Prior focus on professions had looked at how they, individually, control their knowledge. But it therefore missed a more important feature of professions - their inter-organisational rivalry, where they compete to control ownership of knowledge and access to power/publics.
\nJurisdiction disputes is critical, to move from an individualistic to a systematic view of professions.
\n\n
Prior work on the professions developed a functionalist view, which effectively treated them as monopolies operating to exclude the market. Larson's The Rise of Professionalism was the fruit of this.
\n\n
the \"characterisation of abstraction is the one that best identifies the professions. For abstraction is the quality that sets interprofessional competition apart from competition among occupations in general.... Abstraction enables survival in the competitive system of professions.\" p. 8-9.
\n\n
Professional Work
\n\"Jursidiction is a more-or-less exclusive claim. Onr profession's jurisdiction preempts another's\" p. 34
\n\"The tasks of professions are human problems amenable to expert service\" p. 35 - but which problems these are (whether of individuals or of groups) varies over time and space.
\n\n
The jurisdiction may appear to be determined by the 'objective' quality - but in fact, that objectivity can be gradually abstracted by professions in their own interests, and against a rival profession's interests. A train driver has an 'objective' task. But it is simply not sufficiently abstracted, so as to be governed by any professional jurisdiction. pp. 36-38
\nIt is not facts that link a problem to a given professional jurisdiction, but competiting abstractions from those facts.
\n\"The opposition of objective and subjective in human problems is not between the natural and the mental, but rather between the movable and the fixed\" p. 38-9
\nThe objective aspect of professional work can rebel against it - when computers change, so a given expert jurisdiction might be caught out.
\nthe cultural/subjective aspects of professional work are threefold:
\n- Diagnosis: this is constrained by two external conditions - academics policing the distinctions (upstream) and the treatment system (downstream) which lumps types of diagnosis together.
\n- Treatment: normally the more specialised a treatment is - and more measurable its effect - the better a profession can keep control over it. Treatment can be a path to diagnosis - if a treatment works, then that helps explain what the problem is.
\n- Inference: this is the subtle bit that cannot be routinised, and makes professional work accessible to competitors. It is undertaken when the connection between diagnosis and treatment is obscure. Distinction between 'one chance problems' and multichance problems - this affects how inference can take place. Architecture is the first; medicine often the second. The former are more complicated, and the chain of inference ends up being longer.
\n\n
In addition to these subjective/cultural/pragmatic aspects, there must also be the objective/abstract/formal aspects:
\n- Academic knowledge: academic knowledge is not organised to be useful, but to achieve abstract order.
\n\"Professional knowledge exists, in academia, in a peculiarly disassembled state that prevents its use\" p. 53.
\nAcademics provide symbolic legitimacy for professions - they represent rigour, rationality, logic, science.
\nIt can do things that practitioners cannot - make connections which make sense abstractly, but which would be nonsensical to the expert practitioner. Academic knowledge system ultimately gives a profession three things: legitimacy, research and instruction. In each case, it helps defend the borders of the jurisdiction through abstract principles and boundaries p. 57.
\nAcademia can make cognitive claims to jurisdiction, but it cannot appeal to the broader public.
\n\n
The Claim of Jurisdiction
\n
Diagnosies, treatment, inference and academic work provide the cultural machinery of jurisdiction. But this doesn't explain how jurisdiction comes about.
Audiences: different people have to be convinced of a professional jurisdiction. The legal system may have to recognise it; public opinion must be won over. A certain image of how and why the professional acts as they do must be maintained - to do with craft, objectivity, neutrality, etc. Things may have to appear clearer to the audience than they in fact are.
\nWithin a workplace, jurisdictions are very fuzzy. To the outsiders, they must appear very clear cut. There is a contradiction between these two aspects of professionalism. p. 66.
\ne.g. doctors must maintain the notion that what they do is very separate from what nurses do, but in fact expertise is much less tightly defined within the workplace than in the eyes of society.
\n\n
Settlements: There are various ways in which a claim to jurisdiction can be settled. That of complete control over a sphere of knowledge/practice is only one such way.
\nSome achieve subordinate jurisdiction - where they are implicitly lesser, without a monopoly. E.g. nursing profession.
\nAll settlements are uneasy, because of other professions.
\n'Advisory jurisdiction': where a profession intervenes in the jurisdiction of another. This may be the first step towards aggression, or the last act of retreat. Because it is a weak position to be in, and requires consolidation. It can't be sustained, without perhaps getting the public onside. p. 75-77
\n\n
Internal structure: the profession also has jurisdiction over itself, through worksites, groups and controls.
\n\n
The System of Professions
\n\"Since jurisdiction is exclusive, professions constitute an interdependent system. A move by one inevitably affects others\" p. 86
\nHowever, professions do not endlessly gobble each other up, extending jurisdiction further and further. There are constraints around the jurisdiction of a profession:
\n1. Limit to how many groups can occupy the same jurisdiction.
\n2. Limit to how many jurisdictions can be occupied by a single group.
\nThey have something in common with the 'vacancy model' - professions can only occupy new territory if some other territory is found, either by bumping another out of the way or by discovering it.
\nThe question is how does the system become disturbed in order to transform jurisdictions?
\n- External sources of disruption: \"opening new task areas for jurisdiction and by destroying old jurisdictions\" - new technologies do this very quickly and frequently; organisational change and new organisations. Particular subgroups, at the periphery of a profession, may attack it and offer to serve ignored clienteles (i.e. professions splinter).
\n- Internal sources for change: theoretical developments within a profession may enable expansion of its jurisdiction into the space of others. The increasing 'professionalisation' of a group may also disrupt others - as the standards or organisational efficiency of one group increases, then others may have to make way for it. p. 97.
\n\n
Mechanisms of jurisdiction shift:
\n- Abtraction
\nJursidictional attack has rhetorical elements - e.g. reduction - providing an underpinning causal framework which others then have to comply with; or metaphor - providing a way of thinking of the problem.
\n\"Reduction replaces one profession's diagnosis of a problem with another's. Metaphor extends one profession's models of inference to others\" p. 100.
