Charles Woolfson
Biographic Data
| ID | 157198 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Charles Woolfson |
| GIVEN NAMES | Charles |
| FAMILY NAME | Woolfson |
| SIGNATURE | WOOLFSON C |
| AFFILIATIONS | University of Glasgow |
| ORCID | 0000-0002-1933-3847 |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 19 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 105 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 18 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 1 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 1983 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2016 |
| H-INDEX | 6 |
The moral discourses of ‘post-crisis’ neoliberalism: A case study of Lithuania’s Labour Code reform
This article problematizes the neoliberal reconfiguration of labour rights in Lithuania, a newer European Union member state, in which the impacts of the global economic and financial crisis were particularly severe and where radical austerity measures were subsequently imposed. Now, after six years, in an attempt to resolve the exhaustion of previous austerity-based solutions for economic recovery, a new Labour Code is being introduced which wil…
Austerity and the Demise of Social Europe: The Baltic Model versus the European Social Model
This article draws on the experience of the imposition of radical austerity measures in the Baltic states. It challenges the myth that austerity can be achieved in a socially and economically ‘costless’ manner. Baltic-style austerity has now become a template of ‘successful adjustment’ and a recipe for recovery of the Eurozone. The authors argue contra such ‘myth-making’ that austerity is compromising the longer run sustainability of societies th…
Austerity as a global prescription and lessons from the neoliberal Baltic experiment
This article analyses the 2008 economic crisis and its outcomes for the Baltic states. It then gives a genealogy of European economic policy responses to the crisis, tracing them from the emerging ‘freshwater’ school of economics (e.g. University of Chicago) that arose in opposition to Keynesian theory. The more immediate cause of the 2008 crisis, long in the making, was its reliance on private debt to sustain economic demand in light of profit-e…
The Contradictions of Austerity: The Socio-Economic Costs of the Neoliberal Baltic Model
The great financial crisis of 2008 and the ensuing global economic and financial turmoil have launched a search for "models" for recovery. The advocates of austerity present the Baltic States as countries that through discipline and sacrifice showed the way out of crisis. They have proposed the "Baltic model" of radical public sector cuts, wage reductions, labor market reforms and reductions in living standards for other troubled Eurozone countri…
Negotiated responses to the crisis in the Baltic countries
This article reviews the negotiated responses to the crisis at different levels of social dialogue in the Baltic countries. The Baltic countries form a relatively coherent group of small open economies that can be classified as belonging to the neoliberal type of central and eastern European capitalism. Their responses to the crisis were consistent with such classification: flexible labour markets absorbed the main impacts of the crisis through r…
Labour migration and informalisation: East meets West
Purpose – Against a theoretical discussion of informalisation, the purpose of this paper is to trace wider commonalities and migratory interconnections that are leading to informalised or deteriorated employment conditions both East and West in the enlarged Europe. Design/methodology/approach – The paper examines the ways in which informalisation has come increasingly to typify employment relations both East and West via contrastive case studies …
The Race Equality Directive
This article examines the Race Equality Directive (RED) and its transposition in the context of a new European Union (EU) member state, Baltic Lithuania. Taking this post-communist society as a case study, it is suggested that while formal legislative compliance with the RED has been broadly attained, transposed anti-discrimination legislation and national policy implementation initiatives may not adequately take into account societal attitudes a…
Hard times' in Lithuania: Crisis and 'discourses of discontent' in post-communist society
This article analyses the intersection of global recession with the underlying crisis of neo-liberalism in Baltic Lithuania, and the disappointment of expectations regarding the promised benefits of free market capitalism for the citizens of post-communist society. Drawing on an empirical analysis of Lithuania, a new European Union member state and former Soviet republic, the post-communist trajectory of neo-liberal economic and social developmen…
Labour Migration, Neoliberalism and Ethno‐politics in the New Europe: The Latvian Case
