Have Mulroney, Reagan and Thatcher beaten labour into the ground? Are unions a spent force? Do ordinary people in Canada, the United States and Great Britain truly believe in the so-called free market? How are the Swedish social democrats handling challenges to their consensus society? Is there indeed a neo-conservative hegemony for the nineteen-nineties?

These are some of the questions which the authors of this sixth Socialist Studies Annual try to answer. They present case studies from various countries, using the social and political insights of Gramsci and other progressive thinkers.

Larry Haiven is associate professor in the Department of Industrial Relations and Organizational Behaviour, College of Commerce, University of Saskatchewan.

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Stephen McBride, Professor and Director of the Centre for Global Political Economy, specializes in political economy, and comparative public policy, and Canadian politics. He is the author of Not Working: State, Unemployment and Neo-conservatism in Canada (1992) which won the 1994 Smiley prize, and Paradigm Shift: Globalization and The Canadian State (2001; 2nd edition 2005). He is the co-author of Dismantling a Nation: Canada and the New World Order (1993; 2nd edition 1997) and several co-edited volumes: Global Turbulence: Social Activists’ and State Responses to Globalization (2003), Global Instability: Uncertainty and New Visions in Political Economy (2002), Globalization and its Discontents (2000), and Power in a Global Era (2000).

Stephen McBride is a professor in the Department of Political Science and Canada Research Chair in public policy and globalization at McMaster University.

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John Shields teaches Canadian political economy and labour studies in the Department of Politics and School of Public Administration at Ryerson University.

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