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Drawing on data from the 2015 China Household Finance Survey, this paper assess the links between rural-urban migration and the marketization of land rentals. The estimated results indicate that farm households with more migrant labour are less likely to participate in land rentals, and lessees with more agricultural labour tend to use the rented land for non-grain production. Meanwhile, lessees with less migrated labour are more likely to rent land for profit and pay high land rent, even when land rentals are conducted between acquaintances. Further evidence shows that lessors with more migrated labour have a higher probability of leasing farmland for for-profit purposes and obtain high land rent. Our analysis reveals that with rural-urban migration, the marketization of land rentals between acquaintances in rural China increases if there emerge large numbers of lessees who are specialized in agricultural production. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper focuses on school choice within the public school system in Queensland, Australia. While school choice has typically been framed as a logic of economic rationalism (for middle-class families), in this paper we use Ahmed's concept of the cultural politics of emotion to describe a more complex dimension of choice through gendered community. We argue that mothers become responsibilized for school choice, and in the process become emotionally invested in school choosing. In managing their soft bodily desires and hard cognitive rationalities, they are responding to the emotional histories that stick to schools. The problem we frame through our empirical case is that there is a clash of cultures between the type of school mothers desire, and the reality of what schools are, and could ever be. This is the double-bind or 'cruel optimism' of mothering school-aged children. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Providers' tendency to cream skim clients according to certain sociodemographic traits is widely believed to increase under marketization, and therefore also discrimination. However, due to a lack of experimental research, little is known about the presence of discrimination in marketized welfare services and of the potential drivers of such biased treatment. The lack of research is particularly evident in regard to socioeconomic status (SES) discrimination and publicly financed for-profit providers. Moreover, competition, an important aspect of marketization, has not been investigated. Focusing on the interesting case of the Swedish school sector, we aim to improve knowledge on these matters. In a field experiment, 3,430 elementary school principals were randomly contacted though e-mail by parents with Arabic- or Swedish-sounding names and in low- or high-socioeconomic professions. The fictional parents were interested in placing their children at the school. The Swedish school sector resembles marketized public services in several Western countries. The results show clear signs of ethnic as well as SES discrimination, particularly in regard to more qualitative aspects of the replies. However, we find no significant differences in discrimination between public and private/for-profit schools and depending on the degree of competition in the school market. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Research focusing on China's media system has mainly discussed the influence of the Party on media's editorial sectors. This study directs its attention to the Party's impact on the non-editorial sectors of Chinese media. Econometric analysis of the panel data collected from 30 state-owned listed media companies (2016–2020) found that the Party's involvement in profit-making and image-managing activities of media companies improved the latter's financial and social performance; such effects differ significantly across regions with different marketization levels. It was found that the CPC is acting as a 'supporting hand' in non-editorial sectors, presenting the emergence of a new state-media-society relationship in China. Such findings demonstrate the analytical role of econometrics for scholars to theorize the impacts of party-media relationship in contemporary China as well as lay an empirical foundation for the prediction of the next steps of China's media reform. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In a context of ever-growing demand for tourism property, this paper scrutinizes emerging forms of tourism-led housing commodification in Havana, Cuba. In 2011, the Cuban property market reopened to investment when the socialist government allowed the sale of private property at prices set in a market environment. We pay attention to the critical role of Cuban migrants, remittance investors and lifestyle elites in commodifying Havana’s historic housing stock and transforming residential property into short-term rentals, hotels, private restaurants and tourist boutiques. We demonstrate how the Cuban government has become an active market facilitator, either by restraining private competition or by encapsulating tourism property investment within broader channels of the state. We conclude that the case of Havana is indicative of broader trends in tourism and hospitality, particularly in the Global South and East. We propose tourism-led housing commodification as a conceptual framework for understanding these broader commonalities. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper examines the contemporary implications of entrepreneurship and utilizes panel data from Chinese A-share listed companies spanning 2011 to 2022. Based on the five aspects of Chinese entrepreneurship, namely "patriotism, courage to innovate, integrity and law-abiding, social responsibility, and international vision", the findings suggest that fostering entrepreneurship enhances the environmental, social, and governance (ESG) performance of firms. Mechanism analysis indicates that green technology innovation, social performance enhancement, and governance capability optimization mediate this relationship. Furthermore, factors such as corporate market power, regional marketization processes, and advancements in artificial intelligence technology influence the link between entrepreneurship and ESG performance. Robust entrepreneurship equips firms to navigate environmental uncertainties, but entrepreneurship cannot improve corporate governance performance. This article elucidates the distinctive significance of entrepreneurship, expanding the institutional economics research perspective, offering practical insights for cultivating entrepreneurship and elucidating potential determinants of corporate ESG performance. This article also provides spiritual guidance for sustainable development. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Powered by global financial institutions, philanthrocapitalists and development agencies, agricultural commercialization is once again at the forefront of development discourse and policies, especially since the late 2000s. The cornerstone of this development approach is that by investing in raising agricultural productivity, supporting infrastructure, and introducing climate-smart agricultural systems, with private sector investments all along the food value chain, Africa will transform into a breadbasket for the world. In the last decade, Uganda and Tanzania have enthusiastically embraced agricultural modernization discourses, becoming test beds of new ‘frontier’ blueprints: ‘responsible’ agricultural commercialization projects, ‘inclusive’ business models and ‘sustainable’ contract farming schemes. This paper takes issue with the de-politicizing discourse of the value chain paradigm by exploring diachronically the genealogies of agricultural commercialization in Uganda and Tanzania from colonial times, across post-independence state-led modernizations, to the present neoliberal reforms. It argues that mainstream development narratives tagged to commercialization projects have worked as an ‘anti-politics machine’ making invisible to the public eye the widespread land dispossession, rural pauperization and social conflicts it entails. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Governments engage in corporatization by creating corporate entities or reorganizing existing ones. These corporatization activities reflect an interplay between political agency and environmental pressures, including (changing) notions of state-market relations. This paper discusses two ideal-typed organizational models of corporatization: the state as a marketizer and the marketization of the state. Whereas the first emphasizes the role of political design and agency in corporatization, the second emphasizes the role of (actors in) the environment for corporatization. Both models are assessed across five corporatization episodes in Norway and Sweden, where we also demonstrate the interplay between political agency and environmental pressure. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Within a neoliberal educational policy context, we are increasingly witness to educational leaders compelled to become strategic operators to ensure the survival of their schools. Drawing on the tenets of institutional ethnography (IE), this article traces the everyday work and experience of a school leader in one Australian private school site that was in 'survival mode' after experiencing an unprecedented decline in enrolment numbers. By tracing the power of global and local market forces informing the work of one educational leader, our intention is to capture how a school leader's subjectivity was influenced by market demands and how he invested his time in strategizing to ensure his school would survive. The article makes two main contributions; first, the case study complements research exploring the impact of neoliberal reform on schooling and, second, we highlight the role of IE in furthering our understanding of the pressures schools face and the lived experience of school leaders. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

