Why avoiding ‘Japanification’ could be a massive task

• ? 'Japanification risk’ is back on the agenda in the context of a slowing world economy. Japan's struggle to drag its economy out of an entrenched deflationary cycle offers a cautionary tale for other economies such as the eurozone, demonstrating the enormity of the policy effort needed.
• ? Low inflation and low growth in Japan are linked to demographic and monetary factors, against which Japan has intensified policy efforts since 2011–12. Japan can claim some success in boosting workforce participation but productivity growth has stalled while monetary policy efforts have delivered limited gains.
• ? The eurozone has avoided some of the early policy errors made by Japan and taken a number of steps to tackle ‘Japanification’ risks. But productivity growth has flagged even more than Japan's in the 1990s, and parts of the eurozone still risk sliding into deflation if the global downturn worsens.
• ? The eurozone's policy options to fight ‘Japanification', particularly at the individual country level, are more limited than was the case in Japan. Further ‘heavy lifting’ by the ECB would be required – implying downside risks for the euro and bond yields staying low, if not compressing further.

     

‘The parallels are striking’…crisis in the inner city? GB 1977

Le centre-ville est devenu un sujet populaire de débat dans le 'média', parmi les hommes politiques, et dans la recherche académique. Le gouvernement travailliste vient d'esquisser dans un livre blanc sa perspective future envers les problèmes du centre-ville en indiquant que les résidents de ces zones centrales bénéficieront de ses programmes. Cet article questionne les suppositions sur lesquelles les débats en cours sont basés, et offre une analyse alternative fondée sur le développement inégal des villes britanniques qui se concentre sur les contradictions de l'intervention étatique en affaires urbaines. Il est soutenu que la notion de 'crise urbaine' est utilisée par l'état en tant que tactique de diversion durant une période de récéssion économique; elle est idéologique plutôt que réelle bien qu'il soit évident que l'état aille peur de la possibilité de conflits raciaux intra-urbains.     

Technology policy between ‘diversity’ and ‘one best practice’ — A comparison of Korean and German promotion schemes for new production technologies

Policy makers in all industrialized countries are increasingly orienting their science and technology policy towards foreign patterns. There seems to be ‘one best practice’ which is used by all nations to make their economies fit for global competition.This paper doubts this paradigm. By comparing the South Korean and German promotion schemes for new production technologies, it is shown that an appropriate technology policy has to take the individual national system of innovation into consideration. Merely initating the examples of countries with different frame conditions is inappropriate.Diversity in science and technology policy has been the precondition for the success of contributions of these policies to economic and technological development in both South Korea and Germany.     

Why do firms adopt ‘beyond‐compliance’ environmental policies?

This paper examines why firms selectively adopt ‘beyond‐compliance’ environmental policies. It argues that existing explanations based on factors external to firms are under‐specified and a focus on internal dynamics is also required. It draws insights from institutional theory, corporate social performance perspective, and stakeholder theory and relates them to internal processes. Beyond‐compliance policies are adopted, if at all, due to two types of intra‐firm process: power based and leadership based. These processes arise under different conditions and lead to different types of outcome. Copyright © 2001 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd and ERP Environment     

2010影响未来管理那些事儿

2011年,将会发生什么?答案恐怕要从2010年来寻找。——刚刚过去的2010年真可谓多事之秋。国内国际,各个层面的商业事件层出不穷,且常常红黑两面交集,引发出远远超越商业层面的多方反思。它们发生于2010,影响的却将是2011。在征集各方意见之后,我们筛选出14个事件,提炼成14个关键词,力求勾画出2011年的管理图谱。     

Regionalization as ‘experimental regionalism’: the rescaling of territorial policy‐making in Germany

