Business and Management

Modern constitutions are relatively recent instruments of rule and are closely associated with the formation of national states from the eighteenth century onwards. So what is this term doing in respect to global business practices and corporate affairs? This question is the one the book sets out to explore. The argument is that with the advent of globalization — where corporate organizations and the commercial relations that accompany them are argued to have become increasingly transnational — the locus of powers, authorities, and responsibilities has shifted to the global level. The nation-state arena is losing its capacity to regulate and control commercial processes and practices as a transformational logic kicks-in, associated with new forms of global rule making and governance. And it is this new arena of global rule making can be considered as a surrogate form of global constitutionalization, or ‘quasi-constitutionalization’. But as might be expected, this surrogate process of constitutionalization is not a coherent program or a set of rounded outcomes but is full of contradictory half-finished currents and projects: an ‘assemblage’ of many disparate advances and often directionless moves — almost an accidental coming together of elements. Thus, the book is about governance, law, and constitutional matters. these are discussed in the context of international corporate constitutional governance. So, the emphasis is upon how and why the business world, commercial relations, and particularly company activities have increasingly become subject to legal and constitutional forms of regulation and governance at the international level. The questions asked is how to characterize the process that has seen the international corporate sphere increasingly subject to juridical and constitutional-like regulatory initiatives and interventions. Does this amount to a new attempt to subject international commercial relations to the ‘rule by law’ and, indeed, to rule the world through these very means?

The practice of consultation between senior managers and employee representatives has a long history in British employment relations yet has often been a poor cousin to collective bargaining. Two trends have elevated the importance of consultation. First, the decline in trade union membership and the retreat from collective bargaining in the private sector has meant that consultation is often the only form of collective employee voice available. Second, since the 1970s the European Union (EU) has embarked on programme of legislative support for consultation, most recently in the information and consultation directive of 2002. The United Kingdom's Information and Consultation of Employees (ICE) Regulations implementing the directive became fully operational in 2008. The book charts the meaning and development of consultation in the twentieth century and explores the justifications for the practice. The way EU intervention to promote consultation evolved and changed is analysed with particular attention to the adoption of the ICE directive. The half-hearted response to EU consultation initiatives in Britain is analysed with a critical assessment of UK governments' handling of the issue, employer hostility, and union ambivalence. The take-up and impact of consultation regulations, especially ICE, is assessed and the processes involved in effective consultation explored. The dynamics of consultation are described drawing a contrast between ‘active’ consultation, and more limited consultation used as a means of communication. The UK experience is compared with practices in Europe. Suggestions are made to improve take-up of consultation and changes needed to the EU directive and ICE regulations.

The Nordic welfare states have been at the top of the lists of national competitiveness throughout the 2000s. The Nordic welfare model is deemed able to combine equality, welfare and economic efficiency. Among the Nordic countries, Finland has been considered as an epitome of information society, of high-quality education and systemic innovation policy. In order to make sense of the Finnish development, this book puts political economy, innovation studies, welfare state research, organizational institutionalism and cultural-historical psychology into dialogue with each other. It develops an approach of studying institutional change and learning based on cultural-historical activity theory. This approach is used to analyze the emergence and development of the Finnish comprehensive school system. The steadfast success of Finnish students in the PISA studies shows, against neoliberal principles, that a public school system inspired by educational equality can achieve excellent results with moderate costs. The book outlines a model of an enabling welfare state which develops further the capability cultivating universal services created by the welfare state in the 1960s–1980s. In future these services — produced by multi-professional collaboration — will be increasingly tailored to meet the needs of different individuals and specific life situations. They enable citizens to cope with risks and to meet the challenges of the rapidly changing labour market. An enabling democratic welfare state fosters local experimentation as well as learning in collaborative communities and developmental associations. It mobilizes well-educated professionals and practitioners to innovate in all spheres of society and in this way deepens democracy within the society.

