Engaging in normative discussions about the characteristics and requirements of a good life in a good society, Political Philosophy has a long-standing history in identifying the economic, political and social requirements for turning waged work into a practice that contributes to human flourishing. Meanwhile, a widely shared scepticism towards meaningful work under capitalism is another powerful theme in the field, arguing that the alienating nature of waged work cannot be overcome. This chapter argues that contributions to meaningful work in the realm of Political Philosophy have a strong tendency to incorporate both positions, presenting an ambivalent understanding of wage labour as activity that is burdensome and alienating for the many and emancipatory and meaningful for the few. Discussing two of the most significant schools of thought in this field, virtue ethics and political materialist contributions, the chapter identifies and compares their ontological understandings of work and its nature under capitalism, the conceptualisation of labour agency and the guiding principles of meaningful work that they promote.

Sometimes, it is possible for an industry to preempt government regulation by mitigating the societal concerns that prompt the government to intervene. This is desirable when government intervention is likely to be clumsy. Executing preemption is difficult. The challenge lies in the absence of enforcement power: not every industry player, and sometimes no single industry player, necessarily has an incentive to do what is desirable for the industry as a whole. And, by construction, there is no Institution with the power to impose change. This chapter studies two general settings in which this challenge exists and, nevertheless, the industry is able to achieve optimal preemption.

The chapter begins with a brief summary of the theory and findings. It then examines whether the strong relationship between electoral autocracies and Chinese foreign spending is evident among a wider range of issues based on analysis of United Nations General Assembly votes. The findings indicate that electoral autocracies have displayed a markedly higher propensity to vote with China since the launch of the Belt and Road Initiative. The chapter then discusses theoretical, policy, and business implications in turn.

To explain countries’ varying participation in the Belt and Road Initiative, this chapter begins with a discussion of recipient country characteristics that impact the demand for Chinese spending, including the political regime, clientelism, and the public-private orientation of the corporate sector. It then discusses the supply-side factors that influence Chinese foreign spending, including the Chinese Communist Party (CCP), state-owned entities (e.g., SOEs), and private firms. Finally, it evaluates the compatibility of these demand and supply characteristics. The key prediction is that electoral autocracies will display the strongest compatibility with Chinese foreign construction spending. This is amplified when the leaders of these regimes have a weak or insecure hold on power. Electoral autocracies are also predicted to be the most avid adopters of Chinese standards stemming from their eagerness for Chinese infrastructure spending.

Because the rules of the competitive game are tremendously flexible, there are few limits to the amount of change that can be achieved through SBM. Therefore, it may seem that, in SBM, ``all options are on the table at any time. This is not quite the case.In practice, there are limits to what can be achieved by SBM at any given moment. Ideas that are too far from the status quo cannot even be entertained, so the practical options are limited to a window around the status quo. This is called the Overton window. Moreover, legislative (as opposed to regulatory) change does not happen gradually over time. Instead, change is punctuated: the status quo lasts for a long time and then, suddenly, all the change happens at once. Therefore, when SBM involves a legislative change, there are narrow windows of opportunity.

This chapter develops a novel theory of meaningful work that is informed by the politics of working life perspectives and grounded in Critical Realism’s stratified theory of the human being. This combination allows us to identify the structural constraints and enablers of meaningful work as objective dimensions of meaningful work that interact with agential responses that we term subjective dimensions of meaningful work. Approaching meaningful work in this way promotes an understanding of meaningful waged work as a dynamic continuum that emerges from the interplay of its objective and subjective dimensions. The objective and subjective dimensions identify autonomy, dignity and recognition as the central pillars of meaningful waged work. The first part of this chapter recapitulates the relationship between structure and agency and establishes the key parameters of the stratified social ontology of human beings that guides our undertaking. This displays how the interplay between the structure, which is represented here as the objective dimensions of meaningful work, and the agential responses to it, encapsulated in the subjective dimensions of meaningful work, culminate in the experience of different forms of meaningful work or its absence.

Who makes -- and can change -- the rules of the game? In every democratic country, the political system has institutions that make and change laws and regulations. This chapter sketches out, in broad strokes, how these institutions work. In a sense, this chapter is standard civics, except that an unconventional viewpoint is adopted: that of business instead of citizens. This chapter, therefore, may be thought of as ``civics from a business perspective.

This chapter establishes the empirical facts regarding political regimes and the prevalence of clientelism and the public-private orientation of the corporate sector. It begins by showing that electoral autocracies constitute around half of all developing countries during the 2010s, the most of any regime type. They are especially prevalent in Africa and Asia. The theory posits that clientelism plays an important role in driving Chinese foreign infrastructure spending. Several widely used proxies for clientelism establish that it is most prevalent in electoral autocracies. The theory also posits state control of the corporate sector is important to attracting Chinese foreign spending. A variety of measures are used to establish that state ownership of the corporate sector is significantly higher in autocracies than in democracies, especially in industries related to infrastructure. Overall, this chapter provides robust evidence about the characteristics of political regimes posited to influence Chinese infrastructure spending.

Regulators are different from elected officials because regulators are not motivated by electoral incentives. But then, what motivates regulators? This chapter makes the case that all regulators are motivated by a desire to uphold and increase their reputation for technical expertise. In addition, political appointees are accountable to the elected officials who have the power to remove them.

The aim of this chapter is to trace the link between political regimes and the initiation and implementation of BRI projects. The cases in this chapter provide context and detail for the quantitative findings presented in Chapters 5 through 7. The chapter includes five country cases that map the evolving policies toward Chinese foreign investment and construction projects from before 2013 to after, including the United Arab Emirates (closed autocracy), Djibouti (electoral autocracy in which the leader has a secure hold on power), Malaysia (electoral autocracy in which the leader has an insecure hold on power), Indonesia (electoral democracy), and Greece (liberal democracy). Each case represents a strategically important partner to China’s Belt and Road Initiative and includes a focused analysis and comparison of the construction of a port-related development project.