Klaipėdos universitetas

In the article, the activities of presidents in the creation of welfare states are analysed. The main factors behind successful effectiveness in the creation of the welfare state are: public opinion towards the president, his/her individual philosophy, clear communication, and relations with political parties. The case of Gitanas Nausėda, the President of the Republic of Lithuania, with his vision of the creation of the welfare state as the main aim of governance and social rights, is presented in the article. The role of President Nausėda is significant because of the proposals and changes he has inititated. The president not only supports the welfare state, but also suggests concrete proposals for changes to the tax environment in the country, improving social security conditions and conditions for the disabled, enforcing equal opportunities, etc.

In the article the notion of “sustainable development” is analysed gnoseologically, onthologically and axiologically, and the historical meaning of the term is presented. The article is of analytical review type, which is implicating the remarks on theoretical and practical analysis of the phenomena by formulating and implementing the aims of sustainable development. Substantial attention of the readers is drawn to the tasks and aggregated indicators of sustainable development, which encompass the environmental, social and economical aspects, and the significance of sustainable development for mankind’s survival and prosperity is underlined. The authors stress the harmful impact of the extreme economization of social and environmental spheres, and affirm that only the balanced and sustainable development has the future, if we do not want to take away the resources from the future generations and want to improve the present social life and environmental quality.

In the article the importance of national cultures towards effectiveness of public sector‘s modernization reforms is analyzed with the aim of creation of public value abstractedly – on the governance macro level, as well as on meza level – concretely and adequately corresponding to the trajectories of national states development. The significance of national cultures in the article is analyzed in such dimensions as acquired status, length of service, power distance, uncertainty avoidance, contradiction with hierarchy, standpoint of time, universalism and particularism, integration, individualism and collectivism, masculinity and femininity.

In the article there is analysed the significant historical period in Chile, when after overthrowing of the democratically elected socialist president S. Allende, and taking power by military Pinochet regime, for the first time in the world history there were created the enabling conditions for the reforms based on neoliberal ideas. The reforms in Chile are significant, because they became the political laboratory for the further modernization reforms in Latin America and the whole world. Together with Chicago university (by M. Friedman) educated Chilean economists there were begun to implement the programmes of privatisation, depolitization, deregulation and decentralization, there was devaluated national currency and significantly reformed the spheres of education, health and social policy. In the last part of the article the authors evaluate the present situation in Chile and the perspectives of its development.

In contemporary society the new organizational forms take pace, which enable individuums to form some kind of common identities by reaching consumers communities. Consumerism is the main feature of such communities, which may be called as certain “tribes” with their values and they develop as capitalist system deepens and widens. Postmodernism creates such cultural environment, which forms “tribal marketing” phenomena as mobilizing different groups for the more developed, clearly defined and specific consumption. The authors in the article seek to reveal the impact of postmodernist consumerism to the formation of “tribal marketing” and the development of this phenomena vice/versa.

There is presented and shortly evaluated in the article the basic development of public administration in Central and Eastern European countries by indicating the most important stages of modernization in the light of prevailing theoretical paradigms. The authors identify three main stages – traditional public administration, New Public Management and New Public Governance, which are sometimes interrelated or contradicting to each other at the same time. New Public Governance is the most wanted and admired paradigm in Central and Eastern Europe, especially because of its social attractiveness and sensitivity, but it is still lacking more certain methods and tools to be implemented in practice. New Public Management, because of its capitalist entrepreneurship spirit, only partially changed public administration model. It was not an excellent model of reform, that’s why it is possible to point to NPM as socially irresponsible reform of the public sector. At the same time the principles of New Public Governance are orientated not only to the participation of citizens and citizens’ groups, but also to the development of social welfare, social quality, social responsibility and social justice. These are the values, which are most necessary to overcome the side effects of modernization. It is possible to draw a conclusion about this article, that by developing and presenting the more progressive principles and values of NPG, such as openness, transparency, social justice, social quality, absence of corruption and more active non-governmental organisations, Central and Eastern European countries could achieve more stable democratic development, as well as elimination or minimization of the negative impact of New Public Management for various spheres of public sector’s reforms.

In the article the paradigm of traditional public administration is analysed by trying to accomplish the critique of the model in the cultural dimension direction and by identifying the crucial elements of post-modernism which, according to the authors, had made an impact for the formation of such a model. There are also revealed the parameters of post-modernism in metanarrative theories of rationality, as the grounded technological and instrumental relation towards traditional paradigm principles by stressing the hierarchical governance, bureaucratic relations, control mechanisms, rational organisational structure and functional division with professionalism. By identifying the main traits of traditional paradigm, the aspects and tendencies of post-modernist organisations are revealed and the controversial answer to the question about the relevance of traditional public administration model is presented.

It is pointed in the article that a significant and relevant direction of new social sciences in the body of the problems of research into welfare states (in general) and in Central and Eastern European countries in particular, could be the investigation of the problem of compatibility and coherence between welfare state models and public administration models, to be more precise, examining if this relation is accidental or not. This problem of coherence between welfare state and public administration models has to be investigated empirically in subsequent research, as the author raises this problem firstly in this article theoretically.

The essence of the “Swedish socialism” created in the 20th century lies in “democratic functional socialism”. During the last 30 years, even after having refused part of its elements, it remains the foundation of the Swedish welfare state, and historically the name of the “Swedish socialism” is mostly related to the famous Swedish and global figure of the smart political powers, social democrat Olof Palme. The article reviews the features of the biography of Olof Palme and his both theoretical and practical activity opting for social justice and by creating a welfare state in Sweden by the means of “democratic functional socialism”. Olof Palme was also an advocate of human rights and freedoms, neutrality of small countries, an international mediator, an advocate of nuclear disarmament policy and a severe critic of neo-liberal ideas.