Search results

This chapter maps existing patterns of broad-based worker ownership and control in contemporary advanced capitalism and considers future possibilities for expanding democracy within firms. Section one discusses worker ownership and control arrangements in relation to different theories of the firm and shows how these arrangements map onto different national systems. Section two compares Germany, which is characterized by worker control without ownership, and the United States, which is marked by worker ownership without control. Section three explores three pathways through which broad-based worker ownership and control might be deepened and more strongly coupled in the future.

This chapter sheds light on long-term trends in the level and structural dynamics of investments in Russian human capital formation from government, corporations, and households. It contributes to the literature discussing theoretical issues and empirical patterns of modernization, human development, as well as the transition from a centralized to a market economy. The empirical evidence is based on extensive utilization of the dataset introduced in Didenko, Földvári, and Van Leeuwen (2013). Our findings provide support for the view expressed in Gerschenkron (1962) that in late industrializers the government tended to substitute for the lack of capital and infrastructure by direct interventions. At least from the late nineteenth century the central government's and local authorities' budgets played the primary role. However, the role of nongovernment sources increased significantly since the mid-1950s, i.e., after the crucial breakthrough to an industrial society had been made. During the transition to a market economy in the 1990s and 2000s the level of government contributions decreased somewhat in education, and more significantly in research and development, but its share in overall financing expanded. In education corporate funds were largely replaced by those from households. In health care, Russia is characterized by an increasing share of out-of-pocket payments of households and slow development of organized forms of nonstate financing. These trends reinforce obstacles to Russia's future transition, as regards institutional change toward a more significant and sound role of the corporate sector in such branches as R&D, health care, and, to a lesser extent, education.

We address here how the U.S. neoliberal policy regime developed and how its reconstructed vision of modernization, which culminated, under the rubric of globalization, was neutralized by 9/11 and neoconservative geopolitics. We analyze the phases in the rise of neoliberalism, and provide a detailed map of its vision of global modernization at its high tide under Clinton. We also address how the Bush Doctrine's unilateral, preemptive polices and the consequent War on Terror and Iraq War eroded U.S. legitimacy as the globalization system's hegmon and shifted the discourse from globalization to empire. Cold War modernization theorists, neoliberal globalization advocates, and Bush doctrine neoconservatives all drew on an American exceptionalist tradition that portrays the U.S. as modernity's “lead society,” attaches universal significance to its values, policies, and institutions, and urges their worldwide diffusion. All three traditions ignore or diminish the importance of substantive equality and social justice. We suggest that consequent U.S. policy problems might be averted by recovery of a suppressed side of the American tradition that stresses social justice and holds that democracy must start at home and be spread by example rather than by exhortation or force. Overall, we explore the contradictory U.S. role in an emergent post-Cold War world.

There are two influential interpretative positions in the current debate on the crisis among Marxists. The first understands financialization as a consequence of the tendential fall of the rate of profit. The other interpretation, prevalent among those influenced by Keynesianism and Neoricardianism, refers to the tendency toward the crisis of realisation, because of the squeeze on the wage bill and the insufficiency of consumer demand. In both cases, the current crisis is the crisis of a feeble capitalism, permanently stagnationist. A Marxian interpretation of the crisis cannot be separated from the tendential fall of the rate of profit. This latter, however, cannot be accepted as it is presented by Marx, and it must be rethought as a meta-theory of the crisis, including within it the different crisis theories that can be derived from Capital. This article first provides a personal survey of Marx's crisis theories, often presented as opposed to each other. Second, it seeks to integrate the different positions into a unitary discourse, within a nonmechanical reading of the fall of the rate of profit. This discourse then mutates into an historical sketch of the long dynamic of capital: from the Great Depression of the end of the nineteenth century, to the Great Crash of the 1930s, to the Social Crisis in the immediate processes of valorisation of the 1960s–1970s (the Great Inflation). Finally, the “new” capitalism (the Great Moderation) and its recent crisis (the Great Recession) are read – integrating Marx and Minsky – as the conjunction between the real subsumption of labour to finance and the fragmentation of labour.

Stations have two main functions. The primary function of a station is to connect different modes quickly and easily with each other, this is when passengers are moving from one place to another. The secondary function is to make sure that passengers can spend their (waiting) time at a station in a pleasant way when they are staying at the station. Interchanges have to be designed to make moving as efficient as possible and staying as pleasant as possible. This means that users want a station where they can move safe, fast and easily and spend their time in a comfortable and pleasant way. The station experience can be enhanced with optimal (intuitive) wayfinding and environmental stimuli (e.g. music, light, colours, infotainment and advertisements) that can turn a transport interchange into an efficient node and a positive unique place. In this chapter, we explain how the quality of stations can be improved.