Remaking Market Society

Remaking Market Society
Author: Antonino Palumbo
Publisher: Routledge
Total Pages: 296
Release: 2017-07-14
Genre: Business & Economics
ISBN: 1135041687

Neoliberalism has been one of the most hotly contested themes in academic and political debate over the last 30 years. Given the global and persistent influence of neoliberal ideas on contemporary styles of governance, social-service provision, and public policy, this intensive interest is understandable. At the same time, the use of the term has become loose, vague, and over-extended, particularly in the extensive critical literature. Rather than engage in further critique, or in the reconstruction of the history of neoliberalism, this volume seeks to bring analytical clarity to the ongoing debate. Drawing inspiration from the work of the Hungarian economic historian, Karl Polanyi, Remaking Market Society combines critique, original formulations, and case studies to form an analytical framework that identifies the key instruments of neoliberal governance. These include privatization, marketization, and liberalization. The case studies examine the development of neoliberal instruments (reform of the British civil service); their refinement (reform of higher education in England and Wales); and their dissemination across national borders (EU integration policies). Rather than look back nostalgically on the post-war welfare-state settlement, in the final chapter the authors ask why the coalitions that supported that settlement broke down in the face of the neoliberal reform movement. This highly original work offers a distinctive transdisciplinary approach to political economy, and therefore is an important read for students and academics who are interested in political economy as well as social theory and political philosophy.

A Market Out of Place?

A Market Out of Place?
Author: Pernille Hohnen
Publisher: Oxford University Press
Total Pages: 182
Release: 2003
Genre: Business & Economics
ISBN: 9780199267620

Pernille Hohnen has written a detailed ethnography of a Lithuanian market place in the mid-1990s and as such contributes significantly to the understanding of a phenomenon largely unaccounted for by anthropologists, namely shuttle trading, and a new form of transnationalism connected to thenumerous outdoor markets that were established all over Eastern and Central Europe during the 1990s, most of which still flourish. Traders go as far as China, India, Turkey, and Poland and bring back items for local consumption as well as for retail, not only within the country, but throughout theregion. The global extension of the local market is astonishing, not least on account of the personal ingenuity invested in an uncertain business where one can only learn the hard way. Furthermore, by combining a synchronic analysis of the market with an analysis of changing trading practices duringthe crucial 10-year period of the 1990s, the book sheds important light on processes of creativity and venture, as well as on the more gradual institutionalization of trading practices such as trade routes, trading routines, technology, and forms of political control.Both traders and their environment tend to evaluate the market place as somehow outside civilized society. The 'disorderly' nature of the market epitomizes contested social hierarchies and cultural categories, as well as privatized power relations in the form of racketeers which slowly gainlegitimacy. The analysis of the market place sheds light on changing discourses of ethnicity, gender and work in Lithuanian society as well as contributing to a more thorough theoretical understanding of 'transition'.

Marriage Markets

Marriage Markets
Author: June Carbone
Publisher: Oxford University Press
Total Pages: 267
Release: 2014-04-01
Genre: Law
ISBN: 0199916594

There was a time when the phrase "American family" conjured up a single, specific image: a breadwinner dad, a homemaker mom, and their 2.5 kids living comfortable lives in a middle-class suburb. Today, that image has been shattered, due in part to skyrocketing divorce rates, single parenthood, and increased out-of-wedlock births. But whether it is conservatives bewailing the wages of moral decline and women's liberation, or progressives celebrating the result of women's greater freedom and changing sexual mores, most Americans fail to identify the root factor driving the changes: economic inequality that is remaking the American family along class lines. In Marriage Markets, June Carbone and Naomi Cahn examine how macroeconomic forces are transforming our most intimate and important spheres, and how working class and lower income families have paid the highest price. Just like health, education, and seemingly every other advantage in life, a stable two-parent home has become a luxury that only the well-off can afford. The best educated and most prosperous have the most stable families, while working class families have seen the greatest increase in relationship instability. Why is this so? The book provides the answer: greater economic inequality has profoundly changed marriage markets, the way men and women match up when they search for a life partner. It has produced a larger group of high-income men than women; written off the men at the bottom because of chronic unemployment, incarceration, and substance abuse; and left a larger group of women with a smaller group of comparable men in the middle. The failure to see marriage as a market affected by supply and demand has obscured any meaningful analysis of the way that societal changes influence culture. Only policies that redress the balance between men and women through greater access to education, stable employment, and opportunities for social mobility can produce a culture that encourages commitment and investment in family life. A rigorous and enlightening account of why American families have changed so much in recent decades, Marriage Markets cuts through the ideological and moralistic rhetoric that drives our current debate. It offers critically needed solutions for a problem that will haunt America for generations to come.

