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This paper examines evidence on wage spillovers from workers with experience in foreign multinational enterprises (MNEs) to incumbent workers in domestic firms. Using administrative panel data from Ireland, I examine possible heterogeneity for such spillovers across the wage distribution using quantile regressions. I begin by using existing methodology and find that, once industry-year and region-year dummies are added as control variables, the average wage spillover effect on incumbents from former foreign MNE workers moving to domestic firms disappears. The quantile results suggest that there are positive spillovers for incumbent workers in the top 40 percent of the wage distribution only. This indicates that foreign MNEs increase inequality through spillovers to domestic firms via labour mobility.

This paper deals with two principal questions, drawing closely on the experience of Ireland. First, it addresses a deficit in our knowledge of resource governance institutions and land tenure systems as moderators of the impact of famine. We have known for some time of the extent and distribution of common tenancy systems in districts of 19th-century Ireland and across wider Europe, but little has been written about their role in determining levels of ecological risk exposure. Knowing that both distress and common tenancy were higher in marginal, impoverished Irish districts, this is an omission of some concern. Second, although current thinking on common-pool resource governance suggests such systems were potentially robust to ecological stress, why did this not translate into greater resilience in the Irish case? The paper argues that to make sense of this contradiction, we must consider both the local behaviour of ecological stressors, and the wider context of Irish colonialism. Using local clustering analysis and geographically weighted regression, it shows how the impact of key stressors varied geographically. It concludes by suggesting that narratives and analyses of the role of common-pool resource governance in conferring ecological resilience must be tempered with a fuller appreciation of geopolitical context.

The rundale system has held a certain fascination for Irish geographers and historians due to its prevalence in the cartographic record and comparative absence from historical record. As a system of cultivation and landholding characterised by share allocation through collective governance, popular conflicting accounts have interpreted it both as a functional adaptation to the ‘ecological niche’ of the Irish Western Seaboard or, controversially, as a modern survival of an archaic mode of production of great antiquity. To date, little attempt has been made to impose conceptual clarity on the rundale system, and agreement on its essential characteristics is absent. Beginning with an overview of the current state of knowledge, this article presents a critical assessment of the manner in which rundale has been conceptualised, and the dominant methodologies employed in its study. This assessment reveals a number of features and mechanisms which researchers have identified as its defining characteristics. As a result, many have tended to present it as the product of singular ‘prime movers’ such as its unique demography, or to characterise it in strictly spatial terms as a morphological oddity. Following this critical appraisal, and drawing upon recent works in resilience ecology, an alternative model of rundale is presented in terms of its institutional, spatial, and historical complexity. This model suggests that the rundale system be defined as a configuration of spatial and social-structural characteristics, varying according to place and time.

The study of rundale has slowly graduated from a relatively isolated debate within Irish historical geography, to a subject of wider consideration amongst anthropologists, sociologists, agricultural scientists, archaeologists, and historians. This widening of the scope of debate has brought renewed attention not only to the social, cultural, and geographical features of rundale, but to the variety of sources brought to bear on its study. As a result, the incorporation of new source materials, and new approaches to analysis, has breathed life into an important aspect of Irish social history for which further discovery doubtless remains. Since the publication of Estyn Evan’s foundational paper ‘Some Survivals of the Irish Openfield System’ in 1939, subsequent major works in the field have revealed additional layers of complexity to rundale which, rather than closing down debate, have served merely to keep it alive by raising new questions. The publication of works beyond the field of Irish studies has also placed the study of rundale in comparative context, as social scientists pay greater attention to historical modes of production across Europe and beyond. By revealing historical systems similar to rundale in operation in locations as diverse as Germany, Romania, and Russia, renewed attention is being paid to fundamental questions regarding the evolutionary precursors of our modern capitalist society.

