Flexicurity And Political Philosophy

Flexicurity is a European labour market policy adopted in 2007 within the European Employment Strategy. This policy aims at combining the ongoing flexibilisation of employment relations with the traditions of the European welfare state. This book examines and summarises thirty empirical studies in flexicurity written by the author in 2004 and 2010. The book provides empirical evidence of increasing labour flexibility accompanied by a decline of social security. The author also shows that the countries with higher flexibility are more affected by the crisis. This is a serious warning against improper implementation of flexicurity and its one-sided use in favour of employers.

Digital Phenomenology is a report on the philosophical theory of everything. From the first principle, digital philosophy and post-Keynesian economics are proved. The report is technical and aimed toward philosophers, mathematicians, computer scientists, physicists, economists, and political scientists.

Hegel's Moral Corporation is about two versions of a corporation, one business oriented and dedicated to shareholder-value and profit-maximisation and one dedicated to moral life, Sittlichkeit, in Hegelian terms.

Seven Moralities of Human Resource Management analyses morality of HRM from the perspective of American psychologist Laurence Kohlberg. This book examines and makes value judgements on whether or not HRM is moral from the viewpoint of Kohlberg's seven stages of morality as a follow-up study of the author's 2012 book, Seven Management Moralities.

This book operationalizes the idea of political representation, which is fundamental to modern democracies. Both individual representatives and representative bodies are evaluated using the indices of popularity (the average percentage of the population whose opinion is represented on topical policy issues) and universality (the percentage of issues for which the prevailing public opinion is represented). Viewed as objective functions, these indices can aid in the search for optimal representatives and representative bodies. By replacing the consistency analysis of the social choice axioms with the calculation of the best compromises, the paradoxes of social choice, such as those of Condorcet and Arrow, can be overcome. These indices also form the core of an alternative election method that is aimed at enhancing policy representation — a recent concept of political representation, which is not supported by the conventional voting systems shaped during the American and French Revolutions. This method is tested in a series of election experiments that focus on implementation details. In addition, non-societal applications such as MCDM, finance or traffic control are considered, where the objects that reflect the properties or behavior of other objects are regarded as their “representatives.” Given its scope, the book will appeal to political scientists, economists and operations researchers, as well as to politicians interested in improving democratic performance and electoral system design.

In The Tumbleweed Society, Allison Pugh offers a moving exploration of sacrifice, betrayal, defiance, and resignation, as people cope in a society where relationships and jobs seem to change constantly. Based on eighty in-depth interviews with parents who have varied experiences of job insecurity and socio-economic status, Pugh finds most seem to accept job insecurity as inevitable but still try to bar that insecurity from infiltrating their home lives. Rigid expectations for enduring connections and uncompromising loyalty in their intimate relationships, however, can put intolerable strain on them, often sparking instability in the very social ties they yearn to protect. By shining a light on how we prepare ourselves and our children for an uncertain environment, Pugh gives us a detailed portrait of how we compel ourselves to adapt emotionally to a churning economy, and what commitment and obligation mean in an insecure age.

In recent years, the concept of flexicurity has come to occupy a central place in political and academic debates regarding employment and social policy. It fosters a view in which the need for continuously increasing flexibility is the basic assumption, and the understanding of security increasingly moves from social protection to self-insurance or individual adaptability. Moreover, it rejects the traditional contradictions between flexibility and security, blending the two into a single notion and thus depoliticizing the relationships between capital and labour. This volume provides a critical discussion of the flexicurity concept, the theories upon which it is built and the ideas that it transmits about work, unemployment and social justice. It shows that flexicurity fosters the further individualization of social protection, an increase in precariousness and the further weakening of labour in relation to capital. The authors present a series of alternative theoretical, normative and policy approaches that provide due attention to the collective and political dimension of vulnerability and allow for the development of new societal projects based on alternative values and assumptions.