Influential Spheres
Indian Education System as Engine for Economic Growth and Nation Building
Paper Presentation in a Themed Session Ravi Prakash
Education leads to knowledge and subsequently to economic empowerment of the every individual in particular and society in general. All fields of education, be it Engineering and Physical Sciences, Medical, Management, Humanities and Social Sciences etc., ultimately help in development of individuals by imparting necessary skills required for appropriate employment. In India, people have benefitted by educational infrastructure and our emphasis on “Education for All”. Special efforts were made to ensure that no child or woman is left out from enrollment process. Our Gross Enrollment Ratio (GER) increased considerably over past few years and the effect of education is visible on India’s economic growth. For providing meaningful engineering education, the role of academia – industry partnership, is praise worthy. Our forward looking educational institutions are using this partnership for development of skills and competencies. This study features a case showing as to how this academia-industry partnership has successfully been used by Amity Institute of Technology, which has partnered with Tata Technologies, to impart skills and competencies to engineering students to make them industry ready from day one after graduation.
Ten Years after the Enlarging the Varieties of Capitalism of Nölke and Vliegenthart: The (R)evolving Dependency in Central and Eastern Europe
Paper Presentation in a Themed Session Maciej Grodzicki
It has been ten years since A. Nölke and A. Vliegenthart (NV) published a seminal article on the specific variety of capitalism, identified in certain Central and Eastern Europe countries (CEE), namely the dependent market economies (DME). They argued that the multinational firm and its internal hierarchy is the main channel of economic coordination in the CEE region, dominating its institutional framework and organizing the socio-economic development. The thesis gained widespread acceptance in institutional economics, while the article itself has been broadly discussed and cited. In the meantime, the CEE group has been subject to profound economic and political shifts. On the one hand, its position in the global value chains organized by multinational corporations has been grounded, with booming industrial production and exports. On the other hand, the neoliberal regimes evolved, at least in some CEE countries, into right-wing populist governments. The DME variety, arguably, lies at the core of these both developments. However, can one still classify the CEE countries as the dependent market economies? In the article, we aim at reconsidering the original thesis of NV, appreciating properly its impact on the institutional thought. We conduct a review of major works commenting on NV, which developed their argument or highlighted different aspects of political economies in CEE. We discuss the nature of DME in CEE, in the face of most-recent developments, in terms of economic structures and political shifts. In particular, we make use of the global value chains theory to highlight certain aspects of the dependency.
Our Lady of Sorrow, Our Lord of Mercy and Models of Historiography Driven by Prefiguration
Paper Presentation in a Themed Session Łucja Piekarska - Duraj
This paper examines several narrative practices used by Polish museums and Catholic Church, both seen as institutions safeguarding collective identity. The ways in which they shape historiography as the main reference framework for storytelling is considered. Special focus is laid on prefiguration - a technique successfully used in readings of mythologies. The Museum of the Second World War in Gdansk together with Home Army Museum in Krakow are examples of symbolic transfers where honour, national pride, and cult of ancestors are used to create specific sense of belonging. Other cases will be provided by some manifestations of collective Catholicism with Krakow based St Rita offerings and St Faustina and Merciful Jesus devotion. The final case combining the religious and national aspect will be provided by Wadowice John Paul II Family Home Museum. I argue that prefiguration as a narrative technique enforces the notion of historical imperative, where individuals are objects of precisely conceptualised time flow spanned between the domain of the past, established on the sacrifice of ancestors and the domain of future understood as a reward for everyday efforts and hardships. Prefiguration driven historiography can be also seen as a phenomenon connected with populisms, as it not only deprives individuals of their own liberty of choice but also structures much of chaos experienced in the world after the end of history.
Ordoliberalism Is Not a Core: The Social Market Economy as an Appropriate Way of Economic and Monetary Union Governance
Paper Presentation in a Themed Session Justyna Bokajło
Since the financial and economic crisis of 2008+ many political and scientific discussions focus on the issue of “ordoliberalisation of Europe”. Ordoliberalism is widely perceived as an austerity policy implemented by Germany, which makes its financial support for Economic and Monetary Union (EMU) uncompromisingly depend on the strict fiscal strategy. The engagement of Germany into “saving the Eurozone”, placed them in the uncomfortable leader’s position. But in a fact ordoliberalism is not a holistic idea, but rather the microeconomic, normative theory, that even in Germany has never been fully implemented. What should be taken into consideration in the context of EMU and the whole EU is the style of governance- the Social Market Economy. The aim of this research is drawing attention to the original meaning of the Social Market Economy in which ordoliberalism is only an economic foundation. The sense of Eurozone's order is to understand the solidarity, related to the principle of subsidiarity and stability of the single currency, international competitiveness, macroeconomic policy, business cycles, and values such as democracy. The idea of orders interdependence (M. Weber, W. Eucken) and the 'Ordnungspolitik' seems to be adequate to achieve the goal of the study.
