Disorganising the public?

Despite their centrality to Western modernity, ideas and institutions of the public have been challenged by recent social, political and eco-nomic transformations. Although neo-liberalism is usually seen as the central force, driving process such as privatization, deregulation and the withdrawal of the state, this article argues that the tendencies and transitions in publicness are heterogeneous. It explores this heteroge-neity by examining four different aspects of the disorganisation of the public: organizational, occupational, social and spatial. The article con-cludes by reflecting on three different approaches to this question of het-erogeneity: a distinction between real and superficial changes; a view of disorganisation as a political strategy; and a conjunctural view of hetero-geneity as the outcome of multiple forces, tendencies and projects

What Drives the Speed of Job Reallocation During Episodes of Massive Adjustment?

This paper uses individual-level data to characterize economy-wide job creation and destruction during periods of massive structural adjustment. We contrast the gradualist Czech and the rapid Estonian approach to the destruction of the communist economy to provide evidence on selected macroeconomic theories of reallocation with frictions. We find that gradualism (slowing down job destruction) effectively synchronizes job creation and destruction. Drastic job destruction leads to little or no slowdown of job creation. Small newly established firms are the under-researched fountainhead of jobs during the transition from communist to market oriented economies.http://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/39816/3/wp432.pd

Cronin-Sheehan Interviews 2001-2002

These interviews with Jeremy Cronin MP, which took place in 2001 at University of Cape Town and in 2002 in the South African Parliament were much discussed in the mass media and at political meetings and cited in academic texts. They were originally published on my DCU website, which has since been re-organised. I am depositing them here, because it is important that they be accessible for the historical record

Governance puzzles

About the book: Developing hand in hand with e-Business in its use of information and communication technologies (ICTs), e-Government emerged in the 1990s with the promise of a more accessible, efficient, and transparent form for public institutions to perform and interact with citizens. The successes–and some critics say, general failures–of e-Government initiatives around the world have led to the development of e-Governance–a broader, more encompassing concept that involves not only public institutions but private ones as well. Taking a multidisciplinary approach, this book explores e-Governance in theory and practice with an analytical narrative from heterodox perspectives. Covering such essential issues as global governance of the internet, the European Knowledge Economy, the transformative promise of mobile telephony, the rise of e-Universities, internet accessibility for the disabled, and e-Governance in transition economies, the book draws on contributions from experienced academics and practitioners with an expertise in an emerging field. In addition, each chapter includes such features as discussion of key issues that draw on case studies in order to facilitate significant discussion questions

Critical animal and media studies: Expanding the understanding of oppression in communication research

Critical and communication studies have traditionally neglected the oppression conducted by humans towards other animals. However, our (mis)treatment of other animals is the result of public consent supported by a morally speciesist-anthropocentric system of values. Speciesism or anthroparchy, as much as any other mainstream ideologies, feeds the media and at the same time is perpetuated by them. The goal of this article is to remedy this neglect by introducing the subdiscipline of Critical Animal and Media Studies. Critical Animal and Media Studies takes inspiration both from critical animal studies – which is so far the most consolidated critical field of research in the social sciences addressing our exploitation of other animals – and from the normative-moral stance rooted in the cornerstones of traditional critical media studies. The authors argue that the Critical Animal and Media Studies approach is an unavoidable step forward for critical media and communication studies to engage with the expanded circle of concerns of contemporary ethical thinking

Using Organization Theory to Explore the Changing Role of Medical Libraries

This historical research review uses organization theory to describe and interpret the evolution of American hospitals, medical libraries, and the role of the professional librarian. Various organization theories are applied to explain changes in hospitals and medical libraries over time. The interaction between the organization and the environment as described in organization theory shaped the emergence of today\u27s information services. For readers unfamiliar with health sciences libraries, the study will provide a glimpse into the social forces that framed the development of this type of special library

Cultural integration and its discontents

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Friedrich List's Adam Smith historiography and the contested origins of development theory

Friedrich List's National System of Political Economy continues to be positively received in IPE, where it is treated as a seminal text in development theory. Only a handful of IPE scholars have questioned the specific history of economic ideas through which List asserted the distinctiveness of his own position. They do so by showing that he deliberately put words into the mouths of his classical political economy predecessors to provide himself with something to argue against. His alleged authority on development issues rests in particular on purposefully caricaturing the arguments of Adam Smith. I use this article to suggest a plausible reconstruction of the route to List's Smith, one which recognises the possible intermediary influence of the early Dugald Stewart, John Ramsay McCulloch, the Earl of Lauderdale and Georg Sartorius. By following this complex trail to List's rather eccentric Smith historiography, it becomes possible to break down one of the most important oppositions in IPE pedagogy: that between List's National System and Smith's Wealth of Nations. Moreover, it also becomes necessary to engage more circumspectly with List's history of economic ideas when searching for the origins of contemporary critically-minded development theory

Crises and collective socio-economic phenomena: simple models and challenges

Financial and economic history is strewn with bubbles and crashes, booms and busts, crises and upheavals of all sorts. Understanding the origin of these events is arguably one of the most important problems in economic theory. In this paper, we review recent efforts to include heterogeneities and interactions in models of decision. We argue that the Random Field Ising model (RFIM) indeed provides a unifying framework to account for many collective socio-economic phenomena that lead to sudden ruptures and crises. We discuss different models that can capture potentially destabilising self-referential feedback loops, induced either by herding, i.e. reference to peers, or trending, i.e. reference to the past, and account for some of the phenomenology missing in the standard models. We discuss some empirically testable predictions of these models, for example robust signatures of RFIM-like herding effects, or the logarithmic decay of spatial correlations of voting patterns. One of the most striking result, inspired by statistical physics methods, is that Adam Smith's invisible hand can badly fail at solving simple coordination problems. We also insist on the issue of time-scales, that can be extremely long in some cases, and prevent socially optimal equilibria to be reached. As a theoretical challenge, the study of so-called "detailed-balance" violating decision rules is needed to decide whether conclusions based on current models (that all assume detailed-balance) are indeed robust and generic.Comment: Review paper accepted for a special issue of J Stat Phys; several minor improvements along reviewers' comment