Civic Spirit Research Articles

Transforming Employment-Oriented Adult Education to Foster Arendtian Action

“Vocational education” and “community education” have evolved into largely separate fields. Bridges are reconstructed by adopting a view of vocation that recognizes the meaning people find in their work and the public value of the work they do. While these considerations underpin recent initiatives to revive a civic spirit among the “professions,” it is suggested that they apply across a much wider spectrum of occupations. Arendt’s theory of action serves as a lens from which to inquire into the nature of vocational practice when enacted as public and democratic deliberation with members of the community on important issues affecting their lives. The author concludes that, appropriately understood, vocational practice includes the facilitation of Arendtian action, thereby constituting a form of community education. The author furthermore suggests that modelling types of public pedagogy characteristic of community education would enrich vocational education and help foster practitioners’ capacity to act as civic agents.

Diversity and the Civic Spirit in British Neighbourhoods: An Investigation with MCDS and EMBES 2010 Data.

Recently, there has been a proliferation of studies investigating the relationship between diversity and outcomes such as social cohesion and civic mindedness. This article addresses several common problems in this field and, using data for British neighbourhoods, elaborates on the experiences of both white British and ethnic minority respondents. We conclude that, if anything, diversity should be encouraged to cement the integration progress of migrants and foster stronger identification with Britain in the second generation. Deprivation at the neighbourhood level along with individual factors such as fear of crime is a much stronger predictor of deterioration of the civic spirit than diversity. Bridging contacts have the expected strong positive association with cohesion outcomes; and contrary to policy concerns no strong negative impact is observed for associational bonding among minority ingroupers.

Beneficiários ou reféns? o patrimonialismo na perspectiva dos cidadãos de Poço Fundo, Minas Gerais

Há uma diversidade de elementos na cultura política dos pequenos municípios brasileiros agindo em anteposição ao processo democrático, à solidariedade social e para a desconstrução do espírito de comunidade cívica. Nesse cenário, merece destaque a ação do clientelismo, do patrimonialismo e do personalismo. Com objetivo de discutir a dominação e a vigência desses elementos em rotinas públicas e relações sociais, este artigo apresenta o caso de Poço Fundo, município de pequeno porte localizado no Sul de Minas Gerais. Três situações foram destacadas para demonstrar como tais práticas, além de toleradas, são convertidas em estratégia individual diante da ineficiência e da insensibilidade pública, esclarecendo como os políticos capitalizam para si e para seus partidos os favores prestados e como a natureza cíclica dos privilégios constrange ações coletivas, capazes de oferecer resistência ao "loteamento" político da cidade. A precariedade dos serviços públicos identificada nos depoimentos, embora pareça causa da cultura do favor é, antes de tudo, produto desta. Desse modo, ficou evidenciado que a população poçofundense não se tornou beneficiária dessas práticas, mas sim, refém do sistema político.

Is the Jury System Appropriate for India?

In this paper I would be analyzing how the different jury systems across the world are conducted and have changed over time. Further I shall look at the effects of the jury system on social change in the administration of justice and public policy making. I shall also highlight the prominence of the jury system in the “pre-trial”, “trial” and “appellate” processes and bring out the value of jury which is considered both as a “model of deliberation” and an “engine of civic spirit”. I would also like to examine the differing perceptions and stereotypes of judges and the public in order to get a broad overview of my topic. Using these I would like to show the efficacy of the jury system and how it is rightly justified in the case of India.

Facilitating the disabled persons’ insertion in the Labour market through a professional counselling process directed towards the certification of competences

Equality and diversity are essential values of a democratic society, many companies being interested nowadays in developing ample programs of Corporate Social Responsibility. An ever-increasing number of studies demonstrate that the civic spirit and tolerance on the job are directly proportional to the team productivity and to the economic performance of the organisation, and the Romanian state offers fiscal facilitations to encourage the civic spirit. However, although in Romania there live more than 600 000 people with disabilities (acc. to ANPH), while 50% of them could be integrated on the labour market (in their case, their handicap affects activity only partially), only 5% of them are actually hired. In the herby study, our purposes are: to identify the resources that are necessary in the recruitment/selection process of the people with disabilities; to build up a specific counselling program of the people with disabilities with a view to fructifying their individual potential and to guaranteeing equal opportunities in their career development by means of a process of acknowledging the competences acquired as a result of their work experience, in protected workshops or outside them.

