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Even when efficiency gains can be expected from contracting out municipal services, it surprisingly rarely occurs. Political pressure by interest groups, especially unions, is usually assumed responsible. We argue that the effectiveness of such pressure is actually a function of a service's 'transparency,' which determines voter's knowledge of the quality and cost of the service as well as the tax burden. A model is presented of the interplay between union opposition to contracting and service transparency. Policies are offered to increase transparency and make contracting optimal for governments.

This paper explores the privatization of state owned enterprises in Turkey as a function of an alliance of diverse social forces composed of market-oriented capital groups, mainstream media, national bureaucracies, and government officials. It highlights that these actors emerged in the post-1980 period because of dramatic transformations in Turkish society and the economy initiated by the process of neo-liberal globalization. The unification of diverse identities and interests around the strategy of further integrating with the global economy were crucial in the recent acceleration of the privatization process in Turkey. The paper also shows that market-oriented social forces sidelined resistant groups through a discourse that emphasized that privatization would bring material and other benefits to all and that the alternatives were worse. Such a communicative process played a crucial role in generating consent/hegemony for privatization in the 2000s. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

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The article approaches a theme which was intensely debated during the last couple of decades: the privatization of social services as a means for insuring their quality and efficiency, due to the promotion of a competitive environment similar to the one in the business realm. The arguments for and against the privatization of social services are analyzed, in close conjunction with the ideological elements. The article further discusses the implications of privatization at different levels: beneficiaries of social services, social workers, community and society at large. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article references a case study to examine the significance of privatisation within the nation of Vietnam. As the nation has entered an era of neoliberal globalization, the concept of privatisation has taken on a separate meaning from its traditional context, in which it was defined through bureaucracy. The author urges that the process is significant in terms of its implications for the operations of business firms.

This article starts with basic information about historical developments and circumstances concerning Serbia as a country still in the process of transition. Media restructuring is explained from the point of view of an activist who has been fighting for civil society media both in research and practice. The process of transition that is taking place in Serbia is a good opportunity for an attempt to establish a ‘third media sector’. However, this endeavour has been unsuccessful so far because most media organizations restructuring from government monopoly have chosen the commercial privatization option, even though civil society media are a legally sanctioned and recognized option. This article presents results that are far from optimistic. The main part of the article is dedicated to reasons that explain how a specific type of broadcasting media has been prevented from growing in Serbia. The civil society media model was, and still is, a blind spot of media transition. It is ignored in the political sphere, and the public is not properly informed about it. Journalists are not keen to try media restructuring in the direction of civil society media either, as a survey of their opinions and attitudes shows. The survey indicates that professional journalists also have poor knowledge about civil society media as an alternative to privatization. Consequently, they did not attempt to make use of civil society media legislation in the restructuring of their own media organizations. An encouraging finding of the survey was that working journalists are aware, in principle, of the liberating and participatory potential of people's media. It seems that only the rise of civil society in Serbia can create the societal conditions in which civil society media can graduate from hope to reality. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Copyright of Revue d'Études Comparatives Est-Ouest is the property of Presses Universitaires de France and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

Copyright of Lusotopie is the property of Brill Academic Publishers and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

Copyright of Revue Anthropologie et Sociétés is the property of Anthropologie et Societies and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

Today, in what has been described as a re-emergence of privately organized extraterritorial force, the private military and security industry supplies the major military powers with a range of core services. This article asks how such a development came about, and why it has become politically uncomplicated to outsource such intimate state functions as the executive branches of foreign policy programmes. How did certain states arrive at a situation where it is unclear whether core military and security affairs are run by public or private agencies? The article answers these questions by presenting and commenting on general explanations as to why the private military industry has grown so much in post-invasion Iraq. It adds new perspectives to existing scholarly work by suggesting that the reappearance of private extraterritorial force could not have occurred on such a scale without a restructuring of neutrality in international relations. It is suggested that this change in neutrality might constitute the sine qua non of the re-emergence of private extraterritorial force. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Copyright of International Social Work is the property of Sage Publications, Ltd. and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

The Congress of South African Trade Unions (COSATU), though it represented the most progressive and powerful of of union movement in the world in the 1980s, in the 1990s has been on the defensive because of political changes it helped to bring about. Its ally, the African National Congress (ANC) now controls the government of the country, and new means of political engagement which use both support and opposition have had to be embraced. The AND government is promoting a more liberalized economy to reintegrate with the world. A compromise is needed.

