'Big Society, Chavez’s style? An excursion into the barrios'.
Middlesex University HRM Research Seminar
Wednesday 24th November, 1230pm - 2pm
The Barn 2 (Rear of Williams Building)
Middlesex University Business School
The Burroughs
Hendon
London NW4 4BT
(nearest tube Hendon Central - Edgware branch of Northern Line)
Speaker: Dr. Anne Daguerre (Middlesex University).
The title of this presentation is deliberately provocative: do David Cameron’s Big Society and Hugo Chávez’s Bolivarian revolution have anything in common? In fact, there is a world of difference between Chávez’s generous social policies and Cameron’s spending cuts. But Cameron and Chávez use a similar rhetoric in the sense that both place a strong emphasis on people’s participation and autonomy in order to justify contrasting political projects: the advent of a much leaner social state in the case of Cameron, and the development of an omnipotent ‘revolutionary state’ in the case of Chávez.
In Venezuela support for poor people has become the government’s trademark since the creation in 2002-2003 of a series of emergency social programmes, the Missions. These programmes attend to the basic needs of low income individuals in terms of nutrition, health and education. The Bolivarian Revolution was supposed to empower socially excluded people through the implementation of the Missions in deprived rural and urban areas, the barrios. Research conducted in September 2008 and August 2010 clearly shows that the Bolivarian Revolution, for all its achievements, is running out of steam. In particular, urban communities visited in September 2008 and revisited in August 2010 have not shown any real improvement, for various reasons that the researcher will explain during the course of the presentation.
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Martin Upchurch
Professor of International Employment Relations
Middlesex University Business School
The Burroughs
Hendon
London NW4 4BT
07545 487952
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