\nOr claims about treatment: simply claim that our treatment is better than yours, will have better effects. This doesn't require claims of exclusive jurisdiction, but simply that our treatments should be adopted, regardless of diagnosis/inference (e.g. alternative therapies within the NHS).
\n\n
Jurisdictions are strong when they are both abstract and have a clear treatment: if they are merely abstract, but lack treatment, then others can move in; if they lack abstraction, then they are equally weak. p. 103.
\ne.g. business management as a profession never managed to effectively combine abstraction with treatment:
\n\"The real problem with business management is the tenuous connection between the various abtractions applied to the area and the actual work of managers\" p. 103.
\nOthers claim to be able to both understand business equally well, and to prescribe treatments.
\nThere is an optimal amount of abstraction: that which provides a secure boundary around jurisdiction, but doesn't end up so abstract as to offer no basis for treatment. Strength of jurisdiction depends on this optimal level of abstraction p.104.
\nHow to claim optimal abstraction?
\n- amalgamation:
", "tags": [], "relations": {}, "dateAdded": "2010-10-13T12:24:19Z", "dateModified": "2010-10-15T15:24:11Z" } }, { "key": "UWJQN4RM", "version": 20, "library": { "type": "group", "id": 28207, "name": "economicsociology", "links": { "alternate": { "href": "https://www.zotero.org/groups/economicsociology", "type": "text/html" } } }, "links": { "self": { "href": "https://api.zotero.org/groups/28207/items/UWJQN4RM", "type": "application/json" }, "alternate": { "href": "https://www.zotero.org/groups/economicsociology/items/UWJQN4RM", "type": "text/html" } }, "meta": { "createdByUser": { "id": 236280, "username": "willda5", "name": "Will Davies", "links": { "alternate": { "href": "https://www.zotero.org/willda5", "type": "text/html" } } }, "creatorSummary": "Valdés", "parsedDate": "1995", "numChildren": 0 }, "data": { "key": "UWJQN4RM", "version": 20, "itemType": "book", "title": "Pinochet's Economists: The Chicago School in Chile", "creators": [ { "creatorType": "author", "firstName": "Juan Gabriel", "lastName": "Valdés" } ], "abstractNote": "", "series": "", "seriesNumber": "", "volume": "", "numberOfVolumes": "", "edition": "", "date": "1995", "publisher": "Cambridge University Press", "place": "Cambridge", "originalDate": "", "originalPublisher": "", "originalPlace": "", "format": "", "numPages": "334", "ISBN": "0-521-45146-9", "DOI": "", "citationKey": "", "url": "", "accessDate": "", "ISSN": "", "archive": "", "archiveLocation": "", "shortTitle": "Pinochet's Economists", "language": "", "libraryCatalog": "catalogue.bl.uk Library Catalog", "callNumber": "338.983 |2 20", "rights": "", "extra": "", "tags": [ { "tag": "1973-1988", "type": 1 }, { "tag": "Chicago school of economics", "type": 1 }, { "tag": "Chile", "type": 1 }, { "tag": "Economic conditions", "type": 1 }, { "tag": "Economic policy", "type": 1 } ], "collections": [], "relations": {}, "dateAdded": "2010-10-13T12:24:19Z", "dateModified": "2010-10-13T12:24:19Z" } }, { "key": "GIG2MQWC", "version": 20, "library": { "type": "group", "id": 28207, "name": "economicsociology", "links": { "alternate": { "href": "https://www.zotero.org/groups/economicsociology", "type": "text/html" } } }, "links": { "self": { "href": "https://api.zotero.org/groups/28207/items/GIG2MQWC", "type": "application/json" }, "alternate": { "href": "https://www.zotero.org/groups/economicsociology/items/GIG2MQWC", "type": "text/html" } }, "meta": { "createdByUser": { "id": 236280, "username": "willda5", "name": "Will Davies", "links": { "alternate": { "href": "https://www.zotero.org/willda5", "type": "text/html" } } }, "creatorSummary": "Eyal", "parsedDate": "1998", "numChildren": 0 }, "data": { "key": "GIG2MQWC", "version": 20, "itemType": "book", "title": "Making Capitalism Without Capitalists: Class Formation and Elite Struggles in Post-Communist Central Europe", "creators": [ { "creatorType": "author", "firstName": "Gil", "lastName": "Eyal" }, { "creatorType": "contributor", "firstName": "Iván", "lastName": "Szelényi" }, { "creatorType": "contributor", "firstName": "Eleanor R", "lastName": "Townsley" } ], "abstractNote": "", "series": "", "seriesNumber": "", "volume": "", "numberOfVolumes": "", "edition": "", "date": "1998", "publisher": "Verso", "place": "London", "originalDate": "", "originalPublisher": "", "originalPlace": "", "format": "", "numPages": "280", "ISBN": "1-85984-819-2", "DOI": "", "citationKey": "", "url": "", "accessDate": "", "ISSN": "", "archive": "", "archiveLocation": "", "shortTitle": "Making Capitalism Without Capitalists", "language": "", "libraryCatalog": "catalogue.bl.uk Library Catalog", "callNumber": "305.50947 |2 21", "rights": "", "extra": "", "tags": [ { "tag": "Capitalism", "type": 1 }, { "tag": "Europe, Eastern", "type": 1 }, { "tag": "Post-communism", "type": 1 }, { "tag": "Social structure", "type": 1 } ], "collections": [], "relations": {}, "dateAdded": "2010-10-13T12:24:19Z", "dateModified": "2010-10-13T12:24:19Z" } }, { "key": "7IQWC8SA", "version": 20, "library": { "type": "group", "id": 28207, "name": "economicsociology", "links": { "alternate": { "href": "https://www.zotero.org/groups/economicsociology", "type": "text/html" } } }, "links": { "self": { "href": "https://api.zotero.org/groups/28207/items/7IQWC8SA", "type": "application/json" }, "alternate": { "href": "https://www.zotero.org/groups/economicsociology/items/7IQWC8SA", "type": "text/html" } }, "meta": { "createdByUser": { "id": 236280, "username": "willda5", "name": "Will Davies", "links": { "alternate": { "href": "https://www.zotero.org/willda5", "type": "text/html" } } }, "creatorSummary": "Desrosières", "parsedDate": "1998", "numChildren": 0 }, "data": { "key": "7IQWC8SA", "version": 20, "itemType": "book", "title": "The Politics of Large Numbers: A History of Statistical Reasoning", "creators": [ { "creatorType": "author", "firstName": "Alain", "lastName": "Desrosières" } ], "abstractNote": "", "series": "", "seriesNumber": "", "volume": "", "numberOfVolumes": "", "edition": "", "date": "1998", "publisher": "Harvard