Search

The tertiarisation, or perhaps more accurately, the deindustrialisation of the economy has left deep scars on cities. It is evident not only in the industrial wastelands and empty factory buildings, but also in the income and social structures of cities. Industrialisation, collective wage setting, and the welfare state led to a stark reduction in income differences over the course of the 20th century. Conversely, deindustrialisation and the shift to tertiary sectors could result in increasing wage differentiation. Moreover, numerous studies on global cities, the dual city, and divided cities have also identified income polarisation as a central phenomenon in the development of major cities. Using data from the German Socio-Economic Panel (SOEP), we find an increasing polarisation of household income structures since the mid-1990s. In urban agglomerations, this income polarisation is even more pronounced than in the more rural regions. The income polarisation in Germany is likely to have multiple causes, some of which are directly linked to policies such as the deregulation of the labour market. But extensive deindustrialisation is probably also one of the drivers of this process, and it has directly weakened Germany’s middle-income groups. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

As a consequence of the international financial crisis in 2007, the region of Algarve, where tourism plays an important economic and social role, suffered a decrease in tourism demand, while unemployment increased sharply. Although tourism activities registered a quick recovery, unemployment levels continued to grow. This article examines the impacts of tourism activities on the sectorial structure of the regional economy, using a Bayesian vector autoregressive model. The results reveal that tourism growth did not automatically create the expected positive impacts on the economic performance of the other sectors, as was expressed by the objectives defined in the regional development strategies over the last two decades. The positive impacts of tourism were concentrated in the production of non-tradable goods and the construction sector, leading to a significant reduction of the weight of the tradable sector within the regional economy, similar to a process of deindustrialization described as the 'Dutch disease'. The decline of construction activities after 2007 has led to a significant increase of regional unemployment, although tourism growth has returned to 'pre-crisis' levels, revealing the lack of regional resilience. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Pamela Ann Davies argues that the closure of the Lynemouth, UK, aluminum smelter generated adverse social justice impacts and was caused by the adoption of green state policies. She employs that argument to critique green criminology for promoting adverse social justice impacts. Here, we reanalyze the Lynemouth plant closure. First, this reanalysis illustrates the various social and environmental forms of injustice the plant generated, especially its adverse human, nonhuman and ecological health consequences. Second, the closure is reassessed from a political economic perspective that places the plant closure within the context of global capitalist plant closures in the aluminum industry. That review notes that plant closures and deindustrialization in developed economies are now a common occurrence driven by economic concerns, not environmental policies. We point out that social injustice as well as ecological destruction are often created by the normal operation of capitalism, and that those consequences should not be overlooked. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article considers Theodor W. Adorno's thesis of the 'liquidation of the individual' as a contribution to the critique of political economy insofar as it links structural economic imperatives of the capitalist order to transformations of consciousness and human conduct. For Adorno, such 'liquidation' amounts to not only the superfluity of bourgeois individuality as an anthropological type but also to the objective superfluity of actually living individuals. I develop Adorno's argument that the 'form and organization of labor' in capitalism produces these forms of superfluity by turning to Marx's critique of value with an emphasis on the logic of 'socially necessary labor-time.' My argument is that as long as society is enthralled to the ongoing self-valorization of value (i.e. capital), social reproduction makes 'socially necessary' the superfluity of individuality as well as actually-living human individuals. In short, the anthropological decomposition of the bourgeois individual and the generation of 'surplus populations' are expressions of the same contradiction: the necessity and superfluity of labor in capitalism. After illustrating some current expressions of this contradiction evident in the global 'crisis of work' – including the displacement and transformation of labor by automation and the massive growth of the 'global slums' – I suggest that further analysis of the temporal contradictions of the law of value evinces the conditions of an emancipated individual in a post-work society. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