The Value of Nothing

The Value of Nothing
Author: Raj Patel
Publisher: Macmillan + ORM
Total Pages: 24
Release: 2010-01-04
Genre: Political Science
ISBN: 1429982624

"A deeply though-provoking book about the dramatic changes we must make to save the planet from financial madness."--Naomi Klein, author of The Shock Doctrine Opening with Oscar Wilde's observation that "nowadays people know the price of everything and the value of nothing," Patel shows how our faith in prices as a way of valuing the world is misplaced. He reveals the hidden ecological and social costs of a hamburger (as much as $200), and asks how we came to have markets in the first place. Both the corporate capture of government and our current financial crisis, Patel argues, are a result of our democratically bankrupt political system. If part one asks how we can rebalance society and limit markets, part two answers by showing how social organizations, in America and around the globe, are finding new ways to describe the world's worth. If we don't want the market to price every aspect of our lives, we need to learn how such organizations have discovered democratic ways in which people, and not simply governments, can play a crucial role in deciding how we might share our world and its resources in common. This short, timely and inspiring book reveals that our current crisis is not simply the result of too much of the wrong kind of economics. While we need to rethink our economic model, Patel argues that the larger failure beneath the food, climate and economic crises is a political one. If economics is about choices, Patel writes, it isn't often said who gets to make them. The Value of Nothing offers a fresh and accessible way to think about economics and the choices we will all need to make in order to create a sustainable economy and society.

Privatizing Poland

Privatizing Poland
Author: Elizabeth Cullen Dunn
Publisher: Cornell University Press
Total Pages: 228
Release: 2015-09-25
Genre: Social Science
ISBN: 150170219X

The transition from socialism in Eastern Europe is not an isolated event, but part of a larger shift in world capitalism: the transition from Fordism to flexible (or neoliberal) capitalism. Using a blend of ethnography and economic geography, Elizabeth C. Dunn shows how management technologies like niche marketing, accounting, audit, and standardization make up flexible capitalism's unique form of labor discipline. This new form of management constitutes some workers as self-auditing, self-regulating actors who are disembedded from a social context while defining others as too entwined in social relations and unable to self-manage.Privatizing Poland examines the effects privatization has on workers' self-concepts; how changes in "personhood" relate to economic and political transitions; and how globalization and foreign capital investment affect Eastern Europe's integration into the world economy. Dunn investigates these topics through a study of workers and changing management techniques at the Alima-Gerber factory in Rzeszów, Poland, formerly a state-owned enterprise, which was privatized by the Gerber Products Company of Fremont, Michigan.Alima-Gerber instituted rigid quality control, job evaluation, and training methods, and developed sophisticated distribution techniques. The core principle underlying these goals and strategies, the author finds, is the belief that in order to produce goods for a capitalist market, workers for a capitalist enterprise must also be produced. Working side-by-side with Alima-Gerber employees, Dunn saw firsthand how the new techniques attempted to change not only the organization of production, but also the workers' identities. Her seamless, engaging narrative shows how the employees resisted, redefined, and negotiated work processes for themselves.

Remaking the Rust Belt

Remaking the Rust Belt
Author: Tracy Neumann
Publisher: University of Pennsylvania Press
Total Pages: 277
Release: 2016-05-26
Genre: History
ISBN: 0812292898

Cities in the North Atlantic coal and steel belt embodied industrial power in the early twentieth century, but by the 1970s, their economic and political might had been significantly diminished by newly industrializing regions in the Global South. This was not simply a North American phenomenon—the precipitous decline of mature steel centers like Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, and Hamilton, Ontario, was a bellwether for similar cities around the world. Contemporary narratives of the decline of basic industry on both sides of the Atlantic make the postindustrial transformation of old manufacturing centers seem inevitable, the product of natural business cycles and neutral market forces. In Remaking the Rust Belt, Tracy Neumann tells a different story, one in which local political and business elites, drawing on a limited set of internationally circulating redevelopment models, pursued postindustrial urban visions. They hired the same consulting firms; shared ideas about urban revitalization on study tours, at conferences, and in the pages of professional journals; and began to plan cities oriented around services rather than manufacturing—all well in advance of the economic malaise of the 1970s. While postindustrialism remade cities, it came with high costs. In following this strategy, public officials sacrificed the well-being of large portions of their populations. Remaking the Rust Belt recounts how local leaders throughout the Rust Belt created the jobs, services, leisure activities, and cultural institutions that they believed would attract younger, educated, middle-class professionals. In the process, they abandoned social democratic goals and widened and deepened economic inequality among urban residents.

