Charles Dannreuther

Political signification of the entrepreneur: Temporal analysis of constructs, agency and reification

This article explores the political signification of the term entrepreneur in UK parliamentary debates over the past forty years. Following a review of the literature, a need is identified to understand the construction of the entrepreneur in political discourse. Concern here is not with the prosaic cataloguing of policies or definitions, but with exploring shifts in the discursive constructs of the entrepreneur that underlie political practice. To explore these constructions a large longitudinal dataset is systematically condensed, while maintaining sensitivity to the nuances of meaning. A corpus-based linguistics approach is undertaken. This combines the computational analysis of significant collocates, that is important words (concepts) that surround the term entrepreneur, with the richness of qualitative analysis. Patterns of reification, agency and structure are identified in the portrayed entrepreneurial constructs. The philosophical and practical implications of these patterns are discussed and proposals are made for using corpus techniques in international comparative analyses.

The European Social Model after the crisis: the end of a functionalist fantasy?

What is the European Social Model (ESM) for? This paper argues that it is best seen as an ideal type that facilitates the selection of values that sustains the political economy of the European Union. The ESM has facilitated integration in response to changing systemic requirements in the EU: to compensate for Economic and Monetary Union, to coordinate responses to globalisation under the Lisbon Agenda and to offer solace within the EU 2020 agenda after the sovereign debt crisis. As the systemic demands of the EU have changed, the ESM has not. It now has damaging effects on society which have harmed the political integration of the EU. In conclusion, it is argued that the ESM was a missed opportunity, and that while it remains an ideal type rather than a reality, it needs to present a more ambitious political agenda that would reconfirm the EUs commitment to its society over its markets.

Turkey in the World System and the New Orientalism

Turkey’s integration into the world system of capitalism after the collapse of the Ottoman Empire is usually understood from the restrictive perspective of a Western ‘Orientalist’ view. This perspective presents the Ottoman Empire either as a Feudal Mode of Production (FMP) or as an Asiatic Mode of Production (AMP). Although Turkish and Western contributions to World Systems Analysis (WSA) have challenged both these views (Keyder 1987), the shift from the Ottoman Empire to the Turkish Republic and the associated implications for Turkey’s role in the current world system of globalising capitalism are often restricted to a Christian, post-Enlightenment view of progress: that after a period of peripheralisation followed an impressive story of upward mobility culminating now in the civilising process of EU accession.