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This book explores the new applications of established theories or adapts theoretical approaches in order to illuminate behaviour in the field of food. It focuses on social processes at the downstream end of the food chain, processes of distribution and consumption. The book reviews the existing disciplinary approaches to understanding judgements about food taste. It suggests that the quality 'halal' is the result of a social and economic consensus between the different generations and cultures of migrant Muslims as distinct from the non-Muslim majority. Food quality is to be viewed in terms of emergent cognitive paradigms sustained within food product networks that encompass a wide range of social actors with a wide variety of intermediaries, professional and governmental. The creation of the Food Standards Agency (FSA) and the European Food Safety Authority (EFSA) occurred at a juncture when perceptions of policy failure were acknowledged at United Kingdom and European Union governmental levels. The book presents a case study of retailer-led food governance in the UK to examine how different 'quality logics' actually collide in the competitive world of food consumption and production. It argues that concerns around food safety were provoked by the emergence of a new food aesthetic based on 'relationalism' and 'embeddedness'. The book also argues that the study of the arguments and discourses deployed to criticise or otherwise qualify consumption is important to the political morality of consumption.
Does European integration contribute to, or even accelerate, the erosion of intra-party democracy? This book is about improving our understanding of political parties as democratic organisations in the context of multi-level governance. It analyses the impact of European Union (EU) membership on power dynamics, focusing on the British Labour Party, the French Socialist Party (PS), and the German Social Democratic Party (SPD). The purpose of this book is to investigate who within the three parties determines EU policies and selects EU specialists, such as the candidates for European parliamentary elections and EU spokespersons.
The book utilises a principal-agent framework to investigate the delegation of power inside the three parties across multiple levels and faces. It draws on over 65 original interviews with EU experts from the three national parties and the Party of European Socialists (PES) and an e-mail questionnaire. This book reveals that European policy has largely remained in the hands of the party leadership. Its findings suggest that the party grassroots are interested in EU affairs, but that interest rarely translates into influence, as information asymmetry between the grassroots and the party leadership makes it very difficult for local activists to scrutinise elected politicians and to come up with their own policy proposals. As regards the selection of EU specialists, such as candidates for the European parliamentary elections, this book highlights that the parties’ processes are highly political, often informal, and in some cases, undemocratic.
reflected in income-based statistics alone (CEC, 2001). We have two main reservations. Firstly, it remains unclear how this primary focus on poverty reduction as an end can be squared with the increased emphasis on political conditionalities evident in the Cotonou Agreement. Secondly, it is also uncertain how a pro-poor focus can be compatible with the desire to facilitate global economic competitiveness in less poor economies for which preferential trade margins will no longer exist. These are matters for further research. Our aim throughout has been to assess the record
resources of environmental policy governance at the European level. National responses to European integration The establishment of the European Common Market had significant ramifications for the regulation of environmental policy in the economies of the member states. The consequence of the dismantling of trade barriers in the member states was that different environmental regulations in the member states had a direct impact on the economic competitiveness of a country. For example, enterprises in states with strict environmental standards are generally faced with
policies, and the quality and effectiveness of the supporting or flanking infrastructures upon which Ireland depends. Given the potential contributions which diasporic populations can make to the enhancement of the global economic competitiveness of sending states, it is not surprising that many sending states are becoming motivated to better harness their overseas cohorts. Concomitantly, a new area of public policy, referred to as ‘diaspora strategy’, has started to come of age. A diaspora strategy is an explicit policy initiative or series of policy initiatives enacted
. Although the PSOE’s manifesto at the 2004 general election was critical of the prominent position played by the housing sector, highlighting ‘the current risks concerning the Spanish economy, which is highly indebted and geared towards bricks and mortar’ (PSOE, 2004a: 104), Rodríguez Zapatero did little when in government after 2004 – particularly during his first term, when the economy boomed – to replace Spain’s construction-based economic model with an alternative approach more geared towards addressing structural weaknesses within the economy and improving economic
no longer adequate, due to the growing crisis in Italy. Additional sources for capital as agreed at the summit in October turned out to be insufficient. Calculations indicated that these sources would provide only half the capital now needed. Finally, despite German aversion, the discussion in the Eurozone did return to eurobonds. The European Commission published a discussion paper on possible ways of introducing ‘stability bonds’.7 The paper indicated that their introduction would require fiscal discipline, economic competitiveness on a national level and more
its desire to promote biotechnology in the interests of national economic competitiveness (Barling and Henderson 2000). The FSA’s chair is a member of the Cabinet Sub-Committee on Biotechnology for which the promotion of biotechnology is a key goal, according to a former minister and member of the panel (Hall and Vidal 2003). Yet, the Government’s overriding desire to be able to endorse GM crops and ease their entry into the European market is running into the obstacles generated by the complexities of realising consumer preferences through management of the food
context of the economic recession, the policy debate focused on the necessity to restore economic competitiveness and market deregulation acquired the status of a new orthodoxy. Forgotten variables? Another aspect of the policy-making process has possibly been neglected in the book: the nature of the policy problem itself. As argued by Rittberger and Richardson (2001), ‘in terms of regulatory tools, different problems might require different tools’. Thus, it is perfectly possible to introduce different types of policies for the regulation of different policy problems
system,1 while Japan was and is, according to Lijphart (1999), a ‘semi-proportional’ system, both under the medium-sized multi-member-district system up to 1995 and since 1996 the system that combines the single-memberdistrict plurality formula with proportional representation. Both countries have also been strong ‘productivists’. For a long time after the Second World War, Britain was preoccupied with reversing its declining economic competitiveness, while Japan pursued rapid economic growth. Given these common features, one might consider it not surprising that the