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The macroscopic changes to post‐industrial employment that were examined in the previous chapter are unlikely to affect all nations similarly. Job loss through de‐industrialization, e.g., will be more massive where existing industries are uncompetitive (as in Britain or Spain) and less devastating elsewhere—perhaps because firms are more adaptable (as in much of Danish, Italian, or German industry), but possibly also because wage costs decline (as in the US). De‐industrialization may or may not cause heavy unemployment, depending on skill and production structure, and also on how labour markets are managed; most of Europe has,e.g., transformed mass lay‐offs into early retirement. Similar root causes of post‐industrial employment will, therefore, have radically divergent outcomes—there is no such thing as one post‐industrial model because the institutional make‐up of nations differs, and so also does their choice of how to manage change. The different sections of this chapter are: Industrial Relations; Labour Market Regulation; The Dilemmas of Flexibilization; The Welfare State and the Reservation Wage; Wage Regulation; Employment Protection; The Regulatory Infrastructure and the Management of Industrial Decline; Managing the Equality—Jobs Trade‐Off; The Hump‐Shaped Curve—a quadratic measure of labour market rigidities; and National Idiosyncrasies and Welfare Regimes.

This is the second of three chapters on the sources of pressure on contemporary national welfare states, all of which seek to show how examining the sources of strain carries implications for identifying who is likely to fight with whom over what; the authors of the three chapters are not of one mind on this issue. Iversen's analysis seeks to show that de‐industrialization—caused by the dramatic increases in productivity in the manufacturing sector rather than by globalization—is the crucial motor of social change. He directly challenges a variant of the globalization thesis that has been popular among scholars: the idea that exposure to the heightened labour market risks of an open economy fuelled the expansion of the welfare state as a form of compensation. Instead, he marshals considerable evidence for the view that it is the shrinkage of the manufacturing sector, and not economic (trade) openness, that fuelled the growth of compensatory social policy. He finds little evidence in favour of the view that the various dimensions of globalization constitute a source of real threat to the contemporary welfare state.

This chapter uses both survey data and qualitative research to examine the shifting nature of homophobia over the past thirty years. It argues that homophobia reached its apex in the 1980s, as a result of three factors: 1) the AIDS crisis; 2) a resurgence of conservative politics; 3) the rise of the religious right. However, recent evidence shows that there has been a dramatic cultural decline in homophobia since the 1990s, particularly among male youth. Highlighting that declining homophobia is an uneven social process, it is argued that rather than being the result of economic changes, declining homophobia is primarily attributable to the success of the gay rights movement and the democratizing power of the Internet.

Why were most peakists white males? This chapter explores the racial and gender dynamics of the peak oil movement using survey responses, online forum comments and peak oil fiction. It explains the demographic composition of the peak oil movement with reference to early twenty-first century white male fears that gender equality and immigration would erode their own privilege. These fears were aggravated by long-term political economic changes (such as deindustrialization) and the recent economic recession, which led some male peakists to posit (or hope for) surprising developments in the post-carbon future: the reversal of feminism and a return to a mythical pioneer masculinity (‘retrosexuality’). With these issues in mind, it analyzes the gendered and raced individualism and false meritocracy of many recent post-apocalyptic fantasies, from peak oil visions to the zombie survival scenarios, via analyses of the television show Revolution (2012-2014) and other popular culture.

The economic performance of Northern Ireland since 1945 is considered in its broader UK and European context. In general, unemployment was considerably higher, and incomes per head generally much lower, than the UK average. The region never achieved full employment and missed out on the ‘golden age’ of economic growth in Western Europe between 1950 and 1973. The 1970s were a particularly disappointing decade and the economic fragility discussed in earlier chapters is reaffirmed for the later twentieth century. Brownlow considers it ‘implausible’ to attribute Northern Ireland's relatively poor performance to the ‘Troubles’ and looks instead to institutions, innovation, entrepreneurship and productivity. Above all, the region's dependence on the public sector in the later twentieth and early twenty-first centuries stands out. Deindustrialisation and the growing importance of the public sector were reflected in the region's trade union membership and pattern of industrial relations.

This chapter details the early years of Margaret Thatcher's regime and the related shift in national sentiment towards market philosophy, private ethic, and liberalism. Dubbed as the ‘Iron Lady,’ Thatcher's regime banked on a strong political base to deal with mass de-industrialization, high inflation, and a possible economic downturn. The implementation of tax increases on petrol, tobacco, and liquor coupled with sizeable public spending cuts caused unemployment to rise and public sentiment to turn against the new administration. A less rigorous monetary policy to curb inflation was adopted later on. Thatcher's industrial and social policy showed cautious moderation and compromise while foreign dealings showed her instinctive pragmatism, resulting in improved relations with Africa, the commonwealth, and the United States as well. Thatcher survived internal party turmoil, the terrorist violence in Northern Ireland, and the war with Argentina over the Falklands to continue on as Prime Minister for another term.

