National Political Economy Research Articles

Merging Worklife Organizational Innovation and Educational Programs: Promoting Continuous Adaptations to the Global Economy

AbstractThis essay honors the accomplishments of Morten Levin both by analyzing some of the key innovative educational programs he created and by extending the elements of that analysis to two other cases, that of Aker Solutions and the Mondragon Cooperatives. We acknowledge that the relationship between higher education institutions and manufacturing-service-public sector organizations is multiplex and has undergone multiple transformations over the decades. It is also affected by the national political economy and the scope and diversity of the higher education sector itself. Creating sustained and yet dynamic relations among these actors in service of both higher education and the efficacy and innovativeness of worklife organizations is a significant challenge which all the cases we present have addressed with some success. What the efforts have in common is a democratizing action research built on an ethos and worldview of the benefits of collaboration and co-creation, and organizational capabilities built on Actor Network strategies to promote collaboration and innovation as a way of adapting to the rapidly changing world conditions effectively. We argue that there are many more such examples in existence and that a key role for action research is to document them, show how more collaborative and adaptive organizational processes are possible and show how neoliberal New Public Management is an authoritarian “wrong turn” with dire consequences. Ultimately, this essay is an argument against the “iron cage” view of bureaucracy as always coercive and stultifying and show that it is not bureaucracy but the authoritarian approaches to creating coercive bureaucracies that destroy organizational collaborations and innovation.

“Capacity for Labor,” Work, and Disability in the Early Republic, 1791–1833

Abstract: In the northeastern cities of the early United States, healthy, physically versatile workers were few and far between. Even as employers and welfare administrators experimented with the emerging bureaucratic categories “disabled” and “able-bodied” to delineate workers and non-workers, the unpredictability and fluidity of the population’s health resisted simple classification. This article argues that, between the 1790s and 1830s, the architects of the early national political economy were keenly aware of workers’ varied capacity for labor. Early advocates even argued that manufacturing work would prove more accessible to groups they believed had not been “usefully” employed in the colonial economy—namely, women, children, the elderly, and those with illnesses and impairments. When this did not prove to be the case, welfare administrators retained a commitment to flexible labor in their organization of poor-relief structures and institutions. Bringing disability into the narrative complicates scholars’ long-held assumptions about the rationale directing early manufacturing, poor relief, and institutional practices. The early republican period is crucial both to the emergence of disability as an (albeit unstable) social category and the formation of the antebellum American labor force and welfare system.

US technological statecraft towards China

PurposeThis study aims to define a “technological statecraft” concept to distinguish tech-based measures/sanctions from an array of economic measures ranging from restrictions of rare earth elements and natural gas supplies to asset freezes under the wider portfolio of economic statecraft. This concept is practically intended to reveal the USA’s “logic of choice” in its employment of technology as an efficient instrument to deal with China in the context of the great power rivalry.Design/methodology/approachThis study follows David A. Baldwin’s statecraft definition and conceptualization methodology, which relies on “means” rather than “ends.” In addition to Baldwin and as an incremental contribution to his economic statecraft analysis, this study also combines national political economy with statecraft analysis with a particular focus on the utilization of technological measures against China during the Trump administration.FindingsThe US rationale for choosing technology, namely, emerging and foundational technologies, in its rivalry against China is caused at least by two factors: the nature of the external challenge and the characteristics of the US innovation model based largely on radical innovations. To deal with China, the USA practically distinguished the role of advanced technology and followed a grammer of technological statecraft as depicted in the promulgated legal texts during the Trump administration.Originality/valueDespite a growing volume of literature on economic statecraft and technological competition, studies focusing on countries’ “logic of choice” with regard to why and under what conditions they choose financial, technological or commodity-based sanctions/measures/controls are lacking. Inspired from Baldwin’s account on the “logic of choice” from among alternative statecrafts (i.e. diplomacy, military, economic statecraft, and propaganda). This study will contribute to the literature with a clear lens to demonstrate the “logic of choice” from among a variety of economic statecraft measures in the case of the US technological statecraft toward China.

Three waves of schooling marketization in urban China amid changing political economy since the 1990s

Schooling marketization is a global syndrome characterizing post-1980 societies. However, while many studies have examined the political economy and politics of schooling marketization in Western economies, China’s schooling marketization remains insufficiently understood. Moreover, the existing studies have the analytical tendency to fall into the trap of methodological nationalism, with an exclusive focus on the state restructuring under neoliberalism and neoliberal globalization, leading to schooling marketization being viewed as a static and locally homogeneous practice. This paper fills these gaps by developing a city-level and time-sensitive analysis of local practices of marketizing the urban schooling system in the post-reform age. Two cities in western China—Chengdu and Mianyang—are taken as cases for comparative analysis. We found three waves of schooling marketization in urban China that are driven by the changes in the political economy between the 1980s and 2010s. Through a cross-fertilization of the outward-looking approach to geographies of education and geographic political economy, we understand China’s schooling marketization as a state-mediated institutional transformation that is employed to serve the local economic restructuring/time-varying urban growth strategy, which is staged by the changing (inter)national political economy.

