Governing drug reimbursement policy in Poland: The role of the state,civil society,and the private sector

This article investigates the distribution of power in Poland’s drug reimbursement policy in the early 2000s. We examine competing theoretical expectations suggested by neopluralism, historical institutionalism, corporate domination, and clique theory of the post-communist state, using data from a purposive sample of 109 semi-structured interviews and documentary sources. We have four concrete findings. First, we uncovered rapid growth in budgetary spending on expensive drugs for narrow groups of patients. Second, to achieve these favorable policy outcomes drug companies employed two prevalent methods of lobbying: informal persuasion of key members of local cliques and endorsements expressed by patient organizations acting as seemingly independent “third parties.” Third, medical experts were co-opted by multinational drug companies because they relied on these firms for scientific and financial resources that were crucial for their professional success. Finally, there was one-way social mobility from the state to the pharmaceutical sector, not the “revolving door” pattern familiar from advanced capitalist countries, with deleterious consequences for state capacity. Overall, the data best supported a combination of corporate domination and clique theory: drug reimbursement in Poland was dominated by Western multinationals in collaboration with domestically based cliques.     

The lawyers’ war: states and human rights in a transnational field

While torture and assassination have not infrequently been used by states, the post 9/11 ‘war on terror’ waged by the US has been distinguished by the open acknowledgement of, and political and legal justifications put forward in support of, these practices. This is surprising insofar as the primary theories that have been mobilized by sociologists and political scientists to understand the relation between the spread of human rights norms and state action presume that states will increasingly adhere to such norms in their rhetoric, if not always in practice. Thus, while it is not inconceivable that the US would engage in torture and assassination, we would expect these acts would be conducted under a cloak of deniability. Yet rather than pure hypocrisy, the US war on terror has been characterized by the development of a legal infrastructure to support the use of ‘forbidden’ practices such as torture and assassination, along with varying degrees of open defence of such tactics. Drawing on first-order accounts presented in published memoirs, this paper argues that the Bush administration developed such openness as a purposeful strategy, in response to the rise of a legal, technological, and institutional transnational human rights infrastructure which had turned deniability into a less sustainable option. It concludes by suggesting that a more robust theory of state action, drawing on sociological field theory, can help better explain the ways that transnational norms and institutions affect states.     

Redrawing the Contours of the Nation‐State in Uruguay? The Vicissitudes of Emigration Policy in the 2000s

This study analyzes Uruguay's recently launched emigration policy. It argues that the redrawing of the boundaries of the nation‐state along non‐territorial basis is still an incipient and contested process. The findings highlight some relatively under‐explored explanatory factors: emigrants' profile; political junctures requiring immediate commitment; the impact of rhetorical changes and post‐neoliberal projects; presidents as policy drivers and sources of inconsistencies; and institutional deficiencies, inertias, lack of reform, and society's conflictive notions of nation and belonging as brakes. The conclusions indicate that the sustainability of emigration policy is contingent on the state's progress toward internal reform and society's ability to acquire a greater voice and more organizational capacity. Exploring emigration policy characteristics and sources of setbacks in Uruguay unveils the inter‐mestic character of state transnational outreach efforts, qualifies and refines existing explanations, expands our understanding of new governance techniques, and provides some insights into the requirements for emigration policies to work effectively.     

Research,policy and funding – academic treadmills and the squeeze on intellectual spaces1

In recent years, there has been a great deal of collective rumination about social scientists' role in society. In the post‐1997 UK context, public policy commitments to ‘evidence‐based policy’ and ‘knowledge transfer’ have further stimulated such reflections. More recently, Michael Burawoy's 2004 address to the American Sociological Association, which called for greater engagement with ‘public sociology’ has reverberated throughout the discipline, motivating a series of debates about the purpose of sociological research. To date, most such contributions have been based on personal experience and anecdotal evidence. In contrast, this paper responds directly to Burawoy's suggestion that we should ‘apply sociology to ourselves,’ in order that we ‘become more conscious of the global forces’ driving our research ( Burawoy 2005 : 285). Drawing on an empirical research project designed to explore of the relationship between health inequalities research and policy in Scotland and England, in the period from 1997 until 2007, this paper discusses data from interviews with academic researchers. The findings suggest that the growing pressure to produce ‘policy relevant’ research is diminishing the capacity of academia to provide a space in which innovative and transformative ideas can be developed, and is instead promoting the construction of institutionalized and vehicular (chameleon‐like) ideas. Such a claim supports Edward Said's (1994 ) insistence that creative, intellectual spaces within the social sciences are increasingly being squeezed. More specifically, the paper argues we ought to pay far greater attention to how the process of seeking research funding shapes academic research and mediates the interplay between research and policy.     

