Search Results

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.

While the accomplishments of (and the existing problems with) 20th century ingenuity are clear, their implications for the future are highly contested as techno-optimists clash with critics of technical advances. In this context, it is useful to remember that even the most destructive technical advances were not responsible for most of the man-made deaths during the 20th century. There is nothing inevitable about the long-term survival of civilization based on technical ingenuity and high energy consumption: openness and uncertainty best describe our prospects.

Moves away from explaining the comparative statics of risk regulation regimes and explores what happens when regimes are under pressure to change, and, in particular, when they are under presure for greater openness and transparency. The chapter develops a style‐phase model of staged organizational responses to external pressure for change and compares its predictive value against two competing hypotheses. Examination of the nine case‐study risk regulation regimes reveals that, contrary to the common belief that such pressures are all pervasive, less than half were exposed to substantial pressures of this type. Responses of organizations in the ‘high‐pressure’ regimes were varied, but the overall pattern was consistent with a mixture of an autopoietic and staged‐response hypothesis stressing blame prevention. The chapter presents a hybrid ‘Catherine‐wheel’ model of the observed pattern and concludes by discussing the implications for policy outcomes.

The essays in Part III of the book, on liberal constraints and traditionalist education, argue for a more regulatory conception of liberal education and emphasize the need for some controls over cultural and religious educational authority. In the last chapter, on liberalism and group rights, according to Stephen Macedo, while the commitment of liberalism to individual freedom and equality is far more easily reconciled with group-based remedies for group-based inequalities than the critics of liberalism allow, the liberal commitment to freedom of association imposes limits on group recognition by insisting on intragroup openness and diversity. The chapter has two main parts. Section 15.1, Liberalism, Education, and Group Identities, rebuts the charge that a liberal public philosophy embraces a narrow individualism that is incompatible with tackling group-based forms of inequality, and surveys some of the myriad liberal reforms of the 1950s, 1960s, and 1970s that promoted more equal respect for differing group identities, especially in schools. Section 15.2, Special Exemptions and the Rights of Traditional Communities, focuses on the difficulties raised by “traditionalistic” groups that seek special accommodations in part because they reject liberal values of equal freedom for all, and makes the point that a liberal regime should not seek to be equally hospitable or accommodating to groups that accept and those that reject educational policies designed to promote the equal freedom of all persons; various examples are presented and discussed.

This chapter summarizes what is common and what is not in the experiences of the individual countries studied. It develops an interpretive framework for understanding the growth of the software industry in these countries, and attempts to distill the lessons that others can learn. What stands out in this story is the role of human capital and human capital flows, and the role of those flows in opening these countries to the outside world. The least appreciated aspect of the growth of the software in the 3Is has been the role of entrepreneurship and the development of firm level capabilities.

Glasnost in the Soviet Union, kaifang in China, or doi moi in Vietnam: “openness” in socialist states has become such an inflated term of political propaganda that one tends to forget that prerevolutionary regimes were often marked by a much higher degree of cosmopolitanism. It has been argued that globalisation was a vector of cultural diversification, which, in turn, was best supported by increased globalisation. It is also indicated that increased interdependence with the rest of the world might eventually lead to participatory politics and the rule of law, while on the other hand the pessimistic view points at the use of a relative degree of economic openness to shore up the power of a privileged elite at the expense of the civil liberties of ordinary people. Whatever the case may be, the overlooked cosmopolitan experience of the republican era is of even greater relevance today, now that even in the People's Republic globalisation rather than revolution has become the guiding issue for the twenty-first century.

This chapter examines the possibility of building a new bargain of embedded liberalism that can effectively maintain or even generate public support for policies of economic openness in majoritarian democracies with competitive labor markets. This new bargain must be crafted with the economic constraints of 21st century globalization in mind, and it must be built on a set of policies that are robust and compatible with the incentives of office-seeking politicians, particularly those from the Left, since these politicians tend to be more sensitive than their counterparts on the Right to anti-trade political pressure.

Humans have a natural conservative tendency to hold onto what appear to them to be already achieved epistemic goods. Yet such voluntary intellectual practices as reading, conversing, studying, hypothesis testing, and soliciting testimony exert pressure toward epistemic change. These opposing tendencies admit two possible errors: on the one hand, holding so tightly to our achieved ways of thinking that we are rigid and dogmatic, and on the other, holding previous epistemic accomplishments so lightly that we never achieve any depth or knowledge, or become ironists or skeptics. The virtue of intellectual firmness is a kind of practical wisdom and proper intuition and proper flexibility about ‘hold’. Firmness is the cognitive analog of well-trained muscles (especially the gripping, hugging, biting ones) that nimbly adopt the strongest and lightest grips as varying circumstances demand.