Societal Interest in The Policy Making Process: Study of Singapore’s Political Institutions Under Prime Minister Lee Hsien Loong

This study will discuss the mainstreaming of public interest in economic policy making under the government of Prime Minister Lee Hsien Loong and the ruling People’s Action Party (PAP). Policy making, especially in making political-economic policies, is very unified and interesting, namely the public choice method, where the government or policy-making actors collect ideas that are used as national and international political economy policies based on the interests of the community through interaction with the political institutions of the People’s Action Party as a party that has been in power in Singapore since 1959. Multiracial political policies provide a change in perspective on the differences between the minority and the majority in making economic policies that tend to have no differences or barriers. The method used in this detailed study uses a systematic literature review. This research uses descriptive qualitative research method. The results show that the mainstreaming of public interest in Singapore’s economic policy making has a positive impact on the Singaporean economy. Significant economic growth is supported by the development of good public education. Keywords: Society Interest; Political Institution; Economic Policy; People’s Action Party

The impact of indigenous culture and business group affiliation on corporate governance of African firms

AbstractResearch Question/IssueThis is a study of the relationship between business group ownership and constituent firms' adoption of Anglo‐American shareholder value governance in African firms at the undertaking of an initial public offering (IPO).Research Findings/InsightsWe find business group ownership to be associated with lower Anglo‐American corporate governance adoption by constituent firms. However, this association is reversed in the institutional context of higher tribalism, while correspondingly being exacerbated in the context of lower tribalism.Theoretical/Academic ImplicationsWe theorize that the influence of business group ownership on firms' adoption of Anglo‐American corporate governance is better understood when considering the institutional context. We highlight how informal cultural institutions are heterogeneous and thus shape the indigenous political economy and impact business groups. Specifically, we argue institutional contexts with higher tribalism are associated with more in‐group favoritism and nepotism. This association makes it critical for business group constituent firms to escape the constraints of the political economy of tribalism when attracting outside funding, leading to a higher inclination to adopt Anglo‐American governance. Contrastingly, in lower tribalism contexts, there is more universal trust across societies and an increased availability of domestic funding.Practitioner/Policy ImplicationsGiven the proliferation of business group ownership within economies worldwide, the study provides a useful framework with which to gauge the influence of business group ownership on a constituent firm's adoption of Anglo‐American governance best practice. In particular, the study emphasizes that the interdependence of formal institutional architecture and tribalism—both fundamentally associated with the demographic shape and with the incentive structures embedded within the underlying national political economy—calls for careful considerations when making national corporate governance recommendations.

What did COVID-19 really teach us about science, evidence and society?

What did COVID-19 really teach us about science, evidence and society?

Ways and Means: Lincoln and His Cabinet and the Financing of the Civil War by Roger Lowenstein, and: Bonds of War: How Civil War Financial Agents Sold the World on the Union by David K. Thomson

