Debates about the gig economy are cropping up everywhere: from Uber’s latest scandal and the convenience of Deliveroo to the global reach of Amazon’s MTurk. Is this the future of work? What are the benefits and challenges of crowd work for consumers, taxpayers, and regulators? And is the gig economy really fundamentally different from existing work arrangements and should it therefore fall outside the scope of employment law and other existing regulation, as many providers claim?

Booking note:Oxford Q-Step Summer Institute is open to social science undergraduates from other universities across the UK who would like to enhance their quantitative methods skills. Details on how to apply will be posted here in April 2017.

During this two-day workshop, our aim is to bring together scholars that approach the processes and institutions of representative democracy and mass politics from a variety of perspectives. In the first part of the workshop, we will discuss the main themes and arguments of The Meaning of Partisanship with the authors. The second part will be dedicated to independent research papers. We will engage with theoretical papers as well as more empirically-minded work that is in direct dialogue with recent theoretical literature on representative democracy.

Following the global financial crisis, economic growth and international trade growth have been sluggish. Current projections indicate that growth may continue to be sluggish in the medium term. These continuing trends will limit income raising productivity growth needed to maintain and improve living standards with population ageing across many economies. It will also limit capacities needed to raise living standards amongst lower income regions.

Matthew Kramer’s Liberalism with Excellence, to be published by Oxford University Press in early 2017, promises to be a significant intervention into the debate between liberal neutralists and perfectionists concerning the justification of the exercise of political power. While neutralists hold that the state must be neutral in some sense between competing conceptions of the good, perfectionists hold that claims about the good can or ought to play an important role in justifying the state’s actions.

The social sciences have long been heavily influenced by modernization theory, focusing on issues of economic growth, political development and social change, in order to develop a predictive model of linear progress for developing countries following a Western prototype. Under this hegemonic paradigm of development, the world tends to get divided into simplistic binary oppositions between the ‘West’ and the ‘rest’, ‘us’ and ‘them’ and ‘self’ and ‘other’.

https://www.politics.ox.ac.uk/materials/Political-Remittances-Poster.pdf

The 7th Annual Oxford Fulbright Distinguished Lecture in International Relations is entitled ‘Universities in an Age of Populism' and will be given by Professor Louise Richardson, Vice Chancellor of the University of Oxford.

Please join us for this event, which will take place in the Pichette Auditorium, Pembroke College at 5pm-6.30pm on 16th June 2017.

Professor Philip Howard's Inaugural Lecture: Is Social Media Killing Democracy? Computational Propaganda, Algorithms, Automation and Public Life