The rundale system has held a certain fascination for Irish historians due to its troublesome prevalence in the cartographic record and comparative absence from historical record. As a system of communal cultivation characterised by equality of land allocation through collective governance, popular conflicting accounts have interpreted it both as a functional adaptation to the ‘ecological niche’ of the Irish Western Seaboard or, controversially, as a modern survival of an archaic, embryonic mode of production of great antiquity. Beyond such empirical concerns with its origins and spatial distribution, the rundale system raises theoretical concerns of some antiquity (such as those concerning the place of communal modes of production as precursors to the development of capitalism within Marxist historical-materialism), and other issues permeating foundational debates of sociology, concerning the relationship between the natural and the social, and systems-based conceptualisations of societies and social order. These latter theoretical concerns have recently enjoyed a resurgence of interest under the interdisciplinary rubrics of resilience ecology and complexity theory, offering a means with which to discard old dualisms of nature-society, and the restrictions of normative stability assumptions and structuralism imposed by earlier variants of post-war sociological systems theory. The rundale system is here explored in the context of these informants both as an exercise in theoretical compatibility, and with a view toward establishing a more rounded perspective on rundale as a distinct social-ecological system. A macro-context for this subsequent investigation is thus established by subjecting a set of aggregate data on prefamine Ireland to an optimisation clustering procedure, in order to discern the potential presence of distinctive social-ecological regimes. This resultant typology provides a contextual framework for subsequent quantitative and qualitative work at lower levels of aggregation.

Drawing upon recent reworkings of world systems theory and Marx’s concept of metabolic rift, this paper attempts to ground early nineteenth-century Ireland more clearly within these metanarratives, which take the historical-ecological dynamics of the development of capitalism as their point of departure. In order to unravel the socio-spatial complexities of Irish agricultural production throughout this time, attention must be given to the prevalence of customary legal tenure, institutions of communal governance, and their interaction with the colonial apparatus, as an essential feature of Ireland’s historical geography often neglected by famine scholars. This spatially differentiated legacy of communality, embedded within a country-wide system of colonial rent, and burgeoning capitalist system of global trade, gave rise to profound regional differentiations and ecological contradictions, which became central to the distribution of distress during the Great Famine (1845-1852). Contrary to accounts which depict it as a case of discrete transition from feudalism to capitalism, Ireland’s pre-famine ecology must be understood through an analysis which emphasises these socio-spatial complexities. Consequently, this structure must be conceptualised as one in which communality, colonialism, and capitalism interact dynamically, and in varying stages of development and devolution, according to space and time.

There can be few questions more fundamental to political economy than the share of national income that goes to capital and labour. The central organising concept of a division of factor shares between capital, labour and rent has long featured as an axiom of classical political economy in its derivations of essential heuristics of productive activity. Cross-national studies of income inequality, and of domestic labour market and macro-structural change have failed to adaquately account for the variable distribution of national product between labour and capital however, as an essential intermediary between personal income, and national economic activity. Labour’s share of income has declined almost universally among advanced capitalist economies under the apparent combined influences of globalisation, sectoral shifts in national employment, and the entrenchment of neoliberal policy regimes. Existing research into factor share distributions has failed to capture crucial differences in variability between countries however, differences which challenge existing stylised narratives emphasising stable compensation rates, which call for a case-sensitive orientation to the manner in which heterogeneous configurations of state and labour market institutions mediate the distribution of returns to labour and capital. This paper presents a contextualised, case-centered approach to the comparative analysis of the dynamics of labours’ share of national income, based on parallel time series analyses of institutional and structural covariates in Ireland and Denmark – cases examplary of the influential ‘varieties of capitalism’ and ‘worlds of welfare capitalism’ heuristics. The results of a set of time series models show that the institutional configurations defined by the interaction of national economic composition, levels of unionisation, globalisation, labour market change and financialisation, construct evolving national contexts of institutional complementarity and conflict, which in turn mediate the dynamics of the distribution of returns to labour and capital. Consequently, oberved cross-European declines in aggregate labour shares must be understood both in terms of an historical complexity which transcends the limitations of the conventional typologies of comparative political economy, and in a manner which confronts the heuristics of macro-economics, which empahsise constant returns to scale.

