Showing papers on "Capitalism published in 2007"

Golden Gulag: Prisons, Surplus, Crisis, and Opposition in Globalizing California

Abstract: Preface and Acknowledgments List of Abbreviations Prologue: The Bus 1. Introduction 2. The California Political Economy 3. The Prison Fix 4. Crime, Croplands, and Capitalism 5. Mothers Reclaiming Our Children 6. What Is to Be Done? Epilogue: Another Bus Notes

Cold Intimacies: The Making of Emotional Capitalism

Abstract: * Contents * Chapter 1: The Rise of Homo Sentimentalis * Chapter 2: Suffering, Emotional Fields and Emotional Capital * Chapter 3: Romantic Webs

Creating a World Without Poverty: Social Business and the Future of Capitalism

Abstract: In the last two decades, free markets have swept the globe. But traditional capitalism has been unable to solve problems like inequality and poverty. In Muhammad Yunus' groundbreaking sequel to Banker to the Poor, he outlines the concept of social business--business where the creative vision of the entrepreneur is applied to today's most serious problems: feeding the poor, housing the homeless, healing the sick, and protecting the planet. Creating a World Without Poverty reveals the next phase in a hopeful economic and social revolution that is already underway.

Spaces of Global Capitalism: Towards a Theory of Uneven Geographical Development

Abstract: to the rise of a neoliberalism which has both commoditized otherness and stripped away the buffers of the welfare state. The introduction establishes that, although Brennan critiques the formation of \"theory,\" he is not dismissive of theory in principle; he actually is deeply invested in a trajectory of theory, embodied in the Hegel-Marx line: Bakhtin, Lukács, Benjamin, Adorno, Marcuse, Gramsci, Bourdieu, and Said. Lamenting the predominance of the Nietszchèan line—in which he includes Heidegger, Deleuze and Guattari, Baudrillard, Lyotard, Derrida, Vattimo, Negri, and Virilio—Brennan blasts the celebratory and uncritical use of \"poststructuralism's infinitely interchangeable metaphors of dispersal: decentered subjects, nomadism, ambivalence, the supplement, rhizomatic identity, and the constructed self—terms whose sheer quantity nervously intimates a lack of variation.\" At such polemical textual moments, we feel the full force of Brennan's bile at a discipline that has abnegated its responsibilities; at the same time, the polemic (as all polemics do) tends to create the fantasy of an other whose totality is self-evident and whose heterogeneity is merely superficial. What, indeed, about the politically engaged work of Cary Nelson, BarrettWatten, Michael Bibby, andMichael True, among others, not to mention the intellectuals left of Noam Chomsky, whose dissident work may share the anarchism of the academic left, but whose consequences have been real and whose relationship to dissenting movements in the US and throughout the world is undeniable? (Chomsky gets three short mentions in this book.) Brennan's relative exclusion of contemporary examples of Gramscian intellectuals actively engaged with social movements makes Wars ofPosition a difficult book, because it offers few models for emerging from the malaise that the academy seems to Detailfrom cover suffer from. Yet Brennan is clearly at his best when he is arguing against the received versions of theorists, engaging his Hegelian impulses to reverse the unexamined consensus. His critical reassessment of Orientalism (1978), for example, suggests that Said's foundational text on the Western fantasies of the Middle East has been misread as a Foucauldian project; rather, for Brennan, while Orientalism clearly borrows heavily from Foucault, Said ultimately is arguing against the poststructuralist doxa that underwrite much of contemporary postcolonial theory. Said, in Brennan's reading, is a crucial figure not only for his resistance to the sacred cows of poststructuralism, but also for his embrace of the public responsibilities of the intellectual.

Moral Views of Market Society

Abstract: Upon what kind of moral order does capitalism rest? Conversely, does the market give rise to a distinctive set of beliefs, habits, and social bonds? These questions are certainly as old as social science itself. In this review, we evaluate how today’s scholarship approaches the relationship between markets and the moral order. We begin with Hirschman’s characterization of the three rival views of the market as civilizing, destructive, or feeble in its effects on society. We review recent work at the intersection of sociology, economics, and political economy and show that these views persist both as theories of market society and moral arguments about it. We then argue that a fourth view, which we call moralized markets, has become increasingly prominent in economic sociology. This line of research sees markets as cultural phenomena and moral projects in their own right, and seeks to study the mechanisms and techniques by which such projects are realized in practice.

