Red, White, and “Big Blue”: IBM and the Business-Government Interface in the United States, 1956–2000

2007 ◽  
Vol 8 (1) ◽  
pp. 1-34
Author(s):  
David Hart

This article describes the evolution of IBM's effort to manage its relationships with the U.S. government from the time that Thomas Watson, Jr. became CEO. While the Watson family controlled the firm, the family members served as the main bridges between IBM and the government. This personalized approach began to give way in the 1960s, as the intensity and scope of pressure from the firm's political environment grew beyond the capability of any individual to handle. During the 1970s and 1980s, IBM constructed a managerial hierarchy, with a newly opened Washington office at its center, which could gather more detailed intelligence and execute more sophisticated political strategies. The firm's crisis in the early 1990s provoked a second major restructuring of the interface, as IBM became more of a Washington “special interest.” Yet, some traces of the Watson imprint remained, even in the Gerstner era. Tracing IBM's evolution helps us to understand better the broader interactions between U.S. firms and their environments in this period. These interactions entailed adaptation by firms to environmental change but also efforts by firms to exert control over external forces, including public policy.

2017 ◽  
Vol 17 (1) ◽  
pp. 31-52 ◽  
Author(s):  
Sawsan Abutabenjeh ◽  
Stephen B. Gordon ◽  
Berhanu Mengistu

By implementing various forms of preference policies, countries around the world intervene in their economies for their own political and economic purposes. Likewise, twenty-five states in the U.S. have implemented in-state preference policies (NASPO, 2012) to protect and support their own vendors from out-of-state competition to achieve similar purposes. The purpose of this paper is to show the connection between protectionist public policy instruments noted in the international trade literature and the in-state preference policies within the United States. This paper argues that the reasons and the rationales for adopting these preference policies in international trade and the states' contexts are similar. Given the similarity in policy outcomes, the paper further argues that the international trade literature provides an overarching explanation to help understand what states could expect in applying in-state preference policies.


Author(s):  
Martha Minow

Usually left out of discussions of school desegregation, the historic treatments of American Indians and Native Hawai’ians in the development of schooling in the United States was a corollary of conquest and colonialism. As late as the 1950s, forced assimilation and eradication of indigenous cultures pervaded what was considered the “education” of students in these groups. The social, political, and legal civil rights initiatives surrounding Brown helped to inspire a rights consciousness among Indian and Native Hawai’ian reformers and activists, who embraced the ideal of equal opportunity while reclaiming cultural traditions. Between the 1960s and 2007, complex fights over ethnic classification, separation, integration, and self-determination emerged for both American Indians and Native Hawai’ians. Their struggles, crucial in themselves, also bring to the fore a challenging underlying problem: are distinct individuals or groups the proper unit of analysis and protection in the pursuit of equality? The centrality of the individual to law and culture in the United States tends to mute this question. Yet in this country as well as elsewhere, equal treatment or equal opportunity has two faces: promoting individual development and liberty, regardless of race, culture, religion, gender, or other group-based characteristic, and protection for groups that afford their members meaning and identity. Nowhere is the tension between these two alternatives more apparent than in schooling, which involves socialization of each new generation in the values and expectations of their elders. Will that socialization direct each individual to a common world focused on the academic and social mobility of distinct individuals or will it inculcate traditions and values associated with particular groups? Even in the United States, devoted to inclusive individualism, the Supreme Court rejected a statute requiring students to attend schools run by the government and created exemptions from compulsory school fines when they burdened a group’s practices and hopes for their children. In Pierce v. Society of Sisters, the Court respected the rights of parents to select private schooling in order to inculcate a religious identity or other “additional obligations.”


