Anti-Oedipus: Capitalism and schizophrenia.

The Limits to Capital

Veblen has been claimed and rejected both by sociologists and economists as being one of theirs. He enriched and attacked both disciplines, as he did so many others: philosophy, history, social psychology, politics, and linguistics. Because he took all knowledge as necessary and relevant to adequate understanding, Veblen was a holistic analyst of the social process. First published in 1904, this classic analysis of the U.S. economy has enduring value today. In it, Veblen posited a theory of business fluctuations and economic growth which included chronic depression and inflation. He predicted the socioeconomic changes that would occur as a result: militarism, imperialism, fascism, consumerism, and the development of the mass media as well as the corporate bureaucracy. Douglas Dowd's introduction places the volume within the traditions of both macroeconomics and microeconomics, tracing Veblen's place among social thinkers, and the place of this volume in the body of his work.

Theory of business enterprise

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Seeing Like a State: How Certain Schemes to Improve the Human Condition Have Failed

This book opens a fresh chapter in the debate on local enterprise clusters and their strategies for upgrading in the global economy. The authors employ a novel conceptual framework in their research on industrial clusters in Europe, Latin America and Asia and provide new perspectives and insights for researchers and policymakers alike.

Governance in global value chains

This article offers a theoretical framework to explain how Global Wealth Chains (GWCs) are created, maintained, and governed. We draw upon different strands of literature, including scholarship in International Political Economy and Economic Geography on Global Value Chains, literature on finance and law in Institutional Economics, and work from Economic Sociology on network dynamics within markets. This scholarship assists us in highlighting three variables in how GWCs are articulated and change according to: (1) the complexity of transactions, (2) regulatory liability, and (3) innovation capacities among suppliers of products used in wealth chains. We then differentiate five types of GWC governance – Market, Modular, Relational, Captive, and Hierarchy – which range from simple ‘off shelf’ products shielded from regulators by advantageous international tax laws to highly complex and flexible innovative financial products produced by large financial institutions and corporations. This article high...

The Governance of Global Wealth Chains

This contribution discusses how ideas are powered through expertise and moral authority. Professionals compete with each other to power ideas by linking claims to expertise, how things best work, to moral claims about how things should be. To show how, we draw on a case of battles over global tax policy. Corporate reporting for tax purposes is an area where the European Union, Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development, the United Nations, large global accountancy firms and non-governmental organizations have been active. The point of contention here is what form of financial reporting multinational corporations should provide to ensure they pay their fair share of tax. Ideas powered by expertise contain shared causal beliefs, as well as principled beliefs about value systems. We demonstrate that professionals can contest the established order when demonstrations of expertise can be fused with claims to moral authority. Such a constellation is more likely when political conditions are ...

https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/pdf/10.1080/13501763.2015.1115536

Powering ideas through expertise: professionals in global tax battles

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The governance of global wealth chains

The rise of intangible assets such as brand names, research and development, patents and other forms of abstract capital such as digital platforms and data flows has confounded extant measures and concepts of capital and accumulation. What used to be a residual asset category known as ‘goodwill’ has now overtaken so-called fixed or tangible assets in the profitability and valuation of many leading corporations. Yet these intangible assets lead a double life as both spatial and temporal in some dimensions, yet fluid and spatio-temporally elusive in others. Using a framework focused on measuring (by accountants), managing (by corporations) and monitoring (by International Political Economy scholars and regulators), this article explores the longer term implications of accumulation of internationalised capital in intangible and abstract forms, and the prominent role of finance and offshore in giving mobility and fluidity to these forms of capital. The article suggests that while global value chain an...

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Capital Unchained: Finance, Intangible Assets and the Double Life of Capital in the Offshore World

This paper accords derivatives a central role in defining the character and dynamics of financialised accumulation. Under the guise of financial precision and a progressive innovation spiral, financial derivatives have instrumentalised risk so that ownership and property take a novel form. The advent of limited liability and absentee ownership in the second half of the nineteenth century marked the start of this process of transformation. At that stage, ownership became fleeting and its relationship to the underlying technical process uncertain, loose and complex. Risk management through derivatives takes this a stage further. Derivatives imply that ownership can take a form wherein there are no direct ties to a particular asset, and therefore no possibility of a conceptual link between property and stewardship. Instead, ownership proceeds on the basis of disengagement and financialisation proceeds via the construction of indifference to the exigencies of 'real' economic competition.

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Duncan Wigan

Papers

The Governance of Global Wealth Chains

Powering ideas through expertise: professionals in global tax battles

The governance of global wealth chains

Capital Unchained: Finance, Intangible Assets and the Double Life of Capital in the Offshore World

Financialisation and Derivatives: Constructing an Artifice of Indifference