Many are compelled to provide accounts of the market in order to enrich research and policy agendas. This holds for anything from the discourse on the new economy to the coughing process of European marketization as experienced in transition economies and in controversies surrounding de-regulation procedures. But. The market is a tricky thing. Those who are expected to occupy a primary position...

The far-reaching institutional change and societal transformation occurring in former state-socialist societies have attracted new social science interest in transition economies. This chapter reviews recent research on China, highlighting the theoretical arguments and findings of general interest to social scientists. The paper argues that a paradigm shift is taking place within research on Ch...

Universal access is usually taken to be a fundamental feature of the health care systems of the European Union (EU) member states. Reform debates in other continents regularly look to the European experience as a model to be emulated or as a showcase for methods of preserving access in contexts of marketization and privatization. In the EU, the principle of universal access is indeed a governin...

Marketization has changed the education system. If we say that education is a market, this transforms the understanding of education and influences how people act. In this paper, adult-education school-leaders’ talk is analysed and seven metaphors for education are found: education as administration, market, matching, democracy, policy work, integration and learning. Exploring empirical metapho...

This essay argues that crosscutting allegiances between managers and workers, and between existing workers and ex-workers, have formed strong social and psychological bases for sustained collective action and inaction during a period of organizational transformation in contemporary China. This thesis challenges the conventional wisdom that implies either class formation during marketization or ...

In the global debates on English as international lingua franca or as ‘killer language’, the adoption of English as medium of instruction in Higher Education is raising increasing concern. Plurilingualism and multilingualism are embedded in the official policies of the European Union and Council of Europe, and the Bologna Process for harmonizing Higher Education promises ‘proper provision for l...

Much has been learned about calculation, commodification and marketization from the social studies of markets and finance. But what of capitalization? What is distinctive about this mode of valuation and the reality it impels? What does it mean to live under the ‘asset condition’? In Capitalization: A Cultural Guide, Fabian Muniesa and his colleagues at the Centre de Sociologie de l’Innovation ...

In examining family relations in contemporary China the paper reports the findings of an empirical investigation, which are discussed in terms of recent accounts in the specialist literature. While the individualization thesis suggests that the bonds between family members are diminishing and that family obligations are similarly less significant than they used to be, it is shown here that fami...

This brief article posits that the drive to privatize public services in the US (United States) coupled with growing economic inequality are now so extreme that they threaten a cornerstone of American liberal democracyquality public education. The argument rests on the assumption that there is such a concept as “the public good”. This idea of civic-mindedness is used to contrast examples from ...