Mode Of Social Regulation Research Articles

The promise and reality of middle-class homeownership in China: housing assetisation, speculative urban (re)development and residential inequalities

ABSTRACT This paper offers a nuanced understanding of China’s housing assetisation by (1) examining its role in supporting financialised urban (re)development after the global financial crisis, and (2) dissecting the contradictions between seemingly flourishing housing markets and deep-seated residential inequalities. Drawing on the case of Guangzhou, this paper first illustrates how housing assetisation internalizes financial norms within Chinese homeowner society, signifying a shift in the mode of social regulation from managerialism to entrepreneurialism. This shift is evident in the capitalization of priority access to public infrastructure and the prevailing culture of accumulation, investment and speculation. In the post-crisis era, housing has been repackaged as a lucrative investment by the local state through dazzling (sub)urban projects, large-scale infrastructure construction and ambitious urban-planning proposals, thereby fueling a home-buying frenzy. We argue that the assetisation-induced social ethos of capital accumulation and speculative investment, entwined with infrastructure-cum-property-led urban (re)development, has recast Chinese cities into shareholder-value machinery. As the local state leverages household savings and income streams to bolster land-based financialised urban development, homeowners/buyers are transformed into investor-citizens. This transformation implies that urban household balance sheets become intricately linked with China’s urban fortunes. Moreover, residential inequalities are exacerbated, exemplified by prevalent gentrification “at a premium”.

Social control and solidarity during the COVID-19 pandemic: The direct and indirect effects of causal attribution of insufficient compliance through perceived anomie.

The COVID‐19 pandemic is a crisis which called for two crucial modes of social regulation: social control and social solidarity. In the present pre‐registered study, we examine how the perceived non‐compliance with health measures relates to attitudes towards these modes of social regulation, as well as to the role played by the perception of disintegrated and disregulated society (anomie). Using data from an online cross‐sectional survey conducted in Belgium in April 2020 (N = 717), results show that the causal attribution of the crisis to insufficient compliance was differentially associated with support for social control and social solidarity behaviours. Specifically, greater attribution to insufficient compliance was associated with a perceived breakdown in the social fabric (disintegration), which explained stronger support for social control and fewer solidarity‐based actions. Perceived disregulation, conversely, was associated with less support for social control and more support for social solidarity. Therefore, the perception of the pandemic and associated perceived anomie tend to polarize citizens' attitudes towards these two modes of social regulation. In this way, prosocial behaviours might be inhibited by communications that attribute the pandemic's causes to incivility. Other implications of our findings for the social psychological literature on communities' reactions to the pandemic are discussed. Please refer to the Supplementary Material section to find this article's Community and Social Impact Statement.

Metaphysical Anthropocentrism, Limitrophy, and Responsibility: An Explication of the Subject of Animal Rights

This article undertakes a critical analysis of subjectivity and exposes the metaphysical and anthropocentric quasi-transcendental conditions that give rise to the construct(ion) of the Subject. I locate a critical moment for the metaphysical Subject in the work of Martin Heidegger which, whilst sadly not sustained in his later writings, provides a point of departure for an examination of the significance that animality plays in the metaphysical tradition and its constitutive relation to the construct of subjectivity. I discern this relation to be violent and sacrificial and draw on Jacques Derrida's nonanthropocentric ethics against the background of Drucilla Cornell's ethical reading of deconstruction to construct a critique of approaches that assimilate animals to the traditional model of subjectivity in order to represent their identity and interests in the legal paradigm. The main argument that I seek to advance is that such an approach paradoxically re-constructs the classical humanist subject of metaphysics and re-establishes the subject-centred system that silences the call of the animal Other, thereby solidifying and extending the legitimacy of a discourse and mode of social regulation that is fundamentally anthropocentric. I examine how we can address, incapacitate and move beyond this schemata of power through a rigorous deconstruction of the partitions that institute the Subject and how deconstruction clears a space for a de novo determination of the animal "subject" that can proceed from different sites of nonanthropocentric interruption. What follows is a call to refuse the mechanical utilisation of traditional legal constructs and I argue in favour of an approach to the question of the animal (in law) that identifies and challenges anthropocentrism as its critical target. I ultimately propose a critical engagement with the underlying metaphysical support of animal rights at a conceptual level, rather than simply utilising the law pragmatically as an instrument of immediate resolution.
 