The accession of the new European Union (EU) member states of Eastern Europe has highlighted ambivalence towards migration within the older member states. That same ambivalence has been less frequently discussed in the new. The former Soviet republic of Latvia serves as a case study of a new member state facing intensified pressure to accept inward migration to meet labour shortages, in part, a consequence of EU accession. Confounding appropriate…
Trajectories of Entropy and “the Labour Question”: The Political Economy of Post-communist Migration in the New Europe
This article begins by outlining the global historical context of contingent neoliberalism which has emerged in the late twentieth century as the dominant alternative economic trajectory to that of corporatist liberal welfare capitalism. Our analysis connects contemporary dimensions of labour migration and the challenges of economic development. It is relevant to the understanding of contemporary developments in Central and Eastern Europe in that…
Migrants and the Unequal Burdening of “Toxic” Risk: Towards a New Global Governance Regime
The article addresses the changing discourse that frames the neo-liberal regulatory agenda, in the context of the current financial crisis and related, system-threatening ‘toxic’ risk. In this, the authors claim that a flexible mix of regulation/deregulation and self-regulation is reflected in an asymmetric architecture of multilevel governance that is based on an unequal burden-sharing of risk, involving the commodification of risk and an imposi…
Social dialogue and lifelong learning in new EU member states: Reform fit' in Latvia
Vocational education and training (VET) is regarded by EU policymakers as crucial to creating a high-skill workforce capable of adapting to European and global demands in an intensified competitive environment. It is part of the so-called Copenhagen Process, in which social dialogue between employers and employees is seen as an important means of realizing policy. However, many of the new member states from the Eastern European countries which jo…
Pushing the envelope: The 'informalization' of labour in post-communist new EU member states
This contribution to debate explores one aspect of the reconfiguration of power in the workplaces of post-communist Eastern Europe in which relations between employer and employee are informalized to the detriment of employees’ rights and decent labour standards. It focuses on the new EU member state of Lithuania, one of the poorest of the new entrants in the 2004 enlargement which embraced eight former communist countries. In choosing a ‘worst-c…
The “Conventionalization” of Safety Crimes in the Post-Communist New Member States of the European Union
Working Environment and 'Soft Law' in the Post-Communist New Member States
Current, admittedly incomplete evidence, suggests a deteriorating working environment in the new Member States of central and eastern Europe. Moreover, support for occupational health and safety regulation concerning the working environment appears to be limited among business and political elites in the new Member States. This has created a lack of policy 'reform fit' between the 'social dimension' of a European social model and domestic agendas…
Remapping Labour Rights: The Case of Transitional Lithuania
THROUGHOUT THE MID-1990S Lithuania has competed with its neighbours for foreign direct investment (FDI). In this context Lithuanian governments of differing political persuasion have sought to attract foreign investors partly on account of the country's willing, educated and compliant workforce.1 As part of this agenda, the myth of a stable prospering Lithuania with few social and economic problems has been actively promulgated by the country's p…
Paying for the Piper: Capital and Labour in Britain's Offshore Oil Industry
Oil, imperialism and the British state - the origins of the crisis problems of union mobilization - the 1970s and 1980s prelude to action the summer of discontent Lord Cullen's Report `a profound change in culture' the strategy of containment paying for the piper? striking out - setting a new agenda the future of offshore trade unionism the restructuring of Britain's oil and gas - the supply industry conclusion - an unsafe future
Corporate Reconstruction and Business Unionism: The Lessons of Caterpillar and Ford
Technological determinism has recently emerged as the favoured theme of those who seek to challenge the centrality of class politics within the British labour movement. This somewhat uncharacteristic perspective is used to argue that new production technologies are directly creating a new political environment. Production processes, it is
The Labour Theory of Culture: A Re-Examination of Engels's Theory of Human Origins
Pushing the envelope: The 'informalization' of labour in post-communist new EU member states