The book is a collective meditation on the role of materiality in social affairs. The recent and growing interest in the concept of “materiality” certainly has diverse origins. Yet, it is closely associated with the diffusion of technological objects and artifacts through society and many have questioned how human choice and social practice are conditioned by the characteristics of such devices and systems. Many traditional technologies are easy to call “material” — they are made up of wood, steel, and other physical substrates that afford and constrain particular uses. Other technologies, such as software and rhetorical tropes, are not made up of such physical substrates, but they still have implications for human action in many of the same ways as the more traditional technologies. Thus, it is unclear how to talk about the materiality of technology in a way that includes both physical and nonphysical artifacts while still accounting for their effects. The book gathers together a group of scholars from various disciplines who approach the issues materiality raises from various angles, making evident that there is no single answer as to how the concept can be used to approach the perennial question of the ways technologies and humans bear upon one another. The book contributes to untangling the various meanings of materiality and clarifying the positions or perspectives from which they are produced.

After many years in which it appeared to be losing the pre-eminent position it once occupied in the lexicon of the social and human sciences, the term ‘capitalism’ has once again become a matter of critical concern both theoretically and substantively in a range of disciplinary fields. The global financial and environmental crises, and the shifting economic power geometry associated with the rise of the BRICS and the sovereign debt contagion in the Eurozone, for example, have all put the norms, practices and devices of capitalist conduct under the spotlight once again. In the social and human sciences, a revived engagement with the nature and effects of contemporary capitalism received a remarkable boost with the publication of Luc Boltanski and Eve Chiapello's The New Spirit of Capitalism. This text became something of a publishing sensation in its native France, and later in the UK and the USA, sparking debate not simply about the meaning, significance and effects of contemporary mutations in economic and organizational life, but becoming a reference point in political discussions about the future of the welfare state and the possibilities both of collective action in a ‘networked’ world, and of reconciling the interests of social justice with the ‘laws of the markets’. Such a reception is not as surprising as it might first appear, not simply because the themes of the text spoke to a popular sense of discontent concerning the nature, direction and consequences of the ‘neo-liberal’ experiment, but also because the book offered a comprehensive and subtle series of discrete but interrelated arguments combining sociological and cultural analysis, socio-historical narrative, political economy, and engaged advocacy that chimed with ongoing debates about the meaning, significance and effects of changing forms of capitalism and the role of neo-liberalism as these were being articulated in sociology, management and organization studies, economic geography, and political economy, for example. When taken together these arguments offered some important clues as to how and why neo-liberalism had proven so resilient and adaptable when faced with evidence of its own hubris. This edited book offers the first comprehensive attempt to interrogate both the explanatory power and reach of Boltanski and Chiapello's thesis, and the theoretical and methodological perspectives, tools and techniques they developed, and to do so in relation to the development of neo-liberal capitalism in the period since their original publication, and in particular the culmination of these developments in the ongoing crisis since the financial collapse of 2007. The volume provides both a balanced critique and overview of New Spirit, but also shows how it can be used in a variety of empirical studies to develop new insights into the functioning and regulation of capitalism in the contemporary era. The volume brings together leading scholars from a range of disciplinary fields where Boltanski and Chiapelllo's work has received its most serious engagement. Luc Boltanksi and Eve Chiapello also offer their thoughts on the continuing relevance and reach of the New Spirit, over a decade after its publication, and in the context of contemporary global economic and political developments.

The worldwide financial crisis has wrought deep changes in capital and labor markets, old-age retirement systems, and household retirement and consumption patterns. Around the world, plan sponsors, fiduciaries, policymakers, and households have gained a new awareness of retirement risk. When pressed to reform postcrisis, many would recommend enhancing financial advice for plan participants, emphasizing flexibility and the positive effect of working another one or two years to make up for investment losses in the downturn. Adding to this is the continuing need for financial education, essential as the retirement system moves increasingly toward personal account pensions. But perhaps most important of all is the need for greater understanding of risk throughout the retirement security system, along with new approaches to reengineering retirement pensions.