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The conclusion emphasizes more general patterns that were identified in the comparative analyses. If due account is taken of the specifics of economic changes and national policy legacies, the variation among the responses of individual countries is far from random. In each of the periods covered by the study, there were distinct groups of countries facing similar policy challenges that would have called for similar responses. And even though the increasing internationalization of the economic environment has narrowed the range of economically viable national policy choices, we are able to show that in each of these groups, one or more countries did in fact have the institutional capabilities and the policy discourses that allowed them to move “from vulnerability to competitiveness” without abandoning their normative aspirations or jeopardizing the democratic legitimacy of their governments.

This chapter explores UK abortion debates in the 21st century. It describes new anti-abortion strategies which emerged in the 2000s and went beyond the familiar attacks on abortion providers. It demonstrates how issues such as foetal viability and calls for changes in pre-abortion counselling provision evolved as a consequence both of past anti-abortion activity and how pro-choice feminist actors have made their arguments. The chapter argues that counselling amendments are proposed because they undermine the association between a ‘right to choose’ and feminist politics and call into question the medical authority on which the Abortion Act 1967 was based.

This chapter expands on the idea of norm-governed productivity. Because this approach opens the door for a more straightforwardly political assessment of corporate hierarchy, this chapter considers how theories of workplace democracy stack up against this view of corporate efficiency. It argues that radical and participatory democrats are prone to error by essentially doing the mirror image of what the Chicago school does: where Chicago school scholars conflate firms for markets and obscure their cooperative nature, radical democrats often mistake firms for purposive communities and obscure their economic nature. While democratic theorists are right that undefended authority exists within firms and is a problem, they are often in danger of utterly discounting efficiency. It concludes with a more exact enunciation of norm-governed productivity, which emphasizes the manner in which efficiency concerns necessitate a bounded application of noneconomic values.

This chapter draws on the example of the English planning system to examine the role of lawyers and planning law structures and judgements in shaping local decisions. It focuses, in particular, on the growing reliance on quantitative evidence in understanding urban problems, which have an impact on how cities are governed. The chapter shows how the calculative approach to viability illustrates the technocracy currently so prevalent in the English planning system. A reliance on numbers runs throughout the framework: in objective assessments of housing need, efficiency targets for local planning authorities, governance by statistics, and annual reports. It is viability assessments, however, that are so dominated by commercial calculative practices, particularly profit and loss.

This chapter focuses on the changing agricultural structure threatening the existence of midsize farms in the United States, and explores the advantages of midsize farms, which include innovation and flexibility in producing differentiated products, which are high on demand. It also discusses the importance of connecting farmers with the market without the use of direct marketing techniques, and of developing competitive alternatives that can be economically, socially, and environmentally sustainable for them. The impact of the possible disappearance of midsize farms from the rural communities’ employment rate, tax base, and agricultural viability are also analyzed.

Chapter ten considers these issues, exploring micro-enterprise funding models, which rely heavily on individualised purchasing by people rather than local government contracts. This chapter focuses on four interlinked aspects of micro-enterprises which shape their effectiveness and their likely contribution to future care services. These are: visibility; financial viability; relationship with the local authority; and quality and regulation. These are a combination of factors which are internal and external to the micro-enterprises. They encompass some attributes or structures that the organisations have the power to change and others that lie outside of their control. The chapter concludes that micro-enterprises retain a reliance on formal institutions within the care system – local authorities, the Care Quality Commission – which can limit their scope to ‘break the mould’ when it comes to care and support.

Chapter 3 is the second chapter dedicated to the technological imperative stage of the political communication cycle (PCC). It focuses on the technological component of political communication revolutions (PCRs) and addresses how the cost, rate of diffusion, and perceived benefits of each new information and communication technology (ICT) affects its political utility. In other words, chapter 3 evaluates how new ICTs become politically viable. A politically viable ICT does not enter American politics without active choices made on the part of political actors who try to use these new tools in innovative ways. All widely diffused ICTs do not share wide-scale political utility. As a result, some ICTs—like mass-marketed newspapers, radio, television, and the internet—have had a major impact on communication practices broadly and political communication innovations specifically, while others like the telephone and telegraph have transformed social communication but not political communication.