Hegemonic Strategies Research Articles

The State of Training: Learning, Institutional Innovation, and Local Boards for Training and Adjustment in Ontario, Canada

This paper critiques the learning-region literature on two related points. The first is that the learning-region analysis of labour markets is theoretically underdeveloped, because it underestimates the difficulty of overcoming systematic skill mismatches, underinvestment, and free-rider practices which characterize unregulated labour markets. Second and relatedly, because it does not link the problematic nature of labour-market governance to the conflicts and contradictions of state policy, the learning-region literature effectively ‘depoliticizes’ policymaking. The paper draws on a case study of the development of local boards for training and adjustment in Ontario, Canada, and develops an alternative framework utilizing a critical governance perspective which stresses how knowledge and learning must be seen as part of state accumulation and hegemonic strategies. Such strategies are contingent on the representation of stakeholders, in particular business, and current attempts to develop decentralized associational networks are often part of what Jessop terms metagovernance. In the case of Canada, decentralization from the federal to provincial scales is viewed as crisis and cost driven and in many ways antithetical to stakeholder governance. Thus in Ontario, the development of a stakeholder-based form of labour-market governance has been marginalized by shifts in state-accumulation strategies and the inability and disinterest of business in representing itself in such stakeholder institutions. Furthermore, the local boards' generation of knowledge based on inclusionary networks and information is at odds with a state and business emphasis on knowledge derived from exclusive networks and geared to short-term profit maximization.

Synergy and Coherence through Collective Action: Some Insights from Wine Routes in Tuscany

A wine route can be seen as a network established around the theme of wine. The impressive economic impact that the establishment of the Costa degli Etruschi wine route has had on the farms involved is traced back in this article to the collective action that produces synergies and coherence. Synergies can be defined as linkages between two or more entities, whose joint effort produces quantitatively and qualitatively higher effects than those produced by the efforts of the same entities alone. Coherence is a quality belonging to the elements that constitute the context of action in successful rural development practices: natural and man‐made environment, social networks, and symbolic systems. The process of creating coherence is not without conflict, and the article contends that the establishment of coherence needs a hegemonic strategy that involves all sources of empowerment and particularly cultural codes.

Mothers and militias: Islamic state construction of the women citizens of Northern Sudan*

As the only Sunni Islamic Republic in the world, Sudan's middle‐class, modernist Islamist revolution can be seen as a model for the mobilization of public consciousness about citizenship in an Islamic state. That this citizenship is consciously and conspicuously gendered is the main theme of this paper. In the north, where mobilization has been most successful, Sudanese women have both been constructed and have constructed themselves as the woman citizen— mother, Muslim, and soldier. A brief historical background reveals complicated shifts in national, local, and gender identities, from the colonial state to the present. The crux of the paper is an exploration of state hegemonic strategies, including the manipulation of gender and other identities, especially as these are manifested in the fashioning of the ‘new Muslim woman’. Women's complicity in and resistance to these constructions are among the dynamics of contemporary northern Sudan. The paper also explores the waning of ‘Arab’ identity claims in the face of state emphasis on Islamic identity and the relevance to Islamist women. Interview statements by Islamist women attest to both their complicity in and resistance to their construction as members of the Islamic nation/community.

In Defence of Critical Realism

This article reassesses critical realism's role as an underlabourer to the sciences and whether it is of any use to a Marxist analysis. It deals with some of the issues raised in the debate between regulation theorists and open Marxists whilst arguing that this debate does not do full credit to the scope of critical realism. Whilst a rejection of the regulation approach is necessary, it is also necessary to analyse forms of regulation and hegemonic strategies based on the fact that the social world is complexly stratified. However, this stratification also points to the dominant contradictions within capitalism and the centrality of struggle in shaping the social world.

State strategies in the global political economy

State Strategies in the Global Political Economy, Palan, Abbott and Deans argue that the state is not about to decline or ‘wither away’, but must restructure and evolve in response to forces of transnationalization. The state may be besieged but it can fight back and reorganize itself. The nature of this reorganization, the alleged shift from the welfare state to the ‘competition state’ is as much a response to changing global circumstances as it is an instrument of further change. The authors examine the plethora of competitive strategies adopted by the modern state: from the exclusive hegemonic strategies of the most powerful states to the parasitical strategies of the mini-states that serve as tax havens and flags of convenience; from the egalitarianism of the welfare policies of the Shielders to the repressed and exploited labour forces of ‘downworldly mobile’ Third World states; from the emerging continental economies of NAFTA and the EU to the utter dispair of collapsed states structurally unable to compete in the world economy. By investigating these strategic responses, the authors present a comprehensive study of the tactics and strategies employed by states to achieve greater stability and strength within the global political economy.

De Man, Schiller, and the Politics of Reception

Over the last ten years, the work of Paul Man has not become any easier to assimilate. Frank Lentricchia could not have been more wide of the mark when in 1983 he predicted the war between traditionalists and deconstructors would draw to a close by the end of this decade, with Man rediscovered as the most brilliant hero of traditionalism [39]. For even if Man's juvenile contributions to Le soir had remained hidden a few more years in the archive, it is clear Lentricchia would have lost his wager. The furor over Man's wartime journalism has at least had the virtue of making manifest the extraordinary violence with which his mature work is resisted. Doubtless, a measure of institutional success continues to attend de criticism. would be astounding if this were not the case, given the visible rigor of the methodology, the prestige and relative power Man himself was able to achieve, the cultural force of certain notions of comparative literature, theory, European philosophy, and so on. As a rule, however, contemporary criticism quarantines and ignores Manian theory by way of various hegemonic strategies of inclusive exclusion, supplemented by extravagant gestures of anthropomorphization and rejection. One could with considerable justice invert Lentricchia's formulations and claim the most significant realignments of institutional power in literary during the 1980s amount to wholehearted approval of the rhetoric of Criticism and Social Change. Nothing, it seems, is more obvious than the political inadequacy of Man's texts. The task of pursuing some form of historicism has taken on the self-evident necessity of an ethical imperative. It is a fact, Man wrote in 1972, that this sort of thing happens, again and again, in literary studies [AR 4]. What happens perhaps a little more rarely in literary is the event of an exemplary figure such as Man, capable of inspiring the most lurid gestures of monumentalization and ritual sacrifice. The pages follow seek to articulate Man's theoretical text with the politics of his reception and with the question of politics. I shall be pursuing the notions of history and politics inform Man's late texts, mounting