This article investigates whether the doctrine of social Darwinism had any bearing on the Labour Party’s decision to support Britain’s participation in the First World War. Many socialist intellect...

This paper critically examines how senior figures in the UK Labour Party and wider labour movement discussed the topic of immigration in the immediate aftermath of the UK's vote to leave the European Union in 2016. Influenced by the Discourse Historical Approach, the paper is based on an analysis of 86 public interventions by Labour figures, over a 6-month period, delivered in speeches, articles and essays. The paper examines argumentative strategies adopted by Labour figures – (...) including Members of Parliament, advisors and trade union leaders – who called for stronger immigration controls from an avowedly ‘left-wing’ perspective. Foregrounding their commitment to progressive politics, Labour politicians argued that restricting the number of migrants entering Britain was democratic, anti-racist and an expression of the Labour Party's commitment to the interests of working-class people. Nevertheless, it is the contention of this paper that the Labour Party's rhetoric tapped into right-wing populist discourses which constructed immigration as a threat to the racialised privileges of a ‘white’ working class. (shrink)

The main aim of this article is to use the case study of comprehensivisation to examine the role of party activists as policy entrepreneurs and public intellectuals during the period 1950–1965. The intention is to widen the traditional notion of the public intellectual in order to better evaluate policy-making processes within the Labour Party. It will be argued here that these figures were also policy entrepreneurs, who actively created and advocated new policy solutions, not just unconnected idea (...) merchants hawking impractical or ignorable ideas without a clear strategy. Previously, Labour policy on comprehensivisation was viewed as a ‘missed opportunity’, a case study of ambivalent policymakers lacking vision. However, this article demonstrates that, over a long period of time, a methodical policymaking process considered and adopted a position that advocated a more comprehensive schooling system. In this process, the sustained activities of Fabian Society and NALT members, acting as policy entrepreneurs within the Labour Party’s policymaking organs to transform often non-committal and vague conference resolutions into a usable policy solution. (shrink)

This article discusses the connection between Western socialist parties and technological development during the 1950s. The cases of the British Labour Party (LP), the German Social Democracy (SPD), and the Italian Socialist Party (PSI) let us to examine socialist perspectives in managing technological progress and in conceiving programmes and purposes on scientific research. This choice allows to understand two different aspects: on the one hand, the new pragmatism of socialist and social democratic parties, which was a typical (...) trait of Postwar's socialist revisionism; on the other hand, the predominance assumed by domestic affairs in socialists’ vision, instead international topics. A very specific choice concerns the article's main focus. A large historiographical dispute has started to trace about Postwar Social Democracy's revisionism. Given such historiographical debate, this article firstly explores the behaviour and politics of the LP, the SPD, and the PSI about the the so-called modernization, a process which concerned the entire Postwar Europe. It also discusses programmes or ideas circulations about the 1950s ‘technological revolution’ and the agendas settled by socialist and social democratic parties to govern such global phenomena. (shrink)

(2001). The Invocation of External Economic Constraint: A Genealogy of the Concept of Globalization in the Political Economy of the British Labour Party, 1973—2000. The European Legacy: Vol. 6, No. 2, pp. 233-249.

(2001). The Invocation of External Economic Constraint: A Genealogy of the Concept of Globalization in the Political Economy of the British Labour Party, 1973—2000. The European Legacy: Vol. 6, No. 2, pp. 233-249.

(2001). The Invocation of External Economic Constraint: A Genealogy of the Concept of Globalization in the Political Economy of the British Labour Party, 1973—2000. The European Legacy: Vol. 6, No. 2, pp. 233-249.