University Press", "place": "Cambridge, Mass", "originalDate": "", "originalPublisher": "", "originalPlace": "", "format": "", "numPages": "368", "ISBN": "0-674-68932-1", "DOI": "", "citationKey": "", "url": "", "accessDate": "", "ISSN": "", "archive": "", "archiveLocation": "", "shortTitle": "The Politics of Large Numbers", "language": "", "libraryCatalog": "catalogue.bl.uk Library Catalog", "callNumber": "519.509 |2 21", "rights": "", "extra": "", "tags": [ { "tag": "History", "type": 1 }, { "tag": "Statistical services", "type": 1 }, { "tag": "Statistics", "type": 1 } ], "collections": [], "relations": {}, "dateAdded": "2010-10-13T12:24:19Z", "dateModified": "2010-10-13T12:24:19Z" } }, { "key": "DNASIMPP", "version": 1, "library": { "type": "group", "id": 28207, "name": "economicsociology", "links": { "alternate": { "href": "https://www.zotero.org/groups/economicsociology", "type": "text/html" } } }, "links": { "self": { "href": "https://api.zotero.org/groups/28207/items/DNASIMPP", "type": "application/json" }, "alternate": { "href": "https://www.zotero.org/groups/economicsociology/items/DNASIMPP", "type": "text/html" }, "up": { "href": "https://api.zotero.org/groups/28207/items/W96KSUI5", "type": "application/json" } }, "meta": { "createdByUser": { "id": 236280, "username": "willda5", "name": "Will Davies", "links": { "alternate": { "href": "https://www.zotero.org/willda5", "type": "text/html" } } }, "numChildren": 0 }, "data": { "key": "DNASIMPP", "version": 1, "parentItem": "W96KSUI5", "itemType": "note", "note": "Princeton University Press (2002)
\n\n
\n
\n
\n
Firms have three roles in a market:
\n- suppliers
\n- producers
\n- buyers
\n\n
\n
Firms are constantly signalling to each other, offsetting uncertainty. The marketplace isn’t as risky as all that because none of the actors want it to be. Markets exist to control risk, not to embrace it.
\n\n
Traditionally this was straightforward because trade was local. But over distance, “producers attention was pulled away from habitual ties to local suppliers and distributors, whether in Pittsburgh or Minneapolis. Producers’ horizon of opportunity opened up; they paid attention to a much larger and more diverse set of connections”, p. 5.
\n\n
In their different roles, firms face different temporalities simultaneously. Producers are future-oriented, taking risks when they invest; purchasers are not. This is the distinction between facing upstream and downstream.
\n\n
Producers off-set risk by sharing information collectively. The risk they face is not simply calculable risk, but genuine uncertainty – Knightian uncertainty. “At the bottom of the uncertainty problem in economics is the forward-looking character of the economic process itself”, p. 8
\n\n
- does this mean modernity and capitalism are in some tension with each other? Does capitalism actually like progress and change?
\n\n
\n
Firms don’t sit in a market, they constitute it in their behaviour and signalling. Conventional economics presumes perfect competition. “Orthodox economic theory has yet to deal effectively with the three roles in upstream-downstream flows”, p. 9
\n\n
Notions of quality, reputation, hierarchy are co-created in the market process. They don’t exist independently of the market. The market helps dictate what constitutes quality.
\n\n
Firms face both their local social context and the larger system at the same time. “These human actors are oriented to their local contexts and yet also more indirectly and abstractly they coordinate through common forms held across larger scope”, p. 11
\n\n
\n
White’s agenda is the modelling of the social contingencies that economic sociologists have identified, but been too timid to systematise. Economic sociologists traditionally throw grit into economic models, but never show that the grit is actually a necessary feature of economic life. Quality and brand loyalty are not accidents, but necessary constructs!
\n\n
Economists like to study the behaviour of firms, while taking the market as a given; or to study the behaviour of markets while taking firms as a given. But they never study the two as a co-creating system.
\n- structures have agency, and agents are structural.
\n\n
Competitive behaviour is also a form of cooperation because it creates signals. “This rivalry profile guides each producer to its optimising choice and continues to guide its subsequent choices and those of its peers”, p. 28.
\n\n
“A signal is observable, and a market builds only around observables”, p. 30 Entrepreneurs receive their signals from outside of the marketplace, when they see disjunctures. [issue about externalities in Callon]
\n\n
\n
Real, Knightian uncertainty is deliberately replaced by market risk. Quality differentiation then develops to alleviate uncertainty. Quality is a mutually recognised metric, which benefits both producers and buyers. It emerges out of market relationships, it does not precede them; save where a trade association intervenes, it is a fluid category.
\n\n
Even the supposedly independent benchmarks of quality only emerge when something is already in a marketplace – e.g. consumer magazines do not rank things before they are in a market.
\n\n
Guilds intervene where there is the threat of ‘unravelling’ – where the various tiers of quality threaten to become disentangled. This is usually caused by the threat of a new-comer aiming for high volume, low quality.
\n\n
\n
Spence: the cost to the producer of emitting signals on quality falls as quality rises, e.g. diamond-sellers don’t need to advertise; top knowledge workers don’t depend on qualifications. But “Spence presupposes independent minds as originators rather than by-products from, and brokers for, the interactive social constructions”, p. 101 [he splits the market from its actor-creators].
\n\n
Other signals of quality can exist such as location – location forces people to pay for entry, therefore pushing their quality up. Quality and price are co-created.
\n\n
\n
“Knowing oneself, and being known, to be in a given market is the single most important aspect of getting established in business”, p. 121.
