Competition & Change

Utilising an institutional, inter-organisational and inter-personal framework, longitudinal qualitative data are used to examine the changing nature of state–voluntary sector relationships in the area of social care outsourcing and its implications for the terms and conditions of those employed by Scottish voluntary organisations. Over the period 2002 to 2008/09, against the background of funders seeking to pass on efficiencies to voluntary organisations, these relationships have become increasingly cost-based and ‘arm's-length’. This has been accompanied by downward pressure on staff terms and conditions, which are intensifying because of more draconian public expenditure cuts. Consequently, voluntary sector employers are increasingly converging on an employment model based on low pay and more limited access to sickness, pension and other benefits that is informed strongly by narrow financial logics.

This study explores the paradoxical consequences of social welfare reforms in South Korea since the 1997 financial crisis. Despite efforts to implement a comprehensive social insurance system (SIS), the South Korean government did not succeed in providing access to people who qualified for aid. This study examines the dynamics of the implementation of the SIS in relation to the policy domains of labour markets and inter-firm relations, rather than a narrow focus on social welfare policies. This study shows how the implementation of the SIS becomes self-eroding as a result of various actors' exploitation of tensions between the SIS and other institutional domains.

This article argues that a nexus exists between private profit-orienteded actors (privateers and hedge funds) — being only lightly regulated by their home countries (Britain and America) — and ‘offshore’ territories located in the Caribbean and elsewhere in the Anglo-Saxon world. This article argues that the ultimate reason for this nexus is the common ‘Lockean’ state/society complex of the UK and the US. The analysis of hedge funds as privateers reveals that both benefit at the expense of others, while the geographic regions in which they are based are virtually the same — London and New York/Boston. Furthermore, this article shows that the hedge fund ‘value chain’ is clearly dominated by the US and the UK. Most hedge funds are based in Offshore Financial Centres (OFCs). While this is commonplace, by introducing the OFC-Intensity Ratio we show that the most intensive OFCs are under the sovereignty of the US and the UK.

Analysis of globalization-induced gains and losses necessitates not only new types of data to complement that compiled in traditional trade statistics but also new analytical approaches. This article surveys the literature that addresses the evolution of the global value chain approach, an analytical perspective that is able to capture in greater depth than earlier theories the causes and consequences of the ongoing process of global reorganization of production. Our specific focus is, on the one hand, changing activity specialization within the new global division of labour and the related changes in competitiveness of advanced economy actors; and, on the other hand, crisis-related changes in global value chains. We conjecture that advanced economy actors have been continuously shifting their specialization towards ‘the edges of the value chains’ into activities requiring higher skills, which result in the capture of higher value for them. We show that this process has further accelerated during the financial crisis.

In the last 15 years, Italy's industrial districts (IDs) have been undergoing profound changes. Based on a number of empirical studies, this article analyzes several phenomena now amply evident in Italian IDs, including globalization and its effects on the firm population of each district and its fabric of interorganizational relationships; the impact of immigration on how the social structure and the production structure mutually interpenetrate; the shrinking reproducibility of the entrepreneurial factor; the diversification of the local production structure; an increased concentration of the turnover and workforce within the districts; and a weakening of the fabric of relations between enterprises. The combined effect of these phenomena has been to dismantle the Marshallian model that once characterized the majority of Italian IDs. Given this picture, the article focuses on the directions now being taken by these districts. By systematizing evidence emerging from existing studies on various single districts, we identify four scenarios.