The aim of the paper is to explore the discourse strategies of the Party of Labor of Albania to eliminate its enemies in the early years of establishing communism in the country. The contention is that PLA and its leaders made possible the elimination of thousands of people by normalizing the process. The enemies of the party were declared enemies of the people and as such, they had to disappear in one way or another, so that the integrity (...) of the body politics could be preserved. The class enemy was considered a parasite that should be eliminated in the name of social prophylaxis. By using discourse analyses the paper will investigate the discursive strategies followed by the communist party and its leader when addressing the class enemy. Speeches of Enver Hoxha in Party Congresses, Plenums, and gatherings with people will be analyzed. Only by normalizing the process of elimination of everyone who was depicted as an enemy, did the communist party make possible the elimination of thousands of people. Normalization is understood as the standardization of the procedure so that everyone knew in advance what would happen if someone had to be declared an enemy of the people. The paper will analyze the vocabulary used to portray the class enemy and his/her destiny in specific cases. The study has analyzed the speeches given to justify the elimination of Patër Anton Harapi, Lef Nosi, Maliq Bej Bushat, dom Lazër Shantoja, dom Ndre Zadeja, and the sabotage group of the Maliqi swamp. The analysis covers the period immediately after the end of the IIWW when communists seized the power. (shrink)

New Zealand is a multilingual and multicultural society, where English, Maori, and the New Zealand sign language are designated as its official languages. However, some heritage languages are also taught either within or outside the national education system. During the past decade, an increasing number of students have chosen Mandarin Chinese as an additional language because of its fast-growing importance. To date, studies regarding CAL are mainly based on the mainstream Chinese programs or online platforms, with less attention paid to (...) other types of teaching contexts where there also exist many potential challenges awaiting teachers. To fill in this gap, this study, based on a teaching program consisting of two families in New Zealand, explored the trajectories of a CAL teacher’s emotional labor for 47 weeks to understand how she managed her emotions when she taught the language as well as balanced the relationship among the three parties: the institution, the two families, and herself. Narrative inquiry was used as a methodological approach. The data involved written and spoken narratives. Using inductive and deductive thematic analysis, findings revealed her different understandings of the emotional labor in the two families, respectively, during the program. Further analysis of the data revealed some factors that impacted her emotional labor and how they impacted her teaching in a family-based context. We concluded our study with a discussion of the implications of these findings for teaching CAL in similar contexts. (shrink)

The Australian Labor Party has, until recent years, exercised almost unchallenged hegemony over Australian Left and working-class politics. Tom Bramble and Rick Kuhn have ambitiously crafted the first Marxist history of the party in over 50 years, deploying an analysis of its material constitution as a ‘capitalist workers’ party’ to underpin arguments for a revolutionary socialist alternative. From its emergence in class struggles of the late nineteenth century, to its early electoral successes, to multiple internal crises and (...) splits, and its more recent role in driving neoliberal restructuring, the party’s contradictory character is analysed with clarity. However, despite containing much suggestive material, key issues – including the party’s unparalleled success despite its betrayals, failures and crises; radical challenges from within and without the party; the nature of its appeal to reformist consciousness; the shape of Marxist and Left debates about thealp; and the party’s centrality to a wider sphere of politics in capitalist society – remain thinly theorised, thereby inadvertently weakening the authors’ case for a revolutionary alternative. (shrink)

The contrast between the normative functions of political parties in representative democracies and their empirical working is stark and rapidly increasing. This article starts from a sober, realist account of the empirical state of affairs and from structural problems of democracy and participations – in terms of limits of time, information, qualification and relevant expertise – that have to be acknowledged by any realist–utopian proposal of alternatives beyond the exclusive alternative of ‘thin, realist democracy’ or emphatic ‘strong, participatory, direct, or (...) mass democracy’. We can do better. My search for institutional alternatives looks not for the replacement of political parties but for their relief. Many, not all, of their normative tasks can be shared with other functional networks, associations and organizations. In exploring such a new division of political labour I draw on older debates and designs of associative democracy and on recent discussions to democratize expertise and to expertise democracy in order to address urgent societal problems of high-risk decisions under conditions of extreme complexity, contingency, unpredictability and uncertainty and deep contestedness of our knowledge, problems that turn out to be unmanagable by party politics and representative democracy. (shrink)