The British Food Standards Authority (FSA) was established in the aftermath of the bovine spongiform encephalopathy (BSE) crisis as a radical break with the old climate of secrecy in food safety regulation. This chapter studies in detail how the new organization tries to reinvent openness in a highly technical field by combining different ways of knowing and actively reaching out towards the media and its different publics. The struggle of the FSA shows how seemingly self-evident goals of a deliberative governance, like openness and transparency, can be paradoxical and complicated in practice; similarly its motto of “putting ‘the’ consumer first” turns out to be more complex than it might seem. It provides a case study of how an organization tries to become authoritative giving meaning to democratic accountability and deliberation while complying with a commitment to expert knowledge. It also shows how emotional moments can be key to break through institutional routines and establish a shift in thinking and a joint commitment to a new way of working. It narrates one of the most interesting examples of a deliberative regulation known to date.

Children are not strictly conservative, producing only what they have heard, and yet they are not reliably corrected when they produce overgeneralizations. How can children retreat from or avoid overgeneralizations? As many have noted, the most obvious possible explanations, including a reliance on overt corrections or corrective repetitions, are not viable. Two factors are argued to play a central role: statistical preemption or repeatedly witnessing a word in a competing pattern, and a pattern's degree of openness: the variability of the items that occur in a given pattern.

Although the purpose of this chapter is to construct an anatomy of transparency, it is essential to address the triangular relationship between transparency, openness, and surveillance. The first question is whether a clear distinction can be drawn between transparency and openness. The second question concerns the relationship between transparency/openness and surveillance. This chapter examines transparency, focusing on directions and varieties of transparency and how they interact with their habitat and with each other. It distinguishes four directions of transparency and maps its varieties. The chapter also emphasizes the importance of examining the habitats within which transparency operates. Finally, it draws some brief conclusions, stressing the implications of the analysis for the measurement of transparency. The aim is to identify different directions and varieties of transparency in relatively neutral terms. Abstracting from the issue of direction, transparency can be analysed by means of a set of three dichotomies: event transparency versus process transparency; transparency in retrospect versus transparency in real time; and nominal transparency versus effective transparency.

‘Transparency’, ‘openness’, and access to government-held information are widely applauded as remedies for the deficiencies and operations of government where government claims to be democratic but falls short of its rhetoric. This chapter examines whether transparency is a human right, focusing on one of its specific features: access to government information, or freedom of information (FOI). It explains what is meant by FOI and argues that within the framework of internationally agreed concepts of human rights, FOI deserves to be listed with those rights. Not only is FOI instrumental in realizing other human rights such as freedom of speech and access to justice, or other desiderata such as accountability, it is intrinsically important: the right to know how government operates on our behalf. The chapter also discusses constitutionalism and the struggle for information in the United Kingdom.

In January 2005, the United Kingdom's Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) came into force, providing British citizens with a limited but justiciable right to government information. The Blair government promised that the new law would make two important contributions to British political life. The first would be a fundamental change in the predispositions of officials regarding the release of government information. Lord Chancellor Charles Falconer predicted that the FOIA would lead to ‘a new culture of openness: a change in the way we are governed’. This fundamental ‘change in the way we are governed’ was expected to produce a follow-on effect: the restoration of public trust in government. The linkage between a ‘vigorous commitment to freedom of information’ and the ‘renewal of trust’ was often made in the months before implementation of the law. The critical point is that the FOIA does not reduce the political salience of complaints about governmental secrecy and lack of transparency in the public sector.

This chapter assesses freedom of information (FOI) in the United Kingdom. It discusses the terminology associated with FOI, namely, transparency and openness. FOI refers to access to non-personal information; the regulation of personal information is typically governed by privacy or data-protection laws. Some jurisdictions take an integrated approach to both categories of information, but this chapter focuses on information that does not relate primarily to the individual. The family of information statutes – encompassing FOI, privacy, official secrecy and the like – are known collectively as Access to Information laws. Finally, open government is a term close to openness, since both are concerned with systems and delivery.

This chapter examines Raz's theory of legal system, which explicitly sets out to overcome difficulties in Hart's account regarding the identity and borders of legal systems by introducing new explanatory elements. Raz claims that legal systems are unique normative systems since they claim, via the activities of a broad range of norm-applying institutions, to govern comprehensively, supremely, and openly the social life of their subjects. Unlike Hart's, Raz's theory is avowedly state-based and state-restricted, as he says it is not meant to be tested against non-state phenomena of legality. It is argued that there are nonetheless several problems with Raz's theory as a contribution to general jurisprudence. In addition to leaving the problem of indeterminacy unresolved, Raz's theory is unable to explain various types of state legal systems that are comprised of federalist structures as well as shared and distributed governance arrangements.

As governmental processes and judgments become increasingly digital, the transparency of digital systems that implement the processes of government becomes increasingly important. Open code is a necessary but not sufficient prerequisite for maintaining transparency as democracy becomes digitized, and complete openness of process is not appropriate for every domain. This chapter explores some of the complexities in the relationship between openness of code and democratic government. Computer code controls and enables the actions of users, and for users to have true autonomy they must be able to examine, alter, and redistribute the code. A key issue for transparency is the degree to which this observation applies to the activities of government that are embedded in computer code. Free software creates a fundamentally different market structure than closed code. The philosophy of free software argues that the inability to view code that implements governance suggests totalitarian and Kafkaesque control, a constraining complex network of rules and regulations.