Political Construction Sites

The dissolution of the Soviet Union has provided scholars with tremendously rich material for the study of comparative nation building. Not since the decolonization of Africa in the 1960s have so many new states been established in one stroke in one region. The post-Soviet states, moreover, have all the necessary prerequisites for fruitful comparison: a number of similarities, but also significant differences in terms of size, culture, and recent history. In order to survive in the long run, modern states normally must have a population that possesses some sense of unity. Its citizens must adhere to some common values and common allegiance towards the same state institutions and symbols. This does not means that all inhabitants must necessarily share the same culture, but they should at least regard themselves as members of the same nation. Strategies to foster this kind of common nationhood in a population are usually referred to as 'nation building'. After a decade of post-Soviet nation building certain patterns are emerging, and not always the most obvious ones. Some states seem to manage well against high odds, while others appear to be disintegrating or sinking slowly into oblivion. To a remarkable degree the former Soviet republics have chosen different models for their nation building. This book examines the preconditions for these endeavors, the goals the state leaders are aiming at, and the means they employ to reach them. }

The Political Construction of Business Interests recounts employers' struggles to define their collective social identities at turning points in capitalist development.

Capital cities have been the seat of political power and central stage for their state's political conflicts and rituals throughout the ages. In the modern era, they provide symbols for and confer meaning to the state, thereby contributing to the "invention" of the nation. Capitals capture the imagination of natives, visitors and outsiders alike, yet also express the outcomes of power struggles within the political systems in which they operate. This volume addresses the reciprocal relationships between identity, regime formation, urban planning, and public architecture in the Western world. It examines the role of urban design and architecture in expressing (or hiding) ideological beliefs and political agenda. Case studies include "old" capitals such as Rome, Vienna, Berlin and Warsaw; "new" ones such as Washington DC, Ottawa, Canberra, Ankara, Bonn, and Brasília; and the "European" capital Brussels. Each case reflects the authors' different disciplinary backgrounds in architecture, history, political science, and urban studies, demonstrating the value of an interdisciplinary approach to studying cities.

"I would like to commend Professor Woodall for his in-depth look at the corrupt "dango" system that has plagued the public works market in Japan. Having spent the last ten years trying to pry open the closed Japanese public works market, I believe that this book lays out clearly the structural problems that block access for U.S. firms. I hope that this illuminating look at how the Japanese system operates will lead to further changes in Japan's public procurement system."--Senator Frank L. Murkowski "Woodall has done a wonderful job of getting behind the scenes to look at the preeminent sector where money flows to politicians. This is the richest and most subtle analysis of this industry to appear in English."--Ezra F. Vogel, author of "Japan as Number One" "An important contribution to our knowledge of Japan. Brian Woodall has dug up quite a bit of new factual information on this understudied industry."--Frances Rosenbluth, author of "Financial Politics in Contemporary Japan" and coauthor of "Japan's Political Marketplace"

Contributors analyse the preconditions for and processes of nation-building, while the new element is the focus on values in the largest post-Soviet state, Russia.

Photo opportunities, ten-second sound bites, talking heads and celebrity anchors: so the world is explained daily to millions of Americans. The result, according to the experts, is an ignorant public, helpless targets of a one-way flow of carefully filtered and orchestrated communication. Common Knowledge shatters this pervasive myth. Reporting on a ground-breaking study, the authors reveal that our shared knowledge and evolving political beliefs are determined largely by how we actively reinterpret the images, fragments, and signals we find in the mass media. For their study, the authors analyzed coverage of 150 television and newspaper stories on five prominent issues—drugs, AIDS, South African apartheid, the Strategic Defense Initiative, and the stock market crash of October 1987. They tested audience responses of more than 1,600 people, and conducted in-depth interviews with a select sample. What emerges is a surprisingly complex picture of people actively and critically interpreting the news, making sense of even the most abstract issues in terms of their own lives, and finding political meaning in a sophisticated interplay of message, medium, and firsthand experience. At every turn, Common Knowledge refutes conventional wisdom. It shows that television is far more effective at raising the saliency of issues and promoting learning than is generally assumed; it also undermines the assumed causal connection between newspaper reading and higher levels of political knowledge. Finally, this book gives a deeply responsible and thoroughly fascinating account of how the news is conveyed to us, and how we in turn convey it to others, making meaning of at once so much and so little. For anyone who makes the news—or tries to make anything of it—Common Knowledge promises uncommon wisdom.

This book focuses on questions of identity that have confronted the countries of Central and Eastern Europe after the collapse of the communist system that had previously provided them with an identity. This development both facilitated and necessitated a reassessment of the now independent nations’ history, orientation, symbols and identity. In some cases, new states were created without a clear national identity, while in others the nation was regaining statehood, but not always within borders that had an historical association with the nation concerned. The multiethnic character of the space of the former Soviet Union and its erstwhile "satellites," and the long historical legacy of complex relations, boundary changes, population migration, and economic and social changes presented different challenges to the various nations and states concerned. The essays in this volume attempt to elucidate and understand the issues of ethnic and national identity and their relationship to the emerging statehood in various regions of the post-communist world. This study makes clear that some nation-states were far better prepared to handle these issues than others, and that the longer-term impact of the communist experience has varied. This book was previously published as a special issue of Nationalities Papers

Gender constructions do not stop at state boundaries. Global understandings of masculinity and femininity can emerge out of the matrix of international politics. Proposing an innovative conception of global politics by de-emphasizing state actors and instead analyzing competing transnational discourses, The Global Construction of Gender focuses specifically on people who work at home for pay. Prügl explores the debates and rhetoric surrounding home-based workers that have taken place in global movements and multilateral organizations since the early 1900s in order to trace changing conceptions of gender over the course of this century. As Prügl relates, home-based workers, both urban and rural, engage in a broad array of activities: they "sew garments, embroider, make lace, roll cigarettes, weave carpets, peel shrimp, prepare food, polish plastic, process insurance claims, edit manuscripts, and assemble artificial flowers, umbrellas, and jewelry." These (mostly female) workers are widely recognized as underpaid and exploited. In investigating their plight, Prügl describes the rules that have separated home and work and, in the process, created a diverse array of distinctly gendered identities, including that of the working mother as a social problem, the wage-earning worker as a male breadwinner, the crafts-producing woman as the symbol of Third World nationhood, the woman micro-entrepreneur as the heroine of structural adjustment, and the new androgynous home-based consultant/freelancer/teleworker as the exemplary worker of a flexibly organized global economy.