The field of environmental sociology has undergone drastic change in recent decades, in context of a broader reconfiguration of the terrain of sociological theory and practice. Systems-based approaches to the study of human society, located at the interface between the natural and social sciences have since yielded to a fragmentary body of theory and practice. Subsequent developments such as the emergence of actor network theory, linguistic constructivism and epistemic relativism, have sought not only to question the status of scientific discourse as immutable authority, but also the legitimacies of positivism and macro-theoretical modeling as tenable research programs. This thesis suggests that much of this critique is misdirected, informed as it is by false dichotomies of theory and method which empahsise the separatism of the social, and the difficulty of normative analysis. Over the past twenty years, sociologists have begun to re-engage with systemic theory, albeit with a plethora of new anti-reductionist informants rooted in epistemologies of emergentism, complexity and critical realism. Parallel developments in Marxian ecological thought and human ecology offer further conceptual complementarities and points of dialogue, with which to develop new methodologies for the study of human collectives as ‗social-ecological systems‘. The objectives of this work are thus twofold; (1) to advance an alternative basis for theory and practice in environmental sociology, drawing upon the informants of complexity theory, resilience-based human ecology, and Marx‘s concepts of mode of production and metabolic rift; (2) to contribute to this largely theoretical body of knowledge, by operationalising the preceding informants within a specific case study; that of communal farming, or the 'rundale system‘, in nineteenth century Ireland. The ecological dynamics of the rundale system are thus explored through the imposition of a range of quantitative, archival and comparative methods, as an exercise in the explanatory capacities of the investigative framework developed throughout this work. This methodology rejects existing explanatory models which emphasise the role of 'prime movers‘ in the generation of differential ecological outcomes, toward an account which emphasises both macro-structural complexity, and the augmentation of adaptive capacity from below.

In the following account we apply a Marxist ‘mode of production’ framework that attempts to create a better understanding of the complex relationships between society and nature. Most of the discussion of the dualism of nature/society has tended to replicate this divide as reflected in the intellectual division between the natural sciences and the social sciences. We hope to cross this analytic divide and provide an analysis that incorporates both natural and social variables. Marx’s work on ecology and ‘mode of production’ provides us with the theoretical framework for our examination into the essential structures of the Irish rundale agrarian commune. His analysis of modes of production includes not only social relations (people to people) but also relations of material appropriation (people to nature) and therefore allows us to combine the social forces of production with the natural forces of production. The latter relations are conceptualized by Marx as mediated through the process of metabolism, which refers to the material and social exchange between human beings and nature and vice-a-versa. However, what is crucial to Marx is how the natural process of metabolism is embedded in its social form – its particular mode of production. Marx suggested that this unity of the social and the natural was to be located within the labour process of the particular mode of production and he expressed this crucial idea in the concept of socio-ecological metabolism. Some modes of production such as capitalism create a rift in the process of metabolism. The metabolic rift is a disruption of the soil nutrient cycle as nutrients are removed from the soil when they pass into the crops and animals and are not returned. Declining soil fertility therefore becomes a social/economic problem for society

In the following account we apply a Marxist 'mode of production' framework that attempts to create a better understanding of the complex relationships between society and nature. Most of the discussion of the dualism of nature/ society has tended to replicate this divide as reflected in the intellectual division between the natural sciences and the social sciences. We hope to cross this analytic divide and provide an analysis that incorporates both natural and social variables.

The tendency of previous research to subsume labour markets entirely within the domain of the welfare state has obscured differences in the extent and ways in which the commodification of labour has occurred across countries. This chapter aims to fill the gap in comparative research by making a distinct contribution to the development and operationalization of labour regime analysis. First, it advances the conceptualization of labour regimes as the intersection of two dimensions – selectivity and forms of regulation of employment relations –focusing on the ways in which labour is mobilized in different political economies. Second, it demonstrates the clustering of western European economies in four distinct regime types, which only partly overlap with prevailing welfare typologies. These findings are then used to advance debates about what kind of empirical and theoretical relationship exists between welfare and labour regimes.

The preceding chapters have taken us on a tour of European countries, moving from national stories to within organisations, from politics of workplace reorganisation to individual and social consequences, and between work and the economy. Can an integrated sense be made of these diverse journeys across the European economy and its workplaces?

Recent decades have seen momentous shifts in the organisation of capitalism, including the range of transformations captured under the grand labels of globalisation, financialisation, liberalisation, and post-industrialism. Not surprisingly, the national forms of capitalist political economy are themselves in flux – even though significant differences remain between social democratic, Christian democratic, and liberal economies (among others) the internal dynamics of each of these models of capitalism are being transformed in important ways (Thelen 2014). At the same time, the experience of work in these worlds of capitalism has undergone dramatic changes. Workers often have more autonomy, work more closely with colleagues within and outside their employer’s company, and can exercise more flexibility in organising their work. However, the pressures of work are often more intense, employment is insecure, rewards are uncertain and likely to depend on competition with others, and a general sense of precarity is widespread.