Capitalism

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

Social Movements and Organizational Form: Cooperative Alternatives to Corporations in the American Insurance, Dairy, and Grain Industries

Abstract: How do social movements promote diversity and alternative organizational forms? We address this question by analyzing how cooperative enterprise was affected by the Grange—a leading anticorporate movement in the United States during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. State-level analyses across three industries yield three findings. First, the Grange had positive effects on cooperatives and mutuals during the nineteenth-century populist struggles over corporate capitalism. Second, these effects were stronger where corporations counter-mobilized to block challengers' political efforts. Grangers pursued economic organization as an alternative to politics and in response to blocked political access. Third, the Grange continued to foster cooperatives even as populist revolts waned. It did so, however, by buffering cooperatives from problems of group heterogeneity and population change, rendering them less dependent on supportive communities and specific economic conditions. These findings advance research at the movements/organizations interface by documenting movement effects and by isolating different causal pathways through which mobilization, counter- mobilization, and political opportunity shape economic organization. The results also provide economic sociology with new evidence on how social structure moderates economic forces, and help revise institutional analyses of American capitalism by showing how cooperatives emerged as significant, rather than aberrant, elements of the U.S. economy.

Democracy and Capitalism: Property, Community, and the Contradictions of Modern Social Thought

Abstract: 1. Present: politics, economics, and democracy 2. Past: citizens, property, and the clash of rights 3. Economy: the political foundations of production and exchange 4. Structure: the mosaic of domination 5. Action: learning and choosing 6. Community: language, solidarity, and power 7. Future: postliberal democracy

From shareholder value to present-day capitalism

Abstract: This article introduces a journal special issue which examines how shareholder value and financialization have changed priorities and behaviours in present-day capitalism. This article opens the debate by reviewing three key issues: first, it considers the impact of shareholder value on national capitalisms in France, Germany and the USA; second, it analyses the effects of financialization on corporate strategy and sectoral performance; and, third, it reviews current conjectures about a finance-led macroeconomy and the possibility of a wealth-based growth regime.

Expanding and Elaborating the Concept of Academic Capitalism

Abstract: In our recent book, Academic Capitalism: Politics, Policies and the Entrepreneurial University (Slaughter and Leslie, 1997), we used the term ‘academic capitalism’ to define the way public research universities were responding to neoliberal tendencies to treat higher education policy as a subset of economic policy (Slaughter and Rhoades, 2000). In this policy environment faculty and professional staff increasingly must expend their human capital stocks in competitive environments. The implication is that some university employees are simultaneously employed by the public sector and are increasingly autonomous of it. They are academics who act as capitalists from within the public sector: they are state-subsidized entrepreneurs.1 Academic capitalism deals with market and market-like behaviors on the part of universities and faculty. Market-like behaviors refer to institutional and faculty competition for monies, whether these are from external grants and contracts, endowment funds, university–industry partnerships, institutional investment in professors’ spin-off companies, student tuition and fees, or some other revenue-generating activity. What makes these activities market-like is that they involve competition for funds from external resource providers. If institutions and faculty are not successful, there is no bureaucratic recourse; they do without. Market behaviors refer to for-profit activity on the part of institutions, activity such as patenting and subsequent royalty and licensing agreements, spin-off companies, arms-length corporations (corporations that are related to universities in terms of personnel and goals, but are chartered legally as separate entities), and university–industry partnerships when these have a profit component. Market activity also covers more mundane operations, such as the sale of products and services from educational endeavors, for example logos and sports paraphernalia, profit-sharing with food services and bookstores and the like. Volume 8(2): 154–161 Copyright © 2001 SAGE (London, Thousand Oaks, CA and New Delhi)

Education and the Rise of the Global Economy

Abstract: Joel Spring investigates the role of educational policy in the evolving global economy, and the consequences of school systems around the world adapting to meet the needs of international corporations. The new global model for education addresses problems of technological change, the quick exchange of capital, and free markets; policies to resolve these problems include "lifelong learning," "learning societies," international and national accreditation of work skills; international and national standards and tests; school choice; multiculturalism; and economic nationalism. The distinctive contribution Spring makes is to offer an original interpretive framework for examining and understanding the interconnections among education, imperialism and colonialism, and the rise of the global economy. He offers a unique comparison of the educational policies of the World Bank, the United Nations, the European Union, and the Organization for Economic Development and Cooperation. Additionally, he provides and weaves together important historical and current information on education in the context of the expansion of international capitalism; much of this information, gathered from many diverse sources, is otherwise not easily available to readers of this book. In the concluding chapters of the volume, Spring presents a thoughtful analysis and a powerful argument emphasizing the importance of human rights education in a global economy. This volume is a sequel to Spring's earlier book, Education and the Rise of the Corporate State (1972), continuing the work he has been engaged in since the 1970s to describe and analyze the relationship between political, economic, and historical forces and educational policy.