Capitalism

About: Capitalism is a research topic. Over the lifetime, 27714 publications have been published within this topic receiving 858042 citations.

The end of organized capitalism

Abstract: "The End of Organized Capitalism" argues that despite Marx s and Weber s insistence that capitalist societies become increasingly more ordered we now live in an era of disorganized capitalism. The book is devoted to a systematic examination of the shift to disorganized capitalism in five Western nations (Britain, the United States, France, West Germany, and Sweden). Through the analysis of space, class, and culture, Lash and Urry portray the restructuring of capitalist social relations that has resulted from this disorganization. They adduce evidence for the claims that in each of the nations there is a movement toward a deconcentration of capital within nation-states; toward the increased separation of banks, industry and the state; and toward the redistribution of productive relations and class-relevant residential patterns. The authors also show that national disparities in contemporary, disorganized capitalism can be understood through close examination of the extent to which, and mode in which, capitalism became historically organized in each of the five countries under consideration. The lucid arguments and judicious comparisons in this book will be of great interest to political scientists, sociologists, geographers, economists, and historians. "

General Economic History

Abstract: In General Economic History Max Weber focuses on the industrial enterprise for the provision of everyday wants, oriented toward profitability by means of rational capital accounting, as the institutional foundation of modern Western capitalism. This type of enterprise integrates into one institutional complex a constellation of six factors, including: formally free labor; free market trade; appropriation of the physical means of production; rational commercial practices; rational production of technology; and calculable law adjudicated and administered by the state. General Economic History traces the historical development of each of these factors from their informal rational points of origin through the feudal era to their emergence as formal rational elements in the modern capitalist industrial enterprise. The chapters on the history of modern citizenship and the modern rational state are of special significance as otherwise unavailable resources for an integrated view of Weber's work. The new introduction by Ira J. Cohen is an original scholarly work of interest to all who study Max Weber's conception of modern Western capitalism.Theessay situates the institutional and cultural aspects of Weber's view of modern capitalism in the context of his overall vision of the emergence of formal rationality in the Western world. Both aspects of modern capitalism are shown to be defined by economic formal rationality, a type of orientation which is distinct from the legal formal rationality characteristic of Weber's conception of modern bureaucracy.

What Was Socialism, and What Comes Next?

Abstract: Among the first anthropologists to work in Eastern Europe, Katherine Verdery had built up a significant base of ethnographic and historical expertise when the major political transformations in the region began to take place. In this collection of essays dealing with the aftermath of Soviet-style socialism and the different forms that may replace it, she explores the nature of socialism in order to understand more fully its consequences. By analyzing her primary data from Romania and Transylvania and synthesizing information from other sources, Verdery lends a distinctive anthropological perspective to a variety of themes common to political and economic studies on the end of socialism: themes such as "civil society," the creation of market economies, privatization, national and ethnic conflict, and changing gender relations.Under Verdery's examination, privatization and civil society appear not only as social processes, for example, but as symbols in political rhetoric. The classic pyramid scheme is not just a means of enrichment but a site for reconceptualizing the meaning of money and an unusual form of post-Marxist millenarianism. Land being redistributed as private property stretches and shrinks, as in the imaginings of the farmers struggling to tame it. Infused by this kind of ethnographic sensibility, the essays reject the assumption of a transition to capitalism in favor of investigating local processes in their own terms.

Envisioning Real Utopias

Abstract: Rising inequality of income and power, along with the recent convulsions in the finance sector, have made the search for alternatives to unbridled capitalism more urgent than ever. Yet there has been a global retreat by the Left: on the assumption that liberal capitalism is the only game in town, political theorists tend to dismiss as utopian any attempt to rethink our social and economic relations. As Fredric Jameson first argued, it is now easier for us to imagine the end of the world than an alternative to capitalism. Erik Olin Wright's "Envisioning Real Utopias" is a comprehensive assault on the quietism of contemporary social theory. Building on a lifetime's work analyzing the class system in the developed world, as well as exploring the problem of the transition to a socialist alternative, Wright has now completed a systematic reconstruction of the core values and feasible goals for Left theorists and political actors. "Envisioning Real Utopias" aims to put the social back into socialism, laying the foundations for a set of concrete, emancipatory alternatives to the capitalist system. Characteristically rigorous and engaging, this will become a landmark of social thought for the twenty-first century.

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