Showing papers on "Capitalism published in 2022"

The Working Class in Welfare Capitalism

Abstract: First published in 1978, The Working Class in Welfare Capitalism looks at the position of the working class in the Swedish pattern of welfare capitalism and compares it with other capitalist industrial countries. Beginning with an analysis of class, class conflict, power and social change in classical and modern social theory, Professor Korpi discusses the development of the Swedish labour movement and its strategies of class conflict. He focuses on the situation of the worker at the workplace and in the community, on the functioning of the labour union, on industrial conflict, and on the political views and standpoints of the workers. He also examines political developments in Sweden and discusses the prospects for a development towards economic democracy. A challenging and comprehensive study of Swedish social democracy in action, carried out by a Swede within a comparative frame of reference, the book presents an analysis which is of central relevance to all capitalist societies, especially when mass communist parties in Europe appear to be moving towards reformistic socialism. This book will be of interest to students of sociology, social class, economy and history.

The unbearable heaviness of climate coloniality

Abstract: The extremely uneven and inequitable impacts of climate change mean that differently-located people experience, respond to, and cope with the climate crisis and related vulnerabilities in radically different ways. The coloniality of climate seeps through everyday life across space and time, weighing down and curtailing opportunities and possibilities through global racial capitalism, colonial dispossessions, and climate debts. Decolonizing climate needs to address the complexities of colonialism, imperialism, capitalism, international development, and geopolitics that contribute to the reproduction of ongoing colonialities through existing global governance structures, discursive framings, imagined solutions, and interventions. This requires addressing both epistemic violences and material outcomes. By weaving through such mediations, I offer an understanding of climate coloniality that is theorized and grounded in lived experiences.

Reconsidering Reparations

Abstract: Christopher Columbus’s voyage changed the world forever because the era of racial slavery and colonialism that it started built the world in the first place. The irreversible environmental damage of history’s first planet-sized political and economic system is responsible for our present climate crisis. Reparations call for us to make the world over again: this time, justly. The project of reparations and racial justice in the twenty-first century must take climate justice head on. The book develops arguments about the role of racial capitalism in global politics, addresses other views of reparations, and summarizes perspectives on environmental racism.

Cultures of Technology and the Quest for Innovation

Abstract: List of Illustrations Acknowledgments Introduction: The Quest for Innovation and Cultures of Technology Helga Nowotny Part I: On the Relationship between Culture,Technology, and Innovation Chapter 1: Culture and Innovation Thomas P. Hughes Chapter 2: The Unintended Consequences of Innovation: Change and Community at MIT Rosalind Williams Chapter 3: The Vulnerability of Technological Culture Wiebe E. Bijker Part II: The Gender Bias of Technological Innovations Chapter 4: Culture of Gender, and Culture of Technology: The Gendering of Things in France's Office Spaces between 1890 and 1930 Delphine Gardey Chapter 5: Suspending Gender? Reflecting on Innovations in Cyberspace Judy Wajcman Part III: Pluralist Histories of Science, Innovation, and War Chapter 6: Innovation, Diverse Knowledges, and the Presumed Singularity of Science John V. Pickstone Chapter 7: Scientists on the Battlefield: Cultures and Conflicts Jean-Jacques Salomon Part IV: The Adoption of Innovations in Different Cultural Contexts Chapter 8: From Prophecies of the Future to Incarnations of the Past: Cultures of Nuclear Technology Patrick Kupper Chapter 9: The Mining Industry in Traditional China: Intra and Intercultural Comparisons Hans Ulrich Vogel Epilogue: Interdisciplinarity and the Innovation Process How to Organize Spaces of Translation, or, the Politics of Innovation Joachim Nettelbeck Contributors Select Bibliography Index

The Metaverse as a Virtual Form of Data-Driven Smart Urbanism: On Post-Pandemic Governance through the Prism of the Logic of Surveillance Capitalism