Remaking Media

Remaking Media
Author: Robert Hackett
Publisher: Routledge
Total Pages: 257
Release: 2006-07-29
Genre: History
ISBN: 1134159366

Remaking Media is a unique and timely reading of the contemporary struggle to democratize communication. With a focus on activism directed towards challenging and changing media content, practices and structures, the book explores the burning question: What is the political significance and potential of democratic media activism in the western world today? Taking an innovative approach, Robert Hackett and William Carroll pay attention to an emerging social movement that appears at the cutting edge of cultural and political contention, and ground their work in three scholarly traditions that provide interpretive resources for the study of democratic media activism: political theories of democracy critical media scholarship the sociology of social movements. Remaking Media examines the democratization of the media and the efforts to transform the machinery of representation. Such an examination will prove invaluable not only to media and communication studies students, but also to students of political science.

The Origin of Wealth

The Origin of Wealth
Author: Eric D. Beinhocker
Publisher: Harvard Business Press
Total Pages: 563
Release: 2007-09-14
Genre: Business & Economics
ISBN: 1633695972

Over 6.4 billion people participate in a $36.5 trillion global economy, designed and overseen by no one. How did this marvel of self-organized complexity evolve? How is wealth created within this system? And how can wealth be increased for the benefit of individuals, businesses, and society? In The Origin of Wealth, Eric D. Beinhocker argues that modern science provides a radical perspective on these age-old questions, with far-reaching implications. According to Beinhocker, wealth creation is the product of a simple but profoundly powerful evolutionary formula: differentiate, select, and amplify. In this view, the economy is a "complex adaptive system" in which physical technologies, social technologies, and business designs continuously interact to create novel products, new ideas, and increasing wealth. Taking readers on an entertaining journey through economic history, from the Stone Age to modern economy, Beinhocker explores how "complexity economics" provides provocative insights on issues ranging from creating adaptive organizations to the evolutionary workings of stock markets to new perspectives on government policies. A landmark book that shatters conventional economic theory, The Origin of Wealth will rewire our thinking about how we came to be here--and where we are going.

Market Society

Market Society
Author: Benjamin Spies-Butcher
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Total Pages: 279
Release: 2012-04-19
Genre: Political Science
ISBN: 1139510169

Market Society: History, Theory, Practice explores the social basis of economic life, from the emergence of market society in feudal England to the complex and interwoven markets of modern capitalist society. This lively and accessible book draws upon a variety of theories to examine the social structures at the heart of capitalist economies. It considers how capitalism is constituted, the institutions that regulate economic processes in market society and the experience of living in contemporary market societies. Market Society: History, Theory, Practice provides students of both political economy and economic sociology with a more nuanced understanding of how markets and people interact and how this relationship has influenced the nature and structure of modern economies.

Freedom From the Market

Freedom From the Market
Author: Mike Konczal
Publisher: The New Press
Total Pages: 258
Release: 2021-02-02
Genre: Social Science
ISBN: 1620975386

The progressive economics writer redefines the national conversation about American freedom “Mike Konczal [is] one of our most powerful advocates of financial reform‚ [a] heroic critic of austerity‚ and a huge resource for progressives.”—Paul Krugman Health insurance, student loan debt, retirement security, child care, work-life balance, access to home ownership—these are the issues driving America’s current political debates. And they are all linked, as this brilliant and timely book reveals, by a single question: should we allow the free market to determine our lives? In the tradition of Naomi Klein’s The Shock Doctrine, noted economic commentator Mike Konczal answers this question with a resounding no. Freedom from the Market blends passionate political argument and a bold new take on American history to reveal that, from the earliest days of the republic, Americans have defined freedom as what we keep free from the control of the market. With chapters on the history of the Homestead Act and land ownership, the eight-hour work day and free time, social insurance and Social Security, World War II day cares, Medicare and desegregation, free public colleges, intellectual property, and the public corporation, Konczal shows how citizens have fought to ensure that everyone has access to the conditions that make us free. At a time when millions of Americans—and more and more politicians—are questioning the unregulated free market, Freedom from the Market offers a new narrative, and new intellectual ammunition, for the fight that lies ahead.