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This paper estimates the effect of globalization on the implicit tax rates (ITRs) on capital income, labor income, and consumption, and the share of social protection expenditures in total public expenditures in Western and Eastern Europe. It tests the coexistence of efficiency and compensation effects of globalization on the expenditure and the revenue sides of government budgets. In Western Europe, globalization leads to an increase in social expenditures; however, these expenditures are to an increasing extent financed by taxes on labor. There are important differences between the welfare states. In the conservative regimes, both social expenditures and taxes on labor increase due to globalization. In the social-democratic regimes social expenditures are not affected by globalization, but the ITR on labor increases, whereas ITRs on capital and consumption decrease as a result of globalization. In the liberal regimes, the ITR on labor is rising, while social expenditures are declining. In the southern welfare regime globalization does not have any significant effects on the distribution of taxes or social spending. In Eastern Europe, in the Baltic states globalization leads to a decrease in social spending, whereas in the other Central and Eastern European New Member States (postcommunist European regimes) there is an upward convergence in social spending due to globalization. The ITRs on consumption decrease due to globalization in the postcommunist European regimes, whereas in the Baltic states there is no robust significant effect of globalization on taxes. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper outlines recent examples of labor movement renewal in Europe in the context of European integration and globalization. It highlights an increasing tension between the strategy of social partnership pursued by official labor organizations and grassroots “social movement unionism.” The paper demonstrates that the prospects for successful renewal involves linking workplace mobilization and organization with wider popular struggles to form a movement against the new regionalized forms of corporate and state power. This has direct relevance to current debates in the US concerning the tension between “service” and “organizing” models and demonstrates the need for vibrant autonomous workplace unionism as well as a political dimension to labor movement renewal. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article sets out to contribute to the current debate on the transformation of educational research with regard to global transitions and challenges. Nation-centred hierarchical organizations in Europe have increasingly failed to address emergent processes. And in contrast novel forms of governance have gained prevalence in controlling uncertainty and contingency in the transforming European Educational Research Space. The paper addresses one particular dimension of current educational research – that of the mechanisms by which transnational research operates within the European Educational Research space. Within this framework special attention is given to the issue of the governance, as a specific process shaping research cultures in the past, present and future, and to the role of European research associations as a system of evolving networks of ‘knowledge spaces’. The article problematizes assumptions about the potential of European research associations to construct vocabularies, perspectives and applications in an attempt to open up dialogues, discipline narrativity and create a new sovereign actor. The paper concludes with proposals for possible future visions based on the outcomes of the analysis of the nature of the current educational research governance. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

The capacity of the state to delivery healthcare has been affected by a number of factors and is intimately interconnected with the process of globalisation. This has led to a changing political economy and new context for health care financing, not only for the NHS, but for Europe and beyond. This paper considers these changes and explains the process of policymaking that led to the NHS internal market reforms of the 1990s. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this paper I explore the inadequacy of the representation of the border, which is under-pinned by Manichean distinctions of friend and foe, superior and inferior, inside and outside, to analyze the cultural encounter between Europeans and their others. I argue that a great deal of scholarship interest in this cultural encounter is trapped into a border imaginary that loses sight of those cultural phenomena, such as hybridity, transnational identities, and cosmopolitan affiliations, which challenge established political and cultural borders and foster 'from below' new imaginations of the European space. By analyzing a complex set of cultural productions--the creative combination of European modes of thought, texts, and styles in the visual and performative arts, with indigenous local artistic styles and mindsets--I show that, as seen as early as the 16th-century, the rise of a global imagination is the result of complex relations of connectivity between Europe and other parts of the world. I propose a new border imaginary, which is underpinned by a cosmopolitan grammar of difference, to account better for the changing nature of the European space within the dynamics of globalization. