The Evolution of Professionalism as a Mode of Regulation: Evidence from the United States

Opinion is divided on how far and in what ways professionalism as a mode of regulation has evolved. To date, attention has focused on the impact of neoliberal political and economic ideologies that challenge the idea that professions should be trusted to regulate themselves. This article further examines the impact of these attacks on professionalism and assesses whether they have triggered a process of decline. Drawing on a range of documentary sources from the US, it suggests that, while professional modes of regulation are evolving, the dominant pattern is one of continuity. The analysis also draws attention to the path-dependent nature of professionalism and how it is associated with increasing returns for key stakeholders: producers, government regulators and employers. The article’s main contribution is to highlight these trends empirically and raise questions about the accuracy and value of grand narratives that over-emphasise change and understate the self-reinforcing nature of professional modes of regulation.

Conclusion

This concluding chapter reflects on the trajectory of capitalism in Japan and the role of its precarious workers in that process. The key issues facing Japan are whether and how Japan's new labor movement will develop. It is only in studying this recomposition of Japan's working class that one will be able to understand and explain the trajectory of capitalism as it exists in Japan. It remains to be seen, therefore, whether a new mode of regulation emerges, and what role labor—either regular or nonregular, organized or disorganized—will play in any new socioeconomic regime. What is certain is that any attempt to undermine, sideline, or eradicate labor will ultimately be futile, as workers in Japan (as they do elsewhere) invariably continue to disrupt and resist—in different ways in different times and contexts—efforts to consolidate a model of global neoliberal capitalism that cannot be stable.

Japan’s Absent Mode of Regulation

This chapter demonstrates that, despite the attempts at neoliberal reform, Japan's political economy has nevertheless been unable to return to sustainable levels of economic growth similar to those experienced before the bursting of the economic bubble in 1991. If one considers the three-year centered moving average of gross domestic product (GDP) growth in Japan in the period 1961–2018, Japan's economy has consistently struggled to rise above 2-percent annual-average growth for any three-year period since 1991. In part, this is a further consequence of the inability to achieve consensus around a new mode of regulation for Japan's national economy throughout this period. Thus, Japan suffers from the absence of a mode of regulation, and its efforts at liberalization have been unsuccessfully implemented—partly as a result of the opposition to efforts at reform. Japan's process of neoliberalization has therefore been impeded, incomplete, somewhat unsuccessful, and marked more by dissension and a failure to identify an alternative institutional compromise with which to secure a return to economic growth.

Criminalizing Informal Workers: The Case of Street Vendors in Abuja, Nigeria

The article examines the criminalization of street vendors in Abuja, Nigeria. It draws on the debate on informality, legality and rights, to highlight the tensions surrounding the law as a mode of regulation. As documented, ideology provides the rationale for the criminalization of street vending. The activity is deemed inimical to the modernist ideals of a clean and functioning city. Enforcement of the law is accompanied by the harassment of vendors. However, vendors remain on the streets by circumventing the law. The article highlights the shortcomings of a simplistic approach to the governance of informality. It cannot be legislated away.

Some Issues of Legal Regulation of Working Hours in the Republic of Uzbekistan

The article deals with the issues of legal regulation of the employee’s working time in Uzbekistan, which analyzes various aspects of issues related to working time, flexible mode of regulation of working hours, working hours, working week.

Sustainable Welfare beyond Growth

The history of welfare states is tightly linked to industrial capitalism and a mode of regulation where production and consumption patterns increased in parallel [...]

Causal Inference Engine: a platform for directional gene set enrichment analysis and inference of active transcriptional regulators

Inference of active regulatory mechanisms underlying specific molecular and environmental perturbations is essential for understanding cellular response. The success of inference algorithms relies on the quality and coverage of the underlying network of regulator–gene interactions. Several commercial platforms provide large and manually curated regulatory networks and functionality to perform inference on these networks. Adaptation of such platforms for open-source academic applications has been hindered by the lack of availability of accurate, high-coverage networks of regulatory interactions and integration of efficient causal inference algorithms. In this work, we present CIE, an integrated platform for causal inference of active regulatory mechanisms form differential gene expression data. Using a regularized Gaussian Graphical Model, we construct a transcriptional regulatory network by integrating publicly available ChIP-seq experiments with gene-expression data from tissue-specific RNA-seq experiments. Our GGM approach identifies high confidence transcription factor (TF)–gene interactions and annotates the interactions with information on mode of regulation (activation vs. repression). Benchmarks against manually curated databases of TF–gene interactions show that our method can accurately detect mode of regulation. We demonstrate the ability of our platform to identify active transcriptional regulators by using controlled in vitro overexpression and stem-cell differentiation studies and utilize our method to investigate transcriptional mechanisms of fibroblast phenotypic plasticity.