Good Capitalism, Bad Capitalism, and the Economics of Growth and Prosperity

Abstract: Imagine this: a mere century ago, the purchasing power of an average American was one-tenth of what it is today. But what will it take to sustain that growth through the next century? And what can be said about economic growth to aspiring nations seeking higher standards of living for their citizens? In Good Capitalism, Bad Capitalism, and the Economics of Growth and Prosperity, William J. Baumol, Robert E. Litan, and Carl J. Schramm contend that the answers to these questions lie within capitalist economies, though many observers make the mistake of believing that capitalism is of a single kind. Writing in an accessible style, the authors dispel that myth, documenting four different varieties of capitalism, some Good and some Bad for growth. The authors identify the conditions that characterize Good Capitalism the right blend of entrepreneurial and established firms, which can vary among countries as well as the features of Bad Capitalism. They examine how countries catching up to the United States can move faster toward the economic frontier, while laying out the need for the United States itself to stick to and reinforce the recipe for growth that has enabled it to be the leading economic force in the world. This pathbreaking book is a must read for anyone who cares about global growth and how to ensure America's economic future.

Beyond Varieties of Capitalism: Conflict, Contradictions, and Complementarities in the European Economy

Abstract: Since the early 1990s, Europe's economies have been facing several new challenges: the 1992 single market programme, the collapse of the Berlin wall and eastward enlargement, and monetary unification. Building on the influential Varieties of Capitalism (VoC) perspective, first elaborated in detail in the book Varieties of Capitalism (OUP, 2001), this book critically analyzes these developments in the European political economy and their effects on the continental European economies. Leading political economists from Europe and the US debate how VoC can help understand the political-economic challenges that Europe is facing today and how understanding these new challenges can in turn enrich and enhance the VoC perspective. Thematically, the contributions to this volume are organised in four sections: * how the macro-economics of EMU influenced different European models of capitalism, * how the Single Market programme was received in the different institutional regimes in European capitalism, * how welfare and labour market reforms are debated and implemented, * how European capitalism travelled east after 1989. Preceding this is a spirited defence of the VoC approach by Peter Hall, and an introduction from the volume editors, considering the approach, and proposing extensions and amendments. This book demonstrates that the VoC approach remains, as the editors put it in their introduction, a rich seam to mine, capable of accommodating new developments, and theoretically flexible enough to branch out into new arguments.

Introduction to From Higher Aims to Hired Hands The Social Transformation of American Business Schools and the Unfulfilled Promise of Management as a Profession

Abstract: Is management a profession? Should it be? Can it be? This major work of social and intellectual history reveals how such questions have driven business education and shaped American management and society for more than a century. The book is also a call for reform. Rakesh Khurana shows that university-based business schools were founded to train a professional class of managers in the mold of doctors and lawyers but have effectively retreated from that goal, leaving a gaping moral hole at the center of business education and perhaps in management itself. Khurana begins in the late nineteenth century, when members of an emerging managerial elite, seeking social status to match the wealth and power they had accrued, began working with major universities to establish graduate business education programs paralleling those for medicine and law. Constituting business as a profession, however, required codifying the knowledge relevant for practitioners and developing enforceable standards of conduct. Khurana, drawing on a rich set of archival material from business schools, foundations, and academic associations, traces how business educators confronted these challenges with varying strategies during the Progressive era and the Depression, the postwar boom years, and recent decades of freewheeling capitalism. Today, Khurana argues, business schools have largely capitulated in the battle for professionalism and have become merely purveyors of a product, the MBA, with students treated as consumers. Professional and moral ideals that once animated and inspired business schools have been conquered by a perspective that managers are merely agents of shareholders, beholden only to the cause of share profits. According to Khurana, we should not thus be surprised at the rise of corporate malfeasance. The time has come, he concludes, to rejuvenate intellectually and morally the training of our future business leaders.