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Taking the renewal of the management contract (2007-11) of Flemish PSB as a case in point, this article - by means of a policy analysis model - intends to contribute to a better understanding of the role of the technological argument of digitization in policy making and to the ongoing discussion in public and academic forums about the role and position of PSB in the 21st century. Theoretically, the article concentrates on the dominant and alternative paradigms that feed contemporary discussions regarding the possible and 'legitimate' role(s) of PSB in a globalizing and digital interactive cross- and multimedia environment. Special attention is paid to the positions of technology and culture in the discourses on what constitutes a 'legitimate' future for PSB, as these two aspects seem to have (re)gained momentum in the renewed debates regarding the raison d'être and accountability of PSB. This article focuses on the policy process leading up to the new management contract of Flemish PSB. In particular, it analyses the discourses of relevant stakeholders that have dominated the process and influenced the eventual outcome. To this end, desk research and close reading of relevant texts are combined with interviews with relevant actors and privileged witnesses. These findings are then evaluated against the wider international context of European discussions regarding the future of PSB and some of its core characteristics in a media world dominated by digital convergence. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Since the 1990s the largest transnational temporary staffing agencies have progressively expanded the geographical extent of their operations. Moving beyond the established Dutch, French, UK, and US markets in which the majority are headquartered, and encouraged by supportive supranational and national reregulation, they have entered a number of countries in Southeast Asia, Southern Europe, and Latin America. Moreover, in the run-up to, and since, the accession often new member states to the EU on I May 2004, the leading transnational agencies have turned their attentions to establishing and expanding operations in Central and Eastern Europe. This paper offers an initial assessment of the state of temporary staffing and its regulation in two leading markets in the region, the Czech Republic and Poland. It explores how temporary staffing markets are being forged through the interactions between regulators, transnational agencies, local agencies, trade bodies, and inward investors. Both countries legalized temporary staffing in 2004, having begun the legalization process prior to accession. Rather than these developments heralding the start of a period of sustained growth, however, our research suggests that there are still significant constraints on expansion in markets where the pressure to neoliberalize labour markets intersects with postsocialist expectations, norms, and economic structures. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The au pair program m general is still known as a form of cultural exchange program and a good possibility for young women to spend a year abroad, although it has undergone great changes during the last 10 years. This article argues that due to different socio-economic and cultural processes in Western postindustrial societies as well as in the eastern and southern parts of the world the au pair program is becoming a form of domestic work with quite similar working and living conditions to that of live-in migrant domestic workers. This article which is based on two empirical studies on the globalizing au pair business in Eastern and Western Europe as well in the United States looks into the motivations and expectations, the living conditions and interactions between the au pairs and the employer families and contrasts these findings with the discourse of the au pair agencies still advertising au pair as a form of cultural exchange. In doing so the paper can show that it is the still dominant image of au-pair as a cultural exchange program (disarticulating the work aspect) that leaves the young au pair women even more vulnerable to exploitation: 'big sisters' are the best domestic servants. This article draws attention to the racialized economization of the private sphere and care work, the inherent traps and exploitative features of this very specific work place. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The authors examine management whipsawing practices in the European auto industry based on more than 200 interviews and a comparison of three automakers. They identify four distinct ways in which managers stage competition between plants to extract labor concessions: informal, hegemonic, coercive, and rule-based whipsawing. Practices at the three auto firms differed from one another and changed over time because of two factors: structural whipsawing capacity and management labor relations strategy. In the context of economic globalization, whipsawing is an effective means for managers to extract concessions, to loosen national institutional constraints, and to diffuse employment practices internationally. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper examines the high-profile and increasingly frequent international movement of elite players in association football, with a particular focus on migration involving the countries of the European Union and UEFA, Europe's soccer confederation. The complex patterns and structures that characterize the player movements are mapped out and analysed. The global political economy of soccer is examined with specific reference to the European Court of Justice freedom of movement rulings in the Bosman case. The principal data sources are FIFA transfer certificates and player directories. Consideration is given to the interweaving and impact of both broad societal and soccer- specific processes on migrant patterns. The analysis of soccer migration provides insights into both labour migration in other sports and moves towards increased labour mobility in Europe and greater European integration. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

