The Social and Geopolitical Origins of State Transformation: The Case of South Korea

Recent debates surrounding state transformation in East Asia have tended to examine either how transformations in domestic social relations undermined the efficacy of the developmental state, or how mobilisation of coercion and consent at the international level led to the adoption of neoliberal policies. Through an examination of the case of Korea, however, this article seeks to move beyond this division between ‘domestic’ - and ‘international’ - centred analyses to provide a framework wherby mutually constitutive transformations taking place both at the level of social relations of production and at the level of the international order can be integrated to produce a conjunctural analysis of state transformation. Through deploying Gramsci's concept of passive revolution, an analysis of social and geopolitical underpinnings of korean late development is provided in order to provide an alternative explanation of the causes and nature of transition towards the neoliberal state since the latter part of the twentieth century.     

Reciprocity and statehood in Africa: from clientelism to cleptocracy

There is considerable quarrel as to what extent the shape and malfunctioning of contemporary African states can be attributed to the colonial experience or whether the precolonial heritage must be taken into account. Generally, the correct answer is that both, precolonial forms of political organization and the imposition of the colonial state, characterize the African situation. Yet, it is possible to distinguish more specifically between the two formative influences and to gauge their particular importance. Empirically, the result of the colonial encounter was, on the one hand, a subversion of traditional concepts of legitimacy and, on the other hand, still is the fact that the development of market economies and liberal democracies remains unlikely. Theoretically, I propose to use the notion of reciprocity to describe and analyze three historical forms of power relations, namely, clientelism, colonialism and cleptocracy. By reconstructing the historicity and malleability of the concept, I try to show its usefulness and adequacy to outline basic features of societal organization.     

US Hegemony and the Origins of Japanese Nuclear Power: The Politics of Consent

This paper deploys the Gramscian concepts of hegemony and consent in order to explore the process whereby nuclear power was brought to Japan. The core argument is that nuclear power was brought to Japan as a consequence of US hegemony. Rather than a simple manifestation of one state exerting material ‘power over' another, bringing nuclear power to Japan involved a series of compromises worked out within and between state and civil society in both Japan and the USA. Ideologies of nationalism, imperialism and modernity underpinned the process, coalescing in post-war debates about the future trajectory of Japanese society, Japan's Cold War alliance with the USA and the role of nuclear power in both. Consent to nuclear power was secured through the generation of a psychological state in the public mind combining the fear of nuclear attack and the hope of unlimited consumption in a nuclear-fuelled post-modern world.     

林业行政强制立法与《行政强制法》的吻合度分析

林业行政强制制度是我国行政强制法律制度体系的重要组成部分,直接关系到依法治林及林农合法权益保护。我国的林业法律、行政法规和部门规章在木材运输管理、植物检疫和植物新品种保护等三个领域创设了16项林业行政强制行为。通过对林业行政强制立法的实证分析和理论分析得知,除由规章设定的＂通知品种权人缴纳滞纳金＂这一行政强制执行方式以外,我国的15项林业行政强制立法与《行政强制法》的规定相吻合。《森林法实施条例》对《森林法》中＂有权制止＂这一＂暧昧的制定法＂解释为＂暂扣木材＂,是一种合理的行政解释裁量,应予尊重;而综观《森林法》的全部规定可以发现,森林公安机关可以成为＂暂扣木材＂这一行政强制措施的适格实施主体,这一发现得到了法律实践的验证。     

On the Origins of Property Rights: Conflict and Production in the State of Nature

I analyse the emergence of property rights in a model of conflict and production in the absence of institutions of enforcement. The population of agents evolves dynamically through conflicts for possession of factor goods among pairs of randomly matched agents. Conflicts are incomplete information wars of attrition with an agent's type consisting of his or her independently drawn valuation of the prize and cost of competing for it. I prove equilibrium existence and show that in the steady state of the game, the population sorts into two stable groups (resource "haves" and "have-nots") in accordance with a known function of their primitive types.     

The Impact of Social Comparisons on Reciprocity*

In this paper, we investigate how social comparison information about referent others (i.e., learning what similar others do, and how they are treated) affects reciprocal relationships. Using three‐person gift‐exchange games, we study how employees’ reciprocity towards an employer is affected by pay comparison information (what co‐workers earn) and effort comparison information (how co‐workers perform). We find strong evidence of the effects of effort comparison: employees are more willing to reciprocate by choosing high effort in response to a high wage if they observe others doing so. In our setting, we find somewhat weaker evidence of the effects of pay comparison.     

Reciprocity in the shadow of threat

This paper considers a partial equilibrium model of conflict where two agents differently evaluate a contested stake. Differently from common contest models, agents have the option of choosing a second instrument to affect the outcome of the conflict. The second instrument is assumed to capture positive investments in ‘conflict management’—labeled as ‘talks’. The focus is on the asymmetry in the evaluation of the stake: whenever the asymmetry in the evaluation of the stake is large there is no room for cooperation and a conflict trap emerges; whenever the degree of asymmetry falls within a critical interval, cooperation seems to emerge only in the presence of a unilateral concession; as the evaluations of the stake converge, only reciprocal concessions can sustain cooperation. Finally the concept of entropy is applied to measure conflict and conflict management.     