Imperialism is a word that trips easily off the tongue. But it has such different meanings that it is difficult to use it without clarification as an analytic rather than a polemical term. I here define that special brand of it called ‘capitalist imperialism’ as a contradictory fusion of ‘the politics of state and empire’ (imperialism as a distinctively political project on the part of actors whose power is based in command of a territory and a capacity to mobilize its human and natural resources towards political, economic, and military ends) and ‘the molecular processes of capital accumulation in space and time’ (imperialism as a diffuse political-economic process in space and time in which command over and use of capital takes primacy). With the former I want to stress the political, diplomatic, and military strategies invoked and used by a state (or some collection of states operating as a political power bloc) as it struggles to assert its interests and achieve its goals in the world at large. With the latter, I focus on the ways in which economic power flows across and through continuous space, towards or away from territorial entities (such as states or regional power blocs) through the daily practices of production, trade, commerce, capital flows, money transfers, labour migration, technology transfer, currency speculation, flows of information, cultural impulses, and the like. What Arrighi refers to as the ‘territorial’ and the ‘capitalist’ logics of power are rather different from each other. To begin with, the motivations and interests of agents differ. The capitalist holding money capital will wish to put it wherever profits can be had, and typically seeks to accumulate more capital. Politicians and statesmen typically seek outcomes that sustain or augment the power of their own state vis-à-vis other states. The capitalist seeks individual advantage and (though usually constrained by law) is responsible to no one other than his or her immediate social circle, while the statesman seeks a collective advantage and is constrained by the political and military situation of the state and is in some sense or other responsible to a citizenry or, more often, to an elite group, a class, a kinship structure, or some other social group.

David Downes' Delinquent Solution was publicized in 1966 and presented a rich and rewarding picture of East London in the early 1960s. It produced a platform for scholars to understand the worlds of successive generations of British Youth. This chapter reconsiders the socio-economic changes that have taken place in the East End during the past forty years. A few of Downes' old haunts are described in a contemporary context, and the validity of the concept of dissociation that emerged from his fieldwork is interrogated along with the relevance of the subcultural canon. It specifically had a tremendous influence upon the study of British youth subcultures. In general, The Delinquent Solution was an important text in the sociology of youth culture, and in its careful unravelling of the realities of being young in the 1960s Downes succeeded in contradicting some of the crude stereotyping of working-class youth, and in its place created a complex picture of a rich culture that was both oppositional and subservient.

The preceding chapters of the book are primarily focused on rural or inter-urban transportation. This final chapter suggests that, at least in some places, top-down fears of patterns of subversive mobility have also shaped transportation investments within cities. To make this case, the chapter uses the example of New York City. The chapter argues that elite refusals to invest in New York City’s freight infrastructure during the 1920s must be understood in the political context of the German sabotages and Red Scare of the 1910s. The memoirs of the city’s bomb squad captain during the 1910s indicate a local official perception that the inner city’s primary methods and spaces for freight-handling—the lighter-boats of New York Harbor, the city’s riverfront piers, and the adjacent urban complex of factories which made use of this local freight transport network—were being utilized by politically subversive parties. Ultimately, elite refusals to modernize the inner city’s freight-handling facilities helped to undermine New York City’s strength as a manufacturing center.

The 1970s were marked by dramatic changes in government policies during the governorship of Sir Murray MacLehose. The New Territories became the locus of a planned population shift away from crowded Hong Kong and Kowloon, and the idea of ‘New Towns’, based on Tsuen Wan’s developments, was central. It went hand-in-hand with infrastructural developments, which revolutionized transportation and ended the relative isolation of Tsuen Wan through the MTR. The administration of Tsuen Wan fundamentally changed and the creation of District Boards (later Councils), beginning first in Tsuen Wan, altered the system of political consultation throughout Hong Kong. The 1980s were marked by dramatic changes in economic policies within China, not least in the areas of China adjacent to Hong Kong, which saw industrialization through the Pearl River delta region and de-industrialization in Tsuen Wan. Emergence of a distinctive Hong Kong identity, and a new political culture, emerged as sovereignty over Hong Kong was resumed by China in 1997. Tsuen Wan changed from the working class town that it has been into one dominated by middle class housing developments, much like the rest of Hong Kong, although the villages of the original inhabitants remained.

