National Constellation Research Articles

Book Review: Regimes of Belonging – Schools – Migrations: Teaching in (Trans)National Constellations

Book Review: Regimes of Belonging – Schools – Migrations: Teaching in (Trans)National Constellations

ASSEMBLAGE OF MEMORY: ON THE STRUCTURE, PROCESS AND CREATIVITY IN COLLECTIVE MEMORY

The article is aimed at presenting and discussing the theoretical concept of assemblage of memory inspired by and grounded in the creative work done in connection with social research within the framework of participatory theatre. Based on three projects of this kind that I have collaborated on over the last couple of years, all taking memory as their theme, The Method of National Constellations (2014–2016), Prayer: A Common Theatre (2016–2017), and Bieżenki (2018), the concept draws both on artistic, and sociological thinking. An assemblage of memory could be roughly described as a product of creativity, which is constructed using “found” materials, such as stories, images, emotions, behaviours, objects, people even, to compose a new meaningful entity. This is congruent with what became to be known as the assemblage theory, started by Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, who suggested that social phenomena, such as collective memory, one could add, should be viewed as dynamic and heterogeneous arrangements of a variety of elements, material and immaterial, natural and artificial, human and non-human, that are dependent on the connections between them rather than their intrinsic qualities. Thus, an assemblage of memory cannot be accessed through text-oriented methodologies that still seem to predominate the humanities (with its focus on the witness and testimony), but requires innovative, creative procedures, which, as exemplified by the above mentioned theatrical projects, are capable of revealing its structure and dynamics.

Globalisation, postnationalism and Australia

Postnational institutions and identities are products of globalisation. How far along the ‘postnational’ road the world has travelled is debatable. In the early 2000s Habermas referred to an emerging ‘post national constellation’. While the nation-state is still an important institutional form, postnational identities and experiences challenge the boundaries of nation-states, and also national identities. Cosmopolitanism as an outlook, set of predispositions and practices is often seen as postnational, and celebrated as such, since it implies the embrace of humanity beyond nation. To what extent have national identities (as opposed to other kinds of identities) been threatened, undermined or superseded by postnational identities? To what extent is the postnational a utopian hope for a cosmopolitan future, and to what extent is the postnational already upon us – whether we recognise it or not? What are the most convincing examples of postnationalism? This article addresses such questions, with a focus on Australia.

Innovations in innovation policy: reconstructing the emergence, legitimation and dynamics of cluster policies in Germany

Cluster policies are but one of the most well-known policy tools tosteer innovation in the realm of science and technology policy. While there is much research on the effects of cluster based funding for innovation and scholarly strategies, little is said about its emergence, its legitimation and its situatedness in societal discourses and professional practices. This article applies an ‘instrument constituencies’ perspective on cluster policies in science and innovation. Drawing on the case of Germany, it is argued that these policy instruments are not only legitimated by an academic literature but that their introduction also depended on very specific national constellations shaping the uptake of the instrument. It is also shown that the construction of the instrument cannot be separated from its implementation, thus contributing to the emergence of new communities of practice.

The geo-biographies of spatial knowledge: regional planning from Israel to Sierra Leone and back

This article examines the flow of spatial knowledge in different locations and territorial scales, focusing on the geographies of regional planning and its transplantation in the work of two Israeli planners, Arie and Ursula Oelsner. We argue that too often, researchers focus on the movement of spatial knowledge from Western countries to developing countries. We shed light on alternative ways in which this traffic follows different models, that are related to specific political and national constellations. Based on historical study and a thick description of two projects in Israel and Africa planned by these two Israeli planners, we show that spatial knowledge is not only the generator of discourse and of the professional community partaking in it, but also traverses space, crossing national borders and geographies. This dynamic, we suggest, has a politics of its own, as part of its movement and development within the global space, particularly in the movement between first and third worlds.

