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The article discusses a socioeconomic change in America in the 1970s in relation to the issue of nursing home abuse and a patient abuse-related scandal involving the John J. Kane Hospital in Allegheny County, Pennsylvania. The economic aspects of U.S. health care policy are addressed, along with deindustrialization, long-term care for older Americans, and America's New Deal government policies. Social rights and hospital wages in the U.S. are assessed.

Consumer researchers tend to equate successful marketization--the transition from a socialist to a capitalist economy--with the consensual acquiescence to an idealized definition of the socialist past. For this reason, little research has examined how memories about socialism influence marketization over time. To redress this gap, we bring prior consumer research on commercial mythmaking and popular memory to bear on an in-depth analysis of the marketization of the former German Democratic Republic. We find that, owing to a progressive sequence of conflicts between commercialized memories of socialism promoted by marketing agents and countermemories advocating socialism as a political alternative, definitions of the past, and by extension, capitalism's hegemony are subject to ongoing contestation and change. Our theoretical framework of hegemonic memory making explains relationships among consumption, memory making, and market systems that have not been recognized by prior research on consumption and nostalgia. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this paper I offer an innovative analysis of unproductive accumulation in the US economy from 1947 to 2011. I develop a new theoretical and empirical framework to analyze the accumulation of capital in its productive and unproductive forms. I also develop a methodology to compute Marxist categories predicated on the idea that the production of knowledge and information is an unproductive activity that relies on the creation of knowledge-rents. In particular, I provide new empirical estimates to uncover the shifting balance between productive and unproductive forms of accumulation. The accumulation pattern observed during the 1947–79 phase that prioritized productive accumulation gave way after the 1980s to a contrasting pattern prioritizing unproductive accumulation. Unproductive activity has been growing at a fast pace in terms of incomes, fixed assets and employment. Among all forms of unproductive activity, my approach places special attention on how the production of knowledge and information has constituted a rising share of total unproductive income and capital stock. Additionally, productive stagnation and rapid unproductive accumulation have been related to greater exploitation of productive workers and to widening income inequality. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This study adjudicates between two competing perspectives regarding the importance of manufacturing employment for economic growth with the onset of the most recent round of economic globalization. Established economic theories link shifts toward industrial activities to higher growth due to increases in aggregate productivity. While some scholars argue that the global restructuring of manufacturing in the era of globalization presents novel opportunities for development in the South, others suggest that the importance of manufacturing employment for economic growth in less developed countries declines during this period as competitive pressures increase and barriers to entry decline. I use difference models and a broad sample of both developed and less developed countries in the time period 1970-2010 to examine the effects of manufacturing share of employment on economic growth and how these effects have changed over time. First, I find that manufacturing employment has strong positive effects on economic growth net of neoclassical controls for all countries. Second, I find that for less developed countries, the importance of manufacturing share of employment for growth has declined through the course of the time period studied, particularly after 1990. In contrast, my results do not show a similar decline for developed countries. These findings are robust across alternative estimation strategies. I conclude by considering the theoretical implications of these results. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article focuses on findings of a study on neoliberalization and community development practices in Hong Kong, China, as of January 2017. It states that neoliberalism has been a dominant force for change in the policies and practices affecting many aspects of society, and mentions that community development services have undergone significant changes under the influence of neoliberalization. It notes that significance of development of entrepreneurial skills and capacities.

This paper develops a theoretical account of the reconstruction of workforce downsizing as a shareholder-value strategy since the 1980s. This account has two components. First, building on resource-dependence theory, I suggest that growing corporate dependence on institutional investors makes firms susceptible to their demand for greater returns, especially when these institutional investors are blockholders and resistant to counter-pressure from managers. Second, building on Fligstein's theory of conceptions of control, I suggest that the rise of shareholder value reorients managerial behavior, by changing the decision context in a way that induces managers to maximize shareholder value. Crucial to constructing this new decision context are a set of agency-theory prescriptions for reforming corporate governance. My analysis of downsizing announcements, drawing on a sample of 714 US firms between 1981 and 2006, shows that both the pressure from institutional investors and the new decision context encourage firms to downsize more frequently. By demonstrating how both pressure from investors and changed managerial decision contexts have contributed to the prevalence of workforce downsizing, this paper makes a strong case for the financialization of the American corporation, and contributes to the sociological research on growing job insecurity and income inequality over the past three decades. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article contributes to the debate within the comparative political economy literature regarding the viability of market-correcting policy preferences under global socio-economic constraints. The existing literature has thus far focused predominantly on moderate, institutional, elite-oriented forms of contention over welfare policy reform. The article presents evidence that disruptive, innovative or elite-challenging forms of contention play an important role in welfare reform and should therefore be the subject of more sustained research. Pooled time-series cross-sectional analysis provides support for the claim that this more disruptive type of contention has a more significant and consistent impact on the process of welfare reform than do the institutional and moderate forms of contention that are more frequently studied (especially under adverse economic conditions and heightened levels of global socio-economic pressure). This is because (a) participants in acts of institutional, elite-oriented forms of contention more readily accede to elite discourse when it is asserted that welfare retrenchment measures are ‘necessary’; and (b) moderate, elite-oriented activities are more easily ignored by policy makers. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]