Market, Management and Profession. Social Business in the Polder

In a recent policy document of the organized employers in the care and welfare sector in The Netherlands (the MO Group), directors and board members of care and welfare institutions present themselves as "social entrepreneurs", managing their institutions as look-a like commercial companies. They are hardly criticized and there is not any countervailing power of significance. The workers are focusing on their own specialized professional fields and divided as a whole. Many government officials are in favour or do not bother. The relatively small number of intellectual workers in Dutch care and welfare are fragmented and pragmatic. From a democratic point of view this is a worrying situation. From a professional point of view the purpose and functions of professional care and welfare work are at stake. The penetration of market mechanisms and the take-over by commercially orientated managers result from unquestioned adaptation of Anglo-Saxon policy in The Netherlands in the 1990's, following the crisis of the Welfare State in the late 1980's. The polder country is now confronted fully with the pressure and negative effects of unbalanced powers in the institutions, i.e. Managerialism. After years of silence, the two principal authentic critics of Dutch care and welfare, Harry Kunneman and Andries Baart, are no longer voices crying in the wilderness, but are getting a response from a growing number of worried workers and intellectuals. Kunneman and Baart warn against the restriction of professional space and the loss of normative values and standards in the profession. They are right. It is high time to make room for criticism and to start a debate about the future of the social professions in The Netherlands, better: in Europe. Research, discussion and action have to prove how worrying the everyday situation of professional workers is, what goals have to be set and what strategy to be chosen.

Is the Market Eroding Moral Norms? A Micro-Analytical Validation of Some Ideas of Anomie Theory

Anomie theorists have been reporting the suppression of shared welfare orientations by the overwhelming dominance of economic values within capitalist societies since before the outset of neoliberalism debate. Obligations concerning common welfare are more and more often subordinated to the overarching aim of realizing economic success goals. This should be especially valid with for social life in contemporary market societies. This empirical investigation examines the extent to which market imperatives and values of the societal community are anchored within the normative orientations of market actors. Special attention is paid to whether the shape of these normative orientations varies with respect to the degree of market inclusion. Empirical analyses, based on the data of a standardized written survey within the German working population carried out in 2002, show that different types of normative orientation can be distinguished among market actors. These types are quite similar to the well-known types of anomic adaptation developed by Robert K. Merton in “Social Structure and Anomie” and are externally valid with respect to the prediction of different forms of economic crime. Further analyses show that the type of normative orientation actors adopt within everyday life depends on the degree of market inclusion. Confirming anomie theory, it is shown that the individual willingness to subordinate matters of common welfare to the aim of economic success—radical market activism—gets stronger the more actors are included in the market sphere. Finally, the relevance of reported findings for the explanation of violent behavior, especially with view to varieties of corporate violence, is discussed.

The International Three-Step Test. A Model Provision for EC Fair Use Legislation

The three-step test is central to the regulation of copyright limitations at the international level. Delineating the room for exemptions with abstract criteria, the three-step test is by far the most important and comprehensive basis for the introduction of national use privileges. It is an essential, flexible element in the international limitation infrastructure that allows national law makers to satisfy domestic social, cultural, and economic needs. Given the universal field of application that follows from the test’s open-ended wording, the provision creates much more breathing space than the more specific exceptions recognized in international copyright law. EC copyright legislation, however, fails to take advantage of the flexibility inherent in the three-step test. Instead of using the international provision as a means to open up the closed EC catalogue of permissible exceptions, offer sufficient breathing space for social, cultural, and economic needs, and enable EC copyright law to keep pace with the rapid development of the Internet, the Copyright Directive 2001/29/EC encourages the application of the three-step test to further restrict statutory exceptions that are often defined narrowly in national legislation anyway. In the current online environment, however, enhanced flexibility in the field of copyright limitations is indispensable. From a social and cultural perspective, the web 2.0 promotes and enhances freedom of expression and information with its advanced search engine services, interactive platforms, and various forms of user-generated content. From an economic perspective, it creates a parallel universe of traditional content providers relying on copyright protection, and emerging Internet industries whose further development depends on robust copyright limita- tions. In particular, the newcomers in the online market – social networking sites, video forums, and virtual worlds – promise a remarkable potential for economic growth that has already attracted the attention of the OECD. Against this background, the time is ripe to debate the introduction of an EC fair use doctrine on the basis of the three-step test. Otherwise, EC copyright law is likely to frustrate important opportunities for cultural, social, and economic development. To lay groundwork for the debate, the differences between the continental European and the Anglo-American approach to copyright limitations (section 1), and the specific merits of these two distinct approaches (section 2), will be discussed first. An analysis of current problems that have arisen under the present dysfunctional EC system (section 3) will then serve as a starting point for proposing an EC fair use doctrine based on the three-step test (section 4). Drawing conclusions, the international dimension of this fair use proposal will be considered (section 5).