Políticas de administração e gestão em países da Lusofonia: Perspectivas críticas sobre a Nova Gestão Pública e a pós-burocracia em educação

Nas últimas décadas, ganhou centralidade a chamada Nova Gestão Pública/New Public Management que se tem traduzido, entre outras formas, pela incorporação e implementação de princípios de racionalidade empresarial e de gestão privada nas instituições e organizações públicas. Muitas reformas setoriais seguiram esses princípios, alguns dos quais foram concretizados na redefinição do papel do Estado e em alterações nos procedimentos da administração pública, tendo também induzido outras mudanças nos modos de regulação social em contexto de internacionalização crescente do capitalismo. Na sequência destas mudanças, a obsessão (frequentemente mais retórica do que real) com a eficácia e eficiência do Estado passou também a ser entendida no quadro de uma racionalidade pós-burocrática. Esta nova racionalidade foi, no entanto, pouco accionada nos textos que se seguem, tal como aconteceu com a da hiperburocracia—ao contrário do que era desejo dos editores deste dossiê. Esta constatação não deixa, de algum modo, de revelar que a ideologia da Nova Gestão Pública é ainda o referente hegemónico no campo da pesquisa e reflexão das ciências sociais e das ciências da educação. Ainda assim, do nosso ponto de vista, o que é mais notório nas contribuições que se seguem é que muitas das promessas das diferentes versões da ideologia da Nova Gestão Pública, ou não foram cumpridas, ou foram-no apenas parcialmente, sendo uma das críticas mais contundentes a esta ideologia aquela que se pode traduzir na ideia de que administrar é muito diferente de governar. Em síntese, o Dossiê aqui apresentado, objetiva, entre outros aspectos e em diferentes contextos nacionais da lusofonia, analisar reformas e políticas públicas de educação (com dominância em dimensões da administração e gestão, avaliação e accountability, privatização e mercadorização) que, implícita ou explicitamente, assumem, em graus muitos diversos de aprofundamento crítico e/ou de sustentação teórico-conceptual e empírica, alguns dos pressupostos atrás referenciados, os quais os/as autores/as entenderam priorizar.

Patriarchal Regime of the Spectacle: Racial and Gendered Gaze in Jhumpa Lahiri’s Fiction

This article attempts to evince the political, cultural and affective consequences of Jhumpa Lahiri’s diasporic writings and their particular enunciations of the literary gaze. To do so, it details the manner in which the stories’ exercise of visual operations rigidly corresponds with those of the Panopticon. The essay argues that Lahiri’s narrative produces a kind of panoptic machine that underpins the ‘modes of social regulation and control’ that Foucault has explained as disciplinary technologies. By situating Lahiri’s stories, “A Real Durwan” and “Only Goodness,” within a historical-political context, this essay aims at identifying the way in which panopticism defines her fiction as both a record of and a participant in the social, sexual and political ‘paranoia’ behind the propaganda of America’s self-image as the land of freedom. We maintain that Lahiri’s fiction situates itself in complex relation to the postcolonial concerns of the late twentieth century, suggesting that through their fascination with a visual literalization of the panoptic machine, and by privileging the masculine gaze, the stories legitimate the perpetuation of socially prescribed notion of sexual difference. Keywords: Gaze, Sexual difference, Panopticon, A Real Durwan, Only Goodness

Transformaciones de la estatalidad social en el régimen de acumulación post neoliberal

En Argentina, la crisis de 2001 y la redefinición de los postulados neoliberales trajo innovaciones tanto en la sociedad como en el Estado. Uno de los principales cambios fue el nacimiento de un nuevo modo de regulación social, el cual se desarrolló a la par que el Estado tomaba nuevas formas y contenidos. Este artículo se centra en el análisis del nuevo tipo de Estado y de sus intervenciones sociales, observando sus características económicas, políticas y administrativas, pero no en tanto políticas sociales sino como indicadores de la nueva estatalidad y su vinculación con la transformación del modo de regulación.

