The Third wave in globalization theory

This essay examines a proposition made in the literature that there are three waves in globalization theory—the globalist, skeptical, and postskeptical or transformational waves—and argues that this division requires a new look. The essay is a critique of the third of these waves and its relationship with the second wave. Contributors to the third wave not only defend the idea of globalization from criticism by the skeptics but also try to construct a more complex and qualified theory of globalization than provided by first-wave accounts. The argument made here is that third-wave authors come to conclusions that try to defend globalization yet include qualifications that in practice reaffirm skeptical claims. This feature of the literature has been overlooked in debates and the aim of this essay is to revisit the literature and identify as well as discuss this problem. Such a presentation has political implications. Third wavers propose globalist cosmopolitan democracy when the substance of their arguments does more in practice to bolster the skeptical view of politics based on inequality and conflict, nation-states and regional blocs, and alliances of common interest or ideology rather than cosmopolitan global structures

Effects of antiplatelet therapy on stroke risk by brain imaging features of intracerebral haemorrhage and cerebral small vessel diseases: subgroup analyses of the RESTART randomised, open-label trial

Background Findings from the RESTART trial suggest that starting antiplatelet therapy might reduce the risk of recurrent symptomatic intracerebral haemorrhage compared with avoiding antiplatelet therapy. Brain imaging features of intracerebral haemorrhage and cerebral small vessel diseases (such as cerebral microbleeds) are associated with greater risks of recurrent intracerebral haemorrhage. We did subgroup analyses of the RESTART trial to explore whether these brain imaging features modify the effects of antiplatelet therapy

The state of the Martian climate

60°N was +2.0°C, relative to the 1981–2010 average value (Fig. 5.1). This marks a new high for the record. The average annual surface air temperature (SAT) anomaly for 2016 for land stations north of starting in 1900, and is a significant increase over the previous highest value of +1.2°C, which was observed in 2007, 2011, and 2015. Average global annual temperatures also showed record values in 2015 and 2016. Currently, the Arctic is warming at more than twice the rate of lower latitudes

Reflections on a crisis: political disenchantment, moral desolation, and political integrity

Declining levels of political trust and voter turnout, the shift towards populist politics marked by appeals to ‘the people’ and a rejection of ‘politics-as-usual’, are just some of the commonly cited manifestations of our culture of political disaffection. Democratic politics, it is argued, is in crisis. Whilst considerable energy has been expended on the task of lamenting the status of our politics and pondering over recommendations to tackle this perceived crisis, amid this raft of complaints and solutions lurks confusion. This paper seeks to explore the neglected question of what the precise nature of the crisis with which we are confronted involves, and, in so doing, to go some way towards untangling our confusion. Taking my cue from Machiavelli and his value-pluralist heirs, I argue that there is a rift between a morally admirable and a virtuous political life. Failure to appreciate this possibility causes narrations of crisis to misconstrue the moral messiness of politics in ways that lead us to misunderstand how we should respond to disenchantment. Specifically, I suggest that: (i) we think that there is a moral crisis in politics because we have an unsatisfactorily idealistic understanding of political integrity in the first place; and (ii) it is a mistake to imagine that the moral purification of politics is possible or desirable. Put simply, our crisis is not moral per se but primarily philosophical in nature: it relates to the very concepts we employ—the qualities of character and context we presuppose whilst pondering over political integrity

A estranha não morte da privatização neoliberal na Estratégia 2020 para a educação do Banco Mundial

