Ankie Hoogvelt

Globalization and the technocratization of social work

Few commentators have focused on how globalization has impacted on social work practice. This article demonstrates the significance of global ization on the process of intervention and the labour process in social work. As a result of global market forces, needs-led assessments and re lationship building have given way to budget-led assessments, increased managerial control over practitioners and bureaucratised procedures for handling consumer complaints. Led by the purchase-provider split in service provision as the British states response to the market discipline imposed by the privatization of the welfare state, these changes seek to reorient social work away from its commitment to holistic provisions and social justice towards technocratic competencies which are the purview of the externally direct bureaucrat.

Globalization, Contract Government and the Taylorization of Intellectual Labour in Academia

There is a distinct climate of anti-intellectualism in Britain today. It is important therefore, that intellectuals once more become the subject of serious sociological analysis. This paper makes a start in the re-examination of the role of intellectuals which must be sustained by further systematic research.

Globalisation, Crisis and the Political Economy of the International Monetary (Dis)Order

This article argues that the origins of the financial crisis of 2008 reside in the conditions of economic globalisation in the context of an imperfect world monetary order. It first describes the emergence of globalisation, after the demise of the Bretton Woods Monetary System, as a ‘historical structure’ in which financialisation has become the dominant mode of capital accumulation. It next outlines the interregnum period of a petrol-backed dollar reserve currency that underpinned, for a time, US hegemony. The concluding sections explore the consequences of the present crisis, the decline of the US dollar and alternative scenarios of world monetary order. Este artículo sostiene que los orígenes de la crisis financiera de 2008 residen en las condiciones de la globalización económica dentro del contexto de un orden monetario imperfecto. Primero describe el surgimiento de la globalización, después de la extinción del Sistema Monetario Bretton Woods, como una ‘estructura histórica’, en la cual la financiación ha pasado a ser el método dominante de la acumulación de capital. Luego subraya el período interregno de una reserva de divisa respaldada por el petrodólar que sustentó, por un tiempo, la hegemonía de los E.E.U.U. Las secciones conclusivas exploran las consecuencias de la actual crisis, la decadencia del dólar estadounidense y los diferentes escenarios del orden monetario mundial.

Indigenisation and foreign capital: industrialisation in Nigeria

A survey of Kano‐based industries affected by the indigenisation programme reveals a very high concentration of indigenous equity ownership, and partly because of this, sheds doubts on the success of the programme to achieve its stated objective: independent capitalist development. Such an objective is furthermore thought to be an unlikely outcome because of the emerging patterns of collaboration between the new industrial (though still largely mercantile oriented) elite and the foreign owners of capital who compensate for their loss of direct economic control through increased technological control. Such increased technological control encourages also a pattern of production unlikely to expand the labour absorption rate of industry.

Rethinking development theory

Development theory is in something of a muddle. Societies which were previously classed together as featuring the same conditions and as subject to the same laws of motion, have demonstrated a disorienting divergence of development performance and experience. This has undermined our confidence in generalizing theories. The Third World or the Less Developed World as a unified, homogeneous object of enquiry no longer exists. With its disappearance have gone the grand competing theories at one time majestically erected to explain the causes of its poverty and to chart the path to its prosperity. Worse still, detailed empirical scrutiny of the successes of some countries, and the failure of others, has contradicted and refuted the theoretical predictions and policy prescriptions of the main opposing paradigms.

Globalization and post-modern imperialism

Abstract This paper explores the changing relations between core and periphery of the world capitalist system under conditions of globalization. Using a Coxian analysis of historical structures, it examines the coherent conjunction between certain material forces of globalization and the emergence of a new moral mandate and institutional form for intervention in the third world. This is identified as post-modern Imperialism. By way of illustration, the paper ends with a brief discourse analysis of the recently revitalized aid agenda for Africa including the commission for Africa Report, the Make Poverty History campaign, and the Live8 concerts.

The World Bank & Africa: A Case of Mistaken Identity

In the last decade it has become standard practice in the literature, not least that flowing from World Bank staff pens, to treat sub-Saharan Africa as one continent: forty-five extremely diverse nations which are nevertheless thought to have common characteristics, common features, common problems, and common prospects. Increasingly, the entire edifice of internationally sponsored aid programmes, such as, for example, the IMF/WB jointly sponsored Structural Adjustment Programmes, has been built on this classification of commonality.

Moving the goal posts: the political economy of international statistics

The international fraternity that gave us the statistical warts and econometric s(t)imulations that were supposed to convince us of the welfare related benefits of the Uruguay Gatt Accord (cf. Lucy Walker elsewhere in this issue), have come up with another bag of tricks. This time they want to persuade us that the poor are not nearly as poor as we always thought, nor the rich as wealthy. In one fell statistical swoop the gap between rich and poor countries has been reduced by a third.

Going lean or going native? The social regulation of ‘lean’ production systems

Abstract The experience with Japanese or ‘lean’ production systems when trans‐’ planted to the West has often been below expectations. This article reviews some of this experience and the surrounding debate. Adopting a theoretical position akin to that of the Regulation School, we argue that production systems need to be understood from within the wider sociocultural context in which they have been embedded. We next examine five critical features of the Japanese production system and their modus operandi within Japanese society. We submit that the sociocultural context creates and is reproduced by psychological factors, in particular a concept of self which is arguably different from that which drives the motivations of Western homo economicus. A concluding section explores to what extent, in the West, information technology is accompanied by an organizational function that may replace the role of indigenous social structure in Japanese production systems.

Neo-evolutionary Theory, Structural Functionalism and Modernisation Theories

One of the more conspicuous features of neo-evolutionism, the observant reader may have noticed, is the almost total lack of concern with causal explanations of social change. Indeed, as a proper theory of social change, neo-evolutionism has an appalling record, as many of its critics have, often angrily, pointed out.1