Not necessarily a place: How mobile transnational online workers (digital nomads) construct and experience ‘home’

This article adds to current research on mobile transnational online workers (digital nomads) who travel the world in search of a holistic lifestyle that balances work and leisure. Using Kannisto's (2014) and D'Andrea's (2007) work on ‘global nomads’ as a theoretical lens and Nowicka's (2007) research on mobile professionals as a guide, I discuss the multiple meanings of ‘home’ for digital nomads who stayed in Chiang Mai, Thailand, in 2019. I will show that people feel at home when travelling with a loved one or by surrounding themselves with objects of emotional value. Furthermore, digital nomads create a feeling of being at home by connecting with their family via social media and video calling apps, while at the same time keeping them at a comfortable distance. Finally, some digital nomads envision an idealized ‘home base’ that is defined by social relations and not necessarily by the geography or amenities of a place.     

Institutional obstacles to service delivery in South Africa

This paper argues that the service‐delivery crisis facing two‐thirds of the municipalities across South Africa is caused by a series of institutional shortcomings ranging from incoherence in national policy towards rural and urban development, a lack of enforcement when it comes to financial controls and competencies, and a lack of skills affecting local officials ranging from customer service and relations, to financial controls, to technical competencies in the core areas of electrification, basic water and sanitation, and refuse collection. Government needs to address the skills shortage at the local level and enforce the rules and regulations concerning the role of public and elected officials to ensure not only service delivery but accountability and transparent decision‐making. Attending to the skills shortage and enforcing relevant rules would ensure better service delivery and, in turn, encourage bringing ‘democracy to the people’, which is at the heart of the post apartheid government’s decentralisation project.     

Academic freedom,institutional autonomy and the corporatised university in contemporary South Africa 1

This article examines threats from the state, institutional bureaucrats and academics themselves to academic freedom and to the institutional autonomy of universities in South Africa, and argues that the situation is more complex than is often perceived. The generally disappointing post‐independence history of academic freedom and autonomy in Sub‐Saharan Africa is drawn upon to illustrate the perils that may accompany too eager an embrace of the state by intellectuals in South Africa in confronting persisting racial inequities in institutions of higher learning. The article suggests that a ‘republican’ approach linked to social accountability may provide a way forward. To be securely founded, the advancement of academic freedom and institutional autonomy must be embedded in the prevailing power realities: it must grow from the contestation of empowered stakeholders. Finally, the article makes a number of specific recommendations calculated to strengthen the quest for such freedom and autonomy.     

Economies of sacrifice: Recognition,monadism, and alien‐ation∗

Abstract

‘Economies of Sacrifice’ compares Girard's (1987) Hegelian inter‐dividualism to the Cartesian notion of the cogito and the Freudian theory of the unconscious in order to show how the monadic identity position violates the communicative balance of the self‐other bind. By looking at how both these thinkers constitute an identity category through the concept of sacrifice, the paper refers to the Girardian (1986) and Bataillean (1990) theories of violence and recognition in search of an alternative stance that may provide a more balanced view of human sociability. With regard to Bataille's theory of radical difference we can see how the idea which seeks to attack monadic individualism by destroying all identity advocates a principle of amoralism which views equality as ‘the generalisation of expendability’. As such, through reference to the work of Goux (1998) and O'Neill (2000) the article shows how the Bataillean thesis may pre‐empt the emergence of the post‐modern political economy. In light of this realisation the paper looks beyond both the Bataillean attempt to collapse identity, by exposing humanity to the total violence of the state of nature/post‐modern economic system, and the solipsistic theories of Descartes and Freud, which emphasis the centrality of the self at the cost of an acceptance of otherness, and towards Girard's theory of social justice as a communicative attempt to re‐state the importance of Hegelian recognition and human sociability.     

The Cultural Politics of Childhood: Public Policies in Post‐authoritarian Chile

This article offers an interpretation of the cultural politics of childhood during the second decade of post‐authoritarian democracy in Chile (2001–2010), as sustained by the discourse of public policies in this area. I understand cultural politics as the combination of cultural contexts, social practices and political processes through which childhood is constructed in different societies and different times James and James (2008b). I develop a ‘textual’ analysis focusing on the discourse of the most recent official governmental policy document on childhood, which is still in force, as well as a ‘contextual’ analysis that examines the historical relationship between the state, public policies and childhood in different periods of Chile's history as a republic.     

