This chapter discusses the number of working opportunities that are available to minorities in Britain and the United States, and studies the prospects which minorities have of finding (good) work and how often they are able to have successful careers. It studies detailed data taken from the national census that shows how minorities fare compared to the white majority and how the chances of getting ahead in the workplace differ between various minority groups.

This introduction discusses the theme of this book, which is about the sex and moral agenda of the administration of U.S. President George W. Bush. It argues against the claim that Bush's faith and his connection with the Christian right were key factors in the formulation of his policies towards moral issues such as abortion, homosexuality and sex education, contending that Bush's policies were also influenced by middle-ground opinion. The book explains that, as both Texas Governor and President, Bush not only grasped the different niches of median opinion, but built upon them with unparalleled skill and precision.

This chapter focuses on Ronald Dworkin's egalitarian theory and the resonances between liberal equality and the neoliberal conception of active citizenship. It looks at Dworkin's account of equality of resources, which is often taken as the point of departure for a hugely influential school of egalitarian thought, namely ‘luck egalitarianism’. The most significant element of the luck egalitarian literature is the foregrounding of notions of personal responsibility and individual choice, which according to its advocates not only give shape and force to egalitarian concerns, but also allow it to meet head-on the most significant opponent of equality — the ideology of the New Right. This chapter also scrutinises Dworkin's advocacy of a hypothetical insurance market, which closely parallels many of the shifts within welfare provision that have taken place since the rebirth of neoliberalism. Dworkin's achievement, at the level of political theory, has been precisely to incorporate liberal egalitarianism within a broadly neoliberal framework.

This chapter describes how the local government system in Northern Ireland functioned in relation to direct rule. It explains that the introduction of direct rule coincided with the reorganisation of local government and that local government reform had become one of the main priorities of the British government during the period 1969–72. Local government occupied a somewhat unusual role under direct rule and its significance lay mainly in its political representation and lobbying role in the absence of a regional tier of government.

Several sociologists have examined ways in which music may be used by people to assert a certain kind of identity. This chapter considers some implications of this on music and the idea of manipulation. It concludes that, theoretically, the ‘meanings’ of music must be understood as embedded in more general configurations of social activity, and methodologically that ethnographic research, rather than the production of decontextualised ‘readings’, is more likely to elucidate these meanings.

This chapter seeks to get clear of various understandings of culture so as to make way for the conception of the scope of modern cultural theory. It lays the basic elements of some distinctions between modern cultural theory and other types of discourse such as cultural studies, cultural sociology and cultural anthropology. The chapter discusses the authors' own sense of what modern cultural theory actually is, attempting, partly by way of Georg Simmel, to convey the antinomical idea of culture that is fundamental to it. Simmel shows why art, especially the modernist art of his time, is important for the antinomical view of culture: for if anything resists the freezing of life into form, it is modernist art. The chapter further emphasises on the analysis of culture as the institutionalisation of creative convention and is concerned with something like the ethics of culture or critical reflexivity.

This chapter explores the failure of the European Union (EU)'s plans to promote a professional civil service. Finance remained one of the weakest central ministries. The government showed an undiminished desire to regularly redesign new laws rather than attempt to implement them as they currently stood. It was difficult to retain competent people in light of the politicisation of the civil service and the lack of a fulfilling career structure. Local government should not be overlooked when assessing the fate of administrative reform. The EU failed to react when it was clear that a professional civil service able to assume the responsibilities of implementing legislation emanating from the EU in a transparent manner was not going to emerge without a titanic struggle in which it would need to play a decisive role. The Romanian authorities under Adrian Năstase and during the Tăriceanu Premiership rarely displayed much fear of the EU.

This chapter analyses the place of the Church and cuadrilla in the development of Euskadi ta Askatasuna (ETA) in the 1950s and 1960s, looking at the roots of radical nationalism through the lens of gender by exploring some of the key institutions from which the movement emerged, including the Church. It suggests that ETA's early association of culture with the feminine opened the way for small numbers of women to participate in the new radical nationalism, while keeping largely intact gender divisions within the radical nationalist movement.

