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The market is not the only spontaneous order. Hayek himself drew attention to language and English common law as other examples, noting that they had first been identified as such by Scottish Enlightenment philosophers such as Adam Smith and Adam Ferguson. Hence, such orders “are made with equal blindness to the future; and nations stumble upon establishments, which are indeed the results of human action, but not the execution of any human design” (Ferguson, 1782, sec. II). In the 20th century, Michael Polanyi used the term spontaneous order for the polycentric feedback system that explains the growth of scientific knowledge (Polanyi, 1962).

In Michael Lipsky’s intriguing analysis of the performance of public bureaucracy – in his classic Street-level Bureaucracy (1980) – he shows, for example, the professional discretion they apply may not only involve adapting policy to the individual case, meet real needs in the population, prevent patients, clients, students or users from getting access, etc., but at the same time both have profound policy implications and take very ‘political’ forms. In this chapter, I argue that it is regrettable that Lipsky did not establish a comparative framework for his study. Based on my own ethnographic research in local politics and bureaucratic practice in the municipal world in Norway, I look more closely at the relative autonomy of street-level bureaucracy within the context of universalism – a hallmark of the Nordic welfare state model (Esping-Andersen 1998, 2009) – and explore how it is utilised. The Nordic welfare states are among the most ‘service intense’ states in the Western world, and the personnel working directly with patients, students, clients, etc., play a major role in linking ‘the state’ to the population (Papakostas, 2001, Vike et al., 2002). Thus, the role of the Nordic welfare state’s street-level bureaucracy as a key interface between the state and the population is hard to overestimate (Leira & Sainsbury, 1994). Moreover, as universalism also tends to stimulate what we may call a culture of strong claims (to services) among the population at large, street-level bureaucrats may be able to form strong alliances with other actors, and thus play an important part of the dynamics of power in local politics – where fundamental policy principles such as universalism is at stake.

There is ample evidence that financial market development leads to economic growth. If improving labor rights can be shown to positively influence equity markets, then that, in turn, will lead to economic growth. The finance literature has examined the impact of a broader metric, namely, the Economic Freedom Index, on equity returns worldwide, and the evidence is mixed. This study focuses on one dimension of economic freedom: labor rights. Specifically, the study analyzes the impact of labor rights on national equity market indexes using the Labor Rights Index developed by the Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) and the Fraser Institute (FI). Using panel regression analysis for 49 countries (for the OECD Index) and 76 countries (for the FI Index) over the period 1985–2014, the study finds that changes in labor rights have a statistically significant positive impact on equity returns, after controlling for business-cycle effects and time-fixed effects. The study also finds significant differences in the labor–rights–equity returns relationship between developed and less developed economies.

This paper poses the question of whether the mainstream feminist movement in the United States, in concentrating its efforts on achieving gender parity in the existing workplace, is selling women short. In it, I argue that contemporary U.S. feminism has not adequately theorized the problems with the relatively unregulated market system in the United States. That failure has contributed to a situation in which women’s participation in the labor market is mistakenly equated with liberation, and in which other far-ranging effects of the market system on women’s lives inside and outside of work – many of them negative – are overlooked. To theorize the effects of the market system on women’s lives in a more nuanced manner, I borrow from the insights of earlier Marxist and socialist feminists. I then use this more nuanced perspective to outline an agenda for feminism, which I call “market-cautious feminism,” that seeks to regulate the market to serve women’s interests.

An assessment of Axel Honneth’s reception and appropriation of Hegel’s theory of normative reconstruction as presented in his Freedom’s Right (Columbia University Press, 2014).

A comparative assessment of Honneth’s and Hegel’s approach to normative reconstruction focusing on three basic issues: general methodology, understandings of the logic and program of the Philosophy of Right, and analyses and assessments of modern market societies as detailed in Hegel’s account of civil society (bürgerliche Gesellschaft).

For Honneth, normative reconstruction consists in reworking modes of social rationality already realized in modern institutions. By contrast, Hegel is shown to advance an approach to reconstruction in which an account of social rationality is properly fashioned only in the reconstruction process itself. In this way Hegel is also shown to proffer an approach to normative reconstruction that is at once more robustly reconstructive and more robustly normative than is the case with Honneth.

The paper demonstrates the ongoing value of Hegel’s thought for social and political theory. It illuminates Hegel’s uniquely dialectical approach to immanent social critique, dedicated not only to explicating existing tensions and “bifurcations” (Entzweiungen) but – with the help of a distinctive account of Bildung (cultivation or formation) – to engaging those tensions and bifurcations in order to delineate the conditions for their constructive supersession. It also elucidates different ways in which critical social theorists, committed to notions of “immanent transcendence,” draw on the resources of market societies to mount normative challenges to the aporias of those societies.

The neoclassical ethos is predicated on a goal of efficiency, which is assumed to be advanced through competitive markets where market-clearing wages are achieved when the demand for labor is exactly equal to the supply of labor. In such a market, there is no such thing as unemployment because wages either rise or fall until the demand for labor is exactly equal to the supply of labor. At the wage at which demand equals supply, all those willing and able to work at that wage will be employed. If more people are willing to work, the wage will fall further, thereby inducing firms to hire more workers, with the result being that the supply of labor once again equals the demand. Conversely, when firms are unable to hire as many workers as they would like, the wage rises to induce additional people to enter into the workforce until supply and demand are once again equal.

Germany has become one of the major destination countries for labour migration within the European Union. The German government introduced temporary restrictions on labour migration after the eastern enlargement rounds of 2004 and 2007. These barriers had little impact on the overall volume of labour mobility. Rather they were accompanied by new “atypical” forms of mobility through the posting of workers, self-employment and seasonal workers, which according to EU rules are covered only by a minimum of host country regulations. The combination of temporary restrictions on regular migration and the opportunities through atypical mobility created strong incentives for companies to engage in ‘regime shopping’ strategies. This contributed to a considerable growth in outsourcing, subcontracting and flexible use of external labour added to pre-existing dynamics of low-wage competition, segmentation and fragmentation in the German labour market. Using data on the different forms of intra-EU migration to Germany, the article analyses the different paths that labour migration has frequently used since the fall of the Iron Curtain. First, it maps the changes in magnitude, character and direction of intra-EU labour mobility to Germany and the relative weight of the different channels through which such movements occurred from 2000 to 2015. Second, the article discusses the various responses by the government by the extension of collective agreements and the statutory minimum wage.