ecogitar: Re-Forming Capitalism

domingo, 5 de abril de 2009

Re-Forming Capitalism

Institutional Change in the German Political Economy

Wolfgang Streeck is Director at the Max Planck Institute for the Study of Societies in Cologne, Germany. From 1988 to 1995 he was Professor of Sociology and Industrial Relations at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. In 1998/99 he was President of the Society for the Advancement of Socio-Economics. He has held visiting positions at the European University Institute in Florence, at the University of Warwick, the Instituto Juan March in Madrid, and the Sciences Po in Paris; he was a Fellow at the Wissenschaftskolleg in Berlin and the Russell Sage Foundation in New York; and he is a member of the Berlin-Brandenburg Academy of Sciences and the Academia Europea.

Abstract

In this book Wolfgang Streeck addresses some of the key issues in the field of comparative political economy and institutional theory: the role of history in institutional analysis, the dynamics of slow institutional change, the limitations of rational design and economic-functionalist explanations of institutional stability, and the recurrent difficulties of restraining the effects of capitalism on social order. In the classification of the "Varieties of Capitalism" school, Germany has always been taken as the chief exemplar of a "European", coordinated market economy. Streeck explores to what extent Germany actually conforms to this description. His argument is supported by original empirical research on wage-setting and wage structure, the organization of business and labor in business associations and trade unions, social policy, public finance, and corporate governance. From this evidence, Re-Forming Capitalism traces the current liberalization of the postwar economy of democratic capitalism by means of an historically-grounded approach to institutional change. This is an important book from a leading thinker and researcher in comparative political economy and key reading across the social sciences for academics, researchers, and advanced students of Political Economy, Sociology, comparative business systems.

How the Media Frames Political Issues

In The Emergence of American Political Issues (1977) McCombs and Shaw state that the most important effect of the mass media is "its ability to mentally order and organize our world for us. In short, the mass media may not be successful in telling us what to think, but they are stunningly successful in telling us what to think about."[13] The presidential observer Theodore White corroborates this conclusion in The Making of a President (1972):

The power of the press in America is a primordial one. It sets the agenda of public discussion; and this sweeping political power is unrestrained by any law. It determines what people will talk and think about - an authority that in other nations is reserved for tyrants, priests, parties and mandarins.[14]

McCombs and Shaw also note that the media's tendency to structure voters' perceptions of political reality in effect constitutes a bias: "to a considerable degree the art of politics in a democracy is the art of determining which issue dimensions are of major interest to the public or can be made salient in order to win public support."[15]

http://www.scottlondon.com/reports/frames.html