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Management tools do more than manage and organise – they classify and contribute to the construction of education-as-concept. This article shows how tendering-based procurement, used by Swedish municipalities to outsource adult education to non-public providers, works to commensurate 'education' into measurable tender evaluation criteria. Drawing on the sociology of conventions approach and 47 procurement examples, I show that tendering evaluation criteria define what constitutes 'desirable' education through various degrees of commensuration. Further, I show how mechanisms intended to evaluate and compare bids also construct the value of education different – for example, promoting cost-efficiency as valuable; constructing education as an on-demand service; or by assuming a supply-and-demand approach and viewing value as fluid. Based on the exemplified commensurations and valuations, I discuss the consequences of education privatization via tendering-based procurement. Since competition is inherently built into the tool, it becomes valuable. Further, procurement recasts education stakeholders into market roles and reshapes their relationships. In short, the article underscores the importance of understanding how education privatization is organized and what role management tools play in shaping education, calling for critical education research to delve into their dynamics and impact. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Abstract Although a number researchers have acknowledged that the aging population inhibits firm digital transformation, others find it promoting digital transformation in some firms. As the relevant literature to clarify such paradox is still scare, this paper wants to fill the gap regarding the labor cost theory, the capital-skill complementarity hypothesis, and the human capital externality theory. Based on the empirical tests of Chinese A-share listed companies from 2001 to 2022, this study detected a U-shaped relationship between the aging population and digital transformation. In terms of the institutional environment, higher marketization strengthens the U-shaped relationship by making the slopes on either side of it steeper. However, higher minimum wage levels weaken the U-shaped relationship. In terms of firm strategy, firms with stronger marketing capabilities strengthened the U-shaped relationship. However, firms with higher customer concentration weakened the U-shaped relationship. Overall, we enriched scholarly understanding of the impact of the aging population on digital transformation and demonstrated the dual potential impact of aging populations. Instead of assuming they are detrimental to the economy and society, positive contributions in the form of innovation and progress for companies can be detected.