This contribution to debate explores one aspect of the reconfiguration of power in the workplaces of post-communist Eastern Europe in which relations between employer and employee are informalized to the detriment of employees’ rights and decent labour standards. It focuses on the new EU member state of Lithuania, one of the poorest of the new entrants in the 2004 enlargement which embraced eight former communist countries. In choosing a ‘worst-c…
Hard times' in Lithuania: Crisis and 'discourses of discontent' in post-communist society
This article analyses the intersection of global recession with the underlying crisis of neo-liberalism in Baltic Lithuania, and the disappointment of expectations regarding the promised benefits of free market capitalism for the citizens of post-communist society. Drawing on an empirical analysis of Lithuania, a new European Union member state and former Soviet republic, the post-communist trajectory of neo-liberal economic and social developmen…
Paying for the Piper: Capital and Labour in Britain's Offshore Oil Industry
Oil, imperialism and the British state - the origins of the crisis problems of union mobilization - the 1970s and 1980s prelude to action the summer of discontent Lord Cullen's Report `a profound change in culture' the strategy of containment paying for the piper? striking out - setting a new agenda the future of offshore trade unionism the restructuring of Britain's oil and gas - the supply industry conclusion - an unsafe future
Working Environment and 'Soft Law' in the Post-Communist New Member States
Current, admittedly incomplete evidence, suggests a deteriorating working environment in the new Member States of central and eastern Europe. Moreover, support for occupational health and safety regulation concerning the working environment appears to be limited among business and political elites in the new Member States. This has created a lack of policy 'reform fit' between the 'social dimension' of a European social model and domestic agendas…
Austerity and the Demise of Social Europe: The Baltic Model versus the European Social Model
This article draws on the experience of the imposition of radical austerity measures in the Baltic states. It challenges the myth that austerity can be achieved in a socially and economically ‘costless’ manner. Baltic-style austerity has now become a template of ‘successful adjustment’ and a recipe for recovery of the Eurozone. The authors argue contra such ‘myth-making’ that austerity is compromising the longer run sustainability of societies th…
Migrants and the Unequal Burdening of “Toxic” Risk: Towards a New Global Governance Regime
The article addresses the changing discourse that frames the neo-liberal regulatory agenda, in the context of the current financial crisis and related, system-threatening ‘toxic’ risk. In this, the authors claim that a flexible mix of regulation/deregulation and self-regulation is reflected in an asymmetric architecture of multilevel governance that is based on an unequal burden-sharing of risk, involving the commodification of risk and an imposi…
Labour migration and informalisation: East meets West
Purpose – Against a theoretical discussion of informalisation, the purpose of this paper is to trace wider commonalities and migratory interconnections that are leading to informalised or deteriorated employment conditions both East and West in the enlarged Europe. Design/methodology/approach – The paper examines the ways in which informalisation has come increasingly to typify employment relations both East and West via contrastive case studies …
Labour Migration, Neoliberalism and Ethno‐politics in the New Europe: The Latvian Case
The accession of the new European Union (EU) member states of Eastern Europe has highlighted ambivalence towards migration within the older member states. That same ambivalence has been less frequently discussed in the new. The former Soviet republic of Latvia serves as a case study of a new member state facing intensified pressure to accept inward migration to meet labour shortages, in part, a consequence of EU accession. Confounding appropriate…
Social dialogue and lifelong learning in new EU member states: Reform fit' in Latvia
Vocational education and training (VET) is regarded by EU policymakers as crucial to creating a high-skill workforce capable of adapting to European and global demands in an intensified competitive environment. It is part of the so-called Copenhagen Process, in which social dialogue between employers and employees is seen as an important means of realizing policy. However, many of the new member states from the Eastern European countries which jo…
The Race Equality Directive
This article examines the Race Equality Directive (RED) and its transposition in the context of a new European Union (EU) member state, Baltic Lithuania. Taking this post-communist society as a case study, it is suggested that while formal legislative compliance with the RED has been broadly attained, transposed anti-discrimination legislation and national policy implementation initiatives may not adequately take into account societal attitudes a…