Neoliberalism, embedded neoliberalism and neocorporatism: Towards transnational capitalism in Central-Eastern Europe

Abstract: This article analyses the key features and origins of three variants of transnational capitalism emerging in Central-Eastern Europe: a neoliberal type in the Baltic states, an embedded neoliberal type in the Visegrad states, and a neocorporatist type in Slovenia. These regimes are characterised by their institutions and performances in marketisation, industrial transformation, social inclusion, and macroeconomic stability. Explanations for regime diversity are developed at two levels. First, it is argued that the legacies of the past, and their perceptions as either threats or assets to these countries' future, have had deep impact on regime types. Legacies and initial choices were no less crucial for the degree of democratic inclusion, and the different patterns of protest and patience on the paths towards the new regimes. Second, the article demonstrates the importance of transnational influences in industrial transformation and social inclusion.

The Age of Turbulence: Adventures in a New World

Abstract: By pure chance, two significant books on capitalism were published within weeks of one another in the early fall of 2007. The first (The Age of Tur bulence: Adventures in a New World), by the consummate insider, Alan Greenspan, examines the inner workings of the capitalist system from the perspective of one who was perhaps as responsible as anyone for its spectacular successes in the 1990s. The second (The Shock Doctrine: The Rise of Disaster Capitalism), by activist outsider Naomi Klein, chronicles capitalism's excesses and its dark side. Each author approaches capitalism and globalization from a completely different perspective. For Greenspan, globalization presents challenges but also a whole spectrum of opportunities for increased prosperity and the improvement of the human condition. Klein views capitalism and glo balization as evolving in ways to present greater and greater threats and obstacles to these goals. Greenspan's view of the world from the seat of power is remarkably optimistic: ".. .we are living in a new world?the world of a global capital ist economy that is vastly more resilient, open, self-correcting, and fast changing than it was even a quarter century earlier. The Age of Turbulence is my attempt to understand the nature of this new world: how we got here, what we are living though and what lies over the horizon for good and for ill" (pp. 10-11). This is the third in Klein's trilogy of anti-capitalist, anti-globalist books. Her first was No Logo: Taking Aim at the Brand Bullies (2000), which

Prophet of Innovation: Joseph Schumpeter and Creative Destruction

Abstract: Pan Am, Gimbel's, Pullman, Douglas Aircraft, Digital Equipment Corporation, British Leyland - all once as strong as dinosaurs, all now just as extinct. Destruction of businesses, fortunes, products, and careers is the price of progress toward a better material life. No one understood this bedrock economic principle better than Joseph A. Schumpeter. "Creative destruction," he said, is the driving force of capitalism. Described by John Kenneth Galbraith as "the most sophisticated conservative" of the 20th Century, Schumpeter made his mark as the prophet of incessant change. His vision was stark: Nearly all businesses fail, victims of innovation by their competitors. Businesspeople ignore this lesson at their peril - to survive, they must be entrepreneurial and think strategically. Yet in Schumpeter's view, the general prosperity produced by the "capitalist engine" far outweighs the wreckage it leaves behind. During a tumultuous life spanning two world wars, the Great Depression, and the early Cold War, Schumpeter reinvented himself many times. From boy wonder in turn-of-the-century Vienna to captivating Harvard professor, he was stalked by tragedy and haunted by the spectre of his rival, John Maynard Keynes. By 1983 - the centennial of the birth of both men - Forbes christened Schumpeter, not Keynes, the best navigator through the turbulent seas of globalization. Time has proved that assessment accurate. "Prophet of Innovation" is also the private story of a man rescued repeatedly by women who loved him and put his well-being above their own. Without them, he would likely have perished, so fierce were the conflicts between his reason and his emotions. Drawing on all of Schumpeter's writings, including many intimate diaries and letters never before used, this biography paints the full portrait of a magnetic figure who aspired to become the world's greatest economist, lover, and horseman - and admitted to failure only with the horses.