Although a number researchers have acknowledged that the aging population inhibits firm digital transformation, others find it promoting digital transformation in some firms. As the relevant literature to clarify such paradox is still scare, this paper wants to fill the gap regarding the labor cost theory, the capital-skill complementarity hypothesis, and the human capital externality theory. Based on the empirical tests of Chinese A-share listed companies from 2001 to 2022, this study detected a U-shaped relationship between the aging population and digital transformation. In terms of the institutional environment, higher marketization strengthens the U-shaped relationship by making the slopes on either side of it steeper. However, higher minimum wage levels weaken the U-shaped relationship. In terms of firm strategy, firms with stronger marketing capabilities strengthened the U-shaped relationship. However, firms with higher customer concentration weakened the U-shaped relationship. Overall, we enriched scholarly understanding of the impact of the aging population on digital transformation and demonstrated the dual potential impact of aging populations. Instead of assuming they are detrimental to the economy and society, positive contributions in the form of innovation and progress for companies can be detected. Highlights: • Aging is an unavoidable demographic problem in China, with very complex social roots behind it. • Increased aging has thwarted China's digital economy, but aging is not the only negative impact on digitization. • The digital transformation process of Chinese listed companies is distinctly heterogeneous in the face of aging shocks. • By taking into account the institutional environment and strategic development, Chinese companies can seek a proactive path of development to adapt to aging, and even accelerate digital transformation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

We use content analysis to show that the diagnosis of the financial crisis of 2007–2009 shifted significantly from a focus on the need for structural change in the banking industry to an emphasis on culture and reform at the organizational level. We consider four overlapping subsystems in which this shift in problem–solution clusters played out—political, regulatory, legal, and consulting—and show that the "structural reform agenda," which was initially strong and publicly prominent in the political arena, lost attention. Over time it was displaced by a neoliberal managerialist turn, which watered down or abandoned structural solutions and instead played up a new "culture and conduct reform agenda." We explain this shift in terms of the marketization of regulation, which—following Mautner (Language and the market society, 1st ed. Routledge, 2010)'s model of interdiscursive alignment—we detect in the shifting language of financial-services reform across the four subsystems in scope. We argue that a neoliberal turn took place with a discursive closure that made the structural reform alternative gradually unsayable and, in the end, unthinkable. At the same time, the discourse turned to embrace the neoliberal agenda, built on the myth of self-regulating actors and markets, manifest in the culture problematic. This managerialist turn was able to mobilise, and be operationalised by, an industry of consultants, whereas structural change came to be seen by regulators as too risky to implement. We claim that these dynamics reveal how a form of "collective strategic ignorance," based on powerful institutional myths, was systematically oriented to ignore and reject structural sources of crisis. Finally, we suggest that the observed pattern of displacement—whereby initial calls for structural change become later displaced by managerial and procedural solutions—is common to other social issues, such as audit reform and corporate social responsibility. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This special issue explores the intertwining reconfigurations of labour and welfare in the Global South by bringing together eight empirical studies of different national and transnational contexts and three commentaries. It asks how Global South people and states alike have come to prioritize market logics as guiding principles for welfare systems, moving away from collective risk-pooling towards individual responsibility, and how this reorientation is connected to the restructuring of labour. In this introduction to the special issue, we discuss the genealogies of the social question and review the growing academic discussion on the changing landscape of welfare in the Global South. We then underscore how the contemporary social question is predominantly framed in the terms of people's capacity for market participation in the specific empirical contexts discussed by our authors. The framing of the social question as such, and the accompanying solutions to it, we argue, disregards politics, political economy and social justice at the cost of the more urgent social question that confronts the increasingly asymmetrical power relations between labour and capital. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The neoliberal turn has driven attempts to marketize education, but how does marketization occur? In this article I draw on ethnographic and linguistic-ethnographic methods to investigate marketization through a microanalytic lens. My investigation focuses on a team of educational professionals, who participated in a workshop led by an organizational consultant named Eric. During the workshop, Eric successfully encouraged the educators to adopt some key business terms that he imported from the high-tech sector. My findings indicate that the marketization of education was not straightforward. Rather, the process encountered some resistance and sowed confusion before a business discourse ultimately took hold. The process of marketization became entangled with the power dynamics shaped by group members' positioning vis-à-vis one another; and furthermore, it required the group to negotiate the meaning of some key terms. Marketization was ultimately mediated by a cognitive device called the Business Model Canvas and it relied on some pre-existing neoliberal tendencies among the workshop's participants. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The transformation and upgrading of resource-exhausted cities are crucial for regional sustainable development, but how to help them overcome innovation challenges remains to be explored. Based on data from 2003 to 2016, this study used a difference-in-differences (DID) method to examine the impact of China's support policy for resource-exhausted cities on urban innovation and tests for long-term mechanisms. The results indicate that the support policy significantly enhanced regional innovation levels. The mechanism tests showed that these policies promoted urban innovation through long-term mechanisms of increasing marketization and upgrading industrial structures. Further analysis revealed that the innovation-promoting effects of the policies were more significant in resource-exhausted cities located in the eastern region, those not dependent on coal, those with a low reliance on extractive industries, and those with a favorable talent environment. The findings suggest that the government should provide policy support to achieve the transformation, upgrading, and sustainable development of resource-exhausted cities through urban innovation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