We often hear that the high unemployment rates of low-educated workers in Europe are due to the rigidities of the institutions increasing the labour costs that burden employers. In this article, we challenge this traditional view and offer alternative explanations to the cross-national variation in the employment rate of low-educated workers. Using macro-data and an error correction model, we analyse the determinants of the creation of jobs for low-educated workers in 19 countries between 1997 and 2010. Our findings tend to invalidate the neoliberal view, while also pointing to the positive impact of investing in public employment services and the predominant role of economic growth, which can be weakened by union density and employment protection in the case of male workers. Last but not least, creating low skill jobs has no or little impact on the employment outcomes of low-educated workers, thus indicating job displacement issues. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This article argues that the long-term shift in the incidence of taxation from capital to labour has shifted the centre of political conflicts from representatives of capital to those of labour. The fact that most taxation has become an increasing and regressive burden on labour in mature welfare states creates new divides in tax policies among left politicians. To demonstrate this, the article applies the literature on new divides to the case of tax policy. A comparison of German tax policy debates in the late 19th and late 20th centuries reveals that major conflict lines were intra-class, and that over time these lines have shifted from capital to labour. The article concludes that as the origins of new divides are often endogenous to welfare-state politics, the literature on new divides greatly benefits from a historical ‘turn’. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

While there is a growing awareness of the ‘re-emergence’ of working poverty, this topic remains relatively under-researched. This article provides an encompassing review of the literature dealing with the situation in Europe, North America and the Antipodes, with a focus on the theoretical models found in this literature, the definitions used and the risk groups identified. The main conclusion is that most publications were not based on a specific theoretical model, which has led to a flurry of definitions; moreover, conclusions on certain risk groups are divergent. The end of the article focuses on what remains to be done, because there are good reasons to think that working poverty might become a more pressing problem in the near future, and social policy researchers will have to have good theoretical frameworks and robust evaluation strategies in the years to come. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

There are competing theoretical expectations and conflicting empirical results concerning the impact of partisanship on spending on active labour market policies (ALMPs). This paper argues that one should distinguish between different ALMPs. Employment incentives and rehabilitation programmes incentivize the unemployed to accept jobs. Direct job creation reduces the supply of labour by creating non-commercial jobs. Training schemes raise the human capital of the unemployed. Using regression analysis this paper shows that the positions of political parties towards these three types of ALMPs are different. Party preferences also depend on the welfare regime in which parties are located. In Scandinavia, left-wing parties support neither employment incentives nor direct job creation schemes. In continental and Liberal welfare regimes, left-wing parties oppose employment incentives and rehabilitation programmes to a lesser extent and they support direct job creation. There is no impact of partisanship on training. These results reconcile the previously contradictory findings concerning the impact of the Left on ALMPs. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The mechanisms shaping a shift in intrametropolitan self-employment remain poorly understood. In response, this study aims to examine shifts in both central-city and suburban self-employment by integrating the changing forces of intrametropolitan economy and population with their economic interdependence within an entire metropolitan area. Using a change-score model, data collected over two timeperiods (1980-90 and 1990-2000) are pooled. The analysis shows that a decline in intrametropolitan manufacturing employment, which can be understood as an aspect of local economic restructuring, leads to an increase in intrametropolitan self-employment. Also, the data suggest that a rise in metropolitan-level immigrant population contributes to the growth of central-city self-employment. Moreover, this paper demonstrates that a shift in central-city self-employment is affected by both central-city and suburban economic transformations. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

One of the most widely used concepts in the sociology of women and men's work is that of the breadwinner. Given its centrality to and in so many core academic debates, it is surprising that so little attention has been paid to theorizing and operationalizing breadwinning. Breadwinning seems to lie uncontested, with an unproblematic taken-for-granted, common sense meaning in current sociology. The article reviews how breadwinning has been approached in sociology and how it has been operationalized in empirical studies. After identifying different dimensions of bread- winning, the article explores their reliability in a descriptive analysis of women and men's breadwinning work in Europe. It is concluded that the meaning of bread- winning should be debated as routinely as that of caring. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The new economy's definition and history need to be questioned, specifically the notion that the 'creative industries' are panaceas for economic problems and gifts to cultural studies that make it important. Questions of labor have been occluded in much discussion of the new economy and in cultural studies. Instead of a focus on consumption and meaning, progressive critics need to turn their attention to the new international division of cultural labor. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]