Some Costs of American Corporate Capitalism: A Psychological Exploration of Value and Goal Conflicts

Abstract: Psychology rarely examines the effects of economic systems on people's lives. In this target article, we set out to explore some of the costs of American corporate capitalism and its focus on self-interest, competition, hierarchical wage labor, and strong desires for financial profit and economic growth. Specifically, we apply recent cross-cultural research on goal and value systems (Schwartz, 1996; Grouzet et al. 2006), as well as a variety of other types of evidence, to demonstrate how the aims and practices that typify American corporate capitalism often conflict with pursuits such as caring about the broader world, having close relationships with others, and, for many people, feeling worthy and free. We hope that by bringing to light the value and goal conflicts inherent in this economic system, psychologists might begin to systematically investigate this pervasive yet paradoxically ignored feature of contemporary culture.

Rethinking Capitalist Development: Primitive Accumulation, Governmentality and Post-Colonial Capitalism

Abstract: 1. Introduction: Rethinking Capitalist Development 2. Ship of Fools 3. Accumulation as Development: The Arising of Capital 4. De-essentializing Development: Capital and Governmentality 5. Difference as Hegemony: Capital and the Need Economy 6. Conclusion: Towards a New Political Imaginary for Post-colonial World

Consumed: How Markets Corrupt Children, Infantilize Adults, and Swallow Citizens Whole

Abstract: "Consumed" offers a portrait of how adults are infantilised in a global economy that overproduces goods and targets children as consumers in a market where there are never enough shoppers. Driven by a frantic imperative to sell, consumer capitalism specialises today in the manufacture not of goods but of needs. This provocative culmination of Benjamin R. Barber's lifelong study of democracy and capitalism shows how the infantilist ethos deprives society of responsible citizens and displaces public goods with private commodities. Traditional liberal democratic society is colonised by an all-pervasive market imperative. Barber confronts the likely consequences for our children, our freedom and our citizenship, and shows how citizens can resist and transcend the civic schizophrenia with which consumerism has infected them.

Going beyond The three worlds of welfare capitalism : regime theory and public health research

Abstract: International research on the social determinants of health has increasingly started to integrate a welfare state regimes perspective. Although this is to be welcomed, to date there has been an over-reliance on Esping-Andersen’s The three worlds of welfare capitalism typology (1990). This is despite the fact that it has been subjected to extensive criticism and that there are in fact a number of competing welfare state typologies within the comparative social policy literature. The purpose of this paper is to provide public health researchers with an up-to-date overview of the welfare state regime literature so that it can be reflected more accurately in future research. It outlines The three worlds of welfare capitalism typology, and it presents the criticisms it received and an overview of alternative welfare state typologies. It concludes by suggesting new avenues of study in public health that could be explored by drawing upon this broader welfare state regimes literature.

Nature as Accumulation Strategy

Abstract: A commodity, according to the classical political economists, comprises and combines a use value and an exchange value. Value, they recognized, was the product of human labour; for Marx it was measured by socially necessary labour time. Capital, he argued, was 'value in motion', and capital accumulation was the process by which capitalist societies multiplied social value through the exploitation of labour. Capitalism has always employed labour power to invest value in use values harvested from nature, and so what could it mean to suggest, as the title of this paper does, that nature has become an accumulation strategy? It is increasingly evident, I want to argue that in the past three decades a new dimension of the capitalist production of nature has considerably transformed the social relationship with the natural world.

The Financialization of Capitalism

Abstract: Changes in capitalism over the last three decades have been commonly characterized using a trio of terms: neoliberalism, globalization, and financialization. Although a lot has been written on the first two of these, much less attention has been given to the third.* Yet, financialization is now increasingly seen as the dominant force in this triad. The financialization of capitalism-the shift in gravity of economic activity from production (and even from much of the growing service sector) to finance—is thus one of the key issues of our time. More than any other phenomenon it raises the question: has capitalism entered a new stage? This article can also be found at the Monthly Review website , where most recent articles are published in full. Click here to purchase a PDF version of this article at the Monthly Review website.