As a growing number of Dutch higher education institutions become increasingly interested and active in university-community engagement, questions have arisen about their motivations, goals, and activities in this area. This paper aims to provide insight into the factors driving universities' community engagement and how this is manifested in the Netherlands, considering, in particular, the role of marketization and corporate social responsibility. It thus offers an empirical foundation for understanding university-community engagement. Semistructured interviews were conducted with major stakeholders in university-community engagement at four Dutch universities, including members of the executive boards. It was found that university-community engagement shows several similarities to corporate social responsibility and is based on a complex mix of value-driven, performance-driven, and reaction-driven motivations. Three relationships between marketization and university-community engagement are identified, characterizing university-community engagement as a counteraction against marketization, an expression of marketization, and a result of marketization. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

AbstractThe conceptualization of the neoliberalization of social housing has been largely dominated by Harloe’s models, which define it as the transition from a ‘mass’ to a ‘residual’ model. However, this definition fails to capture the emergence of ‘affordable’ housing policies. Blessing suggests instead conceptualizing neoliberalization through privatization and marketization. This definition helps analyze the focus on the diversification of the supply into mid-market rents. Drawing on mixed-method research, this paper demonstrates the relevance of Blessing’s analysis. To illustrate this, I will take the example of a large French intercommunality, which appears as non-neoliberal due to the absence of residualization. Our findings demonstrate that marketization and privatization have, however, influenced the nature of social housing provision by leading to an absolute decrease in low-rent units through demolitions and sales, and an increase in mid-market rent housing units. In conclusion, the findings emphasize the need for researchers to delve into the issue of social housing exclusion and its underlying mechanisms. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This study investigates how bribery is defined, negotiated, and practiced in the everyday lives of ordinary North Koreans. Reflecting on interviews spanning over two decades with North Korean migrants in South Korea and China, a team of North Korea experts has identified the patterns of micro-level bribery in everyday life in North Korea that differ, to some extent, from those of other post-communist states in Eastern Europe and Asia. By carefully examining the accounts of ten former North Korean residents, the researchers find that the traditional socialist economy, once prevalent in workplaces, schools, and hospitals, has now been supplanted by individual-to-individual private market interactions. Moreover, bribery serves not only as an informal practice but also as a "moral economy," which differs from the more organized forms of corruption seen at the elite and enterprise levels. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article proposes to question the sociology of religion's Western-centrism by taking a sidestep and looking at key religious changes in the non-Western world. It does so by examining religious change in Indonesia and China over the course of the last century. This exercise shows with some clarity that religion in these countries has gone through two radically different historical phases: a first in which religion (as all other social dimensions) was shaped by the nation-state (differentiated and "churched") and a second in which consumerism and marketization appear as major forces behind bottom-up religious booms. The article argues that this shift in religious regimes can be generalized to global societies, including in the West, thereby significantly refreshing many ongoing debates and diagnoses and enabling a new appraisal of the limits of the "secularization" and "Rational Choice" narratives for understanding religion in the world today. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The implementation of ecological protection and restoration projects is a key measure to build a modern society of harmonious term return mechanism, and the threshold for social capital participation is high and risky. Faced with the increasing demand for restoration, establishing and improving a market-oriented mechanism for ecological protection and restoration projects not only helps the introduction of market mechanisms. Starting from the logical premise of marketization of ecological protection and restoration, this article systematically discusses the necessary conditions for achieving marketization of ecological protection and restoration, summarizes the model of social capital participating in ecological protection and restoration projects, and proposes development and optimization healthy development of marketization of ecological protection and restoration. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

As in other countries, regulated savings in France are intricately woven into dense regulatory frameworks driven by explicit governmental objectives. The anticipated marketization of the French economy should have eradicated them; however, a substantial portion of regulated savings has managed to evade this process. Is this phenomenon attributable to the tenacious grip of the French state-led tradition? Not entirely, as another subset of these savings has indeed undergone marketization. The landscape of French regulated savings is notably distinguished by a growing dichotomy: on one side, non-marketized products offered by banks, and on the other, increasingly marketized products provided by insurers. Drawing upon process tracing, we contend that these ostensibly conflicting developments emanate from the distinct and precise institutional dependencies between state and private actors in which these products are enmeshed. The prevailing status quo within the banking sector is owed to banks' engagement in a mutually advantageous, long-term exchange of favors with state actors. Faced with the trade-off between offering less lucrative products and risking the endangerment of this relationship, banks have opted for the former. In contrast, an assertive strategy has gained traction in the insurance industry. Yet, strategies for the marketization of regulated savings aligned with state priorities have been implemented, even when insurers expressed opposition. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