Inside the sausage factory: Decision-making in Israel’s national security policy

This essay examines three recent books by Israeli experts (two in Hebrew) dealing with structure and processes of the Israeli national security constellation, and common themes raised. These include the weakness of Israel’s Government and Security Cabinet in national security affairs; the quasi-presidential role of prime ministers in these issues and their preference for less formalized decision-making processes, based on subcabinet groups and personal staff; the preeminence of the military (including its often moderating influence) in staff and planning processes, and the parallel weakness of civilian bodies; and the disputable effects of the newish National Security Staff, meant to ameliorate the problems of the system. The essay concludes that while the problems presented may not be solvable, understanding of the structure and process is important, in order to manage expectations from them, as well as know how they can be negotiated and ‘played’ in order to get things done.

Charting the EU–national strategic constellation: understanding EU strategy through member states’ strategic partnerships—an analysis of the Czech case

That the national foreign policies of EU member states impact on the EU’s strategy and strategic performance as a (global) foreign policy actor is not in doubt. But how this happens is a different matter. In analysing EU strategy, national foreign policies are often reduced to their (non-)alignment with that of the EU. This not only de-strategises them but also obscures the range of ways in which member states reinforce or undercut the EU’s strategic actor-ness, particularly those involving relations between member states. We address this gap by zooming in on one such way: member states’ bilateral strategic partnerships. We provide a newly comprehensive conceptualisation of strategic partnerships and employ this to analyse their role in the ‘EU–national strategic constellation’, focusing on Czech strategic partnerships—with both EU and non-EU states. This analysis shows the latent political as well as analytical potential of this underexplored aspect of EU strategy.

Can Global Navigation Satellite Systems Signals Qualify to Become a World Public Good?

Abstract The article will first review how and why banal use of global navigation satellite systems (GNSS) has spread so fast, briefly describing the main sectors of the market, basically shared between location-based services and road transportation, and massively dominated by smartphones and car devices. It will then analyze if the characteristics of a world public good defined as a nonrivalrous, nonexcludable, and universal resource, good, or service, the exploitation or the preservation of which can justify a collective international action, are applicable to GNSS open signals. Looking at the GNSS primary resource production, no particular international action is taken today and will likely continue that way until 2020 when only three countries and the EU will generate free GNSS signals destined for a global coverage, each of them preserving full control of its own resource. The dual use of the national constellations, managed by their respective ministry of defense, does not favor right away a collec...

Shifting boundaries and flexible identities within a multicultural Canada

This analysis probes the evolution of Canadian multiculturalism within the national political constellation which in turn is influenced by global geopolitical trends. Rather than narrowly focusing on how and what is being taught under the rubric multiculturalism, falsely taking curricula or vacuous educational manifestos at face value, we describe the political background of Canadian multiculturalism. We contrast the pronouncements of the Canadian state with the sociological facts on the ground and we compare the Canadian situation with similar discourses and divergent developments in Europe, after locating each in their historical context. Canadian multiculturalism so far can be considered a largely unrecognized success story, not because of shrewd government intervention to integrate immigrants, but because the Canadian structural diversity made recognition of divergent identities the most feasible option to avoid conflict.

Running the big city: the Dutch prewar mayoralty under construction

This article discusses the development of the mayoralty in the Netherlands during the first decades of the twentieth century. It will be argued that during the interwar years the mayors' position was in transition, with mayors developing new ways to exert public influence – a development that until now has been associated with the postwar mayor-managers. A case study of mayors in Amsterdam – in particular interwar mayor Willem de Vlugt (1921–1941) – Rotterdam and The Hague during the interwar years will show how changes and shifts in the local and national political constellations and power relations as well as socioeconomic developments both curbed and opened up possibilities for the mayor to adjust his position. At the same time, it will be shown how the mayoralty itself was transformed through the emergence of mayors whose personal and political background differed from their early twentieth-century predecessors.