The Labour Theory of Culture: A Re-Examination of Engels's Theory of Human Origins
The moral discourses of ‘post-crisis’ neoliberalism: A case study of Lithuania’s Labour Code reform
This article problematizes the neoliberal reconfiguration of labour rights in Lithuania, a newer European Union member state, in which the impacts of the global economic and financial crisis were particularly severe and where radical austerity measures were subsequently imposed. Now, after six years, in an attempt to resolve the exhaustion of previous austerity-based solutions for economic recovery, a new Labour Code is being introduced which wil…
The Labour Theory of Culture: A Re-Examination of Engels's Theory of Human Origins
Corporate Reconstruction and Business Unionism: The Lessons of Caterpillar and Ford
Technological determinism has recently emerged as the favoured theme of those who seek to challenge the centrality of class politics within the British labour movement. This somewhat uncharacteristic perspective is used to argue that new production technologies are directly creating a new political environment. Production processes, it is
Paying for the Piper: Capital and Labour in Britain's Offshore Oil Industry
Oil, imperialism and the British state - the origins of the crisis problems of union mobilization - the 1970s and 1980s prelude to action the summer of discontent Lord Cullen's Report `a profound change in culture' the strategy of containment paying for the piper? striking out - setting a new agenda the future of offshore trade unionism the restructuring of Britain's oil and gas - the supply industry conclusion - an unsafe future
Remapping Labour Rights: The Case of Transitional Lithuania
THROUGHOUT THE MID-1990S Lithuania has competed with its neighbours for foreign direct investment (FDI). In this context Lithuanian governments of differing political persuasion have sought to attract foreign investors partly on account of the country's willing, educated and compliant workforce.1 As part of this agenda, the myth of a stable prospering Lithuania with few social and economic problems has been actively promulgated by the country's p…
The “Conventionalization” of Safety Crimes in the Post-Communist New Member States of the European Union
Working Environment and 'Soft Law' in the Post-Communist New Member States
Current, admittedly incomplete evidence, suggests a deteriorating working environment in the new Member States of central and eastern Europe. Moreover, support for occupational health and safety regulation concerning the working environment appears to be limited among business and political elites in the new Member States. This has created a lack of policy 'reform fit' between the 'social dimension' of a European social model and domestic agendas…
Pushing the envelope: The 'informalization' of labour in post-communist new EU member states
This contribution to debate explores one aspect of the reconfiguration of power in the workplaces of post-communist Eastern Europe in which relations between employer and employee are informalized to the detriment of employees’ rights and decent labour standards. It focuses on the new EU member state of Lithuania, one of the poorest of the new entrants in the 2004 enlargement which embraced eight former communist countries. In choosing a ‘worst-c…
Trajectories of Entropy and “the Labour Question”: The Political Economy of Post-communist Migration in the New Europe
This article begins by outlining the global historical context of contingent neoliberalism which has emerged in the late twentieth century as the dominant alternative economic trajectory to that of corporatist liberal welfare capitalism. Our analysis connects contemporary dimensions of labour migration and the challenges of economic development. It is relevant to the understanding of contemporary developments in Central and Eastern Europe in that…
Migrants and the Unequal Burdening of “Toxic” Risk: Towards a New Global Governance Regime
The article addresses the changing discourse that frames the neo-liberal regulatory agenda, in the context of the current financial crisis and related, system-threatening ‘toxic’ risk. In this, the authors claim that a flexible mix of regulation/deregulation and self-regulation is reflected in an asymmetric architecture of multilevel governance that is based on an unequal burden-sharing of risk, involving the commodification of risk and an imposi…
Social dialogue and lifelong learning in new EU member states: Reform fit' in Latvia
Vocational education and training (VET) is regarded by EU policymakers as crucial to creating a high-skill workforce capable of adapting to European and global demands in an intensified competitive environment. It is part of the so-called Copenhagen Process, in which social dialogue between employers and employees is seen as an important means of realizing policy. However, many of the new member states from the Eastern European countries which jo…
