Challenging assumptions of the enlargement literature : the impact of the EU on human and minority rights in Macedonia

This article argues that from the very start of the transition process in Macedonia, a fusion of concerns about security and democratisation locked local nationalist elites and international organisations intoa political dynamic that prioritised security over democratisation. This dynamic resulted in little progress in the implementation of human and minority rights until 2009, despite heavy EU involvement in Macedonia after the internal warfare of 2001. The effects of this informally institutionalised relationship have been overlooked by scholarship on EU enlargement towards Eastern Europe, which has made generalisations based on assumptions relevant to the democratisation of countries in Eastern Europe, but not the Western Balkans

Freedom can also be productive: The historical inversions of "the conduct of conduct"

The Foucauldian conception of power as ‘productive’ has left us so far with a residual conception of freedom. The article examines a number of historical cases in which ‘relationships of freedom’ have potentially come into existence within Western culture, from ‘revolution’ and ‘political truth-telling’ to ‘cynicism’ and ‘civility’. But the argument is not just about demonstrating that there have in fact been many historical inversions of ‘the conduct of conduct’. It is about theorizing how freedom can be ‘productive’ or give rise to cultural norms if any such inversion can only come into being as an event in itself

(WP 2010-08) Neuroeconomics: Constructing Identity

This paper asks whether neuroeconomics will make instrumental use of neuroscience to adjudicate existing disputes in economics or be more seriously informed by neuroscience in ways that might transform economics. The paper pursues the question by asking how neuroscience constructs an understanding of individuals as whole persons. The body of the paper is devoted to examining two approaches: Don Ross’s neurocellular approach to neuroeconomics and Joseph Dumit’s cultural anthropological science organization approach. The accounts are used to identify boundaries on single individual explanations. With that space Andy Clark’s external scaffolding view and Nathaniel Wilcox’s socially distributed cognition view are employed

Human security as ‘Ethnic Security’ in Kosovo

In Kosovo, the concept of human security is invoked in a three-fold manner. First of all, the international community has applied human security for the purpose of maintaining a fragile peace and stability in Kosovo. For the international community, maintaining the fragile peace meant tolerating the establishment and operationalization of Serbian parallel institutions. This leads to the second application of human security: the parallel institutions claim that their existence is necessary to provide human security for the Serbian community in Kosovo. Consequently, this undermines the capacity of Kosovo’s public institutions to exercise legal authority in the north of Kosovo and in other territorial enclaves. Parallel to this, Kosovo’s institutions have viewed the human security approach as a means to prove the institutional capacity of independent self-government to provide inclusive security, welfare, and integration policies for all people in Kosovo, with a special emphasis on ethnic minorities. Accordingly, human security is used by different actors in Kosovo to pursue different political agendas, which have not resulted in achieving the primary goal of furthering human welfare and fulfilment beyond mere physical security. To the contrary, the (ab)use of human security has created the conditions for fragile governance, protracted ethnic destabilization, and stagnating economic and human development

Heterodox Critiques of Corporate Social Responsibility

Corporate social responsibility (CSR) is in vogue in recent times. It has been widely received by socially concerned people in business, academia, and NGOs that CSR would lend support to the improvement in social welfare and the protection of environment. However, the question that whether corporations are socially responsible or corporations should behave responsibly is beside the point from the heterodox economic perspective. The proper question to pose is how corporations manipulate the social by means of CSR. Drawing upon the heterodox theory of the business enterprise along with the social provisioning perspective, I argue that the business corporation has always acted in a socially responsible manner by generating ethical-political-cultural values, norms, and beliefs that legitimize whatever the business corporation does is socially responsible. In this respect, CSR is a market-based means to control the social provisioning process by way of creating an illusionary image of corporations and, thereby, hiding the ruthless acquisitive drive and the exploitation of human beings and nature.Corporate social responsibility, social provisioning process, the business enterprise, social welfare

Determinants for Labour Contract Length: A French Microeconometric Study

Two types of analyses are conducted to explain the determinants of labour contracts length. The first analysis emphasizes on the contracting costs and the level of uncertainty. The second analysis focuses on the incentive and selection effect of the contract length. This paper test the determinants for contract duration by means of econometric duration models. The estimates are carried out from French data (TDE). An econometric treatment of the endogeneity of the labour contract status and unobservable heterogeneity is carried out. Our results show that wages positively affect employment duration. This confirms the positive effect of contracting costs reported.contract length ; duration model ; selection bias ; unobservable heterogeneity

Transitions: An Institutionalist Perspective

A transition to a new technological regime is complete (and stable) when accompanied with a co-stabilization between the mode of regulation and the regime of accumulation. Key to understanding the dynamics of transitions are the factors, including institutions, that “regulate” and stabilize the regime of accumulation over time. However, the available frameworks for institutional analysis employ arbitrary and narrow definition of institutions, focus mainly on the policy domain, and do not pay sufficient attention to the evolutionary characteristics of change as manifested in emergence of numerous institutions that underlie transitions. This paper consists of three parts. The first part critically reviews and synthesizes some of the main approaches for conducting institutional analysis. The second part rearticulates the concept of “transitions”, or technological regime shifts, from a systems perspective to make a case for investigating transitions as multi-level, multi-scale, and multi-system phenomena best understood in their institutional contexts. The third part proposes a framework for examining institutional change and demonstrates how this framework may be used to identify the key factors and conditions whose convergence might result in transitions in a given subsystem. Examples are drawn from the Dutch waste management subsystem to demonstrate how this framework should be operationalized.economics of technology ;

Modelling Economic Impacts of Alternative International Climate Policy Architectures. A Quantitative and Comparative Assessment of Architectures for Agreement

This paper provides a quantitative comparison of the main architectures for an agreement on climate policy. Possible successors to the Kyoto protocol are assessed according to four criteria: economic efficiency; environmental effectiveness; distributional implications; and their political acceptability which is measured in terms of feasibility and enforceability. The ultimate aim is to derive useful information for designing a future agreement on climate change control.Climate Policy, Integrated Modelling, International Agreements