From The Welfare State To The Shadow State

Why, in the recent campaigns for universal health care, did organized labor maintain its support of employer-mandated insurance? Did labor's weakened condition prevent it from endorsing national health insurance? Marie Gottschalk demonstrates here that the unions' surprising stance was a consequence of the peculiarly private nature of social policy in the United States. Her book combines a much-needed account of labor's important role in determining health care policy with a bold and incisive analysis of the American welfare state. Gottschalk stresses that, in the United States, the social welfare system is anchored in the private sector but backed by government policy. As a result, the private sector is a key political battlefield where business, labor, the state, and employees hotly contest matters such as health care. She maintains that the shadow welfare state of job-based benefits shaped the manner in which labor defined its policy interests and strategies. As evidence, Gottschalk examines the influence of the Taft-Hartley health and welfare funds, the Employee Retirement Income Security Act (E.R.I.S.A.), and experience-rated health insurance, showing how they constrained labor from supporting universal health care. Labor, Gottschalk asserts, missed an important opportunity to develop a broader progressive agenda. She challenges the movement to establish a position on health care that addresses the growing ranks of Americans without insurance, the restructuring of the U.S. economy, and the political travails of the unions themselves.

With over 400 A-Z entries, this new dictionary provides clear and authoritative definitions of terms within the fast-growing field of African Politics. It includes coverage on elections, parties and judiciaries, but also popular protest, gender-relations, the politics of development, and Africa's international relations. Entries comprise of major events and figures within African Politics, including the East African Community and independance, as well as covering key terms of particular relevance to Africa such as neopatrimonialism, queue voting, and post-conflict power sharing. Written by a world-leading political scientist working on the area of African politics, this dictionary is an essential guide for both undergraduate and postgraduate students as well as academics, journalists, and researchers working on African politics alike.

Every year the British government spends £80 billion outsourcing public services. Today, private companies are responsible for fulfilling some of the most sensitive and important roles of the state – running prisons and providing healthcare, transport, legal aid, even child protection. These organizations have been handed enormous amounts of power and yet for the most part they operate with no transparency or accountability. From deportations to NHS cutbacks, Alan White exposes what goes wrong when the invisible hand of the market is introduced into public services. Informed by exclusive interviews with senior managers, campaigners and whistle-blowers, Shadow State is the first book to examine the controversial phenomenon of government outsourcing. Not only does White provide the full story behind scandals involving G4S, Serco and ATOS, but he also reveals previously unknown cases of system failure in areas such as social care, welfare and justice. The picture that develops is deeply troubling.

'Resilience' has become one of the first fully fledged academic and political buzzwords of the 21st century. Within this context, Geoffrey DeVerteuil proposes a more critically engaged and conceptually robust version, applying it to the conspicuous but now residual clusters of inner-city voluntary sector organisations deemed ‘service hubs’. The process of resilience is compared across ten service hubs in three complex but different global inner-city regions – London, Los Angeles and Sydney – in response to the threat of gentrification-induced displacement. DeVerteuil shows that resilience can be about holding on to previous gains but also about holding out for transformation. The book is the first to move beyond theoretical works on ‘resilience’ and offers a combined conceptual and empirical approach that will interest urban geographers, social planners and researchers in the voluntary sector.

A powerful analysis of events that helped galvanise resistance across civil society. The 2017 publication of Betrayal of the Promise, the report that detailed the systematic nature of state capture, marked a key moment in South Africa’s most recent struggle for democracy. In the face of growing evidence of corruption and of the weakening of state and democratic institutions, it provided, for the first time, a powerful analysis of events that helped galvanise resistance within the Tripartite Alliance and across civil society.Working often secretly, the authors consolidated, for the first time, large amounts of evidence from a variety of sources. They showed that the Jacob Zuma administration was not simply a criminal network but part of an audacious political project to break the hold of whites and white business on the economy and to create a new class of black industrialists. State-Owned Enterprises (SOEs) such as Eskom and Transnet were central to these plans. The report introduced a whole new language to discuss state capture, showing how SOEs were ‘repurposed’, how political power was shifting away from constitutional bodies to ‘kitchen cabinets’, and how a ‘shadow state’ at odds with the country’s constitutional framework was being built. Shadow State is an updated version of the original, explosive report that changed South Africa’s recent history.

This book illuminates the profound influence of geography on everyday life. Concentrating on the realm of social reproduction – gender, family, education, culture and tradition, race, ethnicity the contributors provide both an articulation of a theory of territory and reproduction and concrete empirical analyses of the evolution of social practices in particular places. At the core of the book’s contribution is the concept of society as a ‘time-space’ fabric, upon which are engraved the processes of political, economic and socio-cultural life. A second distinctive feature of the book is its substantive focus on the relation between territory and social practice. Thirdly, it represents a significant step in the redefinition of the research agenda in human geography.