Abstract: The Metaverse, as a gigantic ecosystem application enabled mainly by Artificial Intelligence (AI), the IoT, Big Data, and Extended Reality (XR) technologies, represents an idea of a hypothetical "parallel virtual environment" that incarnates ways of living in virtually inhabitable cities. It is increasingly seen as a transition from smart cities to virtual cities and a new target for city governments to attain “new” goals. However, the Metaverse project was launched amid the COVID-19 pandemic, a crisis purported to be a rare opportunity that should be seized to reset and reimagine the world—though mainly in regard to its digital incarnation, and what this entails in terms of both cementing and normalizing the corporate-led, top-down, technocratic, tech-mediated, algorithmic mode of governance, as well as new forms of controlling ways of living in urban society. The “new normal” has already set the stage for undemocratically resetting and unilaterally reimagining the world, resulting in an abrupt large-scale digital transformation of urban society, a process of digitization and digitalization that is in turn paving the way for a new era of merging virtuality and urbanity. This has raised serious concerns over the risks and impacts of the surveillance technologies that have been rapidly and massively deployed in the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic. These concerns also relate to the global architecture of the computer mediation of the Metaverse upon which the logic of surveillance capitalism depends, and which is constituted by control and commodification mechanisms that seek to monitor, predict, control, and trade the behavior of human users, as well as to exile them from their own. This viewpoint paper explores and questions the Metaverse from the prism of the social and economic logic of surveillance capitalism, focusing on how and why the practices of the post-pandemic governance of urban society are bound to be undemocratic and unethical. The novelty of the viewpoint lies in providing new insights into understanding the dark side of the ostensible fancier successor of the Internet of today, thereby its value and contribution to the ongoing scholarly debates in the field of Science, Technology, and Society (STS). In addition, by shedding light on the emergence of the Metaverse as a computing platform, the viewpoint seeks to help policymakers understand and assess the ramifications of its wide adoption, as well as to help users make informed decisions about its usage in everyday activity—if it actualizes.

Book Review: Capitalism, Alone: The Future of the System that Rules the World

Abstract: peculiar to China. Instead, industrial citizenship occurred in different parts of the globe thanks to three waves of labour unrest. Examining the effects of three waves on the globe, and specifically in China, draw lessons for the prospects of workers. Disenfranchised is theoretically enthusiastic, which demonstrates its breadth and global intentions by locating the industrial citizenship experience of China on a macroscale. Each chapter considers the changing situation of workers’ participation, autonomy and workplace democracy in the face of Mao and post-Mao CCP’s campaigns. The book may play the role of guidebook for further discussion on industrial citizenship in other regions.

Special issue introduction: what is the new state capitalism?

Abstract: ABSTRACT This article introduces and lays the groundwork for this Contemporary Politics special issue on the ‘new’ state capitalism. We start by noting that the rubric state capitalism tends to elicit paradoxical responses, from uncritically embracing the term and overstretching its realms of application, to rejecting its validity altogether. We argue that the source of such ambivalence resides in issues of conceptual definition, which have led to a number of analytical impasses. We propose instead to construe state capitalism as a set of critical interrogations concerning the changing role of the state, thereby introducing a degree of plasticity in the use of the category. We call this the problématique of state capitalism. We subsequently identify three major themes that are explored in this dedicated issue, and that warrant further research in light of the COVID-19 pandemic, namely (1) its class underpinnings, (2) its global nature, and (3) its relational character.

Stakeholder Capitalism: A Global Economy that Works for Progress, People and Planet (Klaus Schwab with Peter Vanham)

Abstract: Is there an alternative to the current shareholder capitalism model of economic development? The book Stakeholder Capitalism: A Global Economy that Works for Progress, People and Planet, authored by Klaus Schwab, the founder of the World Economic Forum (WEF), published in 2021 compellingly argues that there is an alternative. Not only is the alternative necessary but an emergency that ought to characterize the global economic world in order to protect and assure the sustainability of development and the welfare of future generations. He calls this stakeholder capitalism.