Privatization, or the contracting of government services to the private sector, has existed in child welfare in limited form for decades. Purchase of services contracting has been used to purchase [...]

This article offers a critical perspective on gender mainstreaming in water management in India by exploring the linkages between pre-given notions of 'gender' in mainstreaming rhetoric and selected practices of water management. Evaluative studies have shown that gender mainstreaming is not effective if restricted to practices that try to make women visible or simply add a gender component in an intervention program. The much publicized 'Women, Water and Work' campaign initiated by India's Self-Employed Women's Association (SEWA) by and large excluded men, and the newly-instituted water sector reforms, which promote privatization and marginalize women in the process, are selected for analysis to distill the meanings of gender and social interests. Prospects for effective gender mainstreaming in water management will hinge on how the main agenda can address the transformation of gender relations and treat water as a human right so as to realize the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) in developing countries. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Government policy promoting consumerism in healthcare can be seen as offering up certain preferred identities to which its citizens are encouraged to aspire. Whilst many commentators reject the notion that health services users should be conceived of as consumers, this paper outlines the relevance of the concept to our understanding of the ways in which individuals manage their health and service use. The paper examines the identity work undertaken by individuals in relation to decisions about healthcare preferences and assesses the extent to which this is compatible with the identities promoted in Government policy. We suggest that in circumstances where individuals feel both a sense of personal entitlement and a desire to be supportive of the needs of other members of the community, 'doing' ethical consumer can be fraught with discomfort and anxiety. These anxieties are exacerbated in a context where citizenship is increasingly being defined in terms of consumer identities, and making good (health) choices might be seen as distinguishing the civilised from the marginalised. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Because the traditional concept of social learning has faced significant criticism in recent years, more analytical work is required to back the claim that the lessons drawn from existing institutional legacies can truly impact policy outcomes. Grounded in the historical institutionalist literature, this article formulates an amended concept of social learning through the analysis of the relationship between finance, social learning, and institutional legacies in the 1990s debate over the reform of earnings-related pension schemes in the United States and Canada. The article shows how social learning related to specific ideological assumptions and policy legacies in the public and the private sectors has affected policymaking processes. At the theoretical level, this contribution stresses the political construction of learning processes, which is distinct from the technocratic model featured in the traditional literature on social learning. This article also distinguishes between high- and low-profile social learning while emphasizing the impact of private policy legacies on learning processes. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Privatization and competitive politics brought about accelerated individualization in Bulgarian society. Both the constructive and destructive effects of individualization are particularly concentrated in the country's capital city. It rapidly shifted its economic structure from industry to services and re-oriented its territorial morphology from north-west to south-east. These changes mostly took place in a spontaneous and often anomic way thus provoking the need for a new Master Plan of the capital city. Sociological studies supported its preparation. Below the surface of a relatively stable size of the capital's population they revealed substantial migration to Sofia during the 1990s together with continuing large-scale emigration of the young, best educated and entrepreneurial population cohorts. Recent studies confirm this trend despite of the fact that the capital city is economically in the best position in comparison with all other settlements in the country. The conclusion is that the economic, political and cultural re-integration of Bulgarian society is still incomplete and this may be noticed in all its structural levels, administrative and territorial units, the capital city including. Thus, new institutional strategies are needed for coping with the effects of accelerated individualization. In the capital city, the core of these strategies should be the strengthening of the economic, political and cultural basis of its communal integration. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The welfare state of the future will have a new look. It will be more streamlined and more efficient with much greater emphasis on its key issues. For economic reasons the current range of security measures in the social field will be reduced, and those elements no longer covered will be taken over by private providers. In particular, the state will dispense with the expensive coverage of old age, illness and nursing care. However, in the unemployment sector it will remain the main provider, although the“product” will be better, offering greater differentiation, with a more favourable price–performance ratio. Moreover, the welfare state will adjust its hitherto inefficient and non-transparent policy of redistribution of income to bring it in line with the current economic situation. It will in the future concentrate on better helping the genuinely needy; to achieve this there will be an emphasis on finding decentralised, local solutions to the problems at hand. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article deals with the process of housing privatisation during the 1990s in Estonia and its impacts on social inequalities. The transformation of the social system has resulted in a changed pattern of housing occupancy and new bases for social inequalities. The major causes of change are related to the privatisation process. Briefly, it will be argued that in Estonia the opportunities of households to privatise were not related to their socio-economic status. Rather, their gains were related to their housing situation at the beginning of the privatisation process. As an impact of the privatisation, the gap between the rental and ownership sectors, as well as the social segmentation across different housing submarkets based on form of occupancy, are increasing. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Theories about the impact of the information revolution on the developing world stress the inevitability of democratization and economic privatization. This article tests some of these predictions in light of ethnographic practice using Kuwait as a case study. By studying the development of an active Internet culture in Kuwait and the persistence of traditional political and economic practices, this article provides evidence of the ways in which countries chart unique paths toward the 21st century and subsequently respond to forces of globalization. The author concludes that local cultural frameworks play an important and underrecognized role in the kinds of practices that are enabled by networked communications and adaptations to the global economy., Theories about the inevitability of social, political, and economic change toward globalization and homogenization underestimate the resiliency of local identity and cultural difference in the developing world and the Islamic [...]