As a flexible resource, energy storage plays an increasingly significant role in stabilizing and supporting the power system, while providing auxiliary services. Still, the current high demand for energy storage contrasts with the fuzzy lack of market-oriented mechanisms for energy storage, the principle of market-oriented operation has not been embodied, and there is no unified and systematic analytical framework for the business model. However, the dispatch management model of energy storage in actual power system operation is not clear. Still, the specific scheduling process and energy storage strategy on the source-load-network side could be more specific, and there needs to be a greater understanding of the collaborative scheduling process of the multilevel scheduling center. On this basis, this paper reviews the energy storage operation model and market-based incentive mechanism, For different functional types and installation locations of energy storage within the power system, the operational models and existing policies for energy storage participation in the market that are adapted to multiple operating states are summarized. From the point of view of the actual scheduling and operation management of energy storage in China, an energy storage regulation and operation management model based on “national, provincial, and local” multilevel coordination is proposed, as well as key technologies in the interactive scenarios of source-load, network and storage. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper contributes to the research on the symbiotic relationship between religion and the market by examining the nature and implications of the marketization of religion in a contemporary Christendom in which religion and the market are hegemonic. Based on our analysis of 3741 church advertisements in Ghana over a 6-year period, we conceptualize three symbiotic relationships that coexist between the market and religion—commensalism, mutualism, and competition. We argue that these symbiotic relationships mirror how religion hegemonizes popular imagination and members' consumption through marketization in contemporary Christendom. This study extends our understanding of the dialectical relationship between religion and the market by showing that religion can use marketization to perpetuate its hegemony within and beyond the market. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Over the past decade, debt-based solutions have been implemented as part of austerity policies to distribute public goods by the use of market forces, resulting in an increase in public and private indebtedness. This paper considers the terms of such solutions by developing the conceptual lens of market studies to rethink 'debt' and 'the market' as analytical categories that often reproduce the conditions of their conceptual boundaries. In so doing, it demonstrates how paying attention to particularities reveals the normative, economic and political circumstances that determine debt-based solutions. These do not simply sit peripheral to the market, but come to define debt obligations as part of market relations. In this respect, the paper takes an approach that accounts for obligation as an entanglement of debtors in market relations. The study builds on Michel Callon's rendition of 'problematization' to explore the implementation of the 2010 higher education fee loan regime in England, a result of austerity governance. A novel application of 'markets for collective concern' and 'accountability devices' is thus used to argue that understanding the ways debt-based solutions entangle market participants in the obligation to repay that reproduces the conditions of the intervention's conceptual boundaries, requires a market studies approach. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article develops a new framework for the study of market reforms in Nordic welfare states based on a division between “markets”, “quasi-markets” and “pseudo-markets”. The two latter types of marketization have been the most common, and the article exemplifies them by revisiting the early 1990s Swedish school reform, “Friskolereformen”—which instigated a quasi-market for publicly funded schools run by both for-profit companies and non-profit actors—and the Norwegian hospital reform, “Foretaksreformen” of 2001—which created what we call a pseudo-market, in which public hospitals were reorganized to mimic the structures of capitalist enterprise. By discussing the different reforms in relation to justification, the type of welfare state sector, and the political orientation of the government implementing the reform, our study sheds new light on similarities and differences in marketization processes in the Nordics. Particularly, we find that the justification for the reforms differed, with the Swedish reform being justified in ideological terms and the Norwegian in technocratic terms. Contrary to some literature, we hold that marketization has fundamentally altered Nordic welfare states and the relationship between capital and society in the Nordics, and we suggest that our framework could be used for future comparative studies of market reforms.

Scientific discovery and technological innovation are the ultimate forces that promote socioeconomic development. However, researchers are not certain which factors play a leading role in scientific discovery and technological innovation and what differences in these factors exist between regions. In this study, we selected 286 prefecture-level Chinese cities and developed a coupling model to link them within a comprehensive evaluation framework, then performed multiple linear regression model and geographically weighted regression model to identify the key driving factors for scientific discovery and technological innovation, their contributions to innovation, and their regional differences. We found that marketization (development of a market economy), population density, industrial upgrading, health care, and industrialization most strongly promoted Chinese innovation from 2007 to 2019, whereas the innovation level decreased with increasing environmental pollution. To promote scientific discovery and technological innovation, we should increase marketization, promote market-oriented reform of universities, sustainably increase population density, and upgrade the industrial structure, while simultaneously reducing pollution. These results will provide important guidance for the formulation of China’s future science and technology policy, but our method will also help other countries learn how to improve their own science and innovation by learning from China’s experience.