The federal system of intergovernmental relationships in Germany was greatly affected in the 1990s by the increased importance of transnational rationales and by strong orientations to competitiveness in domestic political discourse. New territorial imperatives have given rise to a variety of innovative institutional approaches to policy‐making, the main focus of which is the need to jointly identify new political arenas and new territorial domains for development policies. The result has been a plurality of highly differentiated experimental approaches to regionalization, challenging nested systems of territorial jurisdictions and consolidated policy styles. German initiatives in ‘experimental regionalism’ are addressed in a perspective that highlights their dimension of institutional coevolution in the framework of emerging multi‐level governance practices at a European level: they are hence not only seen as responses to exogenous factors, but also as outcomes of endogenous factors of innovation and change, related to the need for new forms of political regulation in dealing with intergovernmental policy‐making deadlocks and new ‘local’ claims for representation and mobilization. Building on interpretations of regional governance based on a regulationist‐ and state‐theoretical perspective, elaborated in economic and political geography, recent German approaches to ‘experimental regionalism’ are interpreted as new modes of policy‐making that redefine the state's role in political‐economic regulation through a dual process involving a reframing of state‐local relationships and a rescaling of territorial policy arenas. En Allemagne, le système fédéral de relations inter‐gouvernements a énormément changé dans les années 1990 du fait de l'importance croissante de logiques transnationales et de tendances marquées pour la compétitivité dans le discours politique intérieur. De nouveaux impératifs territoriaux ont suscité un éventail d'approches institutionnelles novatrices du pouvoir politique, leur centre d'intérêt étant d'identifier parallèlement de nouvelles arènes politiques et d'autres domaines territoriaux pour les politiques de développement. Il en a résulté de multiples et très distinctes démarches expérimentales à l'égard de la régionalisation, venant défier systèmes imbriqués de prérogatives territoriales et styles de politique publique homogènes. Les initiatives allemandes de ‘régionalisme expérimental‘ sont abordées dans une perspective qui souligne leur co‐évolution institutionnelle au sein de pratiques naissantes de gouvernance à plusieurs niveaux au plan européen: elles sont donc considérées à la fois comme des réponses à des facteurs exogènes et le produit de facteurs endogènes d'innovation et de changement, liés à la nécessité de nouvelles formes de régulation politique pour résoudre les impasses de l'élaboration des politiques intergouvernementales et les nouvelles revendications ‘locales‘ en matière de représentation et mobilisation. Partant d'interprétations de la gouvernance régionale d'un point de vue théorique régulationiste et étatique, dans une géographie économique et politique, ces récentes approches du ‘régionalisme expérimental‘ sont présentées comme de nouveaux modes d'élaboration des politiques, redéfinissant le rôle de l'État dans une régulation politico‐économique via un double processus de recadrage des relations État‐région et de redimensionnement des arènes politiques territoriales.     

A ‘lost decade’ for pay may be a taste of things to come

• ? The failure of pay growth to respond to falling unemployment is less of a puzzle when allowance is made for structural changes in the jobs market. But the same developments make it hard to see where a pay revival will come from.
• ? In real terms, the average weekly wage in the UK is below the level of 10 years ago, an unprecedentedly poor performance. This is despite joblessness dropping to a 42‐year low and employment at a record high.
• ? The responsiveness of pay to falling unemployment has dwindled. A shift towards less secure forms of employment, the tightening up of eligibility for benefits and the consequences of globalisation have all made workers more compliant and less willing and able to push for higher wages.
• ? The result has been a decline in the ‘equilibrium’ rate of unemployment. The Bank of England currently judges this rate to be around 4.5%. But that earnings growth is so subdued despite unemployment being in line the Bank's estimate suggests that the sustainable rate of joblessness may well be much lower.
• ? With unemployment forecast to plateau at current levels, the odds of a revival in pay growth look slim, despite possible upsides from strong corporate profitability and rises in the National Living Wage. This would not be a new development – a secular decline in earnings growth has been apparent over the last 30 years in both nominal and real terms, with pay growth in successive periods of economic expansion failing to return to pre‐recession norms.
• ? This suggests that a serious revival in pay growth is unlikely to happen without the economy operating at significantly higher pressure and with a substantially lower unemployment rate. But this would require a recognition of, and a more accommodative policy response to, the historically weak economic expansion since the financial crisis. Neither seems likely.

