Helmut Willke

Governance in a Disenchanted World

This book expounds the idea of a disenchanted world composed of nation states and global functional systems. The nation state is losing some of its regulatory prerogatives and, at the same time, extending its legitimacy base in ‘chains of legitimacy’ to transnational institutions. There is neither a global democracy nor a global government. Therefore, establishing alternative forms of legitimacy, accountability and participation in a secular world seem mandatory. Helmut Willke examines the resurgence of moral reasoning in global affairs, pushed by various fundamentalisms, that indicates a real danger of a regression of democracy. The separation of private morals and public policies, the book argues, remains the basis of global aspirations of democracy.

Political Governance of Capitalism

This path-breaking book highlights that systemic risks emerge from a globally operating financial industry that is not only disconnected from the real economy but also allowed to hide in ‘shadow banking’ practices. Governance based on national regimes fails to cover ‘finance-led’ global capitalism. The authors argue that the risk of systemic meltdown will reappear unless intelligent governance regimes are installed, combining legally binding rules and civil society pressures to restore the balance between risk-taking and accountability. They illustrate the goal is ‘resilient’ capitalism in which the rules of the game are set by politics and knowledge-based discourse.

Fragility of global finance: systemic risk as black swan

What if capitalism were to collapse? Many critics of capitalism do not realize that there is no viable alternative to capitalism after the demise of socialism; there are only alternatives within market capitalism. Varieties of capitalism span a broad range from market fundamentalism to welfare capitalism, and these varieties correspond to varieties of democracy (Hall and Thelen 2005; Willke 2009) As a specific governance regime for the economy, capitalism is based mainly on selforganization and self-governance of markets, supplemented with varying institutional arrangements to safeguard the proper functioning of the market.

Zur Komplexität der Entscheidungstheorie

Zusammenfassung Luhmanns Text zeigt einen frühen Versuch, den Entscheidungsbegriff systemtheoretisch adäquat zu fassen und ihn zum einen an die Entscheidungssituation, zum anderen an die Kategorie der Komplexität anzubinden. Luhmann definiert Entscheidung noch vom Handlungsbegriff her, während er in späteren Arbeiten sich von diesem handlungstheoretischen Erbe löst und den Handlungsbegriff dezidiert dem Kommunikationsbegriff unterordnet. Gerade diese Komplikation macht den Text als Studienobjekt für Theorieentwicklung aufschlussreich. Die Reflexion zum Text bindet diesen in eine lange Reihe der Revisionen der klassischen Entscheidungstheorie ein - insbesondere Revisionen der Konzeptionen von Rationalität, Zweck-Mittel-Beziehung, der Relation von Person und Organisation und des Verhältnisses von Handlung, Kommunikation und Wissen.

???A Demonstrably Fragile Financial System??? ??? Information and Knowledge Asymmetries in the Global Financial Crisis

After a long and profitable boom in credit growth and leverage, the year 2007 was the starting point of the financial market turmoil that is often referred to as a credit tsunami (see for example: Mishkin 2011) or credit earthquake: Europe and the United States experienced the “near collapse of the financial system” (Sorkin 2010, 3), leading to the “worst financial crisis in generations” (Financial Stability Oversight Council 2011, I).

Der MikroArtikel als Instrument des Wissensmanagements

Der MikroArtikel ist die dokumentierte Beschreibung einer Lernerfahrung im Sinne einer komprimierten Fallstudie. Er geht uber Daten und Informationen hinaus, indem er den Erfahrungskontext darstellt, in dem eine Einsicht gewonnen wurde. Wie eine Fallstudie dient der MikroArtikel nicht nur der Dokumentation der Lerngeschichte der Autorin, sondern als Lehrund Lernmaterial fur fokussiertes Lernen in Gruppen, Teams oder communities of practice.