'America has a negro problem', the Swedish economist Gunnar Myrdal stated in the introduction to his modern classic An American Dilemma first published in 1944 Half a century later the so called immigrant problem is moving to the top of the political agenda of EU Europe. To speak about a European dilemma in this context means to relate established European values of social solidarity and social responsibility to an increasingly ethnicised and racialised social inequality in European cities How can the dilemma be made transparent? How can we transcend the disjunctures between 'creed' and reality? Along these lines the paper debates potentialities for transethnic alignment in the US and EU Europe exposed to a common condition of globalisation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Literary transnationalism is a relatively new term critically mediating the relationships between national literatures and the wider forces of globalizing culture. ‘Literary’ or ‘critical’ ‘transnationalism’ describes aspects of literary circulation and movement that defy reduction to the level of the nation-state. The term originated in American Studies as a means of bringing American literary discourse into a new relationship with the world that it inhabits. Can the concept of ‘transnationalism’ help in broader discussions of world literature and literary globalization? Literary transnationalism in this sense would identify that point at which two or more geo-cultural imaginaries intersect, connect, engage with, disrupt or conflict with each other in literary form. In this article I discuss transnationalism in terms of its origins and intellectual history in order to suggest ways in which transnational theory might be developed as an analytical tool of both global breadth and historical depth with particular reference to European literature. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

How do national institutional contexts mediate the global? This article aims to answer this question by analyzing screen translation—the translation of audiovisual materials like movies and television programs—in four European countries: France, Italy, the Netherlands, and Poland. A cross-national, multi-method research project combining interviews, ethnography, and a small survey found considerable cross-national differences in translation norms and practices, sometimes leading to very different translated versions of the same product. The analysis shows how differences between national translation fields are produced and perpetuated by the interplay of institutional factors on four interdependent levels: technology, and the organizational, national, and transnational fields. On each level, various institutions are influential in shaping nationally specific translation norms and practices by producing institutional constraints or imposing specific meanings. I propose a model that explains the persistence of national translation systems—not only from the logics of specific institutions, fields, or levels—but by the feedback loops and interdependencies between institutions on various levels. This analysis has implications for the sociological understanding of globalization, the production of culture and media, cross-national comparative research, as well as institutional theory and the role of translation in sociological practice. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article focuses on the impact of international research collaboration on individual research productivity in 11 European countries. Research productivity and international publication co-authorship of “internationalists” and “locals” (or academics collaborating and not collaborating internationally) are compared. The article uses a micro-level (individual) approach and relies on the primary data collected in a comparable format through a survey from 17,211 European academics. In all countries and all clusters of academic fields studied, international collaboration in research is strongly correlated with substantially higher research productions. Internationalization increasingly plays a stratifying role, though: More international collaboration tends to mean higher publishing rates and those who do not collaborate internationally may be losing more than ever before in terms of resources and prestige in the process of “accumulative disadvantage.” The competition is becoming a permanent feature of the European research landscape, and local prestige combined with local publications may no longer suffice in the race for resources and academic recognition. Cross-disciplinary and cross-national differences apply but our study shows a powerful role of internationalization of research for both individual research productivity and the competitiveness of national research outputs. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article examines the role of social class for individual participation in social movements, more specifically in street demonstrations. The authors use protest survey data in order to avoid the limitations of previous research by contextualizing the effect of social class on participation in protest. The analysis focuses on demonstrations addressing redistributive and cultural issues, reflecting a well-known distinction between old and new social movements. The authors show that participants in these two types of demonstrations, as well as in a third, mixed category, present a similar class structure, which casts some doubts on this distinction, although slight differences remain. Furthermore, a comparison of three countries that differ in terms of the strength of the class cleavage (Belgium, Sweden, and Switzerland) suggests that this cleavage acts as a moderator of the relationship between social class and participation in street demonstrations. