| Background to ISC’s research agenda |
Economic and Social Change The neoliberal thrust of the world economic system since 1979 has succeeded in speeding the flow on money around the world and in hollowing out manufacturing employment in much of the developed world while redistributing it to newly emergent industrial economies. The established economic powers have experienced a remarkable employment transition from a manufacturing profile to a service economy. The flow of capital and goods is fast and travels easily across borders; the flows of population are stickier and national boundaries less porous, while the pressures to emigrate become stronger. The Mediterranean has become Europe’s Rio Grande and the Rio Grande is being replaced by the Great Wall of America, stretching from the Pacific towards the Caribbean. The great economic powers are greying under the second demographic transition; they are simultaneously in need of immigration and resentful of it. The Institute for Social Change aims to bring a distinctive academic approach to the study of these changes in the developed world. Periods of significant social change and upheaval have long been associated with profound transformations in the underlying economic processes, cultural norms and political practices of society. The Industrial Revolution constituted probably one of the most clear cut examples of such a seismic shift in the fabric of Western society. Subsequent changes, and particularly post-Soviet moves toward more globalised neo-liberal economies, while perhaps lacking such sharply defined edges, can be seen as ushering in fundamental and possibly even more widespread changes in the populations of the world, in terms of where and how they live. |
Challenges and opportunities Since the 1960s significant shifts in the social fabric and values citizens hold have occurred across democracies and authoritarian regimes. The rising tide of democratisation, increasing flows of people and goods across borders and expansion of new communication technologies, have stimulated an increasing openness of the world order that has brought with it both challenges and opportunities for citizens and leaders. This more porous international context has seen new concerns arise about the environment, population health and aging, immigration and race, workplace practices, active citizenship, as well the role of religion, and the workings of the criminal justice system. Leading scholars such as Putnam and Inglehart have identified links between the globalising forces of economic development and modernisation, and changes in the social and political character of societies (e.g. in relation to levels of inequality, diversity and social trust/social capital). Furthermore, whilst modernisation is regarded as causing large scale value change, social, political and cultural values are also found to have enduring influences on the character of societies. One of the key challenges of social science is to develop our understanding of the linkages between these interconnected processes of economic change, social change and value shift, and how governments are able to shape the impact those processes on society in a positive way. |
