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In this chapter I make recommendations for change in the university, breaking down the disciplines and their “holding” departments – especially for organizing undergraduate education but also for research – while also opening up other university structures, from the conventional barriers between high school and college to those that prevent genuine collaboration among universities. I argue for more institutional differentiation of postgraduate institutions – a goal that is frustrated by overreliance on rankings and that could be facilitated by creating more networks linking and coordinating work across institutions, while also creating easier on and off ramps for students throughout their undergraduate educations (and beyond, to genuine “lifelong” learning). I suggest ways to break down the “guild”-like nature of the faculty described by Kerr, as well as to control some of the costs of higher education while not cutting back on research interests of faculty or for that matter on the working conditions of faculty.
In each of the following sections a business, or an industry, was forced to use SBM to deal with a risk or seize an opportunity. Some succeeded, some failed. Each section illustrates one or more specific learning points: the learning points are mentioned at the end of each section. The chapters overall message is that SBM can be crucial to value creation or destruction.
Lindsay Schakenbach Regele’s essay “A Brief History of the History of Capitalism, and a New American Variety” attempts to provide more structure to the field known as the new history of capitalism (NHOC) by defining martial capitalism as a new variant. In contrast, this essay asserts that the lack of definitional precision within the NHOC is not a bug, but rather one of its key features. To define capitalism would be to delimit where it was and was not present historically. If part of the argument of the NHOC is that capitalism pervaded—indeed infected—all aspects of American life, then defining the term would be self-defeating. In the end, martial capitalism suffers from the same shortcomings of the NHOC more generally, in that it places all “warlike activities” of the state under the undefined umbrella of something vaguely called “capitalism.”
In this essay, I reflect on the growing political obstacles to doing business history in China and how, in my doctoral dissertation research, I attempted to overcome them. More specifically, I discuss how I drew on unconventional historical sources and novel data to examine the relationship between informal entrepreneurial activity and economic change in Maoist China (1949–1978). Through the quantitative analysis of thousands of case files of individuals prosecuted as “speculators and profiteers”—discarded administrative documents that were recovered from Chinese flea markets—I reassessed the scale and scope of informal entrepreneurial activity in Maoist China. I then went on to triangulate these data with evidence found in other sources to illustrate how, over time, informal entrepreneurial activity became more collusive, encompassing, and impossible to contain. Ultimately, I argued that China’s “Reform and Opening Up” was not the state-led watershed event that it is often made out to be; rather, economic and institutional change was, at least partly, the result of a bottom-up transformation, decades in the making. This essay thus suggests that the use of unconventional sources and mixed methods presents opportunities both for doing research in contexts where history is being actively securitized and for producing countervailing narratives that decenter the state.
This chapter discusses what makes a coalition of interest groups powerful with elected officials, and why a coalition builder is necessary to turn a disparate set of Interests into an influential coalition. The chapter also provides a tool called Coalition Dashboard which, for a given policy agenda, helps to visually assess the power of pro and con coalitions.
The technical and market knowledge a business possesses -- its Information, in the language of the 4Is -- can be an important asset in advocating with regulators. Information can be leveraged in two ways. First, the business can share Information that is mission-relevant for the regulator. Doing so helps regulators avoid crises and, therefore, helps regulators cultivate their reputation for technical competence. Second, alternatively, the business can threaten to attack the regulators reputation for competence. Both strategies leverage the regulators desire to preserve and increase their reputation for technical competence.
The key question this chapter addresses is which countries are the most receptive to Chinese foreign infrastructure spending? I theorize electoral autocracies will be the most avid recipients. This chapter analyzes Chinese foreign spending since the introduction of the BRI at the end of 2013 with data from the China Global Investment Tracker (CGIT) dataset. Multivariate tests indicate electoral autocracies are the major recipients during the BRI timeframe, from 2014 to 2019. Extending the timeframe to 2005 to 2019, the findings indicate a substantive difference in the relationship between Chinese foreign construction spending and electoral autocracies that occurs with the initiation of the BRI. Logistics performance indicators also show electoral autocracies display the greatest improvement from before to after the introduction of the BRI. While the share of Chinese exports flowing to electoral autocracies increases during the BRI time period, it is not possible to conclude this is a deviation from previous trends; more time is needed to establish confidence for these effects. The main takeaway is the exceptional role electoral autocracies play in attracting Chinese foreign spending in the context of the BRI, especially when the leaders have an insecure hold on power.
‘Work’ is a contested concept and so is the notion of ‘meaningful work’. The debate on work is hundreds of years old, while the discussion about meaningful work is recent. The historical discussions about the concept of work show, however, not just conceptual and value-free disagreements about the content and form of work, but also, and more fundamentally, its meaning for workers and society. This chapter discusses different approaches to the concept of work in the field of meaningful work. We contrast this scholarship with debates in the realm of job satisfaction and job quality. This allows us to embed the meaningful work discourse in alternative debates in the research on work and its meaning.
This chapter examines whether the patterns observed for political regimes and Chinese infrastructure spending are also manifested by foreign aid and exports of Chinese digital technologies that promote the adoption of Chinese standards. Analysis of several different datasets consistently show electoral autocracies are the major recipients. The datasets include Chinese smart cities technologies exports, foreign aid in the information and communications technology sector, and foreign deals for Huawei’s cloud infrastructure and e-government services. These quantitative findings are supplemented by case studies of Malaysia (electoral autocracy) and Greece (liberal democracy).