\n\n
Social behaviour then entrenches these epi-phenomenal boundaries and identities. E.g. the Scottish knitwear industry is a homogeneous market primarily in terms of history and constructed identity. Not in terms of its operations (cf Porac et al)
\n\n
“Market boundaries are socially constructed around a collective cognitive model that summarises typical organisational forms within an industry. This model is produced when firms observe each others’ actions and define unique product positions in relation to one another”, p. 123.
\n\n
Social network ties need to be expanded to include cognitive perceptions – i.e. whether I believe myself to be part of this network. [problem is that then ‘community’ and ‘society’ are also social networks]. “A market builds and identity that is quite as binding upon its constituent firms as is authority within a clan or bureaucracy”, p. 201
\n\n
\n
To constitute a market, firms need to be reasonably clustered on quality and limited in number.
\n\n
Markets compete with each other:
\n“Substitutability is… an issue not only within a market but also between markets, especially those that share similar, structurally equivalent locations in the networks of a production economy”, p. 128
\n\n
Different markets are at different levels of substitutability. Only where substitutability between markets is complete does a market identity disappear.
\n- contra Adorno et al, capitalism does preserve different degrees of difference, because otherwise it would end up with one firm producing one thing. It is not all about exchange.
\n\n
\n
“”Supply equals demand” sinks to the level of bromide. It becomes recognised as an inert tautology”, p. 152. Because supply and demand are one and the same thing…
\n\n
\n
Embeddedness: when firms relate to other firms, they do so in the expectation of further ties being created. Social relationships are always already in society. “The crux is that any social ties is as much a projection as a record. To participate in a ties is to be enmeshed, to know of further warranties and entailments which justify and require further ties to some of those ties to your alter”, p. 203
\n\n
There is no primary unit of analysis in this. Network analysis tends to privilege the individual or the firm… but parameter sizes are constructed, “a cultural articulation of the situation”, p. 205
\n\n
The market space is simply “a more abstract sort of social space, which is a by-product of greater freedom of connection together with less freedom of valuation… Both modes of network do share in a continuing elision of ordinary geographical space” p. 205
\n\n
Embedding is all about sub-clauses: the way that a day is part of a week, and a week is part of a month…
\n\n
\n
Decoupling: producers will prefer to repeat their custom time and again. No firm actively wants to produce uncertainty. “However some firms may court or force changes, or new actors may appear, perhaps from abroad, or technology may twitch, or the environment may shift”, p. 207
\n\n
Disruption in a market is more likely when both ends of a tie are facing each other [such as Dell and its suppliers?]. Where all actors are facing upstream or all facing downstream, this is unlikely to become disruptive.
\n\n
A market exists where firms are embedded in it, but with the option of decoupling. “There emerges a collective identity, associated with, rather than opposed to, decoupling” p. 215
\n\n
“Decoupling is essential to the paradoxical duality of markets and firms as being embedded in tangible networks among concrete actors while also being actors with scripts for relations that are transposable and interpretable”, p. 215
\n\n
Markets can decouple far more easily than firms. Ties between markets are tiny in comparison to ties within markets. Agricultural markets have very few ties with toy markets, for instance. “The ties between markets tend toward local clustering, corresponding to cliques in human terms”, cf Sassen and the Global City.
\n\n
Using Watts’s small worlds dictum, one or two random ties between markets could make a ‘small world’, and introduce far greater stability. Stability is therefore dependent on a strange compromise between connectivity and decoupling.
\n- “identity as a production economy requires a degree of disjunction and disorder in processes and structure linking constituents”, p. 220
\n\n
\n
Perfect competition would actually be a flawed economic model, because it would prevent the construction of variations in quality that makes markets possible,
\n\n
“The assumptions of perfect competition are hard to square with the existence of markets that have distinct identities”, p. 222
\n\n
Without differentiation on quality, there could be no signalling. No reason to chose x over y, other than cost. No recognition given to the fact that commitment is a necessary component of a production market, and de-coupling is then the exception. The heterogeneity of products is what makes markets possible – economists know that they are missing something, but won’t see that this is it!
\n\n
The main difference between economics and economic sociology is awareness of social constructions. Investors are operating according to a “commonly constituted phenomenology rather than the world that economists portray” p. 249
\n\n
\n
White describes his approach as Erving Goffman and Gary Becker combined. Bounded rationality plus pursuit of optimality.
\n\n
White claims that everything in his approach is social. The economics of information attempts to introduce cognition and individual psychology – but where does information come from, if not from networks.
\n\n
In addition to this, our interpretation of signals and information and consequent behaviour are dependent on others. All social mechanisms are mediated by discourse – business has traditionally relied on accounting.
\n\n
The cultural function of markets is to enable strangers to interact without any prior shared ritual. The higher the linguistic overlap between markets, the more substitutable they are
\n- so markets have an interest in preserving heterogeneity to survive. Does Europe want to become more integrated with China, or would it rather they remained ‘other’?
\n\n
This still all requires legitimation…
", "tags": [], "relations": {}, "dateAdded": "2010-10-13T12:24:19Z", "dateModified": "2010-10-13T12:24:19Z" } }, { "key": "GQT9U44U", "version": 1, "library": { "type": "group", "id": 28207, "name": "economicsociology", "links": { "alternate": { "href": "https://www.zotero.org/groups/economicsociology", "type": "text/html" } } }, "links": { "self": { "href": "https://api.zotero.org/groups/28207/items/GQT9U44U", "type": "application/json" }, "alternate": { "href": "https://www.zotero.org/groups/economicsociology/items/GQT9U44U", "type": "text/html" }, "up": { "href": "https://api.zotero.org/groups/28207/items/6MJUEETP", "type": "application/json" } }, "meta": { "createdByUser": { "id": 236280, "username": "willda5", "name": "Will Davies", "links": { "alternate": { "href": "https://www.zotero.org/willda5", "type": "text/html" } } }, "numChildren": 0 }, "data": { "key": "GQT9U44U", "version": 1, "parentItem": "6MJUEETP", "itemType": "note", "note": "London: Sage (2005)
\n\n
\n
\n
\n
\n
Capitalism is not a system, except to a small relative extent. It is enchanted and mysterious. There are four methodological ways of appreciating this properly.