Top-Down Civic Projects Are Not Grassroots Associations: How The Differences Matter in Everyday Life

Research on civic associations blurs an important distinction between the unfunded, informal, ongoing associations that theorists like de Tocqueville described versus current participatory democracy projects that are funded by the state and large nongovernmental organizations, are open to all, and are usually short-term. Based on a long-term ethnography of youth programs in the United States, this paper shows that entities like these, which participants and researchers alike often called “volunteer” or “civic” groups, operate very differently from traditional civic groups. The ethnography systematically details prevalent tensions that actors face when they try to cultivate the civic spirit in these increasingly typical organizations.

A Little More Civic Spirit, a Few Less Tears: A Discussion of Public-Private Partnerships in Emergency Management Based on the Book Disaster Management: Earthquakes

A Little More Civic Spirit, a Few Less Tears: A Discussion of Public-Private Partnerships in Emergency Management Based on the Book Disaster Management: Earthquakes

Classical Art in Copenhagen

That Copenhagen, a Scandinavian city almost 1 ,000 miles from Mediterranean, should boast one of world's finest collections of classical antiquities will come as a surprise to many. Perhaps even more confounding is that collection was assembled by a man who made his fortune selling beer. Today, museum that bears his name, Ny Carlsberg Glyptotek, continues to honor the brewer Carl Jacobsen (1842-1914), Dane whose collecting acumen, visual perspicuity, and civic spirit rivals American businessman collectors such as J. Pierpont Morgan or Henry Clay Frick. The recent reopening of Glyptotek after a closure of three years to renovate upper galleries and to create a new installation downstairs occasions this review.1

The political economy of virtue: luxury, patriotism, and the origins of the French Revolution

Political economy, John Shovlin asserts, can illuminate the social and economic contexts out of which a revolutionary impulse developed in France. Beyond the role of economy in life, massive public engagement with problems of economic order mediated an enduring cultural transformation. Economic activity was reimagined as a patriotic pursuit, and economic agents-farmers, merchants, and manufacturers-came to be viewed as potential citizens. Drawing on hundreds of economic tracts published in France between the 1740s and the early nineteenth century, Shovlin shows how mid-level French elites (magistrates, clerics, lawyers, soldiers, landed gentlemen) sought to balance their interests and values with the need to regenerate a nation that had seemingly entered a period of decline. In their view, France's moral, political, and economic power depended not simply on expanding the national wealth but also on reviving civic spirit. The political economy of virtue held that luxury was the cause of the nation's economic and moral degeneration. When the monarchy failed to reform its economic structures in the 1760s and 1770s, mid-level elites sought to eliminate the stranglehold of the plutocracy. Shovlin argues that the Revolution grew out of a debate on how to establish a commercial society capable of fostering both wealth and virtue, and the revolutionaries sought to create such a society by destroying the institutions that channeled modern wealth into the hands of courtiers and financiers.