2019 ◽  
Vol 3 (Supplement_1) ◽  
pp. S64-S65
Author(s):  
Emma Aguila ◽  
Jaqueline L Angel ◽  
Kyriakos Markides

Abstract The United States and Mexico differ greatly in the organization and financing of their old-age welfare states. They also differ politically and organizationally in government response at all levels to the needs of low-income and frail citizens. While both countries are aging rapidly, Mexico faces more serious challenges in old-age support that arise from a less developed old-age welfare state and economy. For Mexico, financial support and medical care for older low-income citizens are universal rights, however, limited fiscal resources for a large low-income population create inevitable competition among the old and the young alike. Although the United States has a more developed economy and well-developed Social Security and health care financing systems for the elderly, older Mexican-origin individuals in the U.S. do not necessarily benefit fully from these programs. These institutional and financial problems to aging are compounded in both countries by longer life spans, smaller families, as well as changing gender roles and cultural norms. In this interdisciplinary panel, the authors of five papers deal with the following topics: (1) an analysis of old age health and dependency conditions, the supply of aging and disability services, and related norms and policies, including the role of the government and the private sector; (2) a binational comparison of federal safety net programs for low-income elderly in U.S. and Mexico; (3) when strangers become family: the role of civil society in addressing the needs of aging populations; and (4) unmet needs for dementia care for Latinos in the Hispanic-EPESE.


1980 ◽  
Vol 12 (2) ◽  
pp. 77-85 ◽  
Author(s):  
Luther Tweeten ◽  
G. Bradley Cilley ◽  
Isaac Popoola

The trend toward larger and fewer farms has alarmed many persons who view the small farm as an integral part of American society. Advocates of the small farm have called for policies to halt the continuing decline in the number of small farms in the United States. In evaluating the merits of potential policies, understanding the composition of small farms in the U.S. is critical.Appropriate public policy would be very different if small farms were operated solely by households with substantial off-farm income and who need no public assistance, solely by households pursuing an alternative to urban-industrial society's lifestyle and who want no public assistance, or solely by households who are aged and disabled and who want and need public assistance to avoid absolute deprivation.


Genealogy ◽  
2020 ◽  
Vol 4 (2) ◽  
pp. 56
Author(s):  
Karen Bernadette Mclean Dade

Many problems exist for United States (U.S.) descendants of Cabo Verde (In 2015, the government of Cabo Verde asked in the United Nations that the official name be Cabo Verde in all documents, opposed to the colonial version, “Cape Verde”) Islands seeking dual citizenship. Much of this is due to multiple 20th century racial discriminatory practices by the U.S. in soliciting cheap labor from Cabo Verde Islands, including changing the birth names of Cabo Verdean immigrants when they entered the United States. Without knowing the true birth names of their ancestors, descendants such as myself have no access to proof of birth in the dual citizenship process. Years often pass by as Cabo Verdean Americans search for clues that may lead to proving their legal status through family stories, and track related names as well as birth and death records. For many, dual citizenship may never be granted from the Cabo Verdean government, despite having U.S. death certificates that state that the family member was born in Cabo Verde. This autobiographical case study explores why so many Cabo Verdean Americans seek dual citizenship with a strong desire to connect to their motherland. Moreover, issues related to language, class and colorism discrimination between Cabo Verdean-born immigrants and descendants in the U.S. are explored. In so doing, the researcher hopes to ameliorate the divisions between the current government policies and Cabo Verdean American descendants, as well as build greater intracultural connections between those born in the Cabo Verde Islands and those born in the U.S. and elsewhere.


1977 ◽  
Vol 5 (3) ◽  
pp. 347-358 ◽  
Author(s):  
Adolf Sprudzs

Among the many old and new actors on the international stage of nations the United States is one of the most active and most important. The U.S. is a member of most existing intergovernmental organizations, participates in hundreds upon hundreds of international conferences and meetings every year and, in conducting her bilateral and multilateral relations with the other members of the community of nations, contributes very substantially to the development of contemporary international law. The Government of the United States has a policy of promptly informing the public about developments in its relations with other countries through a number of documentary publication, issued by the Department of State


2020 ◽  
pp. 15-31
Author(s):  
Sit Tsui ◽  
Erebus Wong ◽  
Lau Kin Chi ◽  
Wen Tiejun

During the 1960s, China was effectively excluded from the two major camps: the Soviet camp and the U.S. camp. For about a decade, China was obliged to seek development within its own borders and thereby achieved some extent of delinking: a refusal to succumb to U.S.-eurocentric globalization and an embrace of a people's agenda of development. While foreign relations were later normalized and China once again brought in foreign capital, since being explicitly targeted as the primary rival of the United States, however, the situation may again warrant moves toward delinking and searching for alternatives, with ups and downs along the way.


