Volume 66 (2021): Issue 1 (June 2021)

The economics of the authoritarian regime of Francisco Franco in Spain are often narrowed to a bespoke form of fascism. This paper suggests that this regime’s rather inchoate economic regimes were in fact a series of experiments that blended varieties of statism and liberalism. Thus, a form of import-substitution industrialization colored by Italian fascist features (1939-1959) lasted fifteen years longer in Spain than in the country of importation. In contrast, a local version of French developmentalism (1964-1975) was largely in sync with what was being tried in France at the time. However, this French developmentalist template imbued with fiscal Keynesianism was layered with liberal economic projects, particularly in the monetary policy arena. But while fascist import substitution (the so called “autarky”) collapsed mostly due to its internal problems, Spain’s translation of French developmentalism was associated with economic growth and was only extensively damaged by the crisis of the global capitalist core ushered by the 1973 oil shock. Critically, while in the symbolic terrain of Spanish politics the liberal economic projects that accompanied the local translation of French developmentalism were always associated with reformist and even “dissident” elite circles, the stigma of developmentalism’ association with the core elites of authoritarianism removed developmentalism as a source of alternatives to the liberal economic reforms ushered by Spain’s transition to liberal democracy in the late 1970s and early 1980s.

Flexible labour practices became increasingly institutionalized and professionalized (Aroles, Mitev and de Vaujany, 2019). However, mechanisms and motivations behind these practices have remained often unexplored. This paper discusses the flexible labour practices among ICT professionals with regard to their spatial and temporal dimensions, with the aim to identify the key-factors that improve work-life balance and overall well-being. The qualitative research is based on in-depth face-to-face interviews with ICT knowledge workers, using Grounded Theory in generating new theoretical approaches that connect flexible labour practices with work-life balance. The study reveals, on the one hand, that particular and adapted flexible arrangements contributes to the reconciliation of the working life with the personal life; on the other hand, had led to the rise of knowledge workers with power and influence over their own intellectual capital, with a richness in personal choices.

This paper aims to analyse the conditions that enable a double political-economic instrumentation of culture through European Union programmes, and their consequences for the cultural sector. The first European programmes focused on the symbolic value of culture which was perceived as an essential element for strengthening the European identity, and thus as a crucial tool in the project of building the European identity, which is part of a political integration programme. In the context of the development of the creative economy, which overlapped the 2008 economic crisis and a growing influence of the market ideology, a few years later, the European Union launched the Creative Europe programme, thus setting up a new development framework for the cultural sector. For culture, the economic and political arguments in the Creative Europe programme outline a future inherently connected to its contribution to these fields, leaving behind the symbolic and social value of culture characterised by non-lucrative purposes. The programme lays out a direction in which culture is monetized as competitive advantage and bets on the contribution of the cultural and creative industries to become a competitor on the global creative economy. The new framework offered by Creative Europe transforms the approach to culture, placing it in a landscape of global competition, in the company of creative industries, favouring the integration of culture by the latter, not the other way around, thus entailing structural changes in the cultural sector.

One of the most outstanding intellectual achievements in the history of classical thought in social sciences which have remained influential up until today are undoubtedly associated with the name of Max Weber. Through a detailed text analysis and a conceptual mapping of the logic of the argumentation, this paper sets out to offer a profound insight into the classical German sociologist’s approach to science, both “early” (about 1903/4) and “late” (post-1913), in terms of some fundamental matters of epistemology and methodology. The first part of this paper investigates social economics in terms of its theoretical and methodological foundations and applicability, while the second part looks at interpretive sociology from the same perspectives, with an emphasis on the differences between the two approaches. We argue that Weber’s dualist methodological attitude became explicit and dominant in his later writings. In addition, as he brought in focus the theory of social action, he not only became an explicit proponent of methodological individualism, but he also revisited and specified the logic and role of “causal explanation” and “interpretation”. Interpretive sociology no longer seeks a causal explanation for individual historical events by applying nomological knowledge, but instead commits itself to finding “causally adequate” explanation for the course and consequences of different types of social actions. Interpretation, in turn, no longer means an analysis of effects concerning the cultural significance of individual historical events in a special sense, but an interpretive understanding of various types of social actions, rational or “irrational”, directly or in a motivation-like manner. The paper concludes with a summary designed to highlight key legacies of Weber’s oeuvre that have remained valid and valuable for any analytical and empirical research in sociology.