Stakeholder Capitalism in the Time of COVID

Abstract: This Article tests the claims of supporters of stakeholder capitalism ("stakeholderism") in the context of the COVID pandemic. Supporters of stakeholderism advocate encouraging and relying on corporate leaders to use their discretion to serve stakeholders such as employees, customers, suppliers, local communities, and the environment. The pandemic followed and was accompanied by peak support for, and broad expressions of commitment to, stakeholderism from corporate leaders. Nonetheless, and even though the pandemic heightened risks to stakeholders, we document that corporate leaders negotiating deal terms failed to look after stakeholder interests. We conduct a detailed examination of all the $1B+ acquisitions of public companies that were announced from April 2020 to March 2022, totaling 122 acquisitions with an aggregate consideration exceeding $800 billion. We find that deal terms provided large gains for the shareholders of target companies, as well as substantial private benefits for corporate leaders. However, although many transactions were viewed at the time of the deal as posing significant post-deal risks for employees, corporate leaders largely did not obtain any employee protections, including payments to employees who would be laid off post-deal. Similarly, we find that corporate leaders failed to negotiate for protections for customers, suppliers, communities, the environment, and other stakeholders. After conducting various tests to examine whether this pattern could have been driven by other factors, we conclude that it is likely to have been driven by corporate leaders' incentives not to benefit stakeholders beyond what would serve shareholder interests. While we focus on decisions in the acquisition context, we explain why our findings also have implications for ongoing-concern decisions, and we discuss and respond to potential objections to our conclusions. Overall, our findings have significant implications for long-standing debates on the corporate treatment of stakeholders. In particular, our findings are inconsistent with the implicit-promises/team-production view that corporate leaders of an acquired company should and do look after stakeholder interests;on this view, fulfilling implicit promises to protect stakeholder interests serves shareholders' ex-ante interest in inducing the stakeholder cooperation and investment that are essential to corporate success. Our work also supports the agency critique of stakeholder capitalism which suggests that, due to their incentives, corporate leaders cannot be relied upon to look after stakeholder interests and to live up to pro-stakeholder rhetoric.

Autism, Inc.: The Autism Industrial Complex

Abstract: We contend that, within capitalism, the Autism Industrial Complex (aic) produces both autism as commodity and the normative cultural logic of intervention in relation to it. Comprised of ideological/rhetorical as well as material/economic infrastructure, we argue that the aic is not the myriad businesses and industries that capitalize and profit from it; rather, these constitute its epiphenomenal features. In the production of autism as commodity, the aic also simultaneously produces that commodity’s market, its consumers, and its own monopoly control of that market through production for consumption of need for, consent to, and legitimacy of interventionist logics. Within this apparatus, almost anyone can capitalize on and profit from autism. And within the aic, autistic people—their very bodies—function as the raw materials from which this industrial complex is built, even as autistic people—their very identities and selves—also become unwitting, and often unwilling, products of the aic.

Immigration, integration and citizenship: elements of a new political demography

Abstract: A critical review of the state-of-the-art in migration studies. The paper centres on a contrast between established comparative scholarship – elaborating progressive models of immigration, integration and citizenship, that reflect the increasingly diverse, migrant-built societies of the North Atlantic West – and a new generation of work in the last decade, influenced by critical, anti-racist and decolonial theory, that rejects this ‘Eurocentric' liberal democratic global order and self-image. Establishing a bridge between older neo-Weberian approaches to immigration and sovereign nation-state building and newer (or revived) Marxist-Foucauldian accounts, it accents the state-power building effects of bordering, managing and cultivating ‘diverse' national populations, and its ongoing governmental categorisation of citizens and migrants, nationals and aliens, majorities and minorities, as a key feature of neoliberal ‘racial capitalism'. The argument develops in relation to wanted and unwanted migration in advanced liberal democratic economies, “visible” forms of immigration versus ‘middling' forms of everyday cross-border mobility, and the limits of humanitarian arguments for open borders and expansive asylum rights. The paper sketches an alternate politics to the self-legitimating ‘political demography' of liberal democracy, relating the ongoing colonial power of ideas of immigration, integration and citizenship, to the reproduction of massive global inequalities between ‘the West and the Rest’.

