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

Social partnership as a mode of governance: introduction to the special issue

The development of ?social partnership? institutions has been one of the most striking, and surprising aspects of the transformation of Irish society and politics in the past fifteen years. The papers in this special issue explore the character of social partnership as a distinctive mode of governance ? examining partnership in action at national and local levels and in interaction with the EU, in macroeconomic bargaining, in sectoral and environmental policy, and in urban and rural settings. The papers are all extensive revisions of papers first presented at a conference on ?Social Partnership: A New Mode of Governance?? at the National University of Ireland, Maynooth in September 2004. The conference was generously funded by the Irish Research Council for The Humanities and Social Sciences and was held under the auspices of the National Institute for Regional and Spatial Analysis and the Department of Sociology at NUI Maynooth

Book review: The politics of high-tech growth: developmental network states in the global economy / by Sean O Riain. Cambridge University Press. 2004.

?Sticky places in slippery space? is one of the best-known phrases from the literature on economic geography. The ?slippery space? is the globalised world of highly mobile capital, labour and technology. The ?sticky places? are the successful regions in which these factors agglomerate. This book is, inter alia, an analysis of how Ireland became sticky over the course of the 1990s

Review Symposium of \u27Best of times? the social impact of the Celtic Tiger\u27 / edited by Tony Fahey, Helen Russell, Christopher T. Whelan. Dublin: Institute of Public Administration, 2007.

Socio-economic change in Ireland has long been tracked by research at the Economic and Social Research Institute, and from time to time, has been punctuated by volumes from the ESRI that seek to review the evidence on the character of that transformation. Best of Times? provides an assessment of the social impact of the Celtic Tiger years, drawing on the research of ESRI authors along with a number of colleagues from other institutions. Such a significant review of the recent changes in Irish economy and society seemed to the editors to merit extended discussion here in The Economic and Social Review. Reviewers were chosen to provide a mix of disciplinary backgrounds, of Irish and international institutional affiliations, and of broad perspectives on the social transformations and consequences of the Celtic Tiger boom. Best of Times? has been re-published in recent months as Fahey, T., H. Russell and C. T. Whelan (eds.), 2008. Quality of Life in Ireland: Social Impact of Economic Boom, Springer