LGBTQ Activist Organizations as ‘Respectably Queer’ in India: Contesting a Western View

This study contests the distinction of LGBTQ (lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender and queer) organizations suggested by earlier scholars as ‘respectable’ — i.e. normalizing, professionalizing and conforming to the dominant cultural and institutional patterns — and ‘queer’, meaning challenging the cultural and institutional forces that ‘normalize and commodify differences’. Using Bernstein's model of identity deployment, it is found problematic to distinguish LGBTQ organizations this way because when the actions of LGBTQ organizations are more complex to describe, it is not warranted to conflate identity goals with identity strategies — whether normalizing (respectable) or differentiating (queer). To examine these concerns, a qualitative inquiry was used to study five LGBTQ organizations in India where the intersections of post‐colonial ethnicity, gender, social class and sexuality offer an intriguing context through which to study queer activism. Based on the findings, it is argued from a post‐colonial perspective that when the socio‐cultural and historical existence of non‐homonormative queer communities and practices is strong, LGBTQ organizations challenge the heteronormative and/or other forms of domination to become ‘queer’. But they may simultaneously become ‘respectable′ by conforming to the diversity politics of non‐profit business, donors, and social movement organizations they seek support from, and turn out as ‘respectably queer’.     

Labour Migration Policy in Russia: Considerations on Governmentality

The authors argue that Russian migration policy reflects the functioning of contemporary Russia's entire bureaucratic machine. The bureaucracy's Soviet‐era governance techniques on the one hand and the material interests of particular pressure groups on the other, shape the manipulation of immigration regulation that has occurred since the early 2000s. Therefore, attempts to liberalize migration regulation, i.e., to simplify the legalization of foreign workers, have always been incoherent, accompanied by reservations and limitations. Additionally, Russian actions are riddled with conflict between ‘geopolitical’ and domestic policy rationales. The authorities’ occasional attempts to use immigration regulation as a foreign policy tool acquire primarily symbolic value in the ‘domestic political market’ rather than serving any instrumental purpose. The effort to enhance Russian influence in the post‐Soviet space through the ‘reintegration project’ (Eurasian Economic Union) collides with the goal of national labour market protection, since integration entails the removal of barriers to labour movement.     

No Country Left Behind? Performance Standards and Accountability in US Foreign Assistance

The accountability movement in public policy hails a new programme for US foreign assistance – the Millennium Challenge Account established in 2004 with the aim of ‘picking winners’ for grants among developing countries based on their demonstrated quality of governance. This article uses the MCA's own rating system to dispute its claim to know in advance which countries are best positioned to meet major development goals. High governance scores alone bear little or no relationship to growth in national income or decline in poverty. Attempting to measure public‐policy performance limits the range of choice available to policy‐makers, and may inadvertently limit true performance.     

Deconstruction,postmodernism and philosophy of science: Some Epistemo‐critical bearings

Abstract

In the recent critique of ‘Western metaphysics’ by post‐structuralist and postmodern theorists, there has emerged a distinctive line of thought which seeks to apply such critique to the domain of political theory. This paper approaches Hannah Arendt's conceptualisation of the political as a proto‐type of such a theorisation, deploying as it does key elements of the Heideggerian (and more broadly, phenomenological) position so as to rethink the nature of the political. By delineating the specifically ‘post‐metaphysical’ moments of Arendt's theory and its corresponding critique of political modernity, I endeavour to illuminate both the advantages and pitfalls of contemporary efforts at developing a philosophical conception of the political on the basis of a neo‐Heideggerian position.     

The Importance of Identity in Policy: The Case For and Of Children

This article draws out one of the core reasons why children should be conceived as active agents in research, particularly policy‐related research. The main thesis is that policy inevitably projects and, to an extent, constitutes the subject identities of its intended objects — in this case, that of ‘children’. Drawing on several bodies of theory — the ‘new’ sociology of childhood, identity theory, ‘governmentality’ and theories of discourse — the article shows why not incorporating children’s voices is a problem for social policy, and suggests that the impact of their exclusion has the potential to render policy both inappropriate and non‐responsive.     

Do ‘his’ education and class matter? The changing effect of the husband on women's labour‐market transitions in Italy and Britain

A new stream of sociological and demographic theory emphasizes individualization as the key process in late modernity. As maintained by Hakim ( 2000 ), women also have increasingly become agents of their own biographies, less influenced by the social class and the family. In this study, I intend to contribute to this debate by analysing how, in Italy and Britain, women's movements between employment and housework are linked to their husband's education and class, and how this link has changed across cohorts. Using discrete‐time event‐history modelling on the BHPS and ILFI, my findings show that in both countries, if the woman's educational and labour‐market profile is controlled for, the husband's occupation and education have lost importance. Yet, although based more on ‘her’ than ‘his’ profile, divisions along ‘classic’ lines are still evident and not context‐free, and they assume different forms in the two countries with distinctive institutional and cultural settings. In ‘liberal’ Britain, women's labour‐market participation responds more to motherhood and class than to education, while in ‘familistic’ Italy education seems more important, which suggests the existence of returns over and above strictly human capital/economic ones.     

