John Lie

Managing Decline: Japan's Coal Industry Restructuring and Community Response

For many years, coal formed the backbone of Japans economic development, but the dangers and costs of mining became increasingly expensive for the industry and government. Global changes in coal production and exchange finally prompted Japans decision in 1986 to shut down nearly all domestic coal mines in favour of coal imports. Japans policy for industry restructuring had been applauded as one of the most comprehensive in addressing the needs of the industry, the workers and the community. At micro-level, however, the people in the community most affected by the policy decision have been excluded from the process. This text reveals the stratified effects, as well as compensation, for the different groups in Yubari City, Hokkaido. Although the policy settlement package goes to the coal miners, community redevelopment ignores their needs, prompting them to leave the city and benefiting instead land owners and public employees. Revealed as well are the ways in which Japans cultural values, particularly the vertical social structure as it affects decision making, status, occupations and company organization and the importance of maintaining the family system, figure in the policy process and its consequences.

Korea Leading Developing Nations: Economy, Democracy & Welfare.

Introduction - Characteristics of The Korea People . Part 1: Economic Development. Part 2 Democratisation. Part 3: Social Welfare Services.

Epilogue: The Wreck of the Sewol

The sinking of the Sewol revealed and accentuated the limits and contradictions of the received South Korean political-economic model in particular and of contemporary South Korean society in general.

The Terror of Neoliberalism: Authoritarianism and the Eclipse of DemocracyThe Terror of Neoliberalism: Authoritarianism and the Eclipse of Democracy, by GirouxHenry A.. Boulder, CO: Paradigm Publishers, 2004. 194 pp.

essentially dross. Mildred Schwartz and Kay Lawson also go beyond American concerns to examine trends in party systems and cleavage structures West-wide, observing that because parties are not seen as advancing “a more perfect democratic governance” (p. 285)—the lodestar again—political sociology treats them too negatively. Chapters on the state take us into the welter of theories and studies of state formation (Ertman), democratic transitions (Markoff), revolutions (Goodwin), variations among democratic regimes (Tilly), neo-corporatist practices (Streeck and Kenworthy), undemocratic politics (Brachet-Márquez), and state bureaucracies (Oszlak). All range widely over the modern world and show that the field has moved far to satisfy Giovanni Sartori’s 1960s injunction that a “sociology of politics” concentrating on class and other societal determinants must incorporate the relative autonomy of political actors to form a political sociology. Nevertheless, political elites, the prime actors, are still not fully on stage. There is no Handbook chapter about elites, and references to them, though numerous, are fleeting except when discussing the debate, fueled by Bill Domhoff, about the American power structure. Chapters on state policies and innovations nicely canvas welfare state development and variation (Hicks and Esping-Andersen), how state policies shape women’s roles as workers, citizens, and mothers (Misra and King), and how in the name of “freedom” policies of liberal democracies disguise and leave racial discrimination relatively untouched (Redding, James, and Klugman). Gregory Hooks and James Rice argue grimly that the half-century just begun will be filled with wars, so that political sociology must come to grips with the increasing overlap of political and military power—another reason why the democracy lodestar may be misleading and why elites and their actions need more attention. The Handbook concludes with the puzzle of globalization. Two chapters depict it, in the guise of neo-liberal world hegemony, as a scourge that is reducing state capacity to protect citizens and diminishing democracy (McMichael), even though it is spawning transnational labor, women’s, and environmental movements that are “counterhegemonic” (Evans). With a wealth of data and a mastery of policy outcomes, Evelyn Huber and John Stephens show that globalization has not, at least so far, weakened northern and antipodean welfare states appreciably, but with the help of intermediating political forces it has had devastating effects in Latin America. Echoing in their own domain the foreboding of Hooks and Rice about wars to come, Thomas Janoski and Fengjuan Wang predict that immigration politics will become “a cauldron of emotions and wills for the next half century” (p. 630) and they chart this cauldron’s contours, particularly in the U.S. Despite a few dark scenarios, the Handbook’s contributors may too readily assume it is business as usual. It is striking, for example, that Huntington’s “clash of civilizations” thesis receives not a single mention, while the fusion of nationalism and religious fundamentalism in the U.S. and elsewhere also receives little attention. The reciprocal vulnerability of elites and publics in the now advanced conditions of mass society—a worry of political sociologists in the 1950s but apparently no longer—is not discussed. The failure, or at least sluggishness, of economic development in major world areas and the social disorganization it is producing globally need more assessments of the kind that Huber and Stephens give to Latin America’s plight. We need not become a gaggle of Cassandras, but we should ponder if a long period of essentially flourishing conditions, during which political sociology assumed a bright future, is now behind us.

21.95 paper. ISBN: 1594510113.

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