Toward an Understanding of Aboriginal/Indigenous Rights and Their Impact on Development: An Application of Regulation Theory

This paper explores the relationship between business, society and the developmental aspirations of Indigenous people, whose communities are among the poorest and most marginalized in the world; it explores the emergence, evolution and growing importance of the role that Indigenous rights play in the development of these communities. To do so, the authors examine the interrelationship between Indigenous rights, social capital and entrepreneurial activity. Using regulation theory, we develop several propositions to argue that these conceptual areas can come together to provide insight on how modes of social regulation may be crucial to understanding the pathways available for participation in the global regime of accumulation. The result can be the emergence of a particular mode of development that is aligned with the outcomes sought by the community. From these propositions, the authors argue that the modes of development available are dependent upon multiple levels of societal structures where the degree of localization in the modes of social regulation is central in determining the objectives as well as significant to achieving them.

French Modern: Norms and Forms of the Social Environment by Paul Rabinow

Author(s): Fischler, Raphael | Abstract: French Modern is one of these books that one should read twice: first time, in order to enjoy author's storytelling; second time, to learn from his skillful analysis. The story, in this case, is that of gene­ sis of French urbanisme. It is story of technicians of general ideas: social reformers and statisticians, military men and politicians, architects and social scientists whose work lies in the middle ground between high culture or science and ordinary life (p. 9). Rabinow tells us about their efforts to fashion new fields of knowledge and technologies of social control, as well as new urban forms and social spaces. Through this story, Rabinow analyzes specific forms of rationality that these men embodied and articulated, forms of rationality that made possible a new mode of social regulation: modern city planning. While book is about French planning, it has lessons for American planning practi­ tioners, historians, and theorists, who may find that field of planning evolved in similar ways on both sides of Atlantic. Both French and American planning share an early emphasis on hygiene and both gradu­ ally came to rely on universal standards in order to analyze and regu­ late city and its population.

Capital at Sea, Shaitan Below Decks? A Note on Global Narratives, Narrow Spaces, and the Limits of Experience

Research Article| April 01 2012 Capital at Sea, Shaitan Below Decks? A Note on Global Narratives, Narrow Spaces, and the Limits of Experience Ravi Ahuja Ravi Ahuja Ravi Ahuja is a social historian of modern South Asia whose research interests have included urban labor relations in eighteenth-century South India, social conflicts over “public works” under colonial capitalism, the experiences of Indian peasant-soldiers in World War I Europe, and Indian maritime labor in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. His present research focuses on modes of social regulation in twentieth-century India. He is the director of the Centre for Modern Indian Studies at the University of Gӧttingen. Search for other works by this author on: This Site Google History of the Present (2012) 2 (1): 78–85. https://doi.org/10.5406/historypresent.2.1.0078 Cite Icon Cite Share Icon Share Twitter Permissions Search Site Citation Ravi Ahuja; Capital at Sea, Shaitan Below Decks? A Note on Global Narratives, Narrow Spaces, and the Limits of Experience. History of the Present 1 April 2012; 2 (1): 78–85. doi: https://doi.org/10.5406/historypresent.2.1.0078 Download citation file: Zotero Reference Manager EasyBib Bookends Mendeley Papers EndNote RefWorks BibTex toolbar search Search Dropdown Menu toolbar search search input Search input auto suggest filter your search Books & JournalsAll JournalsHistory of the Present Search Advanced Search The text of this article is only available as a PDF. Copyright © 2012 University of Illinois Press2012 Article PDF first page preview Close Modal Issue Section: Roundtable: Amitav Ghosh’s Sea of Poppies You do not currently have access to this content.