Capitalism, Cronyism, and Management Scholarship: A Call for Clarity

Abstract: Capitalism, characterized by by private ownership, coordination through markets, and decentralization, is blamed for a variety of economic, environmental, and social ills. These critiques often con...

The Precarity of Masculinity: Football, Pentecostalism, and Transnational Aspirations in Cameroon

Abstract: For young men in Cameroon, the future is uncertain. The 1980s economic crisis hampered young people’s transition to adulthood and subsequent neoliberal structural adjustment programs failed to reboot the economy. In the 1990s, the commercialization of global football seemed to offer young men the hope of not only achieving adulthood but doing so in style – by migrating abroad, playing the beautiful game, and enjoying the superstar status that comes with it. Yet flashy football “careers” are elusive, and new forms of uncertainty have emerged. Many footballers turn to Pentecostal Christian churches and Men of God for advice on dealing with the “cruel optimism” that transnational professional football produces and feeds on. This thesis focuses on young Cameroonian men in precarious conditions who increasingly harbor anxieties of becoming “useless” in the eyes of their kin, anxieties that are commonplace throughout the Global South. Their aspirations to migrate abroad and play football for a living are central to the analysis of masculinities in post-structural-adjustment West Africa. Moreover, the athletic aspirations of young Cameroonians and their propensity to consult with Pentecostal Men of God offer new insights about the nature of social mobility in the neoliberal age. The intersection of football aspirations and Pentecostalism suggests that the areas of life grounded in neoliberalism rely on the production of magical possibilities of extraordinary success, but also on the faith that self-discipline, focus, and moral decency will bring social mobility, despite unlikely odds. The trouble is that this might be a leap of faith few are able to survive.

Market and Violence

Abstract: Despite their many disagreements when it comes to the subject of capitalism, Marxist and market-liberal approaches seem to agree about one thing: the economic structures of capitalist market society have made direct violence against the person not only superfluous, but economically counterproductive. Heide Gerstenberger's Market and Violence does not contest the thesis that there has been, in many places, a decline in the use of violence in the pursuit of profit; but it demolishes the assumption that this can be put down to the evolution of economic rationality. By means of a deep engagement with the concrete historical reality of capitalist economies, Gerstenberger establishes that, wherever capitalism has been tamed, this has been achieved only by a combination of energetic social contestation and political intervention. First published in German in 2018, the present English-language edition makes a sweeping history of capitalist violence by one of the preeminent theorists of capitalist society working today available to a wider readership.

The state in global capitalism before and after the Covid-19 crisis

Abstract: ABSTRACT The Covid-19 crisis has once again brought the role of the state in the capitalist economy to the fore. Rather than viewing this as a ‘return of the state’, this article conceptualises the current dynamic in terms of a reconfiguration of the roles the state plays, distinguishing between a market-creating, a market-correcting, a market-intervening, and a market-directing role, with each role having both an internal and an external dimension. This conceptual mapping of the diversity of state-capital configurations is then applied to offer a novel reading of the recent capitalist state trajectories of the US and of China. We conclude that there is – notwithstanding persistent differences – a relative convergence inasmuch as the still strongly market-directing Chinese state also has at the same come to embrace a global market-creating role, while the US is now also showing signs of a stronger emphasis on market-direction.

OUP accepted manuscript

Abstract: Abstract The variegated experiences of financialisation in Emerging Capitalist Economies (ECEs) require a theory of global structural transformation in which these appearances can be located. Such a transformation can be found in the substantive advancement of the internationalisation of the circuits of capital, marking the passage into a new stage of financialised capitalism. In this new stage, finance has taken the concrete form of a US dollar market-based system, while production is carried out through global production networks. The confluence of these new realities has impacted both the size and the nature of the transfer of value from subordinate regions. An increasing share of this transferred value is captured by finance, both as reward for services rendered and as opportunities for expropriation have proliferated. In financialised capitalism, ECEs are cast in a subordinate position in relation to the extraction, realisation, and ‘storage’ of value, and the agency of their public and private agents is severely constrained.