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Foreign language proficiency in general and proficiency in the world’s most widely spoken language, English, are central resources to participate in the globalisation process. Drawing on a survey conducted in 27 European countries the article attempts to explain the huge differences in English proficiency that exist between and within countries. The author presents a general explanatory model for foreign language proficiency, creates hypotheses from this model and tests them empirically by using multilevel techniques. The findings show that the prevalence of a respondent’s native language, the linguistic difference between one’s mother tongue and English, and age affect language acquisition negatively, whereas a country’s level of education has a positive influence. Using Bourdieu’s theory of social class, the author shows that besides other factors a respondent’s social class position and the level of education are important micro-level factors that help to increase a person’s transnational linguistic capital. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Drawing on experiences in the global south and western Europe, this commentary identifies 3 focal points of precarity politics that a singular focus on the United States may have eclipsed: (a) In the global south, precariousness at work creates a crisis not just of job-quality but also of social reproduction; (b) precarious employment is often an integral part of the development strategies of states and international financial institutions, rather than the natural corporate response to global market competition; and (c) popular movements have insinuated alternative imaginations of work, rights, and life. These developments serve as the point of departure for any national, regional, or global policy deliberation. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This article presents a comparative analysis of the changing patterns of media ownership in ten new EU member states from Central and Eastern Europe (CEE) and discusses the implications of these processes for media freedom and autonomy. Briefly outlining the history of internationalization of CEE media markets, it argues that the presence of Western-based multinational companies on the CEE media markets has been recently diminishing rather than further growing. In addition, a different type of actor has been gaining prominence on the CEE media map, unspotted or largely overlooked in most previous analyses, namely, local business elites acquiring stakes in news media. Combining secondary sources and field interviews with media experts and practitioners, this study explores the various practices of business and political instrumentalization of media by their local owners, often resulting in a constrained editorial independence and increasing intertwinement of the systems of media, politics, and economy in the region. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article explores how public service broadcasters (PSBs) in Europe form cross-national partnerships to secure factual television programming and develop new television channels in response to globalization and transformations within the media sector. The article’s main case study is the BBC/Discovery partnership — the most extensive formal agreement in international television history for factual television. This partnership serves as a case to explore the feasibility of such collaborations for other PSBs in Europe. In doing so, two different regional partnership models emerge: the Nordic public—public model and the model adopted by PSBs in German-speaking Europe that mixes the Nordic and the BBC’s Anglo-American approach. While the BBC/Discovery partnership is unique in scale and global impact due to Discovery’s financial weight, and the BBC’s production experience and position in the programming market, as well as the partners’ linguistic advantage, the two other models exemplify the possibilities for less wealthy European PSBs in smaller linguistic markets. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This article analyses Britain’s remarkable performance in the European television industry. In the space of a few years the UK has risen to become the world’s leading exporter of TV formats and the world’s second exporter, behind the USA, of finished TV programmes. The first section of the article compares and contrasts British TV export data with that of France, before examining the emergence of London as Europe’s media hub. The second part argues that this significant progress is essentially due to deft policy-making. In 2003, the British government operated a strategic shift in favour of content producers and created a new intellectual property regime. This regime has enabled producers to keep hold of their rights and become asset-owning businesses, eventually giving rise to a new breed of production companies: the super-indies. This article shows how these super-indies have acquired the scale to compete in an international TV market and drive today’s British TV exports. Contrasting again Britain’s performance in the European TV trade with France, this article also analyses historical influences and claims it is Britain’s imperial past that helps its performance in the European TV marketplace. In addition to the globalization of the English language and the cultural affinities this nurtures, the trading heritage of the British Empire has facilitated Britain’s political elite’s understanding of the role that trade and the market can play in the creative industries, and enabled them to frame a broadcasting policy that is adapted to the global age. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