O artigo trata da estranha "não morte do neoliberalismo" (Crouch, 2011), referencial ideológico que permanece entre as prioridades das políticas do setor educacional do Banco Mundial (BM). Analisam-se, para exemplificar esse fenômeno, dois relatórios da estratégia do setor educacional, Education Sector Strategy 1999 (Banco Mundial, 1999) e Education Strategy 2020 (Banco Mundial, 2011), usados para orientar as operações do BM na área da educação. Focam-se particularmente as maneiras como um setor privado expandido, juntamente com a Corporação Financeira Internacional (International Finance Corporation - IFC) (o braço investidor do setor privado do BM), é promovido como detentor do conhecimento e da capacidade para atuar num papel mais central na educação enquanto um "mercado emergente". Dessa forma, o artigo centra sua crítica na questão das parcerias público-privadas (PPPs), refletindo sobre o neoliberalismo enquanto projeto político e sobre o paradoxo de seus visíveis fracassos, ao menos por ora, parecerem inspirar rodadas mais avançadas de engenhosidade neoliberal no setor educacional.This paper discusses the strange "non-death of neo-liberalism" (Crouch, 2011) in the Bank's education sector policy priorities. A key point of entry will be the two education sector strategy reports, Education Sector Strategy 1999 (World Bank, 1999) and the Education Strategy 2020 (World Bank, 2011), to guide the Bank's education operations. The article focuses particularly on the ways in which an expanded private sector, together with the International Finance Corporation (the Bank's private sector investment arm) are promoted as having the knowledge, and capacity, to play a more central role in education as "an emerging market".Thus, the paper criticizes public private partnerships (PPPs), reflecting on neo-liberalism as a political project, and on the apparent paradox that, for the moment at least, its manifest failures seem to animate further rounds of neoliberal ingenuity in the education sector

Software Sustainability: Research and Practice from a Software Architecture Viewpoint

Context: Modern societies are highly dependent on complex, large-scale, software-intensive systems that increasingly operate within an environment of continuous availability, which is challenging to maintain and evolve in response to the inevitable changes in stakeholder goals and requirements of the system. Software architectures are the foundation of any software system and provide a mechanism for reasoning about core software quality requirements. Their sustainability – the capacity to endure in changing environments – is a critical concern for software architecture research and practice. Problem: Accidental software complexity accrues both naturally and gradually over time as part of the overall software design and development process. From a software architecture perspective, this allows several issues to overlap including, but not limited to: the accumulation of technical debt design decisions of individual components and systems leading to coupling and cohesion issues; the application of tacit architectural knowledge resulting in unsystematic and undocumented design decisions; architectural knowledge vaporisation of design choices and the continued ability of the organization to understand the architecture of its systems; sustainability debt and the broader cumulative effects of flawed architectural design choices over time resulting in code smells, architectural brittleness, erosion, and drift, which ultimately lead to decay and software death. Sustainable software architectures are required to evolve over the entire lifecycle of the system from initial design inception to end-of-life to achieve efficient and effective maintenance and evolutionary change. Method: This article outlines general principles and perspectives on sustainability with regards to software systems to provide a context and terminology for framing the discourse on software architectures and sustainability. Focusing on the capacity of software architectures and architectural design choices to endure over time, it highlights some of the recent research trends and approaches with regards to explicitly addressing sustainability in the context of software architectures. Contribution: The principal aim of this article is to provide a foundation and roadmap of emerging research themes in the area of sustainable software architectures highlighting recent trends, and open issues and research challenges

Complementarity and Institutional Change: How Useful a Concept?