Labour Migration, Neoliberalism and Ethno‐politics in the New Europe: The Latvian Case
The accession of the new European Union (EU) member states of Eastern Europe has highlighted ambivalence towards migration within the older member states. That same ambivalence has been less frequently discussed in the new. The former Soviet republic of Latvia serves as a case study of a new member state facing intensified pressure to accept inward migration to meet labour shortages, in part, a consequence of EU accession. Confounding appropriate…
The Race Equality Directive
This article examines the Race Equality Directive (RED) and its transposition in the context of a new European Union (EU) member state, Baltic Lithuania. Taking this post-communist society as a case study, it is suggested that while formal legislative compliance with the RED has been broadly attained, transposed anti-discrimination legislation and national policy implementation initiatives may not adequately take into account societal attitudes a…
Hard times' in Lithuania: Crisis and 'discourses of discontent' in post-communist society
This article analyses the intersection of global recession with the underlying crisis of neo-liberalism in Baltic Lithuania, and the disappointment of expectations regarding the promised benefits of free market capitalism for the citizens of post-communist society. Drawing on an empirical analysis of Lithuania, a new European Union member state and former Soviet republic, the post-communist trajectory of neo-liberal economic and social developmen…
Negotiated responses to the crisis in the Baltic countries
This article reviews the negotiated responses to the crisis at different levels of social dialogue in the Baltic countries. The Baltic countries form a relatively coherent group of small open economies that can be classified as belonging to the neoliberal type of central and eastern European capitalism. Their responses to the crisis were consistent with such classification: flexible labour markets absorbed the main impacts of the crisis through r…
Labour migration and informalisation: East meets West
Purpose – Against a theoretical discussion of informalisation, the purpose of this paper is to trace wider commonalities and migratory interconnections that are leading to informalised or deteriorated employment conditions both East and West in the enlarged Europe. Design/methodology/approach – The paper examines the ways in which informalisation has come increasingly to typify employment relations both East and West via contrastive case studies …
Austerity as a global prescription and lessons from the neoliberal Baltic experiment
This article analyses the 2008 economic crisis and its outcomes for the Baltic states. It then gives a genealogy of European economic policy responses to the crisis, tracing them from the emerging ‘freshwater’ school of economics (e.g. University of Chicago) that arose in opposition to Keynesian theory. The more immediate cause of the 2008 crisis, long in the making, was its reliance on private debt to sustain economic demand in light of profit-e…
The Contradictions of Austerity: The Socio-Economic Costs of the Neoliberal Baltic Model
The great financial crisis of 2008 and the ensuing global economic and financial turmoil have launched a search for "models" for recovery. The advocates of austerity present the Baltic States as countries that through discipline and sacrifice showed the way out of crisis. They have proposed the "Baltic model" of radical public sector cuts, wage reductions, labor market reforms and reductions in living standards for other troubled Eurozone countri…
Austerity and the Demise of Social Europe: The Baltic Model versus the European Social Model
This article draws on the experience of the imposition of radical austerity measures in the Baltic states. It challenges the myth that austerity can be achieved in a socially and economically ‘costless’ manner. Baltic-style austerity has now become a template of ‘successful adjustment’ and a recipe for recovery of the Eurozone. The authors argue contra such ‘myth-making’ that austerity is compromising the longer run sustainability of societies th…
The moral discourses of ‘post-crisis’ neoliberalism: A case study of Lithuania’s Labour Code reform
This article problematizes the neoliberal reconfiguration of labour rights in Lithuania, a newer European Union member state, in which the impacts of the global economic and financial crisis were particularly severe and where radical austerity measures were subsequently imposed. Now, after six years, in an attempt to resolve the exhaustion of previous austerity-based solutions for economic recovery, a new Labour Code is being introduced which wil…
Political science (16 works) · Economics (15 works) · Law (13 works) · Politics (12 works) · Political economy (11 works) · Social Policy and Reform Studies (11 works) · European union (10 works) · Law (10 works) · Sociology (9 works) · Economic policy (7 works)