Societal Legitimacy Research Articles

Post‐conflict Statebuilding and State Legitimacy: From Negative to Positive Peace?

ABSTRACTThis article is concerned with the potential that statebuilding interventions have to institutionalize social justice, in addition to their more immediate ‘negative’ peace mandates, and the impact this might have, both on local state legitimacy and the character of the ‘peace’ that might follow. Much recent scholarship has stressed the legitimacy of a state's behaviour in relation to conformity to global governance norms or democratic ‘best practice’. Less evident is a discussion of the extent to which post‐conflict polities are able to engender the societal legitimacy central to political stability. As long as this level of legitimacy is absent (and it is hard to generate), civil society is likely to remain distant from the state, and peace and stability may remain elusive. A solution to this may be to apply existing international legislation centred in the UN and the ILO to compel international organizations and national states to deliver basic needs security through their institutions. This has the effect of stimulating local‐level state legitimacy while simultaneously formalizing social justice and positive peacebuilding.

The Need for and the Societal Legitimacy of Social Investments in Children and Their Families

In Europe, social investments on behalf of children have become an important issue in social policy. In the Dutch welfare state debate, however, the issue has only a modest place, which raises questions about whether an extension of existing arrangements would be necessary and what its societal legitimacy would be. This article discusses the first question by putting the Dutch situation and its policies into an international context. The second question is answered by an analysis of a public opinion survey on Dutch popular preferences for new child care and parental leave arrangements. The article concludes that extra social investments in children would be beneficial for the future of the Dutch welfare state but that their societal legitimacy is not that obvious, given the division in public opinion. The analysis shows that self-interest does play a role but that ideas about the importance of children, for society and for peoples' personal lives, and ideas about the well-being of children are more important.

Perspectives of Time and Change

China's burgeoning civil society has often been characterized as state-led or corporatist. However, these concepts fail to capture the current dynamics of Chinese social activism, as they cannot account for two of its critical features. First, the fact that the nature of Chinese state—society relations is not a matter of the former dictating the latter, but rather a kind of “negotiated symbiosis.” Second, the semiauthoritarian context necessitates that China's social activists develop a diffuse, and informal rather than formal, network of relations. This informal web of relations has yielded undeniable political as well as societal legitimacy. It is against this background that we put forward the concept of “embedded social activism.” Since its initial emergence, environmental activism has resourcefully adapted to, rather than opposed, the political conditions of its era. The hallmark, and in fact, the success of China's reforms lie in their strategy of incremental change. Therefore, we might view embedded environmentalism as a transient phase which is itself changing through time, a transitional feature of a burgeoning civil society in a semiauthoritarian context.

Children's Role in Humanizing Forced Evictions and Resettlements in Delhi

This paper evaluates the process of children's participation in resisting forced evictions in Delhi, securing basic human rights in off-site resettlements, and promoting active citizenship in the new settlements. Methodologically, this is a longitudinal case study looking at advocacy efforts, projects and programs undertaken by a group of individuals and organizations in collaboration with hundreds of directly affected children over a five-year period. The initial process was child-centered, with facilitating adults initiating projects and sharing decisions with children. Gradually, children themselves initiated and led projects in collaboration with adults. This long process fulfilled several of the conditions of effective participatory projects with children. There was also expansion of the democratic space in which children's struggles gained wide societal legitimacy and limited official acceptance. However, this process did not affect policy change at a broader social structural level.

Stakeholder Integration

This study examines the central contention of instrumental stakeholder theory— namely, that firms that breed trust-based, cooperative ties with their stakeholders will have a competitive advantage over firms that do not. Acase study of the introduction ofgenetically modified food products in the Netherlands provided the basis for the empirical analysis. The results support the instrumental stakeholder management thesis, showing that stakeholder integration, through the development ofmutually enforcing relationships with external parties, may result in both organizational learning and societal legitimacy.

Stakeholder Integration: Building Mutually Enforcing Relationships

textabstractThis study examines the central contention ofinstrumental stakeholder theory— namely, that firms that breed trust-based, cooperative ties with their stakeholders will have a competitive advantage over firms that do not.Acase study of the introduction ofgenetically modified food products in the Netherlands provided the basis for the empirical analysis. The results support the instrumental stakeholder management thesis, showing that stakeholder integration, through the development ofmutually enforcing relationships with external parties, may result in both organizational learning and societal legitimacy.

