To explain what drives the demand for Chinese infrastructure spending and the adoption of its digital standards among low- and middle-income countries, we must begin by considering how they effectively address market failures. A first set of market failures regards impediments to private investment for building infrastructure. Western multilateral development banks such as the World Bank commonly impose liberalizing conditionalities on recipient states. These can be politically problematic for rulers of autocratic countries that rely on state controls to retain their hold on power. China, by contrast, has an explicit policy of noninterference in the domestic politics of foreign nations. China’s own political motivations coupled with huge dollar reserves have enabled it to effectively address the market failures of autocracies in a politically palatable way. A second type of market failure regards transaction costs and coordination failures. These can be addressed via the adoption of digital technologies. China can leverage its preferential access to autocracies for infrastructure spending in order to promote the adoption of its digital and related technical standards.

Voters are the MVP of any coalition if they are engaged with the coalitions Agenda. How should a business publicly articulate its agenda in order to maximize voter engagement? Or, alternatively, how can messaging reduce the publics engagement with the opposing coalitions agenda? This chapter deals with these questions.

In this chapter I address two related questions: would it be desirable to restrict the business sectors ability to advocate? And, should corporations be encouraged to interface with society in a different way? I make the case that, if business was restricted in its ability to communicate with government officials, the officials would likely make decisions less accurately, but not any more independently of business. Furthermore, I argue that allowing relatively unfettered business advocacy can help ensure that regulations are innovation-friendly and, moreover, that in comparison to other political systems, the USs openness to business advocacy actually promotes innovation. These two arguments, when taken together, amount to a cautious case against restricting business advocacy. I then discuss a different way in which business organizations operate in the political arena: namely, the leveraging of the business organizations relationship with its customers, suppliers, or workers to pursue societal goals not directly tied to its own business. I argue that this behavior, despite being well-intentioned and popular with a segment of public opinion, should be approached with some caution by business corporations.

The introduction sets the mise en scene for the book in a narrative introduction, raising some of the questions the book will be addressing around: crisis of the university, higher education, student protest, intercollegiate athletics, tuition, governance, the cost of higher education and student debt, liberal arts and humanities, the defunding of public universities, sexual assault, sexual harassment, free speech, hate speech, race, intellectual diversity, college closures, culture wars, neoliberalism.

The previous chapter conceptualises the objective and subjective dimensions of autonomy, dignity and recognition with the aim of building a comprehensive meaningful wage labour theory that is informed by the interplay between human agency and structural conditions at the societal, workplace and agential level of analysis. This chapter follows this premise and identifies the parameters of theorising in the tradition of Critical Realism by first outlining the concepts of mechanisms and tendencies, before presenting the theorising technique of property spaces. Against this backdrop, the chapter moves on to analyse how the six meaningful work dimensions function as mechanisms whose interplay produce four hypothetical tendencies along the meaningful–meaningless work continuum. These hypothetical tendencies are matched with five empirical workplace studies from five different countries. The in-depth workplace studies illustrate the explanatory power of the framework along the continuum of meaningful-meaningless work. The analysis casts light on the benefits of the theory for illuminating the connections between work, employment and society through the lens of meaningful work.

The puzzle of this chapter is whether characteristics of BRI projects display patterns corresponding to a host country’s political regime. The prevailing counterargument is that BRI projects reflect primarily what China wants. The evidence presented in this chapter is based on a different dataset from the prior chapter and includes over 2,100 projects up through 2019 across 127 countries. For each project, ten characteristics were manually coded. The findings both corroborate the importance of electoral autocracies and also provide more detailed evidence for systematic differences in the structure of BRI projects depending on the political regime in which they are located. The analysis demonstrates clear and significant patterns between BRI project characteristics and political regimes as well as for strong versus weak electoral autocrats that are consistent with and extend the findings of the previous chapter.

In 2013, Xi Jinping announced the launch of the Maritime Silk Road Initiative while visiting Indonesia. However, Malaysia became a far more avid recipient of Chinese spending in the years afterward. What can account for this surprising outcome? In this opening chapter, Richard Carney explains that we should care about the answer to this puzzle because it can help us understand how China can acquire global influence by addressing developing countries’ enormous unmet demand for infrastructure and spread the adoption of its digital standards. In contrast to existing explanations that focus on the demand for foreign investment by private firms, Carney proposes a novel explanation for why demand for Chinese SOE-led investment varies across countries. He argues state versus private control over the delivery of clientelist resources varies across political regimes, and this affects the demand for Chinese infrastructure spending that is principally delivered by SOEs. He argues electoral autocracies, which hold semi-competitive elections, possess the highest demand due to their heavy reliance on clientelism coupled with a high level of state control over the corporate sector.

This chapter provides a narrative account of my time as Chancellor of UC Berkeley, beginning with issues around the governance of public universities and the place of student protest. It covers issues of personal security, debates over tuition and funding, the crisis caused by major budget shortfalls, the struggle between Governor Jerry Brown and President (of the UC System) Janet Napolitano (former Secretary of Homeland Security and Governor of Arizona), football teams and academic performance, sexual assault among students, data science and the curriculum, the global strategy of the university, the plan for a Berkeley Global Campus, the legacy of the Free Speech Movement of 1964, controversy about the role of civility on college campus, budget cuts, institutional restructuring and change, resistance to change among faculty, sexual harassment, and ultimately the tension between administrative leadership and faculty life. It also covers controversies over the visits to campus of Milo Yiannopoulos, Ann Coulter, and Ben Shapiro and a fullscale riot on campus. It concludes with accounts of progress in data science, biomedical research, and recovery from budget woes.

This chapter compares and contrasts SBM with Competitive Strategy (CS). The aim is to situate SBM in relation to CS in the space of ideas.

In this chapter we suggest that a fundamental shortcoming of the meaningful work scholarship is the neglect or misrepresentation of employee agency. Indeed, when employee groups, teams and communities are mentioned in the literature, they are associated with the formal work organisation – not informal self-organised groups, teams and communities among workers. This position turns a blind eye to the politics of working life and the multi-layered consequences of the interplay between structure and agency. Addressing this issue, this chapter argues that employers seldom provide workers with meaningful wage labour for its own sake; to the extent meaningful work exists, workers mainly capture it with the help of informal self-organisation and trade unions. Therefore, in this chapter we stress the importance of employee agency in the politics of working life for attaining meaningful wage labour.