Joseph Szarka

Networking and Small Firms

JOSEPH SZARKA IS A LECTURERE IN FRENCH and managment at the university of Bath, England. His paper reviews the mangment literature on networking and puts forward and thery small firm development in terms of network formation. this model holds that it is insfficient to consider the small firm in isolation: the small firm is particulary dependent on the nature and quality of its relations with otehr firms and with the external world. these relations can be conceived in terms of exchange networks, commmunication networks and social networks. goods and services, inforamtion, ideas and values are mediated by those networks and sociocial network. Good and services information ideas and values are mediated by those networks. depending on the likages between firms, network constitutions can be based on relations of control, co-ordination or co-operation. Network constitution is shown to influenc the viability and development paths of member firms. Factors encourging network formation and development are analyssed The key issue of economic effectivness and efficiency are related to questions of concetnraion and market condition. the paper concluded by emphasising the role of network formation for the expansion of the small firm sector.

Bringing interests back in: using coalition theories to explain European wind power policies

Coalition theories have made a valuable contribution to understanding public policy but only partially explain policy change, especially in new policy subsystems. To improve empirical explanations and contribute to theory-building, this article identifies forms of coalition behaviour by drawing on the theoretical literature, applies coalition theory to the wind power sector and links coalition preferences with choices of policy instrument made by policy-makers. It provides support for the ‘advocacy coalition framework’, but argues that its explanatory power is increased by bringing both self-interest and the public interest back into the analytical frame.

Climate Challenges, Ecological Modernization, and Technological Forcing: Policy Lessons from a Comparative US-EU Analysis

The practice of “technological forcing,” understood as policy designed to accelerate technological innovation for the purposes of environmental protection, was pioneered in the USA during the 1970s and continued in Europe with feed-in tariffs for renewable energy and the emissions trading scheme. In order to draw lessons for climate policy, the article tests the capacity of “technological forcing” to translate ecological modernization theory into effective policy and practice, by providing analysis of three case studies. It argues that ambitious climate policies require not only technical proficiency in policy design, but also greater acknowledgment of the need to achieve structural change in major industrial sectors. It concludes that technology-based policies need to be accompanied by economic and political strategies to counteract incumbent resistance, and delineates potential means to do so.

From inadvertent to reluctant pioneer? Climate strategies and policy style in France

Abstract To comply with the Kyoto Protocol, signatory nations have implemented a policy template of reducing greenhouse gas emissions mainly from the electricity generation and heavy industry sectors. This article shows how, in the case of France, a policy style based on ‘environmental meso-corporatism’ has largely exhausted this ‘standard recipe’. To consider how far France has developed fresh solutions, two phases of climate policy-making in the 2000s are analysed. Increased recourse to new environmental policy instruments is identified, but implemented through the institutional routines of ‘environmental meso-corporatism’. The article argues that although this policy style has proved relatively well adapted to regulating the technologies of production, it has little purchase on cultures of consumption within the residential and transport sectors. Faced with new challenges, policymakers have proved better equipped to reform policy content than policy style. But France shows some reluctance to resolve the problem of limited policy reach.

Managing Strategic Positioning Choices: A Reappraisal of the Development Paths of the French and German Green Parties

To what extent have green parties been pawns of circumstance or arbiters of their own destiny? Whilst interpretations in terms of ‘political opportunity structures’ suggest that party development is mainly determined by external factors, detailed analysis reveals the growing significance of political agency exercised by small parties. During their history, the green parties of France and Germany have rotated through a range of positioning options and, in conditions of accelerated change within political systems, the importance of agency has increased. Reappraisal of the developmental paths of ecology parties shows that the impact of their own ability (or inability) to identify and manage strategic positioning choices may have been underestimated.

Environmental policy and neo‐corporatism in France

In France, neo‐corporatism has characterised and shaped core components of environmental policy. The argument is made that environmental policy‐making has suffered from implementation deficits, partly because of a lack of resources, technical responses and administrative capacity, but also because of socio‐economic obstacles embedded within long‐standing systems of interest representation. Through case studies of nature protection and the hunt lobby, industrial pollution control, and water management, the meso‐corporatist model is used to elucidate early patterns of interaction between public administration and socio‐economic actors, identify the recent problems associated with exiting from these societal arrangements, and help assess some of the environmental consequences.

