372 research outputs found
State, Competition and Industrial Change in Ireland 1991-1999
As job losses increased rapidly in 2003 amid calls for increased competitiveness, it becomes all the more crucial to understand the character and causes of such industrial upgrading that did occur in Ireland in the 1990s. This paper argues that despite a continuing reliance on foreign investment, there were significant elements of local industrial upgrading within the Irish economy in the 1990s. Contrary to perspectives which emphasise the learning effects associated with foreign firms, the paper suggests that such upgrading only emerged when and where local and national institutions were established to support relations of innovation and organisational development. The current difficulties in the Irish economy can be traced in significant part to the failure to deepen and extend this emergent system of innovation. The emphasis on âcompetitivenessâ in contemporary policy debate threatens to undermine the public investment, social relations and collective institution building that have been, and will continue to be, central to industrial upgrading in Ireland.
State, Competition and Industrial Change in Ireland 1991-1999
As job losses increased rapidly in 2003 amid calls for increased competitiveness, it
becomes all the more crucial to understand the character and causes of such industrial upgrading
that did occur in Ireland in the 1990s. This paper argues that despite a continuing reliance on
foreign investment, there were significant elements of local industrial upgrading within the Irish
economy in the 1990s. Contrary to perspectives which emphasise the learning effects associated
with foreign firms, the paper suggests that such upgrading only emerged when and where local
and national institutions were established to support relations of innovation and organisational
development. The current difficulties in the Irish economy can be traced in significant part to the
failure to deepen and extend this emergent system of innovation. The emphasis on
'competitiveness' in contemporary policy debate threatens to undermine the public investment,
social relations and collective institution building that have been, and will continue to be, central
to industrial upgrading in Ireland
Timeâspace intensification: Karl Polanyi, the double movement, and global informational capitalism
This article advances the concept of 'time-space intensification' as an alternative to existing notions of time-space distanciation, compression and embedding
that attempt to capture the restructuring of time and space in contemporary advanced capitalism. This concept suggests time and space are intensified in the contemporary period :
the social experience of time and space becomes more explicit and more crucial to socioeconomic actors' lives, time and space are mobilized more explicitly in individual and corporate action, and the institutionalization of time and space becomes more politicized. Drawing on Polanyi's concepts of fictitious commodities and the double movement, and developing them through an analysis of work organization and economic development in the Irish software industry, the article argues that the concept of time-space intensification can add significantly to our understanding of key features of the restructuring of the temporal and spatial basis of economic development and work organization
The Crisis of Financialisation in Ireland
This paper explores the intersection of national and transnational processes in shaping
Ireland's financial crisis. It uses insights from economic sociology to reconcile the anal}d;ical
tension hetween an understanding of Ireland's crisis in terms of the unfolding of an international
process and explanations that focus on specific national features. A series of significant policy
decisions in the late 1990s favoured financial markets in allocating capital and opened up
significant institutional space for speculative lending. Underneath the apparently consistent
expansion of the property lending buhble since the mid-1990s, there was a significant shift in
investment logics from the early 2000s as both residential and commercial real estate spending
became detached from underlying demand. This shift in logic was based on two significant
"translations" of investment rationalities into justifications of lending and investment that
underpinned the bubble. Irish banks' own conceptions of risk and rational investments shifted
subtly over time so that property lending was translated into a rational investment, encouraged
by market dynamics such as increased bank profits, rising share prices and concentration of
decision making power in the banking system. At the same time, and in the context of the
establishment of the euro, investing in the assets of Irish banks was translated into a rational
investment for international banks, in large part through the metrics of the credit ratings
agencies. The paper concludes by revisiting the question of how we should understand the
specifics of particular financial crises in conjunction with the general dynamics of financialisation
- pointing to the importance of "translation" processes in creating social rationalities and the
significance of "market liberalism" as a social formation in enabling these translations and
promoting financialisatio
- âŠ