Of Politicians, Populism, and Plates: Marketing the Body Politic

In liberal democracies such as the United States, law emerges from core ritual of the electoral-representation system, the theater of elections. From these cyclical rituals of consent, the people (re)discover political voice in embodied agents who ultimately do the work of governing. Lawmaking as craft, or increasingly as multibillion-dollar industry (CRP 201Oa, 20 1Ob), is performed by those who first pass through an arena where political commitments are mediated by space in which mass suffrage and mass consumerism dramatically converge. The experience of popular democracy for most citizens unfolds within this secular ritual that makes lawmakers. The very phantasmagoric spectacle of elections is the muse through which social relations are translated and reified into positive law. The state regulates everyday life through the discursive and material of law. But what renders law so productive in the modern states quest to control, surveil, and differentiate populations? Per Max Weber's classic formulation, the state is the monopoly of the legitimate use of physical force (Weber 1947), totalizing fantasy at once impossible to realize and yet utterly essential for statecraft to imagine. But law is not simply unitary instrument to shape subjectivities, ideology, and cultural life. As Rosemary Coombe argues, law is nothing less than the authoritative means and medium of cultural politics in which the social is articulated. This social world itself must be represented, performatively expressed, and institutionally inscribed (1998, 36). Law then is also simultaneously social, cultural, and political process, and one that leaves behind genealogy of artifacts that help us to unpack the forces behind these modes of social regulation, ranging from outright coercion, to spontaneous consent, and counterhegemonic dissidence (Gewirtz 1996, 3). But if we begin our examination from within the courtroom, where law is interpreted, or even start our analysis within national political institutions, where law is drafted and executed, then our study falls prey to the tautological nature of state power: the law is the law because it is the law; it has distinct legal dialect, formal procedures, and institutional avenues. Hegemonic power is always self-referential But the legal sphere especially strives for autonomy and relies on its ability to strictly separate those actions backed by the coercive apparatus of the state from those that are not. Let literature borrow from law and life . . . but let law develop its own and structure and editing, declares Alan Dershowitz (1996, 104-5) in his polemic against the use of popular narrative as one strategy to combat systematic exclusions in the courtroom. For Dershowitz, the fantastic and the imaginary are external to law and should be permanently expunged in favor of the real, which exist as distinct category if there can be potential for justice. Richard Sherwin, too, worries about policing the borders between law and its other, popular culture. When Law Goes Pop overflows with concerns about systemic corruption, potential imbalance, and the negative effects of artificially enhanced passions, all pop-culturally driven tendencies that might potentially lead to a state of affairs ... in which tyranny rules (Sherwin 2000, 240-41). Sherwin observes that the culture industries progressively invade the courtroom, with an immeasurable capacity to shape popular legal consciousness and even judicial interpretation. One consequence, he suggests, is that justices, lawyers, and jurors alike are increasingly prone to conflate fiction with reality. Although Sherwin disavows the possibility of total separation between popular culture and law, he does believe that the sheer proliferation of visual imagery in film, television, and on the Internet may have permanently forced law to tipping point where it no longer finds legitimacy or consistency exclusively within its own domain. …

Regulation Theory and the EU

Regulation Theory (RT) approaches have had considerable success in explaining how social institutions have sustained capitalist regimes of accumulation in modern industrial economies. But they have been criticized for an excessive dependence on technological determinism in explaining change, as ignoring political conflicts over recognition (as opposed to redistribution) and as failing to incorporate changes in the international or global political economy in the sustenance and reform of domestic social compromise. This paper examines the EU as a mode of social regulation from a political science perspective. The paper examines recent developments in RT in the light of literature on European integration and finds that rights – civic, political, social and economic – are a focus of both literatures. RT rights are seen as a way of legitimating forms of capitalist accumulation and in political science as a way of integrating societies. It then examines the distribution of rights between the national and European level in the Fordist and then the post-Fordist period to examine the impact of changes in the distribution of rights on the government of member states. The paper concludes that by examining what modes of social regulation do (legitimating certain embedded strategic responses) as opposed to what they are (configurations of institutions), changes in regime of accumulation can be described over long historical periods and across diverse societal contexts. It also suggests that the supranational level has had a far more significant impact on the maintenance of domestic societal compromises than previously acknowledged.

Post-Fordism, beyond National Models: The Main Challenges for Regulation Theory

This paper discusses the challenges to Regulation Theory (RT) that are presented by post-national modes of accumulation. It begins by introducing to RT's core analytical foundations a mode of social regulation and its explanation of the regime of accumulation. The paper then examines how, despite clear asymmetries, the stability of the international system supported domestic accumulation. Because of this, RT only really addressed the international from the perspective of the nation state, and with only limited engagement with North–South issues. While some authors did address the international system, the greater instability of the 1970s combined domestic regime change with greater international insecurity. Up to the collapse of the Berlin Wall, new political ideologies and economic ideals challenged the nation-based Keynesian compromise while greater trade from the South and greater financial liberalisation fundamentally altered the international environment. Various approaches to the post-Fordist international regime are discussed, including that of a financial regime, and the conclusion identifies some of the areas for future research.