国家政权建设与乡村自治单位--问题与回顾

"国家政权建设"是否可以解释基层社会的现象,它在中国的"实践"是否是针对它特指的一些基本问题?它是否企图根据不同于以往的原则和机制将社会重新组织起来本文对此问题进行了回顾和规范性的讨论.     

The State of the Welfare State

Books reviewed in this article:
J.M Wildeboer Schut, J.C Vrooman and P.T de Beer, On Worlds of Welfare: Institutions and their Effects in Eleven Welfare States
Jørgen Goul Andersen and Per H Jensen, Changing Labour Markets, Welfare Policies and Citizenship     

The Transnational Challenge to the Corporate State

Income inequality is not persistent as far as the Netherlands is concerned. Dutch income inequality diminished with the rise of the welfare state. One of the explanatory factors of the development of income inequality is the corporatist model applied to socio-economic negotiations.

The Dutch case endorses the view that corporatist institutions are significant for income distribution. Corporatism also may positively influence productivity. Therefore, the integration of the successful corporatist countries into the European Union does not imply that they have to converge to the socio-economic governance structure of the other countries. It is likely that European countries, such as the Netherlands, can continue their approach to income equality.     

The Macroeconomic Consequences of Reciprocity in Labor Relations*

We develop and analyze a structural model of efficiency wages founded on reciprocity. Workers are assumed to face an explicit trade‐off between the disutility of providing effort and the psychological benefit of reciprocating the gift of a wage offer above some reference level. The model provides a rationale for rent sharing—a feature that is very much present in the data but absent from previous formulations of the efficiency wage hypothesis. This firm‐internal perspective on efficiency wages has potentially important macroeconomic consequences: rent‐sharing considerations promote wage rigidity, internal amplification and differential responses to technology and demand shocks.     

The Origins of Entrepreneurial Opportunities

Kirzner's (1973) theory of entrepreneurship emphasizes the equilibrating role of entrepreneurship. When the market is not in equilibrium, profit opportunities exist, and entrepreneurs discover and act on these profit opportunities to equilibrate the market. Because Kirzner focuses on entrepreneurial actions when profit opportunities exist, and does not describe where they come from, one could imagine a fixed stock of profit opportunities that get used up as entrepreneurs discover them. But new profit opportunities are being created constantly. A taxonomy of the origins of entrepreneurial opportunities includes factors that disequilibrate the market, factors that enhance production possibilities, and most notably, opportunities created from previous acts of entrepreneurship. Entrepreneurial actions do not use up profit opportunities, but create them, and the critical role of entrepreneurship in the creation of new profit opportunities is emphasized. This line of reasoning leads directly to policy implications regarding the economic environment conducive to entrepreneurial discovery and the role of government in research and development. This paper enhances Kirzner's theory of entrepreneurship by illustrating how entrepreneurship enlarges the stock of future entrepreneurial opportunities, and points to entrepreneurship as the engine of economic progress.     

民主的四大渊源

当代最卓越的民主理论家之一的罗伯特·达尔认为,现代民主的理论和实践有四大渊源：希腊的直接民主制、罗马与中世纪、文艺复兴时期意大利城市国家的共和主义、代议制政府的理论与实践,以及政治平等理念。本文对这四大渊源作一评介。     

Tracing the Origins of Personalist Economics to Aristotle and Aquinas

Personalist Economics has identified a central problem in Neoclassical Economics that originates in its representation of the economic agent as homo economicus and its grounding in individualism. Both flaws are directly addressed by Personalist Economics that has a different perspective on human nature as set forth in Personalism. Our remarks are presented in three sections. In the first section we address why individualism is an unsatisfactory philosophical foundation for modern economic theory. In the second section we trace the origins of Personalist Economics to Aristotle and Aquinas. While others, such as Heinrich Pesch and Joseph Schumpeter, played important roles in the evolution of Personalist Economics, here our efforts are restricted to the contributions of Aristotle and Aquinas. In the third section we explore how, in terms of 18 tenets, Personalist Economics and a Personalist economy differ from Mainstream Economics and the individualistic market economy.     

国家在经济分析中的定位:从“黑匣”到“诺思悖论”

国家在相当程度上影响甚至决定了经济绩效与发展。由于国家在经济分析中并未得到系统、明确的定位,主流经济学的增长理论难以解释各国在经济绩效方面存在的巨大差异。反映在以往的经济分析中,国家常常被当作为"黑匣",这严重削弱了理论的解释能力。"诺思悖论"的提出,意味着国家被纳入经济分析中的关键领域。该文认为,围绕国家理论的这一核心命题,从不同的研究视角出发、运用不同的研究工具,有助于更为深入全面地理解经济增长的本质。     

The Letters of John Sherman and the Origins of Antitrust

This paper presents a survey of the letters of Senator John Sherman, who pushed for passage of the first federal antitrust law in the United States. By placing these letters in historical context, this paper helps resolve a debate about Sherman's true intentions in creating an antitrust law. In particular, Sherman's letters reveal that he was more concerned with protecting the interests of small and inefficient businesses than with protecting the interests of consumers.