2017 ◽  
Vol 42 (1) ◽  
pp. 80-113 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jacqueline L. Hazelton

Debates over how governments can defeat insurgencies ebb and flow with international events, becoming particularly contentious when the United States encounters problems in its efforts to support a counterinsurgent government. Often the United States confronts these problems as a zero-sum game in which the government and the insurgents compete for popular support and cooperation. The U.S. prescription for success has had two main elements: to support liberalizing, democratizing reforms to reduce popular grievances; and to pursue a military strategy that carefully targets insurgents while avoiding harming civilians. An analysis of contemporaneous documents and interviews with participants in three cases held up as models of the governance approach—Malaya, Dhofar, and El Salvador—shows that counterinsurgency success is the result of a violent process of state building in which elites contest for power, popular interests matter little, and the government benefits from uses of force against civilians.


2005 ◽  
Vol 5 (4) ◽  
pp. 1850070 ◽  
Author(s):  
Kozo Kiyota ◽  
Robert M Stern

The Michigan Computable General Equilibrium (CGE) Model of World Production and Trade is used to calculate the aggregate welfare and sectoral employment effects of the menu of U.S. trade policies. The menu of policies encompasses the various preferential U.S. bilateral and regional free trade agreements (FTAs) negotiated and in process, unilateral removal of existing trade barriers, and global (multilateral) free trade. The welfare impacts of the FTAs on the United States are shown to be rather small in absolute and relative terms. The sectoral employment effects are also generally small but vary across the individual sectors depending on the patterns of the bilateral liberalization. The welfare effects on the FTA partner countries are mostly positive though generally small, but there are some indications of potentially disruptive employment shifts in some partner countries. There are indications of trade diversion and detrimental welfare effects on nonmember countries for some of the FTAs analyzed. In comparison to the welfare gains from the U.S. FTAs, the gains from both unilateral trade liberalization by the United States and the FTA partners and from global (multilateral) free trade are shown to be rather substantial and more uniformly positive for all countries in the global trading system. The U.S. FTAs are based on “hub” and “spoke” arrangements. It is shown that the spokes emanate out in different and often overlapping directions, suggesting that the complex of bilateral FTAs may create distortions of the global trading system, which could be avoided if multilateral liberalization in the context of the Doha Round were to be carried out. Kozo Kiyota is Associate Professor of International Economics in the Faculty of Business Administration, Yokohama National University. He is also a Research Fellow at the Manufacturing Management Research Center (MMRC), the University of Tokyo and a Faculty Fellow at the Research Institute of Economy, Trade and Industry (RIETI). He received his Ph.D. from Keio University, Tokyo, Japan. His research focuses on empirical microeconomics. He has published articles in the International Journal of Industrial Organization, Journal of Economic Behavior and Organization, and The World Economy. Robert M. Stern is Professor of Economics and Public Policy (Emeritus) in the Department of Economics and Gerald R. Ford School of Public Policy, University of Michigan.


1979 ◽  
Vol 21 (1) ◽  
pp. 156-184 ◽  
Author(s):  
Margaret E. Crahan

Unlike churches in the rest of Latin America, those in Cuba did not embark at the outset of the 1960s on a period of liberalization and innovation in theology, pastoral forms, lay participation and political strategies. Rather, the coming to power in 1959 of a revolutionary government and the initiation of substantial societal restructuring reinforced conservatism within the churches. Strong challenges to the legitimacy of the government by the churches from 1959 through 1961 were not effective due largely to institutional limitations and their identification as bulwarks of prerevolutionary structures. Hence, in spite of a marked increase in participation and contributions, the churches' counterrevolutionary stance had limited impact. Contributing to this was the exodus of many religious activists to the United States and Spain, and a turning in upon themselves by the churches which came to serve as refuges from change.


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