The concept of identity has become increasingly prominent in the social sciences and humanities. Analysis of the development of social identities is an important focus of scholarly research, and ...scholars using social identities as the building blocks of social, political, and economic life have attempted to account for a number of discrete outcomes by treating identities as causal factors. The dominant implication of the vast literature on identity is that social identities are among the most important social facts of the world in which we live. Abdelal, Herrera, Johnston, and McDermott have brought together leading scholars from a variety of disciplines to consider the conceptual and methodological challenges associated with treating identity as a variable, offer a synthetic theoretical framework, and demonstrate the possibilities offered by various methods of measurement. The book represents a collection of empirically-grounded theoretical discussions of a range of methodological techniques for the study of identities.
Every organization of the world economy has been unstable. Each system is necessarily composed of trade-offs. Opportunities emerge, and disappointments abound. Nothing lasts; nothing is finished; and ...nothing is perfect.
Although the energy trade is the single most important element of nearly all European countries' relations with Russia, Europe has been divided by both worldview and practice. Why, in the face of the ...common challenge of dependence on imported Russian gas, have national reactions to such vulnerability varied so dramatically across the continent? And why have a handful of French, German, and Italian corporations somehow taken responsibility for formulating the energy strategy - and thus the Russia policy - for essentially all of Europe? The resolutions of these two puzzles are, I show, interlinked; they also demand theoretical innovation. With several case studies - of Gazprom's decision-making during the 2006 and 2009 gas crises, and of the response of western and central Europe to their gas dependence - I find that: firms are driving these political outcomes; those firms are motivated by profits but employ sociological conventions along their ways; and firms generally seek the necessary inter-firm, cross-border cooperation that will deliver corporate performance. Finally, I conclude that the field will ultimately require a framework that puts firms at its center.
Focusing empirically on how political and economic forces are always mediated and interpreted by agents, both in individual countries and in the international sphere,Constructing the International ...Economysets out what such constructions and what various forms of constructivism mean, both as ways of understanding the world and as sets of varying methods for achieving that understanding. It rejects the assumption that material interests either linearly or simply determine economic outcomes and demands that analysts consider, as a plausible hypothesis, that economies might vary substantially for nonmaterial reasons that affect both institutions and agents' interests.
Constructing the International Economyportrays the diversity of models and approaches that exist among constructivists writing on the international political economy. The authors outline and relate several different arguments for why scholars might attend to social construction, inviting the widest possible array of scholars to engage with such approaches. They examine points of terminological or theoretical confusion that create unnecessary barriers to engagement between constructivists and nonconstructivist work and among different types of constructivism. This book provides a tool kit that both constructivists and their critics can use to debate how much and when social construction matters in this deeply important realm.
The greatest challenge to the sustainability of our current era of globalization comes from within the United States. Most Americans have come to reject globalization. We must discern the lessons ...from the parts of the developed world where the backlash is also profound – France, for example – and where it has been more muted – such as Germany. In both the United States and France, gross Gini coefficients have increased sharply during the past thirty or so years. The French state has, however, delivered a net, after‐tax, after‐transfer distribution of income that is more equal than it was thirty years ago. And yet: France is still in the midst of an anti‐systemic populist revolt. There is only one inescapable conclusion: it is not just about the money. Those who feel left behind in both countries feel that they have lost respect and dignity. We cannot redistribute our way out of the crisis of global capitalism. The German experience holds lessons. We must value and valorize the many ways in which people contribute. We must also pursue policies that create patterns of employment that confer dignity, meaning, and purpose. I argue for dignity as a tool of policy, beyond its normative desirability as a goal.
If governments and firms do not act decisively now to make the models of capitalism in America and Europe more friendly to small‐ and medium‐sized firms, more equal in opportunity, and more meritocratic, then we will suffer the fate of our parents and grandparents in the 1930s and 1940s: a destruction of the system.
Two alternate visions for shaping and explaining the governance of economic globalization have been in competition for the past 20 years: an ad hoc, laissez-faire vision promoted by the United States ...versus a managed vision relying on multilateral rules and international organizations promoted by the European Union. Although the American vision prevailed in the past decade, the current worldwide crisis gives a new life and legitimacy to the European vision. This essay explores how this European vision, often referred to as 'managed globalization', has been conceived and implemented and how the rules that Europe fashioned in trade and finance actually shaped the world economy. In doing so, we highlight the paradox that managed globalization has been a force for liberalization.