This article theorizes some consequences of skewing relational (care) labour into more transactional forms of marketized public service areas; with particular reference to contracted criminal justice services in England and Wales. The authors attribute this to an interplay of the incentives of the corporate sector and those of governments which form a collective 'artificial intelligence' promoting marketization. This creates unintended consequences. Whereas corporate incentive structures minimize transaction costs and optimize profit, recent UK governments have incentivized economic productivity over socially beneficial indicators in public services. The article finds that narrowly transactional calculations of value in the commissioning of care services may produce short-term fiscal incentives for commissioners (usually the state) and corporate suppliers and 'care resellers', but generate longer-term supply-side problems. The article concludes by signposting how more pluralistic forms of collaboration among government, commerce and third sectors can be differently—and more socially—conceived. There are lessons to be learned in the article for all capitalist economies. Governments marketize the delivery of care supposedly for reasons of economic efficiency or innovation. The authors theorize that marketization is, in fact, motivated by government incentives which increase transactional activity, creating the illusion of (economic) growth. This occurs at the cost of devaluing relational aspects of social care, with consequences for workers and users. The voluntary sector is especially construed as a domain where social productivity is supposedly reliant on strong relational values, and distanced from primarily transactional, profit-pursuant activity. Marketization of this sector presents a clear example of depreciating relational values relative to transactional economic activity. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The case for competition and marketization of public services, though widely accepted in government, has been made through the application of formal economic reasoning rather than practical experience. Efficient market production relies on a process of defining services in terms which allow for competition, choice and the substitutability of tradable products. The evidence for this theoretical position is mixed at best. This article provides policy-makers, those commissioning services and practitioners with support in arguing for public services to be judged by different criteria. Within the frame of orthodox economics, only market allocations can be efficient, and markets can achieve any desired outcome. Public services, however, operate by criteria which are not satisfied by market allocations, including the requirements of policy (such as targeting, universality and equity), cost-effectiveness, and conformity with the requirements of democratic government (such as accountability and prior authorization). The efficient delivery of commercialized services depends on commoditization—standardizing commodities so that they can be traded on equivalent terms. That process changes the nature and character of what is provided, and compromises the effectiveness and quality of public services. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In the context of China's market‐oriented transformation, the marketization of urban land transfer (MULT) plays an important role. However, the intrinsic link between MULT and carbon emissions remains unclear. This study aims to revise the assessment methodology of MULT using large‐scale land transaction record data and tested its impact on carbon emissions at the city level. The results indicate that the competitive bidding mechanism of MULT suppresses “bottom line” competition between local authorities and has beneficial effects on carbon emissions reduction. Further analysis shows that MULT has indirectly reduced carbon emissions by industrial structure optimization. The heterogeneity test showed that the effectiveness of MULT on carbon emissions varies significantly across cities with different levels of resource endowment and location. The lag effect test shows that MULT has a negative impact on carbon emissions in the current year and second year but is no longer significant in the third year. This research expands the understanding of the intrinsic link between institutional and sustainable development, providing new insights and policy rationale for mitigating the environmental crisis. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Non-fungible tokens (NFTs) exist today as a component of a broader, ever-evolving financial environment in which questions of value, ownership, and intention are characterized by their ambiguity. This article considers Dapper Labs "NBA Top Shot," a blockchain-backed website inviting NBA fans to join in "a new era in fandom" wherein they may acquire NFTs of NBA highlights by opening "packs," which are functionally similar to trading cards. NFTs reflect the pressures of market forces, as well as increased cultural and economic emphasis on marketization, financialization, commodification, and the ubiquity of gambling-like designs and interactions. Furthermore, this study explores tensions present in differing intentions for the NBA Top Shot platform and Discord server, the diffuse nature of user conversations (a nature that disregards topical boundaries), and audience attention toward marketization and investment interests. The commodification of the NBA fan experience illustrates a shared social pressure to more readily think of one's life, interactions, and consumptive behaviors through the lens of the investor, fostering financial attitudes that normalize instability and encourage risk-taking beyond the scope of a platform where purchase-dependent interactions serve as a source of joy and social experience in a venue representing a perceived electronic gold rush. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper focuses on the consequences of the implementation of a bilateral agreement between Israel and Thailand for migrant workers in the agricultural sector. Its purpose is to shed light on the key mechanisms of the transition from the marketization to demarketization of recruiting migrant workers, and to show how this transition affects the forms of labor recruitment and its consequences for the labor migrants. The study is based on three face-to-face surveys conducted among 180 agricultural workers from Thailand. Fifty-five were surveyed in 2011 before the implementation of the bilateral agreement, and 125 were interviewed after the agreement was implemented. Relying on a “before” and “after design, we first highlight the ways in which the private recruitment industry operated in Israel in the context of a state-sponsored temporary labor migration program, identifying the actors involved in the process and explaining how they profited from the labor recruitment. Second, we shed light on the importance of bilateral agreements in eliminating illicit practices for recruiting foreign workers in Israel and its practical consequences for the Thai migrants arriving under the new arrangement. We discuss our findings in light of the theories presented in the paper. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In the context of existing literature being fragmented and lacking systematicity, the relationship between corporate digital transformation and the cost of equity financing is re-examined by constructing a return-risk-expectation theoretical framework. We found that corporate digital transformation significantly reduces equity financing costs; this conclusion still holds after a series of robustness tests. Corporate digital transformation improves investors' expectations by increasing their future earnings and lowering their risk levels. As a result, to share firms’ growth potential, investors will lower the cost of equity. Moreover, by constructing the lifecycle model, we explored the heterogeneity condition from a time-dynamic perspective and found the inhibiting effect is more pronounced in firms staying in growth and mature stages. Moderating effect analysis shows that marketization and investor sentiment can positively moderate the relationship between the two. We complement and extend the existing literature. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