Marketing the Eikaiwa Wonderland: Ideology, Akogare, and Gender Alterity in English Conversation School Advertising in Japan

The English conversation school ( eikaiwa) industry in Japan has grown significantly over the past twenty-five years. In this paper I perform a semiological analysis on a set of eikaiwa promotional materials gathered in Tokyo and Kanagawa during the period 1998–2002. This analysis relies on a framework of social modalities (Rose, 2001 Visual Methodologies Sage, London) within which a set of gendered Occidentalized longings ( akogare) is discussed. Career development, establishment of relationships with white males, and the potentials for foreign travel and study are highlighted by these eikaiwa promotions. These factors are presented as radical gender alterities that work against the social modalities encountered in Japan. These modalities include a set of rigid life-course expectations and a mode of social regulation that strongly directs women's professional and personal development. While English-language learning and use contain potentials for epistemological challenge to ideologies of gender, the eikaiwa visually emphasize the development of new selfhood ( atarashii jibun). In these promotions key signification is performed by white-male and Japanese-female pairings. According to Kelsky (2001 Women on the Verge Duke University Press, Durham, NC), the white male is represented as an agent of personal transformation and liberation associated with the development of new selfhood. The white male embodies an Occidentalist fantasy that is associated with personal freedom, career development, and individuation. Simultaneously, the promotions articulate with the valorization of female agency in the broader Japanese cultural sphere, and with what Kelsky (1999, page 238) terms “emergent erotic discourses of new selfhood”. Where women are featured, in contrast to Western promotional materials, their purpose is to appeal to other women. This is accomplished by presenting famous women in professionally iconic settings. When they do appear, Japanese males are infantalized and marginalized. The eikaiwa are therefore marketed as wonderlands, rich with radical gender alterities, within which the akogare of female students can be realized.

Compromising positions: emergent neo‐Fordisms and embedded gender contracts

This paper adopts a regulation framework to chart the emergence of neo-Fordism as a flexible accumulation regime and mode of social regulation. Neo-Fordism relies on old Fordist principles as well as incorporating new models of emergent post-Fordisms; old and new social relationships, in their particular combination, specify the trajectory of national variants. I argue that Fordist bargains institutionalized the terms of a compromise between labour, capital and the state. These bargains embedded a male-breadwinner gender contract compromising women's positions and standardizing employment contracts around the needs, interests and authority of men. A focus on compromises and contracts makes visible the differentiated gender effects of work transformation in each country.

Sage Scrub Revolution? Property Rights, Political Fragmentation, and Conservation Planning in Southern California under the Federal Endangered Species Act

In the U.S., conservation planning under the federal Endangered Species Act (ESA) has increasingly applied to species and habitats located on private property in urbanizing regions. Under the ESAs Section 10(a), habitat conservation plans (HCPs) provide mechanisms for local governments, private landowners, and other stakeholders to proceed with development plans while at the same time undertaking conservation measures for federally listed species. Using a “reconstructed urban regime theory” approach to local policymaking, this paper examines the development of a subregional HCP for the protection of the federally listed Stephens’ Kangaroo Rat (SKR) in western Riverside County, Southern California. Empirically, we demonstrate problems of incorporating property externalities into a subregional planning process and the various ways in which landowners and local progrowth interests have mobilized in response to HCPs developed within the federal ESA framework. Theoretically, we emphasize uneven development within Southern California's suburban-oriented mode of social regulation, which also provides a structural context for evaluating recent moves toward multispecies and ecosystem planning under the State of California’s Natural Communities Conservation Planning (NCCP) framework. A pilot NCCP program for the coastal sage scrub ecosystem is fragmenting into a loosely coordinated amalgam of subregional HCPs developed under diverse local policy regimes. The paper critically discusses the extent to which ecosystem planning in Southern California represents a revolution in the role of the U.S. government in managing conflicts arising from conservation measures on private property in urbanizing regions.