A newly liberal, deregulating international order was built to underpin a second great era of globalization during the 1980s and 1990s. The new order undermined the post-1945 social bargain: the ...compromise of embedded liberalism. The “resurgent ethos of liberal capitalism,” John Ruggie explained at the beginning of this process, threatened the compromise that had created a stable, prosperous West.¹
In this chapter, I argue that the politics of creating our current era of globalization were composed of transformations of both the left and the right in the developed world; their convergence created the new system. The new system delivered financial
By the turn of the century, oil had already made the tiny emirate of Abu Dhabi rich beyond anyone's wildest dreams. A sovereign wealth fund, the Abu Dhabi Investment Authority (ADIA), has invested ...extra oil revenues abroad for more than thirty years and amassed a still-growing portfolio worth approximately $750-900 billion. ADIA is widely believed to be the world's largest sovereign wealth fund - indeed the world's largest institutional investor. But Abu Dhabi is not yet a "developed" economy. So, in 2002, the Mubadala Development Company was established as a government-owned investment vehicle. Unlike ADIA's mandate to build and manage a financial portfolio, Mubadala's charge was to develop Abu Dhabi. According to some observers, ADIA was a "sovereign savings fund," while Mubadala was a government-owned investment firm. Mubadala is supposed to invest the wealth of the emirate in activities that would diversify the economy away from energy and into industry and services. Although each Mubadala investment is supposed to earn large returns, the strategy balances financial against "strategic" returns. ADIA and Mubadala are the institutional architecture to manage the wealth of the Abu Dhabi sovereign.
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10.
Identity as a Variable Abdelal, Rawi; Herrera, Yoshiko M.; Johnston, Alastair Iain ...
Perspectives on politics,
12/2006, Letnik:
4, Številka:
4
Journal Article
Recenzirano
As scholarly interest in the concept of identity continues to grow,
social identities are proving to be crucially important for understanding
contemporary life. Despite—or perhaps because of—the ...sprawl of
different treatments of identity in the social sciences, the concept has
remained too analytically loose to be as useful a tool as the
literature's early promise had suggested. We propose to solve this
longstanding problem by developing the analytical rigor and methodological
imagination that will make identity a more useful variable for the social
sciences. This article offers more precision by defining collective
identity as a social category that varies along two
dimensions—content and contestation. Content describes the meaning
of a collective identity. The content of social identities may take the
form of four non-mutually-exclusive types: constitutive norms; social
purposes; relational comparisons with other social categories; and
cognitive models. Contestation refers to the degree of agreement within a
group over the content of the shared category. Our conceptualization thus
enables collective identities to be compared according to the agreement
and disagreement about their meanings by the members of the group. The
final section of the article looks at the methodology of identity
scholarship. Addressing the wide array of methodological options on
identity—including discourse analysis, surveys, and content
analysis, as well as promising newer methods like experiments, agent-based
modeling, and cognitive mapping—we hope to provide the kind of brush
clearing that will enable the field to move forward methodologically as
well.Rawi Abdelal is Associate Professor,
Harvard Business School (rabdelal@hbs.edu). Yoshiko M. Herrera is
Associate Professor, Government Department, Harvard University
(herrera@fas.harvard.edu). Alastair Iain Johnston is Professor, Government
Department, Harvard University (johnston@fas.harvard.edu). Rose McDermott
is Associate Professor, Political Science Department, University of
California at Santa Barbara (rmcdermott@polsci.ucsb.edu). Research for the
paper was made possible by the generous support of the Weatherhead
Initiative of the Weatherhead Center for International Affairs at Harvard
University. We are grateful to those who commented on earlier versions of
this paper: Peter Burke, Lars-Erik Cederman, Jeff Checkel,Michael Dawson, James Fearon, David Frank, Erin
Jenne, Michael Jones-Correa, Cynthia Kaplan, Peter Katzenstein, Herb
Kelman, Paul Kowert, David Laitin, Daniel Posner, Paul Sniderman, Werner
Sollors, Jeff Strabone, Philip Stone, Ronald Suny, Charles Tilly, Mary
Waters, and three anonymous reviewers. We would also like to thank
participants of the 2004 Identity as a Variable conference,
including Henry Brady, Kanchan Chandra, Jack Citrin, Neta Crawford,
Jennifer Hochschild, Jacques Hymans, Ted Hopf, Cynthia Kaplan, Ulrich
Krotz, Taeku Lee, Will Lowe, Jason Lyall, Kimberly Neuendorf, Roger
Petersen, Kevin Quinn, David Rousseau, Rogers Smith, Donald Sylvan, Kim
Williams, and Michael Young, for comments on this version.
