Objections to economic restructuring and the strategies of coercion: an analytical evaluation of policies and practices in Australia and the United States

Abstract

Despite arguments about the necessity of restructuring, for many the use of this notion in government and business policy making is at best opportunistic and at worst deliberately exploitative. We explore the underlying bases of such judgments with reference to liberal conceptions of institutional legitimacy. Having noted a number of empirical and moral objections to restructuring, we analyze the strategies of coercion that must be used when there is principled resistance to restructuring. We focus upon economic restructuring in modern liberal democracies and upon the recent experience of Australia and the US in particular. In the conclusion, we evaluate the efficacy of our analytical framew..