Bionetworking: experimental stem cell therapy and patient recruitment in India

Over the last three to four years, an increasing number of private and public sector tertiary level hospitals and research centres in India have been using stem cell therapy, especially adult stem cell therapy, in the guise of experimental therapy for a variety of medical conditions. The promotion and growth of this experimental field across local and national borders traverses regulatory, ethical, social and financial boundaries. In this complex context, the article examines how healthcare centres in India negotiate bio-medical and health care circumstances in promoting a therapy that raises questionable medical, technical and ethical issues. The process of promoting experimental stem cell therapy is explained here by employing the concept of bionetworking and illustrated by two case studies of hospital groups. The case studies show how through bionetworking a centre creates and maintains novel networks of mutual exchanges with other collaborative bodies situated in local, national and global relations of inequality. Drawing on a three-month period of fieldwork and interviews in various locations in India, this article shows that: (1) Questionable stem cell therapy is promoted through bionetworks that resonate across local, national and global constellations; (2) Regulatory gaps facilitate the growth of such therapeutic practices; (3) The experimental stem cell therapies augment the healthcare divide in Indian society; (4) The weakening Indian state facilitates commercialisation of health, indirectly supporting the ‘bionetworking’ practices of therapy providers.

Management Accounting on the Regulatory Agenda? The Transnational and Local Arenas of Financial Reporting Change in Britain

This qualitative study investigates societal and historical settings, which enabled proposals for mandatory narrative reporting on a business' underlying non-financial and future-oriented success factors in an Operating and Financial Review (OFR) to become a key issue on British Company Law reform-agenda in 1998 to 2006. The analysis argues that accounting regulation reform is shaped by a wide range of non-accounting disciplines that intersect with accounting at a certain moment in history. The British accounting reform debates are seen in relation to other national and arenas of discourse to explain how ideas of future-oriented narrative reporting that have been discussed among British accounting professionals for more than 30 years gained momentum in public regulatory activity after further evolution through history. The analysis begins with a review of British proposals for inclusion of accounting narratives in financial reporting-regulation since mid-1970s, and argues that regulatory reform-initiatives in accounting are also shaped by a wide range of non-accounting disciplines that intersect with accounting at a certain moment in history. The study then outlines a locally detached constellation of overlapping problem-discourses in corporate social responsibility (CSR), strategic management, and management accounting in light of new global competition during 1980s, which challenged and expanded commonly agreed notions of appropriate accounting practice to integrated strategic financial and non-financial performance measurement. The translation of this transnational frame of reference into financial reporting regulation reform-proposals is then traced in British accounting reform agents' problem-discourses on financial reporting in mid-1990s. Financial reporting standard setters, corporate governance reformers, and public policy think tanks drew on expanding conceptions of accounting beyond the numbers to address problems of international economic competitiveness and a lack of trust in national corporate governance and financial reporting systems. Their particular critique on traditional financial reporting seemed to parallel relevance lost thesis in management accounting. The study concludes that presentation of non-financial and future-oriented reporting as a solution to bigger problems of international economic competitiveness and a lack of trust in national corporate governance systems stabilised a national constellation of debates in financial reporting, public policy-making, and corporate governance as much that a regulatory space for introduction of mandatory OFR could eventually emerge. The genealogy of OFR as an issue for public regulation provides basis for further examination of dynamics of actors and ideas within a regulatory space over term of British Company Law Review from 1998 to 2006.

1 Reconfiguring the national constellation

The influence of the state on the trajectory of human lives is more comprehensive and sustained than that of any other organizational construct. We provide a definition of the modern nation-state in four intersecting dimensions – resources, law, legitimacy, and welfare – and review the history and status of each dimension, focusing on the fusion of nation and state in the 19th century, and the development of the ‘national constellation’ of institutions in the 20th. We then assess the fate of the nation-state after the Second World War and, with western OECD countries as our sample, track the rise and decline of its Golden Age through its prime in the 1960s and early 1970s. Finally, we identify the challenges confronting the nation-state of the 21st century, and use the analyses in the following eight essays to produce some working hypotheses about its current and future trajectory – namely, that the changes over the past 40 years are not merely creases in the fabric of the nation-state, but rather an unravelling of the finely woven national constellation of its Golden Age. Nor does there appear to be any standard, interwoven development of its four dimensions on the horizon. However, although an era of structural uncertainty awaits us, it is not uniformly chaotic. Rather, we see structured, but asymmetric change in the make-up of the state, with divergent transformations in each of its four dimensions. In general, nation-states are clinging to tax revenues and monopolies on the use of force, such that the resource dimension may change slowly if at all; the rule of law appears to be moving consistently into the international arena; the welfare dimension is headed in every direction, with privatization, internationalization, supra-nationalization, and defence of the national status quo, occurring at various rates for healthcare, pensions, public utilities, consumer protection, etc. in different countries. How, and whether, the democratic legitimacy of political processes will be ensured in such an incongruent, if not incoherent and paradoxical state is still unclear.

