Capitalism

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

Goodwill and the Spirit of Market Capitalism

Abstract: This article focuses on the predominance of obligated relational contracting in Japanese business. Consumer goods markets are highly competitive in Japan, but trade in intermediates, by contrast, is for the most part conducted within long-term trading relations in which goodwill give-and-take is expected to temper the pursuit of self-interest. Cultural preferences explain the unusual predominance of these relations in Japan, but they are in fact more common in Western economies than textbooks usually recognize. The growth of relational contracting in labour markets especially is, indeed, at the root of the rigidities supposedly responsible for contemporary stagflation. Japan shows that to sweep away these rigidities and give markets back their pristine vigor is not the only prescription for a cure of stagflation. The Japanese economy more than adequately compensates for the loss of allocative efficiency by achieving high levels of other kinds of efficiency. Relational contracts are just a way of trading off the short term loss involved in sacrificing a price advantage, against the insurance. As for relational contracting between enterprises, there are three things to be said. First, the relative security of such relations encourages investment in supplying firms. Second, the relationships of trust and mutual dependency make more for a rapid flow of information. Third, a by-product of the system is a general emphasis on quality.

One World, Ready or Not: The Manic Logic of Global Capitalism

Abstract: In "One World, Ready or Not, " a national bestseller, Wiliam Greider focuses his incomparable reportorial skills on exposing the myths and the realities of the global ecnomy in terms of human struggle. Drawing on in-depth investigations and interviews with factory workers, corporate CEOs, economists and government officials around the world, he contends that the global economy is sowing "creative destruction" everywhere: while making possible great accumulations of wealth, it is also reviving forms of human exploitation that characterized industry one hundred years ago. Greider warns that if the system isn't reformed it will threaten not only our middle-class lifestyles but also social peace in rich and poor countries alike.

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.