Regulating Investment Abroad: The Political Economy of the Regionalization of Singaporean Firms

This paper attempts to understand the regionalization of national firms from Singapore within the methodological construct of the regulationist perspective. It aims to demonstrate the usefulness of some concepts in the regulationist perspective for explaining restructuring processes in developing countries, and to evaluate critically the role of some of these concepts—such as regimes of accumulation and modes of social regulation—in illuminating the internationalization of capital through transnational corporations and their associated foreign direct investment. In particular, the paper argues that Singapore's export‐led regime of accumulation manifests inherent contradictions in its dependence on foreign capital, the domination of the domestic economy by state‐owned enterprises, and the relative underdevelopment of indigenous entrepreneurship. While this accumulation process was embedded in an earlier set of social and institutional mechanisms, its contradictions and tensions were not appropriately regulated and contained. When Singapore experienced two major external economic crises in the mid‐1970s and 1985, these shocks and their internal tensions triggered a continuous process of economic restructuring regulated by a distinct combination of social and institutional mechanisms, or “fixes.” One such institutional fix in recent years has been the promotion of the regionalization of Singaporean firms through the social regulation of local labor markets and the state‐led establishment of institutions to facilitate the regionalization drive.

The French mode of social regulation and sustainable tourism development: The case of Disneyland Paris

The Walt Disney Company located its European resort in the French new town of Marne‐La‐Vallée because it is centrally located relative to a market of 310 million potential visitors. The French Government sought to anchor this circuit of cultural capital in Ile‐de‐France to sustain the economic growth of the region while capturing public amenities (jobs, tax revenues and increased foreign currency reserves) without sacrificing the environment. Its forward planning enabled it to offer the acreage the private company required and to sign with it a Convention to ensure that this urbanizing landscape would not become prematurely derelict. This large investment was regulated by both national and European norms for environmental impacts. These impacts are broadly interpreted to include jobs, demographic characteristics and built structures, not just the natural environment. Regulation theory provided the conceptual framework for this study. It is the particular mode of social regulation found in France which led to the settlement of the Walt Disney Company in the country and which ensured its durable insertion in the Francilian environment. Privatization and restrictions on governmental actions were not yet part of the French mode of social regulation. The Walt Disney Company is now negotiating for further developments that should sustain the economic growth of the eastern part of the region and enhance the quality of its environment.

Governing Massachusetts: Uneven Development and Politics in Metropolitan Boston

This paper analyzes governance and politics in Massachusetts in the 1980s and 1990s. Using a regulationist analysis of the “mode of social regulation” as well as urban regime theory’s emphasis on governing coalitions, we show how spatial restructuring has transformed governing coalitions, governance structures, and local politics. Empirically, we note the importance of the Greater Boston area to the Commonwealth’s recent economic recovery but point to the lack of regional governance capacity. Political fragmentation and territorial conflict continue to frustrate the development of more coherent governing coalitions and governance structures at the state, regional, and local levels. Theoretically, we stress how conditions internal to local economies contribute to their structural incoherence. This contrasts with the regulationist emphasis on external conditions, including globalization and the failure of national states to manage uneven development.

Institutions, Alternative Farming Systems, and Local Reregulation

The weakening of the postwar nexus of a productivist agriculture and a distinctive system of regulating the rural economy has created new challenges for British rural institutions. The task of diversifying rural and farm economies has required the institutions to change how they operate. Using the concept of the local mode of social regulation (MSR) we explore the interrelationships between the development of alternative farming systems and the institutional regulatory environment, using as a case study an area in northern England. We conclude by demonstrating how institutions cope with new policy challenges. The diversity of local responses to this challenge is illustrated and the links between local and national MSRs are explored.

Gender, Race, and Class in the Local Welfare State: Moving beyond Regulation Theory in Analysing the Transition from Fordism

In this paper we attempt to provide a conceptual framework which can help inform our analysis and understanding of current transformations taking place within the welfare state. We argue that the French school of regulationist literature, though able to provide a broad frame of reference for analysing contemporary shifts in economy and society, needs to be supplemented by an analysis which focuses on the racialised and gendered character of the welfare state. In the paper the ways in which the ‘universal’ welfare state has operated to exclude minorities and marginalised groups are charted, and we argue that in practice the Fordist mode of social regulation (MSR) operating in Britain generated a hierarchy of oppression. This hierarchy was constituted through the relations of class, race, and gender, and we show how these are currently being redefined as the British state seeks to mediate the crisis tendencies inherent in the Fordist MSR.