The author presents the changing role of women and of the attitudes towards them in the PWP and the PSP in a midsize industrial town in Central Poland in the years 1945-1948. During the war, women of the PWP were promoted to the highest positions in the party structures, however, due to the quick reaffirmation of gender roles in the post-1945 period, they were relegated to lower posts. Their political influence was thereafter limited solely to the care sector which (...) was considered their natural domain. In turn, the PSP gained importance in the post-war period only after A. Tomaszewska, a woman and an influential prewar labour organizer, took charge of it in 1946. Under her leadership, the Socialists renewed their ties with women workers of the town’s main textile factory and challenged the Communist party. (shrink)

Increasing attention to the issue of child labor has been reflected in codes of conduct that emerged in the past decade in particular. This paper examines the way in which multinationals, business associations, governmental and non-governmental organizations deal with child labor in their codes. With a standardized framework, it analyzes 55 codes drawn up by these different actors to influence firms’ external, societal behavior. The exploratory study helps to identify the main issues related to child labor and the use of (...) voluntary instruments such as codes of conduct. Apart from a specific indication of the topics covered by the code, especially minimum-age requirements, this also includes monitoring systems and monitoring parties. Most important to company codes are the sanctions imposed on business partners in case of non-compliance. Severe measures may be counterproductive as they do not change the underlying causes of child labor and can worsen the situation of the child workers by driving them to more hazardous work in the informal sector. This underlines the importance of a broad rather than a restrictive approach to child labor in codes of conduct. The paper discusses the implications of this study, offering suggestions for future research. (shrink)

The New Labour we got was different from the New Labour that might have been, had the reform agenda associated with stakeholding and pluralism in the early-1990s been fully realised. We investigate the road not taken and what it means for ‘one nation’ Labour.

Objections to child labour range from its creating unfair trade advantage to its infringing children’s human rights. Analysis of the responsibilities of various parties implicated in the use of child labour can lead to identifying stages in a cumulative ethical approach which is not self‐defeating. The author is an economist who has recently completed his MBA at London Business School.

The paper examines some of the processes of the closely knit relationship between Google’s ideologies of neutrality and objectivity and global market dominance. Neutrality construction comprises an important element sustaining the company’s economic position and is reflected in constant updates, estimates and changes to utility and relevance of search results. Providing a purely technical solution to these issues proves to be increasingly difficult without a human hand in steering algorithmic solutions. Search relevance fluctuates and shifts through continuous tinkering and tweaking (...) of the search algorithm. The company also uses third parties to hire human raters for performing quality assessments of algorithmic updates and adaptations in linguistically and culturally diverse global markets. The adaptation process contradicts the technical foundations of the company and calculations based on the initial Page Rank algorithm. Annual market reports, Google’s Search Quality Rating Guidelines, and reports from media specialising in search engine optimisation business are analysed. The Search Quality Rating Guidelines document provides a rare glimpse into the internal architecture of search algorithms and the notions of utility and relevance which are presented and structured as neutral and objective. Intertwined layers of ideology, hidden labour of human raters, advertising revenues, market dominance and control are discussed throughout the paper. (shrink)

A growing number of multi-stakeholder initiatives seek to improve labor and environmental standards through third-party certification. Fairtrade, one of the most popular third-party certifications in the agro-food sector, is currently expanding its operations from its traditional base in commodities like coffee produced by peasant cooperatives to products like flowers produced by hired labor enterprises. My analysis reveals how Fairtrade’s engagement in the hired labor sector is shaped by the tensions between traditional market and industrial conventions, rooted in price (...) competition, bureaucratic efficiency, product standardization and certification and alternative domestic and civic conventions, rooted in trust, personal ties, and concerns for societal wide benefits. At the global level, these tensions shape Fairtrade’s global standard setting as reflected in Fairtrade’s recently revised labor standards. At the local level, these tensions shape the varied impacts of certification on the ground as revealed through a case study of certified flower production in Ecuador. (shrink)

