Opportunism


Book Description

In this bold and forward-looking book, an Israeli civic leader shows how reorienting our society to make the most of "opportunity" could restore the global economy to health—and give added value to the contributions of the new class of knowledge workers. For most of us, opportunism is a tainted concept. Shraga F. Biran thinks otherwise. He shows that our present economy favors the wealthy few more than at any point in history. But such an economy is both unstable and outmoded, unable to recognize the true value of the work done by the new knowledge class, whose commerce is in ideas, not financial assets. This is why most of us have seen no real gains from the spectacular increases in paper wealth during the past three decades. Biran sees a transformative new way in Opportunism. In today's economy, he argues, the way to thrive is to create an opportunity and make the most of it. With great passion, he proposes that we as a society should establish a "right of opportunity," akin to patents and copyrights, enabling all members of society to lay claim to their ideas and benefit from them financially. Thus empowered, the new opportunists can help bring about a revolution in applied knowledge on the scale of the Industrial Revolution— and a more just, stable, and prosperous society.




A Safety Valve Model of Equity as Anti-opportunism


Book Description

Equity can be defined as the use of a more flexible, morally judgmental, and subjective mode of legal decision making that roughly corresponds with historical equity. This Element presents a simple contracting model that captures the role of equity as a safety valve, and shows how it can solve problems posed by opportunists–agents with unusual willingness and ability to take advantage of necessary imperfections in the law. In this model, a simple but imperfect formal legal regime is able to achieve first best in the absence of opportunists. But when opportunists are added, a more flexible regime (equity), can be preferred. However, equity is also vulnerable to being used opportunistically by the parties it intends to protect. Hence, the Element shows that it is often preferable to limit equity, reserving it for use only against those who appear sufficiently likely to be opportunists.







The Fruits of Opportunism


Book Description

An in-depth examination of the regulatory, entrepreneurial, and organizational factors contributing to the expansion and transformation of China’s supplemental education industry. Like many parents in the United States, parents in China, increasingly concerned with their children’s academic performance, are turning to for-profit tutoring businesses to help their children get ahead in school. China’s supplemental education industry is now the world’s largest and most vibrant for-profit education market, and we can see its influence on the US higher education system: more than 70% of Chinese students studying in American universities have taken test preparation classes for overseas standardized tests. The Fruits of Opportunism offers a much-needed thorough investigation into this industry. This book examines how opportunistic organizations thrived in an ambiguous policy environment and how they catalyzed organizational and institutional changes in this industry. A former insider in China’s Education Industry, sociologist Le Lin shows how and why this industry evolved to become a for-profit one dominated by private, formal, nationally operating, and globally financed corporations, despite restrictions the Chinese state placed on the industry. Looking closely at the opportunistic organizations that were founded by marginal entrepreneurs and quickly came to dominate the market, Lin finds that as their non-compliant practices spread across the industry, these opportunistic organizations pushed privatization and marketization from below. The case of China’s Education Industry laid out in The Fruits of Opportunism illustrates that while opportunism leaves destruction in its wake, it can also drive the formation and evolution of a market.










Meskerem


Book Description




The Crisis of Bourgeois Ideology and of Opportunism


Book Description

The second part of the book series, The Crisis of Bourgeois Ideology, and the Doctrine of the Mode of Thinking, deals with the essential variants of bourgeois ideology since the reorganization of international capitalist production in the 1990s. In view of the growing capitalist crisis chaos and a widespread ideological disorientation, the emphasis in this second part is on the critique of the most important opportunist currents of the present day. Opportunism seeks to dissuade the working-class and people's movements from class struggle and scientific socialism. It exerts a harmful influence on parts of the international revolutionary and working-class movement. Every politically thinking, responsibly acting person must ask themselves today where they stand in regard to the globe-spanning capitalist system. Along with absurd wealth, it produces misery for millions and puts the basis of human life at risk. Does one howl with the wolves then and bury the dream of a liberated society for good, only because socialism had to accept a temporary defeat due to the revisionist betrayal in the Soviet Union or in China? Or does one help the gigantic progress of scientific knowledge and practical achievements in social production to break through against the maelstrom of pragmatism and opportunism, and join in the necessary revolutionary transformation of society?