Past Fellows at the Institute of International Studies

Alan Sharlin Memorial Award Fellows, 1999-2000

John Cioffi, Political Science: Public Law and Private Power: The Comparative Political Economy of Corporate Governance in the United States and Germany. This fall Mr. Cioffi will return to Germany for research on current developments in the law and practice of corporate governance. Mr. Cioffi plans to spend the majority of his time in Frankfurt, the financial center of Germany, and Berlin, the new capital. He will also take shorter side trips to other cities. Mr. Cioffi's research trip will follow up on preliminary investigations conducted in Germany this summer during which he interviewed attorneys, legal academics, and policy makers regarding recent changes in financial markets, company law, and labor relations as each of these fields constitute or influence the governance of corporations. Mr. Cioffi's research during the Sharlin Fellowship period will expand upon this research to include political party officials, administrative personnel, union representatives, and executives in business and finance. Each of these groups of individuals plays a different role in shaping the framework and practice of economic regulation and their varying perspectives will provide complementary accounts and a comprehensive picture of how a core feature of national political economies is evolving under the pressures of globalization. During this period, Mr. Cioffi will also continue his research on the development of the law and practice of corporate governance in the United States.

Guian McKee, History: Industrial City to Hospital City: Urban Liberalism and the Deindustrialization of Philadelphia, 1945-1970. Few existing studies have approached the post-World War II American urban crisis through the detailed examination of specific public, private, and individual strategies to address the disappearance of urban industrial jobs. In contrast, Mr. McKee's dissertation analyzes the effectiveness and the consequences of the social and economic initiatives undertaken by political and business leaders, labor unions, and neighborhood and community groups in Philadelphia. This approach places a new emphasis on the role of both local public policy and local activism in shaping the transformation of work in the post-war American city. Faced with increasingly serious problems of industrial obsolescence and capital mobility, during the 1950s and 1960s, Philadelphia's business and political leaders organized extensive, quasi-public programs of industrial renewal and hospital and university expansion. In combination, these two programs played a central part in defining the specific nature of work and economic life in post-industrial Philadelphia. Other important local initiatives emerged from outside the business and citywide political sphere, as community organizations and labor unions forged an active response to the problems posed by deindustrialization. These efforts included union attempts to restrict the movement of manufacturing firms, as well as independent, community-based job training and business development programs. The choices made by all of these actors are evaluated in terms of their effectiveness in countering job loss, stimulating promising sectors of economic activity, and reorganizing patterns of work in the rapidly changing social and economic environment of postwar Philadelphia.