Multiple Equilibrium States and Change Predictors in Chinese Regional Economic Development

依据新经济增长理论,本文研究了20世纪90年代中国经济增长动态。分析发现:我国东、中、西部经济发展分别收敛不同的均衡点,目前已经出现国家整体上开始转向经济收敛,同步发展的关键时期,但是是否收敛,与下一步的区域投资政策有关。     

Demography and Nation. Social Legislation and Population Policy in Bulgaria, 1918–1944

Hermann Rebel, Peasant Classes. The Bureaucratization of Property and Family Relations under Early Habsburg Absolutism, 1511–1636 (1983), xviii+354 (Princeton University Press, Princeton, New Jersey, £24.30).

Philip Jenkins, The Making of a Ruling Class. The Glamorgan Gentry 1640–1790 (1983), xxvi+353 (Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, £25).

M. Elliott, Partners in Revolution; The United Irishmen and France (1982), xx+411 (Yale, £15.00).

R. Wells, Insurrection: The British Experience 1795–1803 (1983), xiv+304 (Alan Sutton, Gloucester, £16).

Barbara Taylor, Eve and the New Jerusalem: Socialism and Feminism in the Nineteenth Century (1983), xviii+402 (Virago, £9.95, paperback £5.95).

Derek Fraser (ed.), Municipal Reform and the Industrial City (1982), x+165 (Leicester, £12.00).

John Garrard, Leadership and Power in Victorian Industrial Towns 1830–1880 (1983), ix+228 (Manchester, £21.00).

Pierre Aycoberry, Cologne entre Napoleon et Bismarck. La croissance d'une ville rhenane, (1981) (Aubier Montaigne, n.p., Paris).

Avner Offer, Property and Politics, 1870–1914: Land Ownership, Law, Ideology and Urban Development in England (1981), xvii+445 (Cambridge University Press £27.50).

Jeffrey Cox, The English Churches in a Secular Society: Lambeth, 1870–1930 (Oxford, 1982), xiii+322 (Oxford University Press, £22.50).

Richard J. Evans (ed.), The German Working Class, 1888–1933: The Politics of Everyday Life (1982), 259 (Croom Helm, £14.95).

Jay Winter (ed.), The Working Class in Modern British History (1983), xii+315 (Cambridge University Press, £25.00).

Derek Fraser and Anthony Sutcliffe (eds), The Pursuit of Urban History (1983), xxx+482 (Edward Arnold, £35.00).

John Breuilly, Nationalism and the State (1982), x+421 (Manchester University Press, Manchester, £25.00).

Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies, Making Histories: Studies in History‐Writing and Politics (1982), 379 (Hutchinson, £6.95).     

Consumption and poverty in the homes of the English poor,c. 1670–1834

The consumer behaviour of the poor in the long eighteenth century has attracted more historical attention in recent years. Yet, we have little understanding of whether regional factors affected consumption or how the poor’s ownership of household goods was influenced by level of poverty and the life-cycle. By focusing on Kent and drawing comparisons to other counties, this article argues that the material lives of the poor were improving by the late eighteenth century, but finds that there were distinct regional differences as the poor acquired more and better goods in London and the Home Counties than in relatively remote areas. Moreover, by using pauper inventories and labourers’ probate inventories, the research finds that the poor were not a homogeneous group with similar levels of material wealth, but should be considered in terms of different subgroups which often led very different material lives to one another due to life-cycle-related problems including sickness and old age. Labourers’ probate inventories are found to represent a minority of the poor who were materially richer than most, whilst pauper inventories appear to represent a more typical subgroup of the poor that struggled to make do and owned most types of goods in smaller numbers.     

Beyond Continuity? Understanding Change in the UK Welfare State since 2010

One approach to identifying policy change stresses policy instruments, settings and policy paradigms, while another also considers the process and culmination of various shifts and consequent outcomes. This article illustrates the debate through an examination of how far developments in social security policy between the 1997–2010 New Labour and 2010–15 Coalition Governments in the UK constituted real policy shifts. It shows that, despite continuities in instruments and approach, there have been substantial changes in the impact of welfare state policies related to short‐term benefits, employment and housing. The article identifies new policy directions leading to a different kind of welfare state, concerned less with living standards and equality and more with individual responsibility and paid work. It suggests that this has been achieved without the need for radical changes in instruments and their settings.     

Social Enterprise – A New Phenomenon in the Field of Economic and Social Welfare?

Drawing upon insights from historical institutionalism, this article critically examines the origins of social enterprise and its emergence into the mainstream policy arena. It begins by relating the social enterprise idea to major non‐state/non‐private institutional traditions, including the European social economy, US non‐profits and the UK charitable sector, and places it within the specific field of economic and social welfare. In so doing, the article contests the idea that social enterprise is a new phenomenon in the social welfare field and proposes instead that the supposed ‘novelty’ of social enterprise as an organizational form and a subject of public policy lies primarily in the nature of the socio‐political and economic context of the 1980s–1990s, during which time it became ‘en vogue’. The process of institutionalization of social enterprise and its ascension into the mainstream policy arena is examined in more detail in the case of England during the time New Labour was in office and beyond, and lessons are drawn from this experience concerning both the role that social enterprise plays or is expected to play as a vehicle to address economic and social needs, and how this is intertwined with both a dominant neo‐liberal discourse, as well as alternative perspectives that emphasize more equalitarian and sustainable development paths. The article concludes with some reflections in relation to the apparent consensus that seems to exist around social enterprise as a legitimate subject of public policy and the resulting social enterprization of public services which is currently taking place in England.     

Statistics and the Public Sphere. Numbers and the People in Modern Britain,c. 1800–2000

Susan Elizabeth Ramírez, The World Upside Down. Cross‐Cultural Contact and Conflict in Sixteenth‐Century Peru (1996), vii + 234 (Stanford University Press, Stanford, £45.00).

Biography Database, 1680–1830: Personal Edition (1997; a rerelease of the 1995 institutional edition with updated software) (Romulus Press Ltd with the University of Newcastle upon Tyne, 91.83/$125).

Martin Hewitt, The Emergence of Stability in the Industrial City: Manchester, 1832–67 (1996), ix + 335 (Scolar Press, Aldershot, £45.00/$74.95).

Louise Young, Japan's Total Empire: Manchuria and the Culture of Wartime Imperialism (1998), xiii + 487 (University of California Press, Berkeley, £35.00/$45.00).

Kevin Passmore, From Liberalism to Fascism: The Right in a French Province, 1928–1939 (1997), xvii + 333 (Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, £40.00/$59.95).     

Contingent on Context? Social Work and the State in Australia, Britain, and the USA

Correspondence to John Harris, School of Health and Social Studies, University of Warwick, Coventry CV4 7AL, UK. E-mail: j.harris{at}warwick.ac.uk Summary The notion that social work is an international profession,operating with generally similar goals, methodologies, and commonvalues is considered critically. Examining the political andsocial contexts of three countries with liberal democratic governments—Australia,Britain and the United States—the role of social workwithin the welfare processes of each country is compared. Whilesocial work as an identifiable professional activity sharessome features, it is argued that the idea of its having a coreessence needs to be tempered with a realistic assessment ofthe importance of contextually created difference. Recent andrapid developments in the institutional context, such as thoseexperienced in these three countries, further underscore thelimited utility of the notion of a common professional project.