As in many countries around the globe, older citizens in long-term care facilities (LTCFs) in Sweden were hit hard by the Coronavirus pandemic, but mortality varied greatly between different facilities. Current knowledge about the causes of this variation is limited. This article closes this gap by focusing on the link between the structural characteristics of LTCFs—ownership, size, and staffing—and the risk of dying from COVID-19 in Sweden during 2020. Having utilized both individual- and facility-level data, our results suggest that lower staff turnover, having a nurse employed at the facility, and smaller facility size are associated with an decreased risk of dying from COVID-19. Ownership type is not directly associated with COVID-19-related mortality, but public facilities have lower staff turnover and fewer personnel with additional employment than privately run facilities, while privately run LTCFs more often have a nurse employed at the facility. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

National policy states that Swedish adult education should be flexible and individualized, based on students' needs. However, adult education in Sweden is a municipal responsibility with a high level of decentralization. Drawing on national policies, this study focuses on how the concepts of flexibility and individualization are enacted locally and what consequences this has for teaching and learning. Starting from a teacher perspective and based on qualitative interviews with 50 teachers, the article analyses how policy requirements for offering flexible and individualized adult education are being enacted, and what the consequences of this are for teaching and learning. The findings show how flexibility and individualization are put into practice through measures such as a fast study pace, continuous admission of students, and pressure on municipalities to maintain a broad course offer, often by turning to distance education. This enactment makes it easier for adult learners to fit education into their lives, but it also has consequences for the quality of teaching and learning. It is causing fragmentation, a learning environment where interactions mainly occur on an individual basis, an instrumental view of education, and teachers experiencing high workloads and low autonomy in making pedagogical decisions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The evolution of computer tools has had profound impacts on many aspects of control rooms and control room studies. In this paper, we discuss some key assumptions underpinning these studies based on a new case of the electricity distribution control rooms, where the reliability of the electricity infrastructure is managed by a combination of planning and real-time maintenance. Some of these practices have changed remarkably little over the past decades – partially because they have been considered to have been 'digitalized' since the 1950s and have continued to amass digital solutions from different periods. Hence, the gradual transformation of control room work demands nuanced attention, both conceptual and empirical. To outline a framework for this work, we provide a conceptualization of organizational routines, habits, and reflectivity and synthesize existing CSCW and control room literature. We then present an empirical study that demonstrates our concepts and shows how they can be applied to study cooperative work. By addressing these aims the paper complements, and advances, the important topics recognized in this special theme issue and hence develops new research openings in CSCW. We address the necessity to avoid implicit determinism when analyzing new digital support tools and suggest focusing on how working habits mediate social changes, distribution, and decentralization in representing the power distribution in control rooms. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Purpose--Remittances to North Korea have been examined as an intrinsic part of the North Korean refugee experience. The purpose of this paper is to assess how remittances, social and financial, have impacted the North Korean borderland's marketization and mobility practices, including border-crossing, expectations of life outside of North Korea, and family strategies. Design, Methodology, Approach-A mixed-method approach. Data collection has included reviewing published materials, a survey about remittances with North Korean refugees, and in-depth semi-structured interviews. Findings--Data shows how financial remittances and items sent to the North Korean borderland have piggybacked on the well-established informal trading and smuggling networks, contributing to market supply and demand and the cash in circulation. Social remittances and economic benefits of remittances have supported the emergence of mobility as a family strategy in the northern provinces. Practical Implications--This paper provides evidence about how remittance flows into North Korea impact the receiving household's economy and marketization. It provides insight into how mobility is used as a strategy for the family's benefit. Originality/Value--This study provides evidence that remittances in North Korea extend beyond household support, fueling marketization through informal smuggling, entrepreneurship, and supply-demand dynamics. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Existing research shows that subnational corruption can be used to expound the ownership choices of foreign firms entering a new foreign market. Yet, most studies either overlook the evolution of foreign firms' ownership structure after entering the host market, or mainly focus on the national level. This study investigates how subnational corruption affects the conversion of Sino-foreign joint ventures (JVs) into wholly foreign-owned enterprises (WFOEs) in China. In a sample of Sino-foreign JVs operating in China between 1998 and 2007, we find that the relationship between subnational corruption and the conversion of foreign proprietorship of Sino-foreign JVs is U-shaped. Furthermore, the U-shaped relationship between subnational corruption and the conversion of foreign proprietorship of JV is stronger when the JV is in a higher degree of marketization, while it is weaker when the local partner is a state-owned enterprise (SOE) rather than a privately owned enterprise (POE). Overall, our findings emphasize how subnational corruption shapes the dynamic ownership choices of foreign firms operating in the host market. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Copyright of Zeitschrift für Soziologie is the property of De Gruyter 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.)