From exception to norm – and back again? France, the nuclear revival, and the post-Fukushima landscape

France’s role in the nuclear revival is analysed by tracing the impact of six categories of norms: cognitive, diplomatic, geopolitical, technological, market, and safety and security. In showing how these normative dimensions shaped the unfolding of the revival process, three development stages are identified. In the first stage, during the late 1990s, in a context of heightened concern over energy security and climate protection, a ‘renaissance’ discourse was constructed by advocates who claimed that nuclear power was cheap and quick to exploit. In the second, new orders for nuclear power plants suggested that the revival was under way. In the third, the revival stalled. Whilst the 2011 Fukushima disaster certainly contributed to the stall by highlighting unmet safety norms, France’s bid to lead the revival was already in difficulties due the impact of market norms, with construction delays and cost overruns revealing the sector’s limited economic viability.

Wind power: towards a sustainable energy future?

Energy has always been important for human societies, but across the world energy issues are now being given unprecedented priority by governments, communities and citizens. According to Zimmerer (2011: 705), energy is ‘far and away the most significant international resource system and political economic nexus’, not least because energy questions cross-cut so many other policy concerns. In his view, such issues are fuelling ‘a general social-ecological crisis of now major proportions’. Strong though this statement is, it is not an extreme or isolated assessment. The European Commission (2010: 1) describes ‘the energy challenge’ as ‘one of the greatest tests which Europe has to face’. Numerous factors have propelled energy to this position of high priority, but arguably there are three which stand out. The first is the rising prices of fossil fuels linked with concerns about ‘peak oil’ which together have focused the attention of national governments on energy security. The second factor is the international imperative of mitigating anthropogenic climate change. These first two considerations increase the importance and urgency of the third factor which is the need to modernise systems of energy provision in the face of almost universally rising energy demand. Additional and more positive reasons why energy is in the spotlight include the desire to capitalise on the economic benefits of harnessing renewable energy (Wood and Dow, 2011) and the potential (little realised thus far) for renewable technologies to contribute to sustainable economic development in rural areas (Munday et al. 2011).

The winning of the 1995 French presidential election

The article analyses the processes which conditioned the outcome of the 1995 presidential election in France. By a fresh evaluation of four frequently made propositions, namely (1) the presidential contest is above party politics, (2) presidential candidacy is pre‐eminently about individual leadership, (3) the confrontation is between the incumbent (or his surrogates) and one or more ‘challengers’, and (4) this confrontation reinforces political polarisation, the unique configuration of the current French polity is delineated. In conclusion, the interaction between social and political fractures is shown to have been crucial to Chiracs victory.

Facing Global Climate Risk: International Negotiations, European Policy Measures and French Policy Style

The photograph of Earth from space taken by the Apollo 17 mission has become the icon of global environmental consciousness. Jasanoff (2001: 310) observed that it was ‘a deeply political image, subordinating as it does the notional boundaries of sovereign power in favour of swirling clouds that do not respect the lines configured by human conquest or legislation’. The icon’s resonances of planetary interconnectedness — of common origins and single destiny — are mixed with the forebodings of vulnerability. During its now canonical prescription for sustainable development, the Brundlandt report evoked ‘a small and fragile ball, dominated not by human activity and edifice but by a pattern of clouds, oceans, greenery and soils’ (WCED, 1987: 308). Ironically, it is this ‘pattern of clouds’ — the global atmosphere — which is threatened by unsustainable human activities. Ongoing climate change caused mainly (but not solely) by greenhouse gas (GHG) release from fossil fuels poses worldwide risks, yet solutions lie in the hands of national policy-makers, firms and local communities. Thus whereas climate risk is global, climate policy is marked by a logic of disaggregation and re-appropriation in which territorially constituted actors — notably sovereign states — assert their interests and preferences within an international order, whilst shaping and being shaped by new global regimes.