What They Think of Us

22 Historically Speaking March/April 2007 needs a big idea. Empires have another potentially beneficial value: they can nurture group tolerance, granting religious pluralism or a special role for diasporas: they also allow for enclaves of autonomy within their extensive spatial domains. They often welcome immigrants , especially those from the peripheries that they dominate. North Africans, Pakistanis, and Latinos have flowed into the countries that have often dominated diem. Nation-states often impose greater conformity on their peoples than do empires. The imperial syndrome also involves a particular relationship of rulers to ruled. An imperial regime searches not for discussion and deliberation, but for approval and acclamation. It measures popularity . The media replace parliamentary debate, and if there is any symptom of empire, it is the attrition of representative bodies. Perhaps they are formally kept in being—even Hider preserved a mock Reichstag . But government by debate loses its integrity and capacity. Granted, these tendencies afflict modern democracies in general, especially when they face complex social choices. Indeed, the attrition of legislative procedures in a democracy usually arises from the complexity of issues; in a proto-imperial situation it results as a response to alleged security dangers. Parliamentary delegates accept the executive 's diagnosis of danger rather than risk being seen as antipatriotic. They pass blanket delegations of power. And even if they insist on legislation, the executive claims the right to interpret the laws that they might pass. Popularity becomes the ultimate measure . If rulers fail in their enterprises, they can lose popularity very quickly. But until public opinion turns adverse, acclamation, photo-ops, spectacular games, and staged pageants replace debate. There are exceptions: rule by committee or by party can continue, as it did in die French Third Republic. But even here the issues that define empire and foreign policy are withdrawn from the arena of debate and discussion. Empire, like authoritarian government more generally, involves the rule of the exception: there is always an exceptional danger that defines imperial politics. The imperial syndrome embodies Carl Schmitt's notion that he who controls the exception in effect controls even democratic politics. The imperial syndrome involves a rampant growth of privilege and inequality that corrupts civic spirit. Empires can be democratic at home—the British expanded the suffrage as they expanded their empire; the French Third Republic was Europe's most democratic regime and it conquered Vietnam and Morocco—but empires cannot let their subject peoples share the same democratic ground rules. And even as they may extend formal equality, and even income equality, toward the bottom, they give die top immense new opportunities for enrichment. This presents grave difficulties of judgment. If millions of middle-income families are each given a small tax rebate, while at the same time several thousand wealthy citizens can each reduce their bill by tens of thousands or more, the redistribution may increase formal measures of equality. But who can doubt which distribution has a greater impact on civic participation? And this is the transaction that the imperial syndrome usually involves: not robbing the poor to pay the rich, although the periphery may be despoiled to pay the center, but fobbing off the humble so that privilege becomes more and more spectacular. For a while, public games, reality TV, philanthropy, and the admirable but hardly taxing charitable deeds of those enriched may counteract the emergence of populist class politics. How long that will last is not at all clear. Let me return to the initial question: Is America an empire? Does it diminish historical understanding , when asked whedier die U.S. is an empire, to say that it has come to behave (at least in recent years and perhaps decades) like an empire and exhibits the syndrome of empire? As a political and moral challenge , perhaps even more than an epistemological one, we must take the current analog of empire very seriously. Charles S. Maier is the Leverett Saltonstall Professor of History at Harvard University. His most recent book is Among Empires: American Ascendancy and Its Predecessors (Harvard University Press, 2006). 1 I am not trained as a philosopher and the philosophical problems of analogy are difficult. But for some recent discussions I...

Jury Service as an Invitation to Citizenship: Assessing the Civic Value of Institutionalized Deliberation

When considering the merits of deliberative democracy, it is important to look into the experience of the American jury system. The jury has demonstrated the potential for citizen deliberation to play a central role in longstanding governmental institutions, but it has also played an unrecognized role in promoting civic engagement. Building on previous research demonstrating how jury service spurs increased electoral participation after jury service, we present results from a three‐wave panel survey that show that a subjectively rewarding jury experience can spur broader civic engagement beyond voting. Given the value of the jury as both a model of deliberation and an engine of civic spirit, we consider the potential value of creating citizen juries to improve the initiative process, which currently lacks the citizen deliberation that is essential for any effective direct democratic processes.

Jury Service as an Invitation to Citizenship: Assessing the Civic Value of Institutionalized Deliberation

When considering the merits of deliberative democracy, it is important to look to the experience of the American jury system. The jury has demonstrated the potential for citizen deliberation to play a central role in longstanding governmental institutions, but it has also played an unrecognized role in promoting civic engagement. Building on previous research demonstrating how jury service spurs increased electoral participation after jury service, we present results from a three-wave panel survey that show that a subjectively rewarding jury experience can spur broader civic engagement beyond voting. Given the value of the jury as both a model of deliberation and an engine of civic spirit, we consider the potential value of creating citizen juries to improve the initiative process, which currently lacks the citizen deliberation that is essential for any effective direct democratic processes.

Building Jerusalem: the rise and fall of the Victorian city

Victorian cities, so long the object of derision as a byword for deprivation, are now celebrated as an urban ideal. They are widely heralded among modern planners and politicians for their active citizenship, local democracy, and civic spirit. This is a history of the ideas that shaped not only London, but Manchester, Glasgow, Liverpool, Leeds, Birmingham, Sheffield and other power-houses of 19th-century Britain. It charts the controversies and visions that fostered Britain's greatest civic renaissance. Tristram Hunt explores the horrors of the Victorian city, as seen by Dickens, Engels and Carlyle; the influence of the medieval Gothic ideal of faith, community and order espoused by Pugin and Ruskin; the reaction led by Macaulay and Mill, who were repelled by the faux medievalism of the early Victorian years and who championed progress and industry; the pride in self-government, identified with the Saxons as opposed to the Normans; the identification with the city republics of the Italian renaissance - commerce, trade and patronage; the change from the civic to the municipal, and greater powers over health, education and housing, especially in Joe Chamberlain's Birmingham; and finally at the end of the century, the retreat from the urban to the rural ideal, led by William Morris and the garden-city movement of Ebenezer Howard.