\n\n
\n
\n
We must equally seek to avoid:
\n\n
This book looks at the ‘cultural circuit of capitalism’. Consultancies, gurus and business schools produce “A continual critique of capitalism, a feedback loop which is intended to keep capitalism surfing along the edge of its own contradictions” p. 6
\n\n
Meanwhile new forms of commodity are emerging: the experience economy, brands, objects which are intelligent; new spatial forms. All of this requires new technologies for ordering and delivering things through time and space.
\n\n
“Mass moral engineering” is needed to enable all of this to link up an work smoothly, p. 10.
\n\n
\n
Most academics have now either forgotten about capitalism or choose to ignore it most of the time. Why is this?
\n\n
\n
Business has become obsessed with information; it has become academic. Universities, meanwhile, are no longer Platonist institutions, but sit in amidst the marketplace. The agendas of academia and business have become overlapping; they face similar theoretical questions
\n\n
“A new managerial discourse is changing the shape of the world economy as much as the changing shape of the world economy is changing it” p. 30.
\n\n
Between WWII and the collapse of Bretton Woods (and especially fall of Berlin Wall), global capitalism was organised with fixed rules: “the world was an organised place, made up of carefully closed-off space which could be rationally appropriated and controlled” p. 31.
\n\n
Six things changed:
\n\n
These have caused businesses to develop new languages: flows; acceleration; tacit knowledge; everything in the present participle (pushing, making, working…); psychological motivation strategies.
\n\n
Producing these languages is the job of business gurus, consultancies and business schools. They produce fads, and distribute them via:
\n\n
\n
\n
\n
Thrift is against the idea of a single triumphant model of capitalism. Now that it is everywhere, we can see quite how uncertain it is. Organisations deal with this fact through the development of theory – theory lies within capitalism, not outside of it.
\n\n
“No one can deny that political economy, and then economics, have been important through recent history, but I am not at all sure how important they were or are in business. Where they are important is as discursive elements of state governmentalities, justifying state action in producing areas which the state enacts as ‘economic’” p. 77
\n\n
\n
e.g. the balanced-scorecard approach, which translates soft indicators into hard ones.
\n\n
Capitalist theory is practical, about solving problems. But it has now also become reflexive. Management theory has existed for most of the twentieth century, but is now in constant churn, constantly reinventing itself, because it is aware of its own project.
\n\n
This is performative: the guru injects energy and coherence in the way that he speaks, not in what he says.
\n\n
[what would the performativity of policy look like…?]
\n\n
\n
\n
“The kind of subject positions that are deemed worthy of managers and workers are increasingly similar to the kinds of subject positions that define the worth of the citizenry” p. 93
\n\n
\n
Political space is a “space where accumulation becomes the very stuff of life, through persuading the population to become its own prime asset – a kind of people mine (in a mineral sense) of reflexive knowledgeability” p. 94.
\n\n
“Enterprise becomes both a characteristic and a goal of the new supply-side state” p. 98
\n\n
[this is similar to the discussion in Barry/Slater/Callon, where the distinction between public and private is dismissed, and the notion that the market is not also a part of public governance attacked]
\n\n
\n
\n
The new economy was an astonishing victory for a coalition of different worldviews, that changed history and left a legacy.
\n\n
By the mid-90s, the ‘new economy’ was a brand name, promoted by five separate groups:
\n\n
\n
Management had to construct the story of the new economy through engaging people, performing, generating community. The tools were
\n- teamwork and HRM
\n- inspiration, seminars, games
\n- ideology – narratives, dress codes, lifestyles for each organisation
\n\n
\n
But this romance is also highly exclusive. It is dominated by the male artist/entrepreneur/leader.
\n\n
The media played a role in driving financial literacy and interest in the stock market. “Telling the new economy story worked, and worked to the extent that it began to redescribe market fundamentals” p. 124.
\n\n
The internet was a crucial prop in this story – “What was being described was not so much new knowledge as new business impressions and sensitivities, a new mood of engaging activity” p. 126
\n\n
The legacy has been profound and creative – sheer will on the part of its players meant that it created a great deal, against all economic logic.
\n\n
\n
Capitalism is now in a situation where, for businesses, the emergency has become the rule.
\n- new benchmarks (which are ultimately financial) push managers as well as workers into shorter and shorter time horizons.
\n- Faster business and creativity.
\n\n
\n
There is also a spatial dimension:
\n- travel is shooting up; office space privileges open/learning environments
\n- New institutions are created for networks to operate in; learning environments.
\n\n
\n
These divide as much as they unite: “For there to be faster subjects, there have to be slower ones” p. 151
\n\n
", "tags": [], "relations": {}, "dateAdded": "2010-10-13T12:24:19Z", "dateModified": "2010-10-13T12:24:19Z" } }, { "key": "JG3SD93T", "version": 1, "library": { "type": "group", "id": 28207, "name": "economicsociology", "links": { "alternate": { "href": "https://www.zotero.org/groups/economicsociology", "type": "text/html" } } }, "links": { "self": { "href": "https://api.zotero.org/groups/28207/items/JG3SD93T", "type": "application/json" }, "alternate": { "href": "https://www.zotero.org/groups/economicsociology/items/JG3SD93T", "type": "text/html" }, "up": { "href": "https://api.zotero.org/groups/28207/items/PHCUGI9T", "type": "application/json" } }, "meta": { "createdByUser": { "id": 236280, "username": "willda5", "name": "Will Davies", "links": { "alternate": { "href": "https://www.zotero.org/willda5", "type": "text/html" } } }, "numChildren": 0 }, "data": { "key": "JG3SD93T", "version": 1, "parentItem": "PHCUGI9T", "itemType": "note", "note": "", "tags": [], "relations": {}, "dateAdded": "2010-10-13T12:24:19Z", "dateModified": "2010-10-13T12:24:19Z" } }, { "key": "P84XFTUN", "version": 1, "library": { "type": "group", "id": 28207, "name": "economicsociology", "links": { "alternate": { "href": "https://www.zotero.org/groups/economicsociology", "type": "text/html" } } }, "links": { "self": { "href": "https://api.zotero.org/groups/28207/items/P84XFTUN", "type": "application/json" }, "alternate": { "href": "https://www.zotero.org/groups/economicsociology/items/P84XFTUN", "type": "text/html" }, "up": { "href": "https://api.zotero.org/groups/28207/items/764JDGRH", "type": "application/json" } }, "meta": { "createdByUser": { "id": 236280, "username": "willda5", "name": "Will Davies", "links": { "alternate": { "href": "https://www.zotero.org/willda5", "type": "text/html" } } }, "numChildren": 0 }, "data": { "key": "P84XFTUN", "version": 1, "parentItem": "764JDGRH", "itemType": "note", "note": "
London: Routledge (2004) [1900]
\n\n
\n
\n
Chapter 1: Value and money
\n\n
“our scale of valuation remains meaningful, whether or not any of its objects appear frequently or at all in reality. Value is an addition the completely determined objective being, like light and shade, which are not inherent in it but come from a different source” p. 60
\n\n
Anti-materialism
\n\n
\n
Valuation has the same relationship to objectivity as being does – it is independent of them, and cannot be inferred through empirical logic. When we value something, this is not something that we can understand by studying the object, just as when we believe something exists, this is something we must simply assume.