The Reconstruction of Universities

This paper reflects on ways AR might support a transformation process in universities and in their relationship to the rest of society. As a point of departure, universities inherited from the 19th century Humboldtian university the credo of 'researching and teaching any important subject' and creating new knowledge through the freedom of thought. They became a state within the state. Universities came to try to nonopolize the knowledge production system while fighting the battle for freedom of thought and expression in academia. They have not, however, participated in the struggle to create knowledge based on and useful to groups in society other than powerful academic, political, and business elites. Now universities face new challenges. The existing modus operandi is unlikely to survive for much longer because the users of knowledge and those who pay to keep universities open, question the relevance of university-created knowledge. This challenge arises from two very different social groups. Businesses are creating their own schools of advanced study and many ordinary people are disenchanted with university knowledge that does not relate to their own life world. This problem is particularly acute in the social sciences, since people have social knowledge of their own. Many pecple realize that social science produces knowledge about the everyday world that is incomprehensible or irrelevant to ordinary people. We propose taking a different view of universities, conceptualizing them as members of many different knowledge supply chains, not as autopoietic systems. The ultimate challenge in a specific knowledge supply chain is to gain societal legitimacy for the knowledge production process and to supply valued knowledge for the users. Pursuing this approach forces a reinvestigation of the rigor/relevance argument. We argue that universities should seek legitimacy in the external world through integrating themselves in many and diverse knowledge supply chains and that this effort will simultaneously improve the quality of knowledge produced by the universities. We offer an Action Research strategy to achieve this integration by linking knowledge users into the research process and integrating the researchers into the knowledge production systems and activities of the users beyond the academy.

A Time-Series Analysis of Self-Employment in the United States

In the early 1970s the proportion of the nonagricultural labor force self-employed in the United States ceased its downward trend and has been rising ever since. This study provides an analysis of the causes of this change. A general-equilibrium model of self- employment and wage employment is analyzed, and aggregate U.S. time- series data are used to test predictions derived from the model. The empirical analysis indicates that changes in technology, industrial structure, tax rates, and social-security retirement benefits have contributed to the reversal of the previous downward trend, which had persisted for over a century. Copyright 1987 by University of Chicago Press.

The Public Backlash against PACs

The American public distrusts political action committees and considers them harmful to the nation's democratic political process. This negative reaction is independent of socioeconomic and demographic characteristics, political ideology, and party affiliation, but is highly correlated with optimism about the future and confidence in the nation's political, legal, and economic institutions and their leaders. The findings of this study suggest that business must undertake substantive and communications-related measures to improve public perception of PAC activities if it is to maintain societal legitimacy in its involvement in the political process.

An Obituary for "Alienation"

In many intellectual circles, “alienation” has become the all-explaining catchword. Its popularity resembles those previously of “progress,” “evolution,” “trends,” and “identity.” It helps formula-peddling counselors rationalize their services. It becomes a device for convincing the individual that he alone or even working with others can do little about his social situation. Many assertions of “alienation” are simply and accurately translated as contentions that members of some “problem” group are at odds with the spokesman's value orientation or conception of societal legitimacy or ideas about appropriate social-action procedures. Some of the phenomena interpreted as “alienation” are more precisely seen in other lights that require greater knowledge of societal processes and of social history. Such terms as “relative isolation,” “relative deprivation,” and “marginality” explicitly suggest process rather than the static “alienated” category.

Danse macabre i musernas hus – om museernas roll och villkor idag

Danse macabre on the museum scene – notes on the decline and fall of the museum idea The museum idea in Europe is closely linked to the concept of the nation state. Now that this concept is losing its dominant role, the role of the museum and its public funding is also being questioned. The crisis in societal credibility is foreshadowed by the real or imminent bankruptcy of museums (specific Danish and Swedish instances are quoted in the text). The battle to regain public confidence and approval is well under way. The scene is set for the danse macabre. Different methods are being chosen. Many museums cling to their traditional functions of preservation and education – and their pedagogical work is most easily accepted, encouraged and subsidized when the space for history teaching in compulsory school is continuously shrinking. Others concentrate on acquiring sponsoring from trade and industry and of course seek support from various foundations. A regrouping of Swedish national collections was suggested as early as 1920 by Gregor Paulsson to better adapt the museum institution to the needs of contemporary society – into a quality museum (for the general public), a study museum (for researchers) and a museum of the present (to serve the need of future orientation). This was a proposal that pointed the way forward and is still relevant.The crisis in the museums is principally political and financial resulting in an institutional lack of resoluteness and uncertainty about purpose and societal legitimacy. To survive it will be necessary to acknowledge the end of the national saga and the reality of cybernations and the Dream World, Museums could find their raison d’être serving as dynamic houses of culture, as Kenneth Hudson suggested in the 1980s. The institutions should accept the museum as medium and think of themselves as process-oriented entities whose job it is to support and inspire their communities and visitors/users. They should obviously adapt to the virtual reality produced in a dynamic digital process where the content is similar to an open oral tradition. The museum should be the cultural storyteller and commentator in its community and tradi- tional museum education should be given up in favour of these new roles. According to Kenneth Hudson the museum should become a club, or perhaps – as Bernard Déloche suggests – a café philosophique. Another possible way forward is such cooperation as that pro- moted in the ABM project where archive, library and museum are amalgamated into a historical workshop. For the e-topia imagined by William Mitchell the paper concludes with conceiving a museum of the future consisting of a physical building supplemented and expanded to a virtual museum.