A nation in barracks: modern Germany, military conscription and civil society

Military Conscription and Civil Society: Historical TrajectoriesI. War, Nation, Gender Images: Core Concepts in Conscription in the Early Nineteenth Century * Criticism of Existing Prussian Army Structures * Conscription: Setbacks on the Road to a 'National Army' * The Battle for the Middle Classes * Military Service, Wartime Service, and Manliness * 'Female patriotism'II. 'Both Citizen and Soldier'? Prussia in the Vormrz Period (1815-48) * The Law on Wartime Service: Rules and Practice * The Landwehr as a Citizen's Militia? * Citizenship and Masculinity: The Jewish Population Demands Participation * The Army as the 'Training School' for War and Peace * Soldiers and Civilians: Soldiers as Citizens?III. Military Systems in the 'Third Germany' * The Move from Exemption to Substitution * Army Service: The View from Inside * Civilian Counterparts: An Armed Citizenry and a Man's Right to Bear Arms * Civilian Militias During the Vormrz period and in 1848-9 * The 'Martial Spirit' in Military Associations or Dreams of a Democratic Army IV. War and Peace: Imperial Germany in the Prussian Barracks * Constitutional or Military State: Paving the Way in the Pre-Empire Years * Middle-Class Arrangements: One-Yearers and Reserve Officers * Soldiers at the 'School of Manliness' * The Regiment as a Family: The Potential and Limits of Military Comradeship * Liaisons Dangereuses: The Military and Civil Society V. The Twentieth Century: The (Ex-)Soldier as Citizen * The Post-World War I Years: Militarisation without Military Service * Soldiers and 'Volksgenossen': The Escalation of Violence Under the Nazis * Post-war Germany: From Disarmed to Rearmed State * Civic Spirit and Gender Politics: The End of Conscription?

What's the Civil in Civil Society? Robert Putnam, Italy and the Republican Tradition

Robert Putnam's Making Democracy Work implies a conception of civil society with claims to republican ancestry. However, in four ways, he misses the more ‘political’ understanding of this Enlightenment category in republican writers, including his hero, Tocqueville. Where Putnam's civic community is spontaneous and voluntaristic, republicans emphasise the creation of civil society from above by state-building and broader political associations. Where his civic spirit is local, republicans stress polity-centred citizenship identification. Where Putnam's ‘social capital’ is a generalised, all-purpose resource with positive effects, modern republicans such as Tocqueville stress normative ambiguities of civic space and see the associational cradles of modern trust and solidarity as more demanding. Finally, where his civil society is a harmonious, ‘functioning’ place, republicans often stress conflict between citizens and between citizens and the state. A reconsideration of empirical and theoretical problems in his analysis suggests that a more republican conceptualisation of civil society would have facilitated different questions and more interesting answers.

Private City, Public City

The successes and failures of the American city have resulted from struggles over the uses of public power as much as from a capitalist culture of “privatism.” Public visions of the city's possibilities have, at times, proved as powerful as private economic interests in shaping the city's future. Examined in relationship to one another, Sam Bass Warner Jr.'s The Private City and Zane L. Miller's Boss Cox's Cincinnati illustrate the clash between economic interest and civic aspiration. Both argued for the necessity of civic spirit and public action if we were to build better cities. The Private City told the story from the point of view of failure, while Boss Cox's Cincinnati examined it from the point of view of success. Miller's analysis of the politics of an urban crisis serves as an essential, hopeful complement to Warner's powerful indictment of the American tradition of privatism.

Bowling Ninepins in Tocqueville's Township

Despite elevating Alexis de Tocqueville to iconic status in our national debate on civic engagement, we have frequently neglected the range and depth of his associational thought. In this essay, I trace the early manifestations and evolution from 1828 to 1840 of his understanding of the commune or township, a featured source of public participation and cohesion within his larger associational lexicon. I show how his reflections on local liberties, in general, and the New England township, in particular, inspired and helped to shape both volumes of his Democracy in America. I emphasize the degree to which Tocqueville saw the participatory vector originating in the township's political life as galvanizing an ardent civic spirit leading to cultural, intellectual, and economic achievements. I conclude by seeking to connect lessons gleaned from Tocqueville's township to contemporary strategies to strengthen citizen participation.For their early encouragement and advice, I thank Clark Gilpin and David Tracy, leaders of the Brauer Seminar at the University of Chicago Divinity School where I presented an initial version of this essay in spring 1994. I am grateful to the late François Furet, who also commented upon that early paper, and Ralph Lerner, who read and notated each of its successive formulations, for their generous and sage oversight of my ensuing Tocquevillian studies. I also thank three anonymous reviewers and the editor of this journal for their comments and constructive criticisms.