The privatization of food and its distribution may interfere with the rights of citizens. As the number of privately-owned food franchises continues to rise, governments disengage themselves from the responsibility of food distribution, forcing the citizen into the privatized sphere. Food franchises such as McDonald's therefore absolve governments from maintaining standards of living for their citizens.

Socialism in the late 19th century had envisioned an international brotherhood where laborers would no longer be exploited and have equal rights. Though its vision of convergence was realized in Europe after the Second World War, its mission had already been transformed. Modern socialism no longer sees itself as the antitheses of capitalism but a restraining factor of potential abuses under a profit-oriented social structure. It has accepted the usefulness of privatization in battling monopolies and has balanced its call for equality with the need to encourage competition.

A European Union-funded research study was conducted in the post-communist cities of Budapest, Prague, Warsaw and Krakow to analyze the economic and social inequalities of privatization in Central and Eastern Europe. Results revealed that there are significant differences in patterns of inequalities in the four cities. Social inequalities were also found to be rapidly increasing in these areas. However, social inequality issues cannot be fully addressed without considering political outcomes., INTRODUCTION Since the demise of the communist regimes in 1989 the countries of Eastern Europe have experienced dramatic changes in political, economic and social life. Much academic and political debate [...]

This paper explores the transformation of customary tenure systems and their impact on women's tights to land in Africa. Emphasis is placed on the diversity of land rights within customary tenure systems, the different institutions and structures (e.g., inheritance, marriage) that influence rights to land, and the trend toward uniformity and increasing patrilineal control. With privatization, different rights to land have become concentrated in the hands of those persons (such as community leaders, male household heads) who are able to successfully claim their ownership right to land, while other persons (such as poor rural women, ethnic minorities) lose the few rights they had and generally are not able to participate fully in the land market. Key words - land tenure, Africa, intrahousehold, privatization, gender

Current proposals for the privatization of social security, including those proposed by the Advisory Council on Social Security, would have negative economic consequences for women. Most adversely affected would be women from low-income and middle-income households and those with low-paying jobs. The potential gains from current privatization proposals are outweighed by the potential risks and disadvantages for women, particularly those in the most vulnerable categories.

