Globalisation, E-learning and the Monetary Pressure on the Educational Field

Globalisation, this is my thesis, change first the trade of goods and services, produce a mercantilist pressure on different political fields and affect finally as a consequence effectively our normative comprehension of education. As states will be more and more under pressure to compete on an economic basis against each other they will rank decisions which generate jobs higher than any thing else. Also Education policy is changing its focus. E-learning is a driving force to bring together education, trade of ICT equipment, trade of educational used content and trade of study degrees and to merge the different objectives into effective distribution of knowledge and maximising profits.

Marginalized Youth, the ‘Modern’ Professional and the ‘Modern’ Workplace: A note on the Need for a Critical Approach to ‘Modernizing’ Strategies

This paper briefly examines plans to ‘transform’ social work services for socially marginalized children and young people in England. More specifically, it will focus on moves to privatize social work services for children and young people who are in public care, or ‘looked after’. In what follows, the focus will be on how the promotion of ‘social work practices’ (SWPs) – the name of these envisaged new structures – is discursively embedded in the idea the idea that ‘liberation’ and worker fulfillment can only be delivered within a privatized sphere. In this context, it will be maintained, the work of Boltanski and Chiapello may help to illuminate how the government and other primary definers are seeking to ‘win hearts and minds’ for further neoliberal ‘transformations’ within Children’s Services in England.

GERMANY: Creating New Property Rights on the Basis of General Legal Concepts - Without Limits?

In two cases recently decided by two different senates of the German Federal Supreme Court (Bundesgerichtshof, BGH), the following issue was raised: To what extent can the filming of sports events organized by someone else, on the one hand, and the photographing of someone else’s physical property, on the other hand, be legally controlled by the organizer of the sports event and the owner of the property respectively? In its “Hartplatzhelden.de” decision, the first senate of the Federal Supreme Court concluded that the act of filming sports events does not constitute an act of unfair competition as such, and hence is allowed even without the consent of the organizer of the sports event in question. However, the fifth senate, in its “Prussian gardens and parks” decision, held that photographing someone else’s property is subject to the consent of the owner of the grounds, provided the photographs are taken from a spot situated on the owner’s property. In spite of their different outcomes, the two cases do not necessarily contradict each other. Rather, read together, they may well lead to an unwanted – and unjustified – extension of exclusive protection, thus creating a new “organizer’s” IP right.