Stakeholder Capitalism, the Fourth Industrial Revolution (4IR), and Sustainable Development: Issues to Be Resolved

Abstract: Stakeholder capitalism is gaining traction among academics and management practitioners in the Fourth Industrial Revolution. The World Economic Forum (WEF) embraced stakeholder capitalism as the key principle guiding the summit’s subject and the organizations’ focus at its 50th annual meeting in Davos 2020. In addition, the Business Roundtable issued a new declaration that articulates the corporation’s new purpose, which was endorsed by 181 chief executive officers (CEOs), who pledged to lead their companies for the benefit of all stakeholders. In this context, the study analyzed and reviewed the stakeholder capitalism theory to better understand the challenges that will need to be addressed if it is embraced as a philosophy to guide corporate management in the Fourth Industrial Revolution. The study, using the document analysis technique, concludes that embracing stakeholder capitalism can lead to the achievement of sustainable development and the various sustainable development goals. However, it was revealed that there are still several challenges that are linked to the ideas of stakeholder capitalism that need to be addressed before it can become a core ideology for corporate management. For instance, the issues around: stakeholder capitalism and positive contributions; the fact that meeting stakeholder expectations may not guarantee long-term viability; the challenge of balancing the needs of companies and stakeholders; the definition of a “stakeholder”, which is not clear in theory; the purpose and character of the company and the duties of managers, which are also unclear; and there is a lack of a theoretical base to describe the company’s behavior, among the other issues that were raised. As a result, when embracing stakeholder capitalism as a major element that will deliver healthy capitalism and sustainable development, it is critical to understand these significant flaws.

OUP accepted manuscript

Abstract: The ongoing struggle of the U.S. labor movement is well known. Globalization, automation, and a highly effective employer onslaught on existing and potential unions have pushed the private sector unionization rate to a low unseen in well over a century. In the current age of financial capitalism, unions have been on the defensive, fighting desperate battles to retain their small islands of strength in a hostile sea. Or so it would seem. In his new book, UCLA’s Sanford Jacoby reveals the astonishing range of union financial activities, both prior to and during recent decades of shareholder primacy. He leverages a range of impressive data sources, from personal interviews with stakeholders, Congressional testimony, archives, and other relevant documents to reframe labor’s role in finance from that of often-victimized bystander to one of energetic, offensive player. The book is simultaneously sweeping in scope and grounded in available evidence. On the core argument...

Fossil Fuel Fiction and the Geologies of Race

Abstract: Abstract This essay argues for an energy literary criticism that centers the problem of the energy epoch as the problem of the color line. It does so by reading a set of novels—Helena María Viramontes's Under the Feet of Jesus (1995) and Colson Whitehead's Zone One (2011) and The Underground Railroad (2016)—as fossil fuel fictions that illuminate the conjuncture of energy and racial capitalism. These works unearth the racialized world making of extractive energy regimes by articulating energy's social production of race across the colonial histories and geographies of the Anthropocene. The entanglement of racialized bodies and hydrocarbon matter across biological, historical, and geological time scales in these novels formalizes what Kathryn Yusoff calls the “geologies of race.” Excavating the racial infrastructures scaffolding the Anthropocene's power grids, Viramontes's and Whitehead's georacial imaginations envision decolonial and abolitionist energy futures for Brown and Black lives.

Social reproduction and pandemic neoliberalism: Planetary crises and the reorganisation of life, work and death

Abstract: This article portrays the COVID-19 pandemic as a planetary crisis of capitalist life and analyses it through the feminist political economy lens of social reproduction. Celebrating the plurality and distinctiveness of social reproduction theorisations, the article deploys three approaches to map the contours of the present conjuncture; namely Social Reproduction Theory, Early Social Reproduction Analyses and Raced Social Reproduction approaches. These provide key complementary insights over the planetary crisis and reorganisation of life, work and death triggered by the pandemic. Through the compounded insights of social reproduction theorisations, the article argues that the pandemic does not represent a crisis of neoliberalism. Rather, it represents its outcome, and deepening of its logics, an argument which is substantiated by exploring the impact of COVID-19 on the reproductive architecture of neoliberal capitalism; on the world of work; and on racialised processes manufacturing different kinds of surplus subjects. In conclusion, the article discusses the political implications of this social reproduction-centred reading of the pandemic for a progressive post-pandemic politics to move beyond pandemic neoliberalism.