The policy projected by the Eighth Congress of the Socialist Unity Party of Germany rests on two cornerstones. First, there is the task of further raising the material and cultural living standard of the people on the basis of the higher rates of development of socialist production which result from increased efficiency, scientific-technological progress, and a rise in labor productivity. Second, there is the foreign policy task decided jointly with the Soviet Union and other fraternal socialist countries: "to create (...) favorable external conditions for the building of socialism, to further the strengthening of the community of socialist states, to strengthen international solidarity with peoples fighting for their freedom, to realize the Leninist principles of peaceful coexistence between states having different social systems, and to struggle actively against aggressive imperialism." (1. (shrink)

Political parties do not merely reflect social divisions, they actively construct them. While this point has been alluded to in the literature, surprisingly little attempt has been made to systematically elaborate the relationship between parties and the social, which tend to be treated as separate domains contained by the disciplinary division of labor between political science and sociology. This article demonstrates the constructive role of parties in forging critical social blocs in three separate cases, India, Turkey, and the United States, (...) offering a critique of the dominant approach to party politics that tends to underplay the autonomous role of parties in explaining the preferences, social cleavages, or epochal socioeconomic transformations of a given community. Our thesis, drawing on the work of Gramsci, Althusser, and Laclau, is that parties perform crucial articulating functions in the creation and reproduction of social cleavages. Our comparative analysis of the Republican and Democratic parties in the United States, Islamic and secularist parties in Turkey, and the Bharatiya Janata Party and Congress parties in India will demonstrate how “political articulation” has naturalized class, ethnic, religious, and racial formations as a basis of social division and hegemony. Our conclusion is that the process of articulation must be brought to the center of political sociology, simultaneously encompassing the study of social movements and structural change, which have constituted the orienting poles of the discipline. (shrink)

People often assign ownership to the person who has invested labor into making an object (labor rule). However, labor usually improves objects and increases their value, and it has not been investigated whether these considerations underlie people's use of the labor rule. We presented participants with third-party ownership conflicts between an owner of materials and an artist who used the materials for some artwork. Experiment 1 revealed that participants were more likely to transfer ownership to the artist for low-value (...) materials than for high-value materials, and Experiment 2 showed that this effect was further moderated by the amount of effort the artist had invested. A third experiment confirmed that participants transferred ownership more often if the artist's labor had increased the value of the materials than when it had added no value. These findings suggest that considerations for value underlie ownership transfers following the investment of labor. (shrink)

There has been widespread emphasis on the importance of trust amongst parties to the employment relationship, associated with a call for increased "integrative bargaining". Trust is bound up with ethical action, but there has been some debate about the ethics of deception in bargaining. Because it is possible for cooperative bargainers to be exploited, some writers contend that deceptive behavior is ethical and established practice. There are several problems about that view. It is questionable how clear and uniform such a (...) practice has been. An appearance of deceptive bluffing can often be explained as exchange of genuine concessions. Recent trends have seen increased devolution of bargaining from professionals to non-professionals, which dilutes any shared understandings there have been in the past, while practices that do exist may not be freely or voluntarily accepted and the existence of such practices is not enough to compensate for inequalities of power and skill. It is questionable to what extent bluffing and deception are necessary for self-defense. There other techniques available by which parties can guard themselves against exploitation. (shrink)

Matt Beech traces the ideological roots of the Labour Party from its nineteenth century origins in the Labour Movement, through the twentieth century, until the years under Tony Blair. He claims that New Labour in power evolved as a revisionist social democratic government and traces its search for new political ideas both to the New Right and Old Labour. Using interviews with former Labour politicians, advisers and academics, he presents an original and comprehensive analysis (...) of Labour's political philosophy. (shrink)