic theory comes from its simple principles on knowledge and action: perfect information (or knowledge), perfect rationality in evaluating information, and self-interested maximization of utility. Unfortunately, these assumptions are not only simple but are wrong in that they fundamentally misunderstand the bases of knowledge and action. Instead, I propose new principles of income distribution analysis by assuming that knowledge and action are embedded in time and space. Four postulates are important: (1) Individual knowledge and action rules are informed and constrained by cultural and institutional contexts. (2) Self-interest is often subsumed by group-interest, whereby societies are characterized by in-group cooperation and out-group competition. (3) Power asymmetries, including monopolies, oligopolies, and predators, which are characteristic of all societies, bear significantly on income generation and distribution. (4) The appropriate geographical scale for understanding income generation and distribution processes is the local scale. These postulates are the basis of a social theory of income distribution.
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Richard Deeg (Temple University, USA)
E-mail: rdeeg@temple.edu
Explorations in Institutional Complementarity in Capitalist Systems
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In the last few years there has been a rapidly intensifying discussion about the nature and meaning of institutional complementarities in national capitalist systems. The debate was precipitated by the combination of widely observed and studied changes in the core institutions comprising such systems - finance, corporate governance, industrial relations, skill formation, etc. - with the observation that change across institutions was often uneven. The level of uneven change observed does not correspond to the widely held assumption that the institutions of a capitalist system are bound to each other through tight complementarities and thus must all change together or resist change.
In this paper I explore the concept of complementarity by breaking it down into sources and types of complementarity between institutions. I believe this typology will advance our ability to understand the different kinds of complementarities that exist and thus explain better institutional change within capitalist systems. A second objective of this paper is to address the issue of how to measure complementarities, since we lack metrics to assess the binding force of complementarities. This is an issue of enormous importance that has only recently begun to receive serious attention. This will be primarily a theoretical paper, but will draw on empirical evidence from case studies of European economies to support its claims.
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Louise M. Dobish (University of Michigan, USA)
E-mail: ldobish@umich.edu
From Relationship to Self-Interest: Core Professionals' Internationalization of Market Culture through the Employment Contract
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The neoclassical-economics assumption of rational self-interest as the basis for human behavior has been challenged by many sociologists who provide alternative behavioral explanations. However, many scholars would concede that self-interest does play a role in behavior. This paper explores the conditions of the implicit employment contract under which rational self-interest prevails in the work milieu.
There is a significant body of literature on changes to the psychological contract for managers and professionals. This paper examines the transformation in the past two decades in the lived experiences and meaning generation of employees in the context of the political economy. It examines the role of firm practices, through the psychological contract, in the diffusion of neoliberal ideology.
Drawing upon the experiences of twenty core-professional employees, working in the United States for a multi-national company, I find a collectively-shared story of work. The "market" is regarded as the governing force driving firm actions and controlling employee wellbeing. There is a shift away from the rhetoric of meritocracy and performance over time to decisions based on instantaneous cost-benefit analyses of employees as the criterion for continued employment. These changes have resulted in the primacy of self-interest for employees, affecting collaboration and commitment to firms.
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John Finch (University of Aberdeen, Scotland)
E-mail: j.h.finch@abdn.ac.uk
Three Narratives About Business Markets as Networks and as Social Systems
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I propose three narratives about markets as social systems and networks, drawing on Luhmann's systems theory and Potts' adaptation of networks and graphs:
(1) Markets in the environment, beyond the 'focal' social system. The horizon is contiguous with firms' boundaries. A proportion of market (including marketing) activities can be in the environment, including in other systems (firms). The key market-related activities in the system involve imposing sense on environmental 'signals,' contributing to the on-going unity of the system.
(2) Markets are the system with firms in the environment. Market activities are highly complementary with each other and dis-similar with other activities undertaken in other systems (firms). 'Complementarity' groups together as constituent elements the market activities of different firms. These activities regularise communications within the system, making sense of environmental data, and emitting data to the environment, and so preserving the identity of markets as on-going systems.
(3) Systems include all firms whose activities are joined in virtue of their capabilities being perceived as highly complementary for some overall activity, but at the same time being dis-similar. Corporate boundaries mark element boundaries rather than system horizons. The focal aspect is instead on unity through communication.
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Gancho Ganchev (New Bulgarian University, Bulgaria)
E-mail: gtganch@yahoo.com
The Economic Theory and Path Dependence in Post-Communist Countries
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No societal change is possible without prior theoretical explanation and interpretation of intended transformations. So the change of theory accompanies any systematic transformation regardless of the depth of the crisis that triggers the transformations in the respective society. The transition from command to market economy obviously requires radical transformation of the initial ideology. Since market economies can be interpreted in different theoretical settings, various economic models can be viewed as prototypes of the emerging economic system. The question is how reasonable could be the initial choice of theory and whether the primary selection can produce a variant of path dependence, i.e. impossibility to replace the initial theoretical interpretation even if the latter is no more a satisfactory explanation of reality. The example of transition in Bulgaria, and more precisely the history of introduction and implementation of currency board arrangement in this country, seems to support the idea of path dependence, where a path dependent theoretical interpretation plays an important role in explaining country's development.
