Essay from the year 2006 in the subject Business economics - Economic Policy, grade: 1,7, University of Warwick (University of Warwick, UK), course: Vorlesung University of Warwick, language: English, abstract: Only a few authors have yet dealt with the interesting development of depoliticisation that is taking place not only in Britain, but also in many other democracies all over the world. In this essay we are going to focus ourselves on the British case, where the change of government in 1997 seems to have intensified the depoliticisation movement. To give a comprehensive picture of the actual debate in the literature on depoliticisation we will review the work done so far by Peter Burnham, Jim Buller and Matthew Flinders. Both papers, Burnham (2001) and Buller & Flinders (2005), try to stimulate debate and research on a political phenomenon that seems not to be new but nevertheless worth to discuss if we want to understand the rationale guiding present British policy.

The late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries are commonly characterised as an age of ‘neoliberalism’ in which individualism, competition, free markets and privatisation came to dominate Britain’s politics, economy and society. This historical framing has proven highly controversial, within both academia and contemporary political and public debate. Standard accounts of neoliberalism generally focus on the influence of political ideas in reshaping British politics; according to this narrative, neoliberalism was a right-wing ideology, peddled by political economists, think-tanks and politicians from the 1930s onwards, which finally triumphed in the 1970s and 1980s. The Neoliberal Age? suggests this narrative is too simplistic. Where the standard story sees neoliberalism as right-wing, this book points to some left-wing origins, too; where the standard story emphasises the agency of think-tanks and politicians, this book shows that other actors from the business world were also highly significant. Where the standard story can suggest that neoliberalism transformed subjectivities and social lives, this book illuminates other forces which helped make Britain more individualistic in the late twentieth century. The analysis thus takes neoliberalism seriously but also shows that it cannot be the only explanatory framework for understanding contemporary Britain. The book showcases cutting-edge research, making it useful to researchers and students, as well as to those interested in understanding the forces that have shaped our recent past.

1. The Weightless World -- 2. Where Have All The Jobs Gone? -- 3. Weightless Work -- 4. Nourishing the Grass Roots -- 5. Fear of Flexibility -- 6. The End of Welfare -- 7. The Ageing of Nations -- 8. Globalism and Globaloney -- 9. Visible and Invisible Cities -- 10. Weightless Government.

This exciting book, available in paperback for the first time, provides an illuminating account of contemporary globalisation that is grounded in actual transformations in the areas of production and the workplace. It reveals the social and political contests that give 'global' its meaning, by examining the contested nature of globalisation as it is expressed in the restructuring of work.Rejecting conventional explanations of globalisation as a process that automatically leads to transformations in working lives, or as a project that is strategically designed to bring about lean and flexible forms of production, this book advances an understanding of the social practices that constitute global change. Through case studies that span from the labour flexibility debates in Britain and Germany, to the strategies and tactics of corporations and workers, the author examines how globalisation is interpreted and experienced in everyday life. Contestation, she argues, is about more than just direct protests and resistances. It has become a central feature of the practices that enable or confound global restructuring.This book offers students and scholars of international political economy, sociology and industrial relations an innovative framework for the analysis of globalisation and the restructuring of work.

This book develops the idea that since decolonisation, regional patterns of security have become more prominent in international politics. The authors combine an operational theory of regional security with an empirical application across the whole of the international system. Individual chapters cover Africa, the Balkans, CIS Europe, East Asia, EU Europe, the Middle East, North America, South America, and South Asia. The main focus is on the post-Cold War period, but the history of each regional security complex is traced back to its beginnings. By relating the regional dynamics of security to current debates about the global power structure, the authors unfold a distinctive interpretation of post-Cold War international security, avoiding both the extreme oversimplifications of the unipolar view, and the extreme deterritorialisations of many globalist visions of a new world disorder. Their framework brings out the radical diversity of security dynamics in different parts of the world.

This work provides a systematic assessment and evaluation of the modernization of the British Labour Party in light of its landslide victory in 1997. It also represents an attempt to locate Labour's modernization in terms of the distincitive political economy of contemporary British capitalism and the impact of globalization, the evolution and transformation of the British State in the post-war period, the legacy of Thatcherism, and the specifics of electoral strategy and competition in contemporary Britain.

The emergence of a common security and foreign policy has been one of the most contentious issues accompanying the integration of the European Union. In this book, Michael Smith examines the specific ways foreign policy cooperation has been institutionalized in the EU, the way institutional development affects cooperative outcomes in foreign policy, and how those outcomes lead to new institutional reforms. Smith explains the evolution and performance of the institutional procedures of the EU using a unique analytical framework, supported by extensive empirical evidence drawn from interviews, case studies, official documents and secondary sources. His perceptive and well-informed analysis covers the entire history of EU foreign policy cooperation, from its origins in the late 1960s up to the start of the 2003 constitutional convention. Demonstrating the importance and extent of EU foreign/security policy, the book will be of interest to scholars, researchers and policy-makers.