Reviewed by: Ways and Means: Lincoln and His Cabinet and the Financing of the Civil War by Roger Lowenstein, and: Bonds of War: How Civil War Financial Agents Sold the World on the Union by David K. Thomson Joseph P. Reidy (bio) Ways and Means: Lincoln and His Cabinet and the Financing of the Civil War. Roger Lowenstein. New York: Penguin Press, 2022. ISBN 978-0735223554. 448 pp., cloth, $30.00. Bonds of War: How Civil War Financial Agents Sold the World on the Union. David K. Thomson. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2022. ISBN 978-1-4696-6661-7. 288 pp., paper, $29.95. During the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, European monarchs faced the challenge of identifying reliable sources of revenue to underwrite overseas adventures and defend their far-flung territories from internal and external foes. In the age of revolution, leaders of successful anti-republican movements fared similarly [End Page 112] as they maneuvered to consolidate their power. Whether in the interest of kings or commoners, regimes at war resorted to one or more of the following fiscal strategies: borrowing, taxing, and increasing the money supply. After Fort Sumter, Union and Confederate planners followed suit as they committed their respective societies to all-out warfare in the industrial age. By 1865, federal officials were spending more than $1.3 billion annually, twenty times the prewar level, and the federal deficit of more than $2.6 billion was more than forty times the 1860 total. The Confederate central and state governments amassed $1.5 billion in debt over the course of the war. Though different in certain respects, Roger Lowenstein’s Ways and Means and David K. Thomson’s Bonds of War cover similar ground and, in fact, complement each other. Lowenstein has authored several best-selling books that focus on business and financial topics past and present and that draw largely from secondary works, printed primary sources, and Internet-accessible manuscript collections. With engaging prose, he spins a fast-paced and riveting tale of oversized personalities and dramatic turning points. He explores not only how effective fiscal management supported military operations but also how battlefield setbacks—such as George B. McClellan’s embarrassing Peninsula Campaign of spring 1862—weakened investors’ confidence in the cause. Whereas Lowenstein’s view of Civil War finances is panoramic, Thomson’s is microscopic. Bonds of War, Thomson’s revised doctoral dissertation, mines unpublished archival records in both the United States and European nations stretching from England to Turkey to understand the mechanics of the Union’s successful borrowing campaign. Although Thomson treats the recent historiography of American capitalism somewhat more closely than Lowenstein does, both authors write clearly and with stylistic flourish. Each author briefly surveys prewar national finances to suggest how ill-prepared both Union and Confederate strategists were for what lay ahead. Salmon P. Chase, the Republican former governor of Ohio, emerged as the guiding spirit of the Union’s fiscal planning, notwithstanding his relative inexperience in that area. Lowenstein explains how, following a cool rebuff from New York’s commercial bankers, Chase turned to Congress, which obligingly authorized the national government to issue bonds and print paper money (which became known as green-backs). Supplemental legislation designated the new currency as legal tender and established a network of national banks capitalized by federal bonds and committed to circulating the greenbacks. Despite Chase’s “innate conservatism,” the net effect of these changes was “revolutionary” (163). Additional measures opened Western lands to homesteaders, offered federal support for higher education to each state, and authorized construction of the Pacific railway. These measures not only won the war but also transformed the national political economy, opening [End Page 113] the door for the further westward expansion of European settler-colonialism, the emergence of New York City as the nation’s chief financial center, and the concentration of both political and economic power in the hands of the Northeastern industrial capitalist elite. For all its virtues, Lowenstein’s account falls short in accounting for the Confederacy’s fiscal strategy, casting it as a counterimage of failure against the Union’s model of success. Because the plantation interest and its proslavery ideology all but...

Beckett's Big House:Watt, Waste, and the Fiction of Irish Autonomy

AbstractHow can an economic model designed to eliminate waste produce nothing but? The answer, according to Samuel Beckett's Watt, can be found in the system of economic relations presupposed by the Anglo-Irish Big House novels that emerged after the 1800 Acts of Union. These novels, which contrasted the profligacy and neglect of absentee English landlords with the idealized social harmony and economic self-sufficiency of the homegrown Protestant Ascendency, allowed an Anglo-Irish readership to imagine a self-sustaining body politic, invulnerable to an unevenly developed empire's devastating cycles of scarcity and waste. The Big House in Watt is the estate of Mr. Knott, to which apparently “nothing could be added . . . and from it nothing taken away.” As his servant Watt discovers, however, the high quality of life inside the home is ensured by the continual production and export of detritus: human waste, leftover food, and pointless activity. The even-keeled manor house, moreover, lays waste to an ever-expanding network of territory and labor to feed itself. Drawing attention to the novelist's engagement with contemporary Irish economic policy, this essay shows how Beckett exploits the weaknesses of this model of national political economy to dismantle the form of the novel itself: Watt produces its own unassimilable waste in the form of aimless digressions and addenda. Rather than discard the exhausted form, as critical tradition would have it, Beckett releases his Big House novel to explore the exogenous play of wasteful contradictions and to overturn the genre's ideal equilibrium.

Reading Mozambique’s mega-project developmentalism through the workplace: evidence from Chinese and Brazilian investments

ABSTRACT Propelled by a commodities boom and expanding South–South investment, mega-projects have reshaped the politics of labour in many African settings. Reflecting on such dynamics, this article critically engages with questions of employment, skills development, and contestation re-configuring capital–labour encounters in the ‘Chinese’ and ‘Brazilian’ workplace in Mozambique. We analyse two mega-projects: the Maputo Ring Road, implemented by the China Road and Bridge Corporation, and the Moatize Coal Project, led by the Brazilian mining company, Vale SA. Engaging with the complex realities at project ground level, the article unpacks how workplace regimes and outcomes reflect an intricate, multi-scalar array of spatial encounters, sector-specific characteristics, and national political economies. For both cases, this is associated with common promises of development and prosperity for Mozambique. While such promises take on different ideational guises, we show that the Chinese and Brazilian workplaces expose, nonetheless, overlapping patterns of inequality, contention, and hostility, reinforced by broader vulnerabilities and imbalances in global production networks and the Mozambican political economy. By providing a ground-level reading of the multi-scalar forces at play in the workplace, this article sheds light on the relationship between emerging South–South global encounters, national political realities, and labour geographies in African contexts shaped by mega-projects.