The effects of marketization on crop diversity and dietary diversity is very contested. Therefore, more empirical work is needed to unpack the multidimensional factors that underpin these processes. This article expands the analytical understanding of the linkages between these dimensions by looking at the case of Uzbekistan. First, it uses quantitative methods to assess the hypotheses that (a) wealth leads to higher dietary diversity; (b) agricultural marketization leads to lower dietary diversity; and (c) crop diversity leads to higher dietary diversity. Regression analysis shows that only wealth is an independent determinant of dietary diversity. Second, the article uses qualitative data to argue that state policies and social norms, by influencing food availability, knowledge and nutritional values, are key to unpacking the relationships between marketization, crop diversity and dietary diversity. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Copyright of Journal of China Tourism Research is the property of Taylor & Francis Ltd 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.)

Copyright of Community & Physician / Toplum ve Hekim is the property of Turk Tabipleri Birligi / Turkish Medical Association 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.)

Purpose: Since 2009 Swedish municipalities may apply the Act on System of Choice (LOV) in, among other things, eldercare. About half of the 290 Swedish municipalities have chosen this within home-care services for older citizens, thus creating conditions for a welfare mix where private and public providers compete. Some of these municipalities later made decisions to abolish LOV. This article aims to analyse the arguments put forward by municipal politicians to abolish LOV and discusses if the case of abandoning LOV represents a case of re-municipalization. Design/methodology/approach: Qualitative method was used to analyse decision protocols and media materials from 20 Swedish municipalities that had abolished LOV in home-care services. Findings: The article shows that politics and ideology seem to have only a limited significance in abolishing LOV. The most important arguments found in the empirical materials were instead pragmatic and related to the transaction costs: in smaller municipalities about the weak position of private providers and in larger municipalities about reported cases of welfare crime and extensive needs to control and review. In smaller municipalities, LOV was replaced by public monopoly and in larger municipalities by other types of procurements. Originality/value: With its focus on eldercare in party-dominated municipalities, the article adds knowledge to the literature on drivers of re-municipalization but also discusses possible delimitations of the concept of re-municipalization. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

As a growing number of Dutch higher education institutions become increasingly interested and active in university–community engagement, questions have arisen about their motivations, goals, and activities in this area. This paper aims to provide insight into the factors driving universities’ community engagement and how this is manifested in the Netherlands, considering, in particular, the role of marketization and corporate social responsibility. It thus offers an empirical foundation for understanding university–community engagement. Semi-structured interviews were conducted with major stakeholders in university–community engagement at four Dutch universities, including members of the executive boards. It was found that university–community engagement shows several similarities to corporate social responsibility and is based on a complex mix of value-driven, performance-driven, and reaction-driven motivations. Three relationships between marketization and university–community engagement are identified, characterizing university–community engagement as a counteraction against marketization, an expression of marketization, and a result of marketization.