\n\n
“The question as to what value really is, like the question as to what being is, is unanswerable” p. 62.
\n\n
“Value exists in our consciousness as a fact that can no more be altered than can reality itself” p. 63. It is not arbitrary.
\n\n
\n
The split between subject and object emerges as we become self-conscious of our thoughts as separate from the world, but of ourselves nevertheless as objects in the world.
\n\n
When we desire an object intensely, we lose the subject/object split – we forget ourselves. This is true of artistic appreciation as well.
\nWhen we desire things we can’t see or have or own, then the split re-emerges once more.
\n\n
“Value does not originate from the unbroken unity of the moment of enjoyment, but from the separation between the subject and the content of enjoyment as an object that stands opposed to the subject as something desired and only to be attained by the conquest of distance, obstacles and difficulties” p. 66
\n\n
\n
Value is a demand or claim:
\n“I have observed that the value of things belongs among those mental contents that, while we conceive them, we experience at the same time as something independent within our representation, and as detached from the function by which it exists in us. This representation when its content is a value, appears upon closer scrutiny as a sense that a claim is being made” p. 68
\n\n
\n
The key way in which value differs is in terms of the distance between subject and object, which the subject seeks to overcome.
\n\n
Primitive people value everything equally – pure need, purely ego-driven. Refinement of taste involves narrowing the terrain of objects that are valued, and less absorption in the self. Standing back from our own emotions/needs is the path to refined valuation.
\n\n
“The value of an object does indeed depend on the demand for it, but upon a demand that is no longer purely instinctive. On the other hand, if the object is to remain an economic value, its value must not be raised so greatly that it becomes absolute” p. 72.
\n\n
Things must be between the entirely ephemeral and the entirely abundant/permanent in order to become objects of value.
\n\n
“The purpose of establishing a distance is that it should be overcome. The longing, effort and sacrifice that separate us from objects are also supposed to lead us towards them” p. 75. We need not to have things in order to value them.
\n\n
Desire may be subjective, but valuation is not – it is determined by the nature of the distance of the object valued.
\n\n
\n
--- Exchange
\n\n
“Within the economic sphere, this process develops in such a way that the content of the sacrifice or renunciation that is interposed between man and the object of his demand is, at the same time, the object of someone else’s demand. The one has to give up the possession or enjoyment that the other wants in order to persuade the latter to give up what he owns and what the former wants” p. 78.
\n\n
“In exchange, value becomes supra-subjective, supra-individual, yet without becoming an objective quality and reality of the things themselves. Value appears as the demand of the object, transcending its immanent reality, to be exchanged and acquired only for another corresponding value” p. 78
\nThings are produced to be exchanged – they become cut off from the subjective dimension of desire/need. Values start to become relative to each other, rather than the subject. They relate to each other, and inter-mingle, before returning eventually to the subject.
\n\n
\n
The exchange economy comes to appear autonomous [Marx; Tim Mitchell on Keynes and ‘the economy’].
\n\n
“The desire and sentiment of the subject is the driving force in the background, but it could not by itself bring about the value-form, which is the result of balancing objects against each other” p. 80 [very close to neo-classical economics; ego-oriented]
\n\n
The economy is indifferent to the fact that it is values that are being exchanged – it simply focuses on exchange of equals. It draws individuals out of their own personal valuations, to consider what is valuable for others. Value becomes a social phenomenon [Marx – capitalism as containing the seeds of socialism]. P. 81.
\n\n
Exchange is a form of life – isolated producers are involved in exchange, because they swap labour for a product. There is a sacrifice of one thing for another; and a concurrent sacrifice on the other side. From this formal starting point, other phenomena are possible.
\n\n
Production is a form of exchange that underlies the exchange economy. It involves the reciprocal sacrifice of labour and nature to produce objects, that then become exchanged with each other. To simply consume wild grain is not an economic act, because there is no sacrifice involved (or reciprocal sacrifice). There is no obstacle to overcome.
\n\n
Attacks the marginalist assumption that people take rational decisions (utilitarianism).
\n“The elusive desire obsessing the mind has first to be pacified by successful acquisition of the object before a comparison with other objects is possible. The tremendous difference in emphasis between momentary interests and all other ideas and valuations which prevails in the untrained and unbridled mind allows exchange to take place before any judgement of value, i.e. of the relation between various desired objects, has been made” p. 94.
\n--- neo-classical economics confuses post-hoc analysis for a prior reason.
\n\n
\n
Value and price are identical – inasmuch as I won’t pay for something if I don’t value it [neo-classical tautology]. Attacks other theories of value, such as Marx’s LTV.
\n\n
“Historical life, thus escapes the alternative of taking place either in individuals or in abstract generalities. Society is the universal which, at the same time, is concretely alive” p. 101.
\n\n
\n
--- Relativism
\n\n
Relativism of knowledge and the idea of an ultimate authority for it are not a contradiction – Kantian epistemology.