Japan, Religion, History, Nation

I connect the invention of Japanese ‘religion’ since the Meiji era (1868–1912) with the invention of other modern imaginaries, particularly the Japanese Nation State and Japanese History. The invention of these powerful fictions in Japan was a specific, localised example of a global process. The real significance of this idea that religion has always existed in all times and places is that it normalises the idea of the non-religious secular as the arena of universal reason and progress. The invention of Japanese ‘religion’ had—and still has—a significant function in the wider, global context of colonial capital and the continual search for new ‘investment’ opportunities. Meiji Japan illustrates, in fascinating detail, a process of cognitive hegemony, and the way a globalising discourse on ‘progress’ transformed the plunder of colonial sites into a civilising mission. The idea that there is a universal type of practice, belief or institution called ‘religion’ as distinct from government, ‘politics’ or ‘science’ was not only new to Japan. It hardly existed in England or more widely in Protestant Europe and North America until the eighteenth or even 19th century. The idea of a secular constitutional nation state was only emergent in the late 18th century with the Declaration of Independence and the US Constitution. Most of Europe—including the colonial powers England and France—were still Christian confessional church states through most of the 19th century. The franchise was granted only to Christian men of substantial property, and denied to women, servants, wage labour, colonised subjects, and slaves. This critical, deconstructive narrative helps us to see more clearly the ideological function of the generic category of religion in the wider configuration of modern secular categories such as constitutional nation state, political economy, nature, history, and science. I also discuss the relation between History as a secular academic science, and the invention of ‘the Past’ in universal Time. I argue here that the invention of the Past by professional Historians has a significant role in transforming modern inventions such as ‘religion’ and the secular categories into the inherent and universal order of things, as though they have always been everywhere. I reveal this on-going process of ideological reproduction by close readings of some recent ‘histories of Japan’ and the way they uncritically construct ‘the Past’ in the terms of contemporary configurations.

Political Economy and Mental Health: A Reconsideration in Modern Era

Political economy can be considered as the shared field between economics, politics and sociology, and the mandatory mindset of politicians. Alternatively, everybody’s livelihood and socioeconomic status is in mutual relationship with governing policies. In line with the existing data, there is a clear relationship between socioeconomic status and mental health. So, it is one of the main tasks of every regime to handle the main fiscal challenges of its people with proper plans, and disregard its scheme or points. But unfortunately, and along with the available facts, a remarkable number of administrators around the world, whether in industrialized or unindustrialized countries, are oblivious with respect to main impressions or intentions of public livelihood, due to lack of confusion in their national political economy or sociopolitical intentions, and so they are part of the problem because they do not know, basically, that what they are working for and why they are among the officials. In the present article, the pragmatic concept and importance of political economy and its relationship with community mental health has been reviewed briefly.

Energizing Comparative Environmental Politics and Comparative Political Economy

Energizing Comparative Environmental Politics and Comparative Political Economy

National elections, sub-national growth: the politics of Turkey’s provincial economic dynamics under AKP rule

AbstractDespite a large body of work on the impacts of institutions on subnational growth and development, economic geographers have, in the last decades, frequently overlooked the role of politics and, in particular, that of national political economies. Drawing on the political science literature, the article argues that studying national political dynamics is still key to understand the cumulative process of uneven regional development. Using data from Turkey over the period 2004–2016, the article shows how national electoral politics and government actions have significantly affected provincial growth patterns. The impact is substantive and increases in election years. Results also suggest that the central government may have influenced sub-national growth trajectories in different ways, including boosting the construction sector and expanding public employment.