Beyond class and nation: reframing social inequalities in a globalizing world

From the start individualization theory is the investigation of the paradigm shift in social inequality. Furthermore it shows, how the transnationalization of social inequalities bursts the framework of institutional responses – nation state (parties), trade unions, welfare state systems and the national sociologies of social classes. In this essay I shall try to conceptually elucidate the ‘cosmopolitan perspective’ on relations of social inequality in three cases: (1) the inequality of global risk; (2) the Europe‐wide dynamic of inequality; and (3) transnational inequalities, which emerge from the capacities and resources to transcend borders. Before that I take up Will Atkinson's question: ‘What exactly constitutes individualization and to what extent has it really displaced class?’ ( Atkinson 2007 : Abstract)     

‘The Right to Choose or Choosing What's Right? Women's Conceptualizations of Work and Life Choices in Contemporary Russia’

The resulting social and economic transformations of marketization and democratization have had a significant impact on the employment terrain of post‐socialist Russia. This has had particular effects on the forms and structures of work available for women. Our article argues that as a result of these social and economic transformations, the metaphor of ‘choice’ inherent in current theoretical approaches to the study of women at work in western contexts can also be adapted to the post‐socialist context. Building on existing research on women and work in the UK and in Russia, we seek to provide new insights into Russian women's own understandings of work and non‐work choices grounded in an analysis of women's use of rights discourses. Drawing on in‐depth interview data with 49 women living in the provincial Russian city of Ul'ianovsk, we explore constructions of work in relation to narratives of discrimination; as a means of ‘samorealizatsiia’, and as ‘choice’ reflecting the continuing inseparability of public and private roles for women. Situating our work in wider global debates affecting the gendered nature of employment, the examination of the use of rights discourses not only highlights the multiple ways in which women perceive their choices about work but also offers an alternative conceptual framework.     

Migrants as strategic actors in the European Union's Global Approach to Migration and Mobility

The European Union's discourse of ‘partnership’ in the Global Approach to Migration and Mobility and the widely expressed critique of this discourse as a process of ‘externalization’ of EU policy both depend on unitary accounts of the main policy actors involved. Two separate literatures contest such unitary accounts. Within political science and international relations, institutional approaches identify a range of strategic actors involved in policy development; in anthropology, there is a well‐established interest in the strategic behaviour of disempowered actors. In this article, I set out to link these two approaches with an examination of undocumented migrants as strategic actors. I use a case study of events at the borders between Morocco and the Spanish enclaves of Ceuta and Melilla in late 2005, which have proved extremely influential in the continued development of the EU's global approach, to identify the ways in which even highly marginalized migrants were able to develop transnational social organizations.     

Reifications of the intellectual: representations,organization and agency in revolutionary China

How did ‘intellectuals’ evolve from a class of subjects in Marxian thoughts to highly visible populations under communism? Such ‘reifications of the intellectual’ have deeply affected subjectivity, conflict and organization, but received little attention in the political sociology of communism. This essay draws on research on classifications and social boundaries to address the objective and subjective foundations of the reifications and their impact on communist rule. The intellectual is viewed as an identification formed and performed around multiple social axes (most notably family background, educational achievement, occupational history, institutional affiliation and revolutionary rank) that reflected broader patterns of communist political domination. I use the Chinese Communist movement to demonstrate that (1) interaction of political contests, ruling strategies and institutional developments turned a diversity of persons into ‘intellectuals’ who were allegedly imbued with reprehensible interests and habits linked to privileged economic classes; (2) constant competitions for power and organizational changes led to classificatory ambiguities and, in turn, allowed individuals some control over their identifications; and (3) the developments profoundly influenced identity, state and class formation. Focusing on the dynamics that produced a highly visible but fluid population of ‘intellectuals’ opens new pathways for comparative research on communism.     

From Exclusion to Inclusion? The Legal Treatment of ‘Foreigners’ in Contemporary Japan

This article provides a survey of postwar Japan's policy toward ‘foreign’ settlers, focusing on the case of ‘zainichi Koreans’–Koreans who were taken forcefully, or migrated voluntarily, from Korea to Japan during the Japanese occupation of Korea (1910–45) and settled down in Japan after World War II, and their descendants residing in Japan. The article explores how the Japanese government and society have treated them since the end of World War II, thus showing that Japan's policy toward foreign settlers has been changing from one of ‘exclusion’ to one of ‘inclusion,’ though there still remain some institutional barriers.