The Literature of the Indian Diaspora : Theorizing the Diasporic Imaginary

Abstract: The Literature of the Indian Diaspora constitutes a major study of the literature and other cultural texts of the Indian diaspora. It is also an important contribution to diaspora theory in general. Examining both the 'old' Indian diaspora of early capitalism, following the abolition of slavery, and the 'new' diaspora linked to movements of late capital, Mishra argues that a full understanding of the Indian diaspora can only be achieved if attention is paid to the particular locations of both the 'old' and the 'new' in nation states. Applying a theoretical framework based on trauma, mourning/impossible mourning, spectres, identity, travel, translation, and recognition, Mishra uses the term 'imaginary' to refer to any ethnic enclave in a nation-state that defines itself, consciously or unconsciously, as a group in displacement. He examines the works of key writers, many now based across the globe in Canada, Australia, America and the UK, – V.S. Naipaul, Salman Rushdie, M.G. Vassanji, Shani Mootoo, Bharati Mukherjee, David Dabydeen, Rohinton Mistry and Hanif Kureishi, among them – to show how they exemplify both the diasporic imaginary and the respective traumas of the 'old' and 'new' Indian diasporas.

From Formal Subsumption to General Intellect: Elements for a Marxist Reading of the Thesis of Cognitive Capitalism, in Historical Materialism

Abstract: Since the crisis of Fordism, capitalism has been characterised by the ever more central role ofknowledge and the rise of the cognitive dimensions of labour. This is not to say that the centralityof knowledge to capitalism is new per se. Rather, the question we must ask is to what extent we canspeak of a new role for knowledge and, more importantly, its relationship with transformations inthe capital/labour relation. From this perspective, the paper highlights the continuing validity ofMarx's analysis of the knowledge/power relation in the development of the division of labour. Moreprecisely, we are concerned with the theoretical and heuristic value of the concepts of formalsubsumption, real subsumption and general intellect for any interpretation of the present change ofthe capital/labour relation in cognitive capitalism. In this way, we show the originality of the generalintellect hypothesis as a sublation of real subsumption. Finally, the article summarises keycontradictions and new forms of antagonism in cognitive capitalism.

From Formal Subsumption to General Intellect: Elements for a Marxist Reading of the Thesis of Cognitive Capitalism

Abstract: Since the crisis of Fordism, capitalism has been characterised by the ever more central role of knowledge and the rise of the cognitive dimensions of labour. This is not to say that the centrality of knowledge to capitalism is new per se. Rather, the question we must ask is to what extent we can speak of a new role for knowledge and, more importantly, its relationship with transformations in the capital/labour relation. From this perspective, the paper highlights the continuing validity of Marx's analysis of the knowledge/power relation in the development of the division of labour. More precisely, we are concerned with the theoretical and heuristic value of the concepts of formal subsumption, real subsumption and general intellect for any interpretation of the present change of the capital/labour relation in cognitive capitalism. In this way, we show the originality of the general intellect hypothesis as a sublation of real subsumption. Finally, the article summarises key contradictions and new forms of antagonism in cognitive capitalism.

The Varieties of Capitalism and Hybrid Success: Denmark in the Global Economy

Abstract: The varieties of capitalism literature maintains that advanced capitalist countries whose institutions best fit either the liberal or coordinated market economy types will perform better than countries whose institutions are mixed. This is because hybrids are less likely to yield functionally beneficial institutional complementarities. The authors challenge this assertion. Denmark has performed as well as many purer cases during the 1990s. And Denmark has recently developed a more hybrid form than is generally recognized by (a) increasing the exposure of actors to market forces and (b) decentralizing collective learning and decision making. The institutional complementarities associated with such hybridization have contributed to its success; however, these complementarities are based on institutional heterogeneity rather than homogeneity. This is demonstrated by analyses of three cases: Danish labor markets, vocational training, and industrial policy. The implication of the authors’ argument is that the ...

The State and Coordinated Capitalism: Contributions of the Public Sector to Social Solidarity in Postindustrial Societies