The privatisation of formerly state-owned housing is one of the main elements of the transition in the post-state-socialist city. This paper examines the process of housing privatization in the context of the Budapest experience by: (1) reviewing theories of the transformation of state socialism with respect to their implications for housing inequalities; tying housing privatization to the market transition debate; (2) providing a brief narrative of housing privatization in Budapest; an (3) analysing how tenants use the institutional-legal possibilities in their privatization decisions on the basis of quantitative survey evidence. It is argued that housing privatization is marked by 'path dependence'; its course and outcome are shaped by the legacy of state socialism along with the emerging logic of the market. This combination hands out rewards very unequally and crystallizes inequalities created by the ancien regime, now protected by the market.

Municipal solid waste management and planning traditionally have been regarded as the responsibility of local government. However, the legal climate surrounding solid waste management has become more constrained, placing local government at the mercy of the private waste management industry, and eroding the effectiveness of local waste planning efforts. This article provides an overview of recent court decisions impacting local government solid waste management. It also discusses current congressional activity relating to interstate waste transport and flow control, and assesses the potential effects of such legislation on public solid waste management and on privatization issues raised by critics of local control., Most state and local governments have regarded municipal solid waste management and planning as the natural responsibility of local governments, some even viewing solid waste management as a public utility, [...]

Urban residents in Argentina, Brazil, Chile and Mexico value individual freedom somewhat more than they value equality of social condition or equality of income distribution. Since they also favour private ownership or a mixture of control by owners and workers as opposed to control of firms by the state, these values tend to support the privatization of state enterprises that has become so widespread in Latin America. Different patterns of values occur within each country, however, and these patterns are strikingly consistent from the early 1960s to the early 1990s. Significant variation among classes appears in the data for these countries from the World Values study collected between 1990 and 1992. Overall, elites have led the fundamental restructuring of national economies in Latin America through privatizations, rather than following public demands to do so. Members of the upper class are most committed to the value of freedom in the four Latin American nations, and, followed by middle-class citizens, they also especially value jobs that allow for personal initiative. Members of the working class are more committed to norms of equality, yet the differences between the skilled and the unskilled working classes stand out, especially in Argentina.

The elimination of retail wine monopolies in Alabama, Idaho, Maine, Montana and New Hampshire has resulted in significant increases in alcohol sales. Wine, beer and hard liquor sales data was collected for the period before and after privatization of the wine industry in each of these states. Wine sales rose abruptly in all states, from 13% in New Hampshire to 150% in Idaho, while beer and spirits sales remained relatively stable. State liquor monopolies have been effective controls of alcohol consumption.

The new economic liberalization in Mexico will result in complete privatization of the rural industry, mass migration of agricultural workers, especially in the vegetable and maize sectors, and reduction in the wages of Mexican farmers. The Mexican farmers will be rendered landless as most of their land will be taken over by private shareholders who will determine wages, crop substitutions, fertilizer subsidies and credit.

Both academic and political debate about the effects of privatisation upon employees in privatised companies has taken place in something of an empirical vacuum. In particular, there is a lack of systematic enquiries into the major privatised utilities. Despite the lack of evidence, a number of claims have been advanced, both about the impact of privatisation upon the political attitudes of employees, and about its effects on working conditions, worker motivation and behaviour. This paper presents the results of a survey of 442 employees in two privatised public utilities. It is divided into two parts, looking first at the more general social and political attitudes of these employees, then presenting their views on the impact of privatisation on the company they work for, and on their working lives. The findings reported here lend little support either to new right claims about privatisation's transformative powers or to the view that 'for most people ... privatisation will make very little difference at all' (Saunders and Harris, 1990).

Russia's attempted conversion to capitalism has resulted in hyperinflation, a growing disparity between rich and poor and a drastically devalued currency. Privatization has put less than 10% of the nation's businesses in private hands and has put 33% of its workforce in the small business sector. The influx of goods has mattered little to the average Russian, who is unable to pay astronomical prices with an ever weakening ruble. The deficit is growing as the tax structure fails to take hold and corruption runs rampant.