The hegemony of equality of opportunity of some kind is profound within the liberal literature, and even beyond. Liberal egalitarianism has focused on equal opportunities to earn income within a market economy, and has offered an insufficient interrogation of the systematic inequalities that characterise contemporary societies. This chapter examines two responses to this. Specifically, it critically analyses Iris Young's and Anne Phillips's approaches to egalitarian politics. Both theorists want to challenge the methodological individualism of liberal egalitarian theory, to challenge its identification of inequality with choice, and to reinsert a concern with systematic inequalities based around, for instance, race and sex. In their critiques of liberal egalitarian theory, both theorists turn towards the value of democratic participation and communication. In support of Phillips, this chapter argues that the commitment to equality is ill served by an exclusive focus on opportunities and claims that the goal of a critical egalitarian politics should be to end substantial inequalities in incomes and social roles such as caring aggregating around hierarchical constructions of race or ethnicity and binary constructions of sex and sexuality.

Culture, not drink per se, has moulded the drink question in England. The ‘gin craze’ represents a change of emphasis in this regard. The feverish public debate on gin was shot through with anxieties over class, the economy, national identity, and the protection of moral norms. Over time, gin exposed fundamental contradictions at the heart of the new market economy of which London was the crucible. As levels of drunkenness continued to rise a small but well-organised group of campaigners led by Thomas Wilson, the Bishop of Sodor and Man, the physician Stephen Hales and Sir Joseph Jekyll, MP for Reigate, began to lobby for a radical and previously untried strategy: gin legislation which was ‘in its nature a prohibition’. Both Wilson and Hales built many of their arguments around the language of disease. The effects of the 1736 Gin Act were a salutary lesson for those who felt that the practical difficulties of prohibition were surmountable. Prohibition also provided the opportunity for Robert Walpole's political opponents to exploit legislation widely perceived as an attack on individual liberty.

This chapter explores the ways in which the trilogy takes up and alters Jean Baudrillard's concept of the genetic/digital code. Within Simulacra and Simulation the code functions as a point of intersection for a number of Baudrillard's ideas and arguments. The chapter addresses some key aspects of its presentation. Baudrillard's conception of the code incorporates aspects of the genetic and the digital. Baudrillard's characterisation of the code as a monistic single substance has clear resonances within The Matrix Trilogy. The Matrix Reloaded offers a key shift in the trilogy's take up of the code in that it presents two different underlying codes. Baudrillard's characterisation of the code also draws on the pathology of two different diseases: viruses and cancer. Baudrillard offers an extended comparison of the code and cancer, arguing that both are ultimately reliant on single cellular elements that are multiplied through a process of perfect replication.

It is clear that Romania joined with the accession criteria relaxed or even set aside in key areas. The European Union (EU) revealed itself to be an institution that had great difficulty projecting democratic values and indeed ethical forms of capitalism into inhospitable terrain. Political power continued to be wielded by a narrow set of parties and economic interest groups. The shape of the acquis communautaire determined the nature of the EU's engagement with Romania. The EU failed to make a significant impact on the corruption, clientelism and very low standards in public life that characterised Romanian politics. It established a privileged partnership with political forces with a questionable commitment to democracy and an inability not to plunder public funds even in the full gaze of Eurocrats. The mishandling of the Romanian application means that a large, under-developed state now finds itself inside the Union.

This book attempts to reframe or reorient the political theory of equality. It begins by drawing a distinction between two such framings: the approach which is prevalent in the ‘equality of what?’ literature, and an alternative approach that is made possible by conceiving equality and inequality in relation to the ideal of equal citizenship. It considers a number of diverse criticisms levelled at the theories of John Rawls, Ronald Dworkin, and proponents of luck egalitarianism. Whilst political gains are supposedly made by incorporating the values of choice and responsibility from New Right or neoliberal rhetoric, the protagonists in the luck egalitarian debate have not properly interrogated the ways in which these ideas are deployed within neoliberalism. The book also argues that the development of post-Rawlsian liberal egalitarian theory clearly parallels the transition from social citizenship to the neoliberal vision of active citizenship. Moreover, it cast doubt on Nancy Fraser's theory on recognition and redistribution, and argued instead for the centrality of hierarchy and oppression as the key targets of egalitarian politics.