     

‘Re-inventing’ China’s Industrial Relations at Enterprise-Level: an Empirical Field-Study in Four Major Cities

This article discusses the impact of China’s latest reforms on industrial relations at enterprise level in both state-owned firms (SOEs) and foreign-invested joint ventures (JVs) based on a sample of 24 industrial enterprises located in four cities. It concludes that the reforms of the early 1990s have ‘re-invented’ the IR system and have significantly influenced recruitment and selection, wage and reward systems, and social security programmes.     

Collective bargaining and new work regimes: ‘too important to be left to bosses’

The formal negotiations process remains perhaps the least‐studied moment of collective bargaining. Drawing on ideal types of ‘distributive’ and ‘integrative’ bargaining and the ‘formal/informal’ distinction, this article reports non‐participant observation and ethnographic research into the negotiations process that enabled a change agreement in a British multinational, hereafter anonymised as FMCG. Informal bargaining relations provided the backdrop to—and emerged within—the formal negotiations process. Formal bargaining established new employment contracts based on a simplified internal labour market and generated the joint governance processes to enable and regulate the change process. Neither management nor union strategy was wholly derived from rational, interest‐based positions. The negotiations process was essential to strategy formation and to the emergence of sufficient ‘integrative’ bargaining for all parties to devise and approve new processual institutions and norms to deliver a more flexible labour process and to restore the long‐run viability for ‘distributive’ bargaining.     

Governing ‘Sustainable Urban Development’ Through Self‐Build Groups and Co‐Housing: The Cases of Hamburg and Gothenburg

This article critically examines the governing of ‘sustainable urban development’ through self‐build cohousing groups in Gothenburg and Hamburg. The two case cities have been selected because both are currently involved in major urban restructuring, and have launched programmes to support self‐build groups and cohousing as part of their emphasis on promoting urban sustainable development through this process. Departing from a theoretical discussion on advanced liberal urban governance, focusing in particular on the contemporary discourse on sustainable urban development, we examine the interaction between political institutions, civil society and private actors in the construction of cohousing as a perceived novel and alternative form of housing that may contribute to fulfilling certain sustainability goals. Questions centre on the socio‐political contextualization of cohousing; concepts of sustainability; strategies of, and relations between, different actors in promoting cohousing; gentrification and segregation; and inclusion and exclusion. In conclusion we argue that, while self‐build groups can provide pockets of cohousing as an alternative to dominant forms of housing, the economic and political logics of advanced liberal urban development make even such a modest target difficult, particularly when it comes to making such housing affordable.     

From ‘spaces of place’ to ‘spaces of flows’? Territorial and functional governance in cross‐border regions in Europe and North America