After Marx

Abstract: After Marx:Literature, Theory and Value demonstrates the importance of Marxist literary and cultural criticism for an era of intersectional politics and economic decline. The volume includes fresh approaches to reading poetry, fiction, film and drama, from Shakespeare to contemporary literature, and shows how Marxist literary criticism improves our understanding of racial capitalism, feminist politics, colonialism, deindustrialization, high-tech labor, ecological crisis, and other issues. A key innovation of the volume's essays is how they attend to Marx's theory of value. For Marx, capitalist value demands a range of different kinds of labor as well as unemployment. This book shows the importance of Marxist approaches to literature that reach beyond simply demonstrating the revolutionary potential or the political consciousness of a 19th-century-style industrial working class. After Marx makes an argument for the twenty-first century interconnectedness of widely different literary genres, and far-flung political struggles.

Reconsidering digital labour: Bringing tech workers into the debate

Abstract: The digital labour debate has produced manifold insights into new forms of work emerging within digital capitalism. So far, though, most research has focused on highly precarious labourers, neglecting the growing ranks of affluent ‘tech workers’. I argue that this analytical oversight can be attributed to a narrow conceptualisation of digital labour. Thus, this article first proposes a broadening of the digital labour concept to encompass all work entangled with the digital economy. In a second step, I demonstrate the heuristic surplus of this theoretical broadening through a discussion of the empirical literature on tech workers. By bringing tech workers into the debate, I point to the cultural, technological and organisational relations between high and low-paid digital labourers. Pursuing twin-aims, the article combines a theoretical reconsideration of digital labour with an analytical discussion of the literature on tech workers to provide a more relational account of work and class in digital capitalism.

Comparing coal and ‘transition materials’? Overlooking complexity, flattening reality and ignoring capitalism

Abstract: This article highlights the misleading calculations, reductions and overstatements of the recent Perspective article: ‘More transitions, less risk: How renewable energy reduces risks form mining, trade and political dependence’ by Jim Kane and Robert Idel. While in theory we might agree with the general claim of Jim Kane and Robert Idel ‘that a transition from coal to wind involves an enormous decrease in mined materials’, we demonstrate that this claim is misleading. This article stresses five essential points to correct their analysis and calculations in order to offer approximations that are more accurate and, thus, revealing the extent of complications and problems facing real energy transition. This entails challenging the fossil fuel versus renewable energy dichotomy; critically interrogating data and research scope; acknowledging the realities of capitalism; paying closer attention to policy objectives; and recognizing the underexplored reality of green extractivism. This is done not only to encourage environmental and energy policy taking ecological crises seriously, but also—more immediately—to prevent the misuse and decontextualization of Jim Kane and Robert Idel's claims to advance the agendas of socially and ecologically destructive companies.

Toward healthier futures in post‐pandemic times: Political ecology, racial capitalism, and black feminist approaches to care

Abstract: The COVID-19 pandemic and state violence converged in the U.S. in 2020 highlighting the uneven distribution of illness and death. In this article, we mobilize three bodies of literature-political ecologies of health and the body, Black geographies and racial capitalism, and Black feminist work on care-to understand the disproportionate impacts of the COVID-19 pandemic on Black, Brown, Indigenous, and Asian people, and to imagine different, more just futures. We argue that these literatures center relationships, enabling an analysis that incorporates viruses and cellular processes, histories of racism, power differences, and political economy. We conclude by taking inspiration from the uprisings and Black feminism to envision a more caring future that nurtures relationships.