\n\n
Truths are true relative to other truths. This is not scepticism. “Relativity is not a qualification of an otherwise independent notion of truth but is the essential feature of truth. Relativity is the mode in which representations become truth, just as it is the mode in which objects of demand become values” p. 116
\n\n
- modern epistemology and the money economy are in some sort of alliance – but what is it? A coincidence?
\n\n
Truth is relative to action “We do not have any other definitive criterion for the truth of a representation except that the actions based upon it lead to the desired consequences” p. 108.
\n- American pragmatists? Nietzsche?
\n\n
Only naïve beliefs in absolutes render relativism a form of scepticism.
\n\n
“Since the basic characteristic of all knowable existence, the interdependence and interaction of everything, also refers to economic value and conveys this principle of life to economic material, the essential quality of money now becomes comprehensible. For the value of things, interpreted as their economic interaction, has its purest expression and embodiment in money” p. 119
\n\n
“The money price of a commodity indicates the degree of exchangeability between this commodity and the aggregate of all other commodities” 120.
\n\n
Money is the essence of relativity – as such it itself is not relative. It is a symbol of the relativity of values to each other. That is all it expresses.
\n“Money is not only the absolutely interchangeable object, each quantity of which can be replaced without distinction by any other; it is, so to speak, interchangeability personified” 124
\n\n
Objects sit between the pole of absolute value and pure interchangeability – money fails in its effort to render all value relative.
\n\n
Money is also a stable storer of value, which is important when there are long chains of exchange in the production process.
\n\n
“If money has its origin in barter, it begins to develop only when a single object is exchanged not against another single object but against several others” p. 127.
\n\n
“The philosophical significance of money is that it represents within the practical world the most certain image and the clearest embodiment of the formula of all being, according to which things receive their meaning through each other, and have their being determined by their mutual relations” p. 129
\n\n
We find the significance of things often in other places from the thing itself – is he saying money tells us something about modernity, rather than about money?
\n\n
\n
Chapter 2: value of money as substance
\n\n
Does money have its own value?
\n\n
“Two objects with different qualities cannot be equalised, but two proportions between qualitatively different things may be” p. 133.
\n\n
\n
“If we establish as an absolute presupposition that the sum total of everything saleable is equivalent to the total amount of money – the meaning of ‘total amount’ to be investigated later – then the price of every single commodity becomes simply the proportion between its value and the total value of commodities, a proportion that is repeated in respect of price and total amount of money” p. 136
\n\n
This is an a priori assumption, which provides money with a substantive value.
\n\n
In particular cases, the relation of money to commodities is entirely empty – but as a whole system of relations, there is real value. The relation only becomes concrete in the aggregate – all other relations between the two are subject to change.
\n\n
\n
Money and commodities have nothing in common. We cannot compare the two, because there is no external barometer. The systemic relationship between the two allows us to perform a relationship between the two, to enact one – this conduct it; it is not a given.
\n\n
Through some sense of the ‘whole’, one sits in some relationship to the other.
\n\n
- how is this different from the price-setting function of the market?
\n\n
\n
“The increasing replacement of metal money by paper money and the various forms of credit unavoidably react upon the character of money – in roughly the same way as in personal relations when somebody allows himself always to be represented by others, so that finally he receives no greater esteem than is accorded to his representatives” p. 143
\n\n
Money nears total relativity as it becomes more mediated by paper/finance. Loses substantive value.
\n\n
[gold standard still in existence; Bretton Woods changes this further.]
\n\n
\n
“Generally speaking, the less developed the economic concepts, the more strongly does measurement involve a direct physical relation between the values compared” p. 144.
\n\n
\n
Progress involves finding standards which enable the comparison of two non-identical things. Creating independent benchmarks
\n“A kind of homogeneity emerges – and not only for our feelings – between two elements which, differing in their substance, have an equal relation to a third or fourth element” p. 146.
\n\n
[competitiveness measurements become a key tool in creating comparability in international capitalism. Creating the barometer; relativism of competitiveness]
\n\n
\n
“The various uses that the material value of money has for our purposes must all be renounced if it is to be used as money” p. 152.
\n\n
A key point about money is that we eliminate usage. There is value in ignoring a usage
\n[Cocaine… admitting the alternative usages means it ceases to be money and people forget who it belongs to]
\n\n
Renouncing uses creates a teeming energy.
\n“It is certainly correct that the other values of money’s substance have to be discarded for the substance to become money; but the value that money has, and that allows it to perform its function, may be determined by those other possible uses which have to be foregone” p. 155.
\n\n
---Why money never quite becomes pure symbol
\n“The development of money is a striving towards the ideal of a pure symbol of economic value which is never attained” p. 157.
\nMoney strives towards some pure, ideal form of value which is over and above the realm of things. It is a flawed Platonism, an almost-ideal realm… pp. 156-7
\n[Carrier and Miller, Virtualism.]
\n\n
\n
\n
“Money performs its services best when it is not simply money, that is when it does not merely represent the value of things in pure abstraction… It is not technically feasible to accomplish what is conceptually correct, namely to transform the money function into a pure token money, and to detach it completely from every substantial value that limits the quantity of money, even though the actual development of money suggests that this will be the final outcome. This is not a contradiction” p. 165.
\n\n
- money involves renouncing functions, but must retain a trace of non-relative functionality….
\n\n
Concepts never quite consume what they seek to; Kantianism? Adorno?
\n“On innumerable occasions, our concepts of things are made so unalloyed and absolute that they do not reflect experience, and only their qualification and modification by opposing concepts can give them empirical form. However, these concepts are not for that reason thoroughly bad; it is precisely through this unique procedure of exaggeration followed by retraction in the formation of concepts and maxims, that a view of the world which is in conformity with our understanding emerges” p. 167.
\n\n
[concept without intuition are empty; intuitions without concepts are blind… money without commodity is empty; commodity without money is blind. Necessary antagonism]
\n\n
---- History
\nSociety is a produce of interaction, and could cease to exist without it – anti-Durkheim.