American Lucifers: The Dark History of Artificial Light, 1750–1865

American Lucifers: The Dark History of Artificial Light, 1750–1865

Graduate employability in Europe: the role of human capital, institutional reputation and network ties in European graduate labour markets

ABSTRACT The link between higher education and employment is central to the understanding of social stratification and social mobility. We use three theories to analyse the importance of education and credentials in recruitment decisions in European graduate labour markets: human capital (HC), network capital (NC) and reputational capital (RC) theory. Latent class modelling was applied to data from over 5,000 European private-sector companies to allow segmentation. The results identify four groups of companies using different HC, NC and RC mixes in the recruitment process. A ‘complementary effect’ was found between these forms of capital at the time of recruitment. Company classes, however, vary in their emphasis on different types of capital according to their characteristics. The article further contributes to the literature by exploring how national political economies relate to segmentation patterns, and questioning some of the central tenets of the Varieties of Capitalism literature.

What drives market construction for fair trade, organic, and GlobalGAP certification in the global citrus value chain? Evidence at the importer level in the Netherlands and the United States

AbstractBecause national governments have limited power to regulate the conditions of production abroad, voluntary certification schemes have come to play a significant role in transnational regulation of many global supply chains, particularly in the food sector, where multiple regulatory issues are in play and different certification schemes compete. However, we still know relatively little about the political‐economic factors that shape the construction of certified citrus markets for these competing standards. Based on an original dataset from a comparative survey of US and Dutch importers, this paper investigates factors that shape the construction of certification markets for citrus, focusing on the construction of markets for different kinds of certification schemes including Fair Trade, Organic, and GlobalGAP certification. The paper investigates from a comparative perspective whether the construction of markets differs across the US and Dutch political economies. The results show both the enduring effects of national political economies and the importance of global value chain dynamics. Across competing schemes, the industry‐sponsored business‐to‐business certification systems have outcompeted consumer‐facing label systems.

Rusty guns and buttery soldiers: unemployment and the domestic origins of defense spending

AbstractScholars and practitioners continue to debate transatlantic burden sharing, which has implications for broader questions of collective action and international organizations. Little research, however, has analyzed domestic and institutional drivers of burden-sharing behavior; even less has disaggregated defense spending to measure burden sharing more precisely. This paper enhances understanding of the relationship between national political economies and burden shifting, operationalizing burden shifting as the extent to which a country limits or decreases defense expenditures, while at the same time favoring personnel over equipment modernization and readiness in the composition of defense budgets. Why do countries choose to allocate defense resources to personnel, rather than equipment modernization? I find that governments slightly decrease top-line defense spending in response to unemployment while shifting much more substantial amounts within defense budgets from equipment expenditures into personnel. This research highlights the intimate connection between Europe’s economic fortunes, transatlantic security, and burden sharing in North Atlantic Treaty Organization and the European Union – of particular interest as a pandemic buffets the transatlantic economy. It also points policy analysts toward factors more amenable to political decisions than the structural variables generally associated with burden sharing, bridging significant gaps between defense economics, security studies, and comparative political economy.

Pakistan’s search for a successful model of national political economy

ABSTRACT This article examines Pakistan’s search for a model of political economy capable of meeting the national objectives of industrialisation and accumulation of sufficient military power to deter India. It contends that the period of promise (1950s and 1960s) was made possible through heavy subsidies drawn from East Pakistan and the West. The resultant hubris blinded Pakistan’s rulers to growing discontent in the eastern wing of the country while encouraging them to take serious strategic risks against India. The unravelling of this strategy plunged Pakistan into a permanent crisis of its national political economy characterised by underdevelopment, internal and external fiscal imbalances, and a failure to mobilise national resources on a scale commensurate with its national goals. Experiments with socialism (1970s) and neo-classical economics-inspired structural adjustments (since the 1980s) have failed to deliver the desired outcomes and, in fact, entrenched Pakistan’s crisis of political economy.

Safe and Risky Sovereigns in the Euro Area Capital Market: Financial Drivers of Fiscal Policies in Germany and Italy

This article extends the literature on the varieties of capitalism within the Economic and Monetary Union of Europe with an analysis of the financial drivers of fiscal policies in creditor and debtor countries from the euro crisis up to the coronavirus pandemic, with an application to Germany and Italy. Market perceptions of sovereign creditworthiness, as grounded in national political economies, cause a persistent segmentation of the euro area capital market between peer countries regarded as safe or risky. As a consequence, cross-border capital flows have an asymmetric effect on the public and private finances of creditor and debtor countries, adding to the asymmetric impact from their economic growth models. These financial asymmetries interact with public opinion and are in turn endogenous drivers of political choices for or against fiscal discipline and of political preferences for a stable domestic investor base of public debt. A common safe asset for the eurozone is necessary to mitigate the asymmetric systemic risks from volatile capital flows and establish a symmetric financial driver of steady output growth, fiscal soundness, and financial stability. This common mechanism for endogenous stabilisation would help to sustain euro area capital market integration and support the long-term viability of the euro.