To what extent are we experiencing a transformation from ‘spaces of place’ to a ‘space of flows’ as proposed by Manuel Castells? Applying his thesis to the political system leads to the following implications. Socio‐economic processes of ‘glocalization’ are undermining the gate‐keeper position of national governments. Furthermore, governance is becoming ‘deterritorialized’, an aspect which is characterized by Elkins as an ‘unbundling’ of identities and jurisdictions. But does this process of unbundling lead to a federal system of multi‐level governance where the national level is complemented by supranational and subnational levels of governance; or does it imply an even more radical transformation towards an architecture of governance which is characterized by a proliferation of single‐purpose governments with variable and flexible spatial scales? A final implication is the transformation from ‘government to governance’— which means a broader array of actors and changing modes of interaction. This article traces these theses by analysing institutions of governance in four cross‐border regions in Europe and North America. In all regions we indeed find many cross‐border networks and institutions undermining the national gate‐keeper position. In Europe, cross‐border collaboration is producing another soft, but institutionalized, comprehensive, stable and territorially‐defined layer in the European ‘multi‐level‐system’. In North America, by contrast, only informal, fluid, specific and non‐territorial institutions are evolving across national borders. Here, the territorially‐based nation state is not complemented by similar kinds of political institutions, but is instead being challenged more fundamentally by new kinds of institutions: transnational socio‐economic exchange networks and transnational ideological coalitions which embody enormous transformational power. In conclusion, cross‐border regional governance in Europe still follows the logic of ‘spaces of place’, whereas in North America quite different ‘spaces of flows’ are emerging as complementary logics of community and institution building. Jusqu'où s'exerce la transformation d'un ‘espace de lieux’ en ‘espace des flux’, comme le suggère Manuel Castells? L'application de cette théorie au système politique a plusieurs implications. Les processus socio‐économiques de ‘glocalisation’ désagrègent la position de garde‐barrière des gouvernements nationaux. De plus, la gouvernance se ‘déterritorialise’, phénomène qu'Elkins appelle la ‘séparation’ des identités et des domaines de compétence. Mais à quel type de gouvernance cette ‘séparation’ mène‐t‐elle: à un système fédéral à plusieurs niveaux où le plan national est complété de plans supra‐ et infra‐nationaux de gouvernance? ou à un changement plus radical vers une architecture caractérisée par une prolifération de gouvernements à finalité unique dont les échelles spatiales varient et s'adaptent? Une dernière conséquence est le passage de gouvernement à gouvernance, qui se traduit par une diversification des acteurs et de nouveaux modes d'interactions. L'article retrouve ces thèses en analysant des institutions de gouvernance dans quatre régions transfrontalières européennes et nord‐américaines. Dans toutes les régions, l'étude identifie en effet de nombreux réseaux et institutions transfrontaliers qui minent la position de garde‐barrière nationale. En Europe, la collaboration transfrontalière crée une strate souple, quoique institutionnalisée, étendue, stable et aux limites territoriales définies dans le ‘système européen à plusieurs niveaux’. En Amérique du Nord, en revanche, n'interviennent à travers les frontières que des institutions informelles, fluides, spécifiques et non‐territoriales; l'État‐nation lié au territoire n'est pas complété d'institutions politiques de types similaires, étant plutôt profondément mis en cause par des institutions d'un genre nouveau: réseaux d'échanges socio‐économiques et coalitions idéologiques transnationaux qui expriment une énorme dynamique de transformation. Pour conclure, la gouvernance régionale transfrontalière en Europe obéit encore à la logique des ‘espaces de lieux’ tandis qu'en Amérique du Nord, des ‘espaces de flux’ tout à fait différents apparaissent dans une logique complémentaire de construction de communautés et d'institutions.     

Rule of Law and Rules‐Lawyering: Legal Corruption and ‘Reprivatization Business’ in Warsaw

Delving into the nexus between the state and informality, this paper discusses the informality of the legal and judicial systems. Produced by structurally powerful actors, this kind of informality is not so much legitimized by the law, but concealed within the very process of legitimization. To capture how legal engineering welds formalized laws with informal translations, I look at judicial outcomes that, while formally legal, are socially delegitimized and perceived as legal corruption. After analysing the contested judicial outcomes of Warsaw's ‘reprivatization’ process (property restitution), I define the mechanism of legal corruption as rules‐lawyering, by which I mean an attempt to gain legal advantage by obsessively sticking to the written laws, while deliberately desecrating its spirit. I describe three of its mechanisms: appropriation, redefinition and fraud laundering. Finally, in my preliminary vivisection of the recent and ongoing process of delegalizing the legal corruption that has been part of the reprivatization process, all the allied concepts of this forum come together to demonstrate the essential inseparability of informality and state.     

‘Repeat commercializers,’ the ‘habitual entrepreneurs’ of university–industry technology transfer

Among academic faculty, is there a class of ‘repeat commercializers’ who account for a disproportionate share of commercialized technologies arising from university research? In a survey of 172 engineering, mathematics, and science faculty members from a major Canadian university, we found evidence that a class of repeat commercializers does exist. Further, we found that the 12% of the faculty who are repeat commercializers account for 80% of the commercialized innovations. Interviews with repeat commercializers in the same faculties at the same university suggest that repeat commercializers parallel habitual entrepreneurs in that they have the ability to commercialize (i.e. the ability to generate and identify commercializable inventions and the ability to acquire resources for the commercialization of their inventions) and the aspiration to do so (i.e. commercialization-friendly attitudes). Since repeat commercializers account for such a large percentage of commercialization activity, it is important that programs and policies associated with technology transfer address the needs of this subpopulation of the faculty.