Making Politics, Making History: Chiefship and the Post-Apartheid State in Namibia*

Since the early part of the twentieth century, a long-standing factional dispute in Kaokoland, Namibia has conditioned not only local internal political processes, but also the relationship between Kaokolanders and the national ruling regime of the day. Under the South African regime, the dispute manifested and perpetuated itself through colonial practices of indirect rule; it generated a dynamic set of politico-ethnic formations; and it helped manufacture competing chiefships in the region. Since independence in 1990, the conflict has been implicated in national party politics, international development initiatives, and the government’s recognition of traditional authorities. Despite the political overtones, local leaders and ordinary people vehemently deny any overlap between these ‘traditional’ institutions and the practice of politics. The Kaokoland case is a complex one, but by peeling through the layers we can consider a number of important issues relating to colonial and postcolonial rule in Africa: the legacy and continuity of colonial divide and rule practices; the politics of ‘history’ and ‘tradition’; political conceptions of ethnicity; and autochthonous discourses of belonging. Most significantly, however, the article offers an ethnographic perspective on Mahmood Mamdani's notion of the bifurcated state. In practice, Namibian state bifurcation appears less distinct than his model suggests. Kaokoland's micro-politics takes root in the state, and, conversely, the Namibian state finds root in local political processes. Here, we see a symbiosis between local and national politics, between chiefs and political party politicians, and between the traditional authorities and central government. The Kaokoland case reveals how local and national power constellations infuse one another, and the extent to which traditional authorities and the state are mutually constitutive.

The TranState Research Centre

What is the state of the state? The members of the national Research Centre Transformations of the State (TranState) at the University of Bremen use the contrast with the OECD nation-state during its ‘Golden Age’ in the 1960s and early '70s to study the rapidly changing interface between international and domestic politics, and between public and private governance. Studies currently underway at TranState confront the changes in the tightly woven fabric of the twentieth-century western, multi-functional state, which emerged after World War II with the functional amalgamation at the national level of the Territorial State, the state that assures the Rule of Law, the Democratic State, and the Intervention State. This functional definition is expressed in the acronym TRUDI.Both TranState research and the contributions to this volume are aligned along TRUDI's four dimensions of statehood: resources (financial, means of force), rule of law, (democratic) legitimacy, and welfare. These dimensions developed over four centuries and merged, during the ‘Golden Age’, in one institution, the nation-state. Since then, however, processes of globalization, denationalization, privatization as well as individualization have initiated a new dynamic. The finely woven national constellation of the Golden Age state is coming apart – it is unravelling. Yet though an era of structural uncertainty is ahead, not everything is in flux. We may see structured asymmetric change in the make-up of the state, with divergent transformations in each of its four dimensions. TranState aims at accounting empirically for these transformations since the mid-1970s; explaining them and their dynamics; and, finally, determining how these transformations affect the provision of public goods such as security, the rule of law, democratic legitimacy, or welfare provision.

‘Eyes wide shut’: reconceptualizing the Asian crisis

Rather than seeing the spectacular collapse of stock and currency markets in East and Southeast Asia in 1997-98 as a financial crisis caused by imprudent banking practices and ‘crony capitalism,’ this article argues that the economic meltdown was a symptom of the collapse of the social coalitions underpinning the developmental states. The first section charts the contours of these social alliances between the late 1940s and the mid 1980s. The second section demonstrates that though the creation of a regional division of labor had enabled these economies to withstand the debt crisis, the progressive trans-border expansion of corporate production and procurement networks rendered national industrial policies increasingly incoherent. It charts how governments were able to paper over cracks in their domestic social alliances through debt-financed industrial expansion till the mid-1990s. Finally, the last section highlights emerging tensions in the different national constellations of power and privilege.