This chapter examines how employer preferences with respect to labor market reforms evolved in the new economic environment shaped by prolonged recession and globalization since the 1990s. More specifically, it considers the policy demands pursued by Japanese businesses and what shaped their policy preferences. It also explores why Japanese firms advocated deregulation of the labor market rather than reduction of employment protection, and whether an ideational shift from cooperatism to neoliberalism occurred in the realm of employment policy. Finally, it discusses the impacts of globalization and de-industrialization on employers as well as the ways in which human resource businesses were able to influence the policy-making process.

Traces changing economic ways and political participations in the Mexican capital from the era of late nineteenth liberalism and emerging informalities, into times of revolution after 1910, through the post-revolutionary turn to national capitalism and the construction of an authoritarian regime. With industrial boom after 1940, neither employment or resources proved sufficient to formal development in a rapidly expanding city, leading to barrio-based informal urbanization, as people built their own homes and new neighbourhoods—and turned to neighbourhood mobilizations to make demands and preserve limited gains. With globalization under NAFTA from 1990s, de-industrialization spread marginality while population continued to grow. The democratization of 2000 brought few gains to people facing marginal and informal lives in a city still the national capital, a pivot of power serving globalization, and the largest metropolitan region in the Americas.

Buenos Aires began the twentieth century as a prosperous port drawing European immigrants to serve a booming export economy. It expanded outward from its core of urban power and prosperity through suburbanization, early on segregating slaughterhouse zones from sites of recreation for the comfortable. Mid-century industrialization drew workers to the peripheries—which became zones of labor politics and bases for active citizenship and Peronist power. Peronist economic and political power sustained an unequally shared prosperity past World War I. Then de-industrialization in times of population expansion accompanied by military dictatorship (1976-1983) and a new suburbanization to protect the wealthy brought the polarizing mix wealth and marginality, formality and informality faced earlier in other New World cities. Re-democratization failed to bring more shared prosperity—or an escape from repeated cycles of promise and crisis.

The chapter examines the crucial strikes in the National Health Service (NHS) during the Winter of Discontent and contextualizes them within historic currents in the health service since its foundation. The chapter describes how acute staff shortages, combined with the Government’s need for cheap labour created low-paid, working-class vocations within the NHS and how three major groups were recruited: men left redundant from de-industrialization; white working- class women who were primary and/or essential breadwinners, and overseas workers, particularly from the West Indies, restricted to such work partly by racism. The chapter details how the National Union of Public Employees (NUPE) harnessed workers’ dissatisfaction with low pay and the political energy of a new generation of local male and female activists like Celia Newman, Lorraine Donovan, and Robert Gregory during the disputes of 1978-1979. The chapter ends with the Prime Minister James Callaghan’s dramatic defeat in March 1979 with the Conservative Party’s call for a vote of no confidence in the Labour Government and the commencement of the General Election of 1979.

This chapter considers the evolution of the world economy in a long-term historical perspective. In 1820, Asia, Africa and Latin America accounted for almost three-fourths of world population and around two-thirds of world income. The dramatic transformation of the world economy began thereafter, as geographical divides in the world turned into economic divides. The rise of ‘The West’ was concentrated in Western Europe and North America. The decline and fall of ‘The Rest’ was concentrated in Asia, much of it attributable to China and India. The Great Divergence in per capita incomes between ‘The West’ and ‘The Rest’ led to the Great Specialization, in which the former produced manufactured goods while the latter produced primary commodities. The outcome of this process was the decline and fall of Asia and a retrogression of Africa, even if Latin America fared better, so that, by 1950, the divide between rich countries and poor countries was enormous.

De-industrialization, de-familization, and immigrants do shake our image of the ‘golden-age’ social fabric, but these forces do not necessarily lead to social erosion. This chapter demonstrates that Sweden and Denmark have also been exposed to these forces, which fact is often used to explain social erosion in the US and UK. The main point of this chapter is to demonstrate the common point of and show how similar developments came to pose a potential threat to the image of the ‘golden-age’ social fabric. Most important here is the documented long-term decline in jobs in the male-dominated industrial sector. But the chapter also discusses de-familization and immigration patterns.

This chapter examines the spread of industrialization to the poor periphery, focusing on Brazil and Mexico. It shows that industrialization of Brazil and Mexico was very impressive between 1870 and 1913, especially compared with the rest of the poor periphery; the industrial liftoff started well before 1890; Mexico recorded the most rapid industrialization before 1901; and after 1900, Argentina, Chile, and Brazil all recorded rapid industrial growth well in excess of their GDP growth. What makes this performance all the more striking is that it was preceded by seven decades of de-industrialization. The chapter also argues that the Latin American findings generalize to other parts of the poor periphery.