We take the 30th birthday of Organization Studies, the publication outlet of the European Group of Organization Studies (EGOS), as an opportunity to reflect on what Europeanness in organization research means at times of globalization where territory and geographic boundaries increasingly lose their relevance for scholarly identity. In particular, we explore the openness of scholars and journals for grand ideas from different linguistic communities and the distinct profile of Organization Studies in this respect. We confirm that research building on 'grand' thinkers represents a central feature of European organizational scholarship and Organization Studies in particular. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This study explores how much the concept of globalization via the internet is transforming the occupation of journalists. This research relied on the expertise of online journalists from Latin America, North America and Europe through their participation in three sets of online focus groups. Our findings pointed to a perception by these specific online journalists of a compressed social distance between themselves and the audience, as well as a more compact time dimension impacting the news cycle. This study supports similar findings of the roles, responsibilities and resources of media workers in other digital occupations, where requirements of multitasking and adaptability are necessary. This exploratory study aims to serve as a foundation to explain how this online medium is evolving and how online journalists perform and operate within it. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Copyright of International Sociology is the property of Sage Publications Inc. and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

European audiovisual legislation focuses exclusively on a concept of external pluralism. It therefore seems necessary to adopt other policies and develop new measures to guarantee diversity. In order to implement this reform, a new, richer concept of pluralism must be sought that reflects the reality of the market. This would enable us to devise instruments to measure the real presence of pluralism in the media, and perform effective regulation to defend this right at every level. The aim of this study is to examine the scope of this problem in the content of public and private broadcasting in different European countries, and then suggest a redefinition of pluralism and cultural diversity, together with new forms of evaluation that could guarantee that both values are present in sufficient measure. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article discusses European migrants to Spain's coastal areas. These 'residential tourists' make creative use of modern communication technologies and accessible air travel to construct fluid migration trajectories and employ transnational affective and instrumental networks. Research on British migrants to Spain has shown a high incidence of social, cultural, economic, and political exclusion. While these migrants dream of integration, an ambiguous status in Spanish society constrains assimilation and leads to marginalisation.

Globalization has attained a prominent place on the sociological agenda, and stratification scholars have implicated globalization in the increased income inequality observed in many advanced capitalist countries. But sociologists have given much less attention to a different yet increasingly prevalent form of internationalization: regional integration. Regional integration, or the construction of international economy and polity within negotiated regions, should matter for income inequality. Regional economic integration should raise income inequality, as workers are exposed to international competition and labor unions are weakened. Regional political integration should also raise income inequality, but through a different mechanism: political integration should drive welfare state retrenchment in market-oriented regional polities as states adopt liberal policies in a context of fiscal austerity. Evidence from random-effects and fixed-effects models of income inequality in Western Europe supports these arguments. The results show that regional integration explains nearly half of the increase in income inequality in the Western European countries analyzed in this article. The effects of regional integration on income inequality are net of several controls, including two established measures of globalization, suggesting that a sociological approach to regional integration adds to our understanding of rising income inequality in Western Europe. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

During the past 30 years, the European management scholars' community, traditionally characterized only by national association, has witnessed the birth of two European associations: the European Group for Organizational Studies and, later on, the European Academy of Management. There is a wide ongoing interest on how these two actors are playing the game of international academia, traditionally represented by the Academy of Management. Analyzing the evolution of the international network of scholars we focus on European Academy of Management and we argue that to increase its reputation within the academia there are two choices: a generalist and a specialist approach. We discuss the risk and opportunities of the two alternatives. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