Common Good and Civic Spirit in the Welfare State: Problems of Societal Self–Description

Common Good and Civic Spirit in the Welfare State: Problems of Societal Self–Description

Kudzu, Rabbits, and School Reform

We, the people, appear to understand that the linchpin of each American's necessary apprenticeship in democracy is a qualified, caring, competent classroom teacher, Mr. Goodlad points out. The role of Presidents and governors is to cheer us on, not to mislead us with the mythology of school reform. RECENTLY, colleagues and were more than a little startled by a letter to the editor of one of our local newspapers. It had been wryly captioned Civic Spirit, and it read as follows: Our son recently finished 90 hours of community service. The crime to fit this punishment? He just happens to be a graduating senior. We believe community service is a wonderful way for drunk drivers, juvenile delinquents - any member of society who has cost the community pain, money, etc. - to pay back a little of what they owe. Is it appropriate for productive, high-achieving high school students to be required to do more punishment than the average teenage burglar? In our opinion, any teenager who stays out of trouble is contributing to their community. Presumably, the couple writing this letter assumed that they had performed their civic duty by bringing a high-achieving student into the world. Their son, in turn, had taken care of his community responsibilities through academic achievement. am reminded of a quite different letter to a newspaper editor reporting the behavior of an aging woman at an open meeting of a state's budget committee. Exasperated by the repeated cuts in allocations for schools, she stood up and spoke out in protest. The committee's chairman interrupted her. You are a schoolteacher, assume. No, am not, she replied. Then you must have a daughter or son who is. No, do not. Surely, grandchildren in school? I have no children, she replied, have to live with everyone else's children. THE HARD AND TOUGH AND THE SOFT AND TENDER These two letters illustrate a long-standing tension regarding the purposes of our schools. At the turn of the 19th century into the 20th, William James referred to the and tough and the and as the warp and woof in the fabric of American social and political ideology. He saw the need for balancing the two. But they have tended to be out of balance, with one rising and the other falling in cycles of two to three decades, with schooling following several years behind. The rhetoric of school purpose has been relatively stable, however. The dozen or so goals that surface again and again in commissioned reports and district guidelines for schools have consistently embraced personal, social, vocational, and academic attributes. In 1987 Mortimer Adler wove the rhetorical fabric this way: for duties of citizenship is one of three objectives for any sound system of public schooling in our society. Preparation for earning a living is another, and the third is preparation for discharging everyone's moral obligation to lead a good life and make as much of one's self as possible.1 Poll after poll and study after study have revealed that we want all three. Nonetheless, reform era after reform era - each politically driven - puts policy and practice out of balance. Adults with quite ordinary academic records invent the past in exhorting schools to be hard and tough, as schools supposedly were for them. Educating the whole child is frequently viewed as the dangerous notion of woolly-headed progressive educators. Indeed, it is not so much the substance of reform cycles but more the side effects that do harm. Whether soft and tender or hard and tough, school reforms fade and die, frequently from their own excesses. But their side effects live on as eduviruses that add cost to the system and create roadblocks to the serious redesign and sustained improvement we need. …

Hardball: Local Government’S Foray into Sports Franchise Ownership

Smaller cities seeking new economic development vehicles have embraced the growth of minor league sports. In an attempt to eliminate the threat of competition and maintain a sense of stability, four local governments purchased their respective minor league baseball franchise. This action may serve as a model for local governments that have invested heavily in professional sports as an economic development strategy. This study investigates the benefits of ownership in terms of stability for development, economic gain, and increased civic spirit. The study finds that publicly owned teams can be successfully used to anchor comprehensive plans for economic development, and that public ownership provides a way to pay the costs of the sports facilities and the debt service. There is little evidence to show that publicly owned teams increase civic spirit. However, this model presents some challenges that may prevent its widespread utilization.