Morality, Normativity, and Economic Development in Slovakia

This article examines debates over local economic development policies and practices in contemporary Slovakia, particularly regarding property and land development. Debates about economic development often occur in relation to economic outcomes, driven by quantitative data and empirical assessments provided by city officials or consultants. In this article, I find that such debates are more likely to be driven by normative concerns, including moral outcomes. I develop a theoretical framework to understand why policy debates occur not in purely objective terms, but the more subjective normative and moral frameworks. The analysis provides greater insight into political debates and policymaking in the postsocialist context

Cars, corporations, and commodities: Consequences for the social determinants of health

Social epidemiologists have drawn attention to health inequalities as avoidable and inequitable, encouraging thinking beyond proximal risk factors to the causes of the causes. However, key debates remain unresolved including the contribution of material and psychosocial pathways to health inequalities. Tools to operationalise social factors have not developed in tandem with conceptual frameworks, and research has often remained focused on the disadvantaged rather than on forces shaping population health across the distribution. Using the example of transport, we argue that closer attention to social processes (capital accumulation and motorisation) and social forms (commodity, corporation, and car) offers a way forward. Corporations tied to the car, primarily oil and vehicle manufacturers, are central to the world economy. Key drivers in establishing this hegemony are the threat of violence from motor vehicles and the creation of distance through the restructuring of place. Transport matters for epidemiology because the growth of mass car ownership is environmentally unsustainable and affects population health through a myriad of pathways. Starting from social forms and processes, rather than their embodiment as individual health outcomes and inequalities, makes visible connections between road traffic injuries, obesity, climate change, underdevelopment of oil producing countries, and the huge opportunity cost of the car economy. Methodological implications include a movement-based understanding of how place affects health and a process-orientated integration of material and psychosocial explanations that, while materially based, contests assumptions of automatic benefits from economic growth. Finally, we identify car and oil corporations as anti-health forces and suggest collaboration with them creates conflicts of interest

The politics of *production in postsocialism: Case studies from light industry in the Slovak Republic.

After the collapse of state socialism in Eastern Europe in 1989, industrial restructuring and the privatization of industry have brought Western multinationals and new forms of work organization to the region. This study examines the transformation of the labor process from socialism to postsocialism through a comparison of the politics of production at three light industrial firms in the Slovak Republic. While current approaches to understanding power and control in the workplace tend to focus on shop floor relations and how consent is manufactured at the point of production, this study more broadly examines the social and cultural context within which the industrial labor process is embedded. The research is based on 14 months of fieldwork examining social networks, second economy activity, women's labor force participation, and labor market changes. The analysis of both qualitative and survey data shows that variation in the securing of consent on the factory floor is a function of levels of trust and reciprocity established within the workplace, both vertically (between management and workers) and horizontally (among production workers), as well as of social relations outside the workplace. Findings indicate that the securing of consent over the labor process is the result of social and cultural processes tied to notions of trust and reciprocity as well as changes in the local and regional labor markets. The study concludes with a broader examination of how structure, agency, and power vary within industrial settings, and suggests some implications for understanding power and control in the workplace.Ph.D.Cultural anthropologyLabor economicsSocial SciencesUniversity of Michigan, Horace H. Rackham School of Graduate Studieshttp://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/123619/2/3096123.pd