U.S. environmental sociology has gone through a very different development path compared with its European counterpart. U.S. environmental sociology was dominant in establishing the field and setting the terms for the development and identity of this subdiscipline. Whereas U.S. environmental sociology still sets the tone in terms of internal organization, structure, and interaction, arguably Northwest European environmental sociology has been more innovative in the last decade of the former millennium with respect to theoretical and conceptual contributions. Although we can still witness significant differences between the environmental sociologies of the two continents, these differences are diminishing. During the past decade, a remarkable degree of interaction, exchange, and social learning has taken place between the two academic communities, facilitated by various aspects of globalization. The question of whether we are moving to one environmental sociology should, however, also take other—and especially the emerging Asian—environmental sociologies into account. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The European debate on the challenges of globalisation often degenerates into a contest between a purportedly ‘Anglo-American’ model of liberalised markets lacking a social dimension, and an inflexible ‘European Social Model’ of generous welfare provision but slow growth and high unemployment. We argue in this article that this is a false choice. Data on the comparative performance of European states in implementing the ‘Lisbon Agenda’ show that countries which perform well in terms of economic efficiency and liberalisation also perform well socially. Although combining efficiency and equity may be easier for some political economies than for others, we question the notion that European states are irrevocably ‘locked in’ to particular welfare regime types, suggesting instead that they are generally ‘hybrids’, and that successful reforms may be achieved even in the most unlikely cases. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This research evaluates the empirical evidence of an emerging transnational corporate community over the past 25 years. In a study of the Fortune Global 500 between 1983 and 1998, we find a significant increase in the total number of interlocking directorates and even greater growth in transnational interlocks. This growth is predominantly among firms within the European Community and between finns in Europe and the US. There has also been a dramatic growth in domestic interlocks in certain European states. These findings suggest that there is, indeed, an emerging transnational business community. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Copyright of International Sociology is the property of Sage Publications Inc. and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

This article discusses the cultural insignificance of football in Europe despite the receptiveness of Europeans to American popular culture in general. It is argued that this anomaly can be explained by a sociohistorical perspective on the differential popularization of sports and the changing social structure in which sports are being diffused. In doing so, it is shown that football only entered the European sport space after 1980 and that the attempts by the National Football League to launch football as a spectator sport will fail without a basic foundation at a grassroots level. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article addresses the growing demand for access to higher education and the conditions under which this is leading to a worldwide market. The supply of transnational (or cross-border) education and the export of educational services play an increasingly important role in fulfilling this demand. Pressures to further liberalize the global higher education market by extending the commitments under General Agreement on Trade in Services are analyzed in terms of implications and concerns. Furthermore, the European response to these global developments is considered, focusing on the question whether the Bologna Process is a sufficiently adequate response to the challenges of globalisation. Finally, some observations and comments are presented on the current discussion and the role and arguments of various actors in it. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

We examine the importance of country-of-origin effects and of universal contingencies such as industrial recipes in organizational practices at the international level of multinational enterprises. This is based on a study comparing European (Finnish, French, German, Dutch, Swiss, Swedish, British), American and Japanese multinational enterprises. Although multinationals are highly internationalized by definition, our study shows their organizational control practices at the international level to be more than anything else explained by their country of origin. Universal contingencies such as size and industry, on the other hand, are more related to internationalization strategy. Internationalization strategy and organizational control are associated with different sets of variables; to this extent they appear more decoupled with regard to each other than the literature suggests. Multinationals appear to follow tracks of coordination and control in which they have become embedded in their country of origin. Nationally specific institutions and culture have to be interpreted as particularistic but universally practicable facilitators of internationally competing organizational practices. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Long confined to historians and sociologists, the study of immigration has garnered increased interest among political scientists. Two dominant schools—the globalization and embedded realist theses—have attempted to account for the gap between restrictionist intentions of governments and continuing immigration (the gap hypothesis). The globalization thesis argues that international norms and institutions limit governments' ability to control migration; the embedded realist thesis counters that limits on state autonomy are domestic. This article argues that although the embedded realist thesis is on stronger conceptual ground, both fail to account for two central categories of immigrants to Europe: colonial immigrants to France and Britain and asylum seekers to Germany. Drawing on historical institutionalist work, this article employs a path-dependent analysis to account for these categories. Against their own wishes, governments found themselves accepting larger migrations and naturalizations because of the path-dependent effects of their own citizenship and constitutional regimes. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]