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Philip Gorski (Yale University, USA)
E-mail: philip.gorski@yale.edu
The Protestant Reformation and Economic Hegemony in Early Modern Europe
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In a general sense my argument is similar to Weber's: like him, I see causal links between the Protestant Reformation and economic dynamism. In the particulars, however, my argument is quite different from his, and in at least two ways. Whereas Weber was interested in explaining "the genesis of modern capitalism" and "the rise of the West" tout court, I focus on a much narrower (if by no means narrow) question: the shift of economic hegemony from Southern to Northern Europe and, more specifically, the rise of Amsterdam and London to the status of "core city." Thus, my question is quite different than Weber's. So, too, is my answer. For Weber, the key link between Protestantism and dynamism lay in religious ideas and institutions (the Protestant Ethic of "innerworldly asceticism", and communal systems of church discipline). By contrast, I focus primarily on economic resources and incentives and, more specifically, on factors of production (land, labor and capital), on one hand, and incentives for investment and innovation, on the other. Or, to put it somewhat differently, while Weber emphasizes internal structures (e.g., motivations and personality), I emphasize external ones (e.g., resources and institutions).
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Philip Jones (University of Bath, USA)
E-mail: P.R.Jones@bath.ac.uk
Instrumental Rationality or Expressive Approval? The Intrinsic Value of Public Choice
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When individuals express choice for services supplied via the public sector, the implicit assumption is that choice registered at the ballot box is comparable with choice revealed in markets. A behavioral analysis questions this assumption. If individual choice was premised on instrumental evaluation of outcomes, there would be no incentive to vote (as one vote has very little chance of changing an electoral outcome). Analysis of choice registered in the 2001 UK General Election is consistent with the proposition that voters self-signal by expressing approval for policies deemed of intrinsic value. As consumer choice for services supplied via the public sector differs systematically from choice revealed in markets, there are implications for analysis of collective choice. Adopted policies, difficult to 'rationalise' in terms of instrumental evaluation of outcomes, can be explained in terms of perceptions of the intrinsic value of policy process. Choice registered in collective decision-making processes can be predicted with reference to the 'price' of expressive approval. The public choice critique that political markets 'fail' is called in question. 'Consumer choice' differs systematically in different forums.
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Vincent-Antonin Lépinay (Columbia University, USA)
Entangled financial company : organic setting against competition
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Summary: This paper introduces the notion of organicity ; drawing on a field work in Finance and engaging with Durkheim's description of markets, it seeks to make sense of the story of a French investment bank at the end of the 90s. It shows a surprising mode of resistance against commodification on the financial market.
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Rick Wicks (Göteborg University, Sweden)
E-mail: Rick.Wicks@economics.gu.se
The Unacknowledged Abstraction from Social Goods
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We get utility from "social goods" produced by non-market-oriented (and non-governmental) "communities": groups with which we identify for reasons of kinship, location, or belief. Besides caring behavior such as love and friendship, social goods include such things as: a sense of security and identity; belonging, status, and role; meaning and purpose; protection and freedom; plus fundamental values and social norms such as tolerance and common courtesy. Social goods are non-marketable not because of non-excludability and resulting property-rights problems, but simply because they disappear - i.e., their character and value are changed unrecognizably - if one attempts to market them. Yet social goods may be private goods. Even when public goods, they are generally not government- (or club-) providable. In either case they may be affected by markets, and apparently by the study of markets; i.e., they are not separable from markets (or from economics). The lack of markets for social goods thus constitutes a unique and unacknowledged violation of the assumptions of universal markets or complete contracting. Social goods are not necessarily social capital, and seem not to have been formally recognized elsewhere in economic theory. Various implications of this "oversight" are briefly explored.
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Erik Olin Wright (University of Wisconsin-Madison, USA)
E-mail: wright@ssc.wisc.edu
Taking Seriously the Social in Socialism
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Socialism, in both its revolutionary and reformist traditions, has generally been viewed as a state-centered project of socio-economic transformation. This is not simply because the state was seen as a pivotal locus of power for overcoming opposition and enacting the relevant policies of social change, but because the state was seen as the central site for organizing socialism itself. In this paper I will explore an alternative way of thinking about socialism in which the central issue of institutional design is empowering civil society relative to both the state and the economy. The vision, then, is of a society-centered socialism.
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