The concept of institutional complementarity – i.e. the idea that the co-existence of two or more institutions enhances the functioning of each – is increasingly used to explain why institutions are resistant to change and why introducing new institutions into a system often leads to unintended consequences or failure to achieve the intended objective. While the concept is appealing and intuitive, in reality its utility for explaining change is less than straightforward. This paper utilizes examples from comparative political economy to, first, unpack and delineate the concept and address the issue of how to measure the strength or ‘binding force’ of complementarities. Second, it assesses the utility of the concept for explaining institutional change. It is suggested that one’s view of the methods and utility of measuring complementarity will hinge importantly on one’s general theory of institutions and institutional change. In the end, while institutional complementarities are significant, assessing their causal effect on institutional change is difficult and ambiguous in most instances. A better understanding requires that we embed complementarities within a more general theory of institutional change which takes a broader view of the ways in which institutions interconnect and change.Das Konzept der institutionellen Komplementarität – d.h. die Idee, dass zwei oder mehr Institutionen sich gegenseitig stützen und ihre Funktionsfähigkeit erhöhen – gilt mehr und mehr als Erklärung dafür, dass Institutionen gegen Veränderungen resistent sind und das Einführen neuer Institutionen in ein bestehendes System oft unerwartete Konsequenzen oder nicht darin erfolgreich sind, das gewünschte Ziel zu erreichen. Obwohl das Konzept attraktiv und intuitiv ist, ist sein Erklärungsnutzen nicht offensichtlich. In diesem Aufsatz werden Beispiele aus der vergleichenden politischen Ökonomie verwendet, um zunächst den Inhalt des Konzeptes zu umschreiben und die Frage zu stellen, wie die Stärke bzw. „Bindungskraft“ von Komplementaritäten zu messen sind. Dann bewertet er den Nutzen des Konzeptes zur Erklärung von institutionellem Wandel. Dabei ist darauf hinzuweisen, dass es stark vom Hintergrund des Betrachters, seiner allgemeinen Theorie von Institutionen und institutionellem Wandel, abhängt, welchen Blickwinkel er in Bezug auf die Einschätzung der Methoden und des Nutzen der Komplementaritätsmessung einnimmt. Abschließend stellt sich heraus, dass institutionelle Komplementaritäten wichtig sind, es aber in den meisten Fällen schwierig und unklar bleibt, ihren kausalen Effekt auf institutionellen Wandel zu bewerten. Zum besseren Verständnis ist es notwendig, dass das Konzept der Komplementaritäten in eine allgemeine Theorie des institutionellen Wandels eingebettet wird, die eine breitere Sicht über die Art und Weise zulässt, wie Institutionen untereinander verbunden sind und sich verändern

How Many Varieties of Capitalism? Comparing the Comparative Institutional Analyses of Capitalist Diversity

This essay reviews the development of approaches within the comparative capitalisms (CC) literature and points to three theoretical innovations which, taken together, define and distinguish these approaches as a group. First, national economies are characterized by distinct institutional configurations that generate a particular systemic 'logic' of economic action. Second, the CC literature suggests a theory of comparative institutional advantage in which different institutional arrangements have distinct strengths and weaknesses for different kinds of economic activity. Third, the literature has been interpreted to imply a theory of institutional path dependence. Behind these unifying characteristics of the literature, however, lie a variety of analytical frameworks and typologies of capitalism. This paper reviews and compares these different frameworks by highlighting the fundamental distinctions among them and drawing out their respective contributions and limitations in explaining economic performance and institutional dynamics. The paper concludes that the way forward for this literature lies in developing a more dynamic view of individual institutions, the linkages between domains, and the role of politics and power.In diesem Discussion Paper werden Ansätze der Comparative-Capitalism-Diskussion vorgestellt. Sie haben drei theoretische Innovationen gemein. Erstens: Nationale Ökonomien werden durch institutionelle Konfigurationen geprägt, die auf jeweils eigene "systemische Logiken" wirtschaftlichen Handelns hinwirken. Zweitens: Die Comparative-Capitalism-Literatur beinhaltet eine Theorie der komparativen institutionellen Vorteile, der zufolge institutionellen Konfigurationen spezifische Wettbewerbsvorteile zugeordnet werden können. Zudem, drittens, beinhaltet die Comparative-Capitalism-Literatur auch eine implizite Theorie der Pfadabhängigkeit. Trotz dieser Gemeinsamkeiten unterscheiden sich die Ansätze hinsichtlich analytischer Zugriffe und Vorschläge zur Typologisierung nationaler Kapitalismen. Beim Vergleich dieser Ansätze werden besonders deren Stärken und Schwächen bei der Analyse wirtschaftlicher Performanz und institutioneller Entwicklungsdynamiken hervorgehoben. Der Aufsatz kommt zu dem Schluss, dass die Comparative-Capitalism-Literatur in dreierlei Hinsicht der Weiterentwicklung bedarf: hinsichtlich einer dynamischeren Modellierung von Institutionen, einem besseren Verständnis der Interaktion institutioneller Domänen und der Berücksichtigung von Macht und Politik in der Analyse von Produktionsregimen