Abstract: This article investigates the politics of change in coordinated market econo\mies, and explores why some countries (well known for their highly cooperative arrangements) manage to sustain coordination when adjusting to economic transformation, while others fail. the authors argue that the broad category of “coordinated market economies” subsumes different types of cooperative engagement: macrocorporatist forms of coordination are characterized by national-level institutions for fostering cooperation and feature a strong role for the state, while forms of coordination associated with enterprise cooperation more typically occur at the level of sector or regional institutions and are often privately controlled. although these diverse forms of coordination once appeared quite similar and functioned as structural equivalents, they now have radically different capacities for self-adjustment. The role of the state is at the heart of the divergence among european coordinated countries. a large public sector affects the political dynamics behind collective outcomes, through its impact both on the state’s construction of its own policy interests and on private actors’ goals. although a large public sector has typically been written off as an inevitable drag on the economy, it can provide state actors with a crucial political tool for shoring up coordination in a postindustrial economy. the authors use the cases of denmark and germany to illustrate how uncontroversially coordinated market economies have evolved along two sharply divergent paths in the past two decades and to reflect on broader questions of stability and change in coordinated market economies. the two countries diverge most acutely with respect to the balance of power between state and society; indeed, the danish state—far from being a constraint on adjustment (a central truism in neoliberal thought)—plays the role of facilitator in economic adjustment, policy change, and continued coordination.

The Great Transformation of Embeddedness: Karl Polanyi and the New Economic Sociology

Abstract: Das Discussion Paper beschreibt, wie das von Karl Polanyi in dem Buch The Great Transformation angefuhrte Konzept der Einbettung in seiner Adaption durch die neue Wirtschaftssoziologie selbst eine "grose Transformation" erfuhr: wichtige Bedeutungen des Konzepts verschwanden, andere kamen hinzu. Zunachst werden die unterschiedlichen Bedeutungen des Konzepts der Einbettung in der neuen Wirtschaftssoziologie untersucht. Weiter wird argumentiert, dass nicht die Einbettung wirtschaftlichen Handelns als solche den Ausgangspunkt der Wirtschaftssoziologie bilden sollte, sondern vielmehr drei Koordinationsprobleme, mit denen Akteure in Tauschhandlungen konfrontiert sind: das Problem des Werts von Gutern, das Problem des Wettbewerbs und das Kooperationsproblem, das aus den sozialen Risiken des Tausches entsteht. Es wird gezeigt, dass die Wirtschaftssoziologie, die Wirtschaftsgeschichte und die Wirtschaftsanthropologie ausgehend von diesen Koordinationsproblemen gemeinsame Forschungsfragen entwickeln konnen, die einen systematischen Dialog uber die Disziplinengrenzen hinaus ermoglichen. In der darauf folgenden Darlegung des sozialreformerischen Anliegens Polanyis in The Great Transformation wird ein Aspekt des Werkes aufgezeigt, der von der neuen Wirtschaftssoziologie nicht aufgenommen wurde. Abschliesend werden Begrenzungen der Entwicklungen einer soziologischen Makrotheorie der Okonomie diskutiert, die sich aus der Verwendung des Konzepts der Einbettung als Kernbegriff der Wirtschaftssoziologie ergeben. I argue that in its adaptation from Karl Polanyi's The Great Transformation, the concept of embeddedness has itself undergone a great transformation. In the process, significant meanings of the concept have vanished, while others have been added. First I explore the different meanings the concept of embeddedness has achieved in the new economic sociology. Then I argue that it is not the embeddedness of economic action that should constitute the vantage point of economic sociology, but rather three coordination problems that actors face in economic exchange: the valuation of goods, competition and the problem of cooperation deriving from the social risks of exchange. I show that by proceeding from these coordination problems economic sociology, economic anthropology and economic history can find common research questions which allow them to enter into dialogue with each other more systematically. In the next section I focus on the social-reformist inclinations of Polanyi's use of the notion of embeddedness and thereby highlight a challenge posed in The Great Transformation that was largely not taken up by economic sociologists. Finally, I discuss limitations for developing a macro theory of the economy that result from making embeddedness the core concept of economic sociology.

Capitalism and Urbanization in a New Key? The Cognitive-Cultural Dimension

Abstract: critique of the currently fashionable idea of the "creative city." I advance the claim that we need to go beyond advocacies about local economic development that prescribe the deployment of packages of selected amenities as a way of attracting elite workers into given urban areas. Instead, I propose that policy makers should pay more attention to the dynamics of the cognitive-cultural production system as such, and that in the interests of shaping viable urban communities in contemporary capitalism we must be more resolute in attempts to rebuild sociability, solidarity and democratic participation.