\n\n
“Money becomes increasingly a public institution in the strict sense of the word; it consists more and more of what public authorities, public institutions and the various forms of intercourse and guarantees of the general public make of money, and the extent to which they legitimise it” p. 184.
\n\n
“The modern centralised state, therefore, came into being partly as a result of the prodigious growth of the money economy which followed the opening up of the gold and silver resources of America” p. 185.
\n\n
[fligstein… architecture of markets]
\n\n
\n
“A particular stage in the process of differentiation between the functional and the material value of money is indicated by those cases in which a certain kind of money is used as a standard of value but not for actual payments. Money cannot exercise the function of exchange without, at the same time, measuring values; but the latter function is in certain respects independent of the former” p. 192.
\n\n
\n
Money advances a key modern trend – intensification of functions, and extensification of reach. It is a medium that allows things like modern statehood and modern warfare to become possible. “Concentration of forces…”
\n“Money not only conforms with this historical trend towards the concentration of forces by expressing the value of things in the most concise and condensed way; but in addition, it confirms this trend by a direct relationship with many of the instances that belong to quite different spheres” p. 197.
\n\n
“This process might be called the growing spiritualisation of money, since it is the essence of mental activity to bring unity out of diversity… The interaction of exchange brings about a mental unity of values. The spatially extended substance is only a symbol of money, because the disconnectedness of what exists as substance contradicts the nature of money as an abstract representation of interaction. Only to the extent that they material element recedes does money become real money, that is a real integration and a point of unification of interacting elements of value, which only the mind can accomplish” p. 198
\n\n
[This is Kant: money starts to perform a function analogous to the understanding in Kant’s theory of knowledge, creating synthetic unity out of the chaos of sensory impressions. As scientific knowledge become more sophisticated, it concentrates phenomena into an ever more expansive, homogeneous theory. Modernity is epistemologically and materially imperialist. Link to Mirowski and physics]
\n\n
\n
\n
chapter 3: money in the sequence of purposes
\n\n
\n
“It is only in purposive action that the self as personality differentiates itself from the natural elements within and outside itself” p. 205. Subject impacts upon object, which rebounds upon the subject.
\n\n
- Kant vs Hume; dualism vs empiricism.
\n\n
Tools
\nModernity involves a lengthening of the chain of means; ends become ever more distant from man. Tools are used to mediate. “By using tools we deliberately add a new link to the chain of purposive action, thus showing that the straight road is not always the shortest” p. 209.
\n\n
- Social institutions are tools
\n- Law is a tool
\n\n
Money is the ultimate tool: it is sheer means, to any ends.
\n\n
“Money in its perfected forms is an absolute means because, on the one hand, it is completely teleologically determined and is not influenced by any determination from a different series, while on the other hand it is restricted to being a pure means and tool in relation to a give end, has no purpose of its own and functions impartially as an intermediary in the series of purposes” p. 211.
\n\n
Tools are distinctly human because they enable us to act as subjects upon objects.
\n\n
Money has no limit of uses, which adds to its value:
\n“The value of a given quantity of money exceeds the value of the particular object for which it is exchanged, because it makes possible the choice of any other object in an unlimited area” p. 212.
\n\n
Unlimited fungibility creates money’s “surplus value” p. 213. It is not only usable on the product of your choice, but at the time of your choice. This is not true of commodities that have particular times when they can be consumed. Money has this intrinsic advantage.
\n\n
Owners of money can profit from violent economic upheavals – David Harvey and crisis; the flip-side of this is that financial culture becomes “characterless”… p. 216
\n- this isn’t really true; metaphors of violence etc.
\n\n
Money accretes as power – being unlimited in its function, having lots of money means being able to do lots of things [echoing some notion of capital here; lack of fixity represents power; all that is solid melts into air…]
\n\n
Inequality
\nPoverty: money is not a means towards choice of ends, but tied up with necessity. Subsistence income transforms money from a basis of freedom to something which limits options.
\nWealth has the opposite effect. The wealthy can stop even worrying about money as money – it is just a means to anything, and not something which delimits. Therefore money offers benefits over and above the value that it purports to carry [some notion of cultural capital here]
\n\n
\n
When the poor can buy the same thing as the rich, they don’t enjoy it as much because they experience the cost – further ‘unearned increment’.
\n\n
“The unearned increment of the ownership of money is nothing but a single instance of what one might call the metaphysical quality of money; namely, to extend beyond every particular use and, since it is the ultimate means, to realise the possibility of all values as the value of all possibilities” p. 221.
\n\n
Marginal people become obsessed with money, because it is a path to freedom – you can’t stop someone from pursuing or acquiring it. When people are excluded from power, status etc. money is the last thing they reach for. You can disenfranchise people, but they still have money.
\n\n
- snobbery? Anti-semitism?
\n\n
“The role that the stranger plays within a social group directs him, from the outset, towards relations with the group that are mediated by money, above all, because of the transportability and the extensive usefulness of money outside the boundaries of the group” p. 224.
\n\n
\n
“The decisiveness of this relationship is demonstrated by its reversibility: not only is the trader a stranger, but the stranger is also disposed to become a trader” p. 225.
\n\n
Financiers have been disliked over time because they were outsiders, strangers. They exist in a realm that is abstracted from or above local social norms.
\n\n
But the culture of strangers has now become dominant in modernity: “The contrast that existed between the native and the stranger has been eliminated, because the money form of transactions has now been taken up by the whole economic community” p. 227.
\n\n
- Don’t trade with friends or enemies.
\n\n
--- End of my chunk ---
\n\n
Our purposes tend to become less and less conscious and explicit. We grow to focus increasingly on means. “If we are constantly conscious of the final purpose, then a certain amount of strength is withdrawn from the labour by the means” p. 231.
\n\n
- Weber?
\n- Progress occurs thanks to the fact that we learn to focus on means not ends.
\n- Technological links become too complex for anyone to become concerned with the whole system.
\n\n
Money is the ultimate:
\n“Never has an object that owes its value exclusively to its quality as a means, to its convertability into more definite values, so thoroughly and unreservedly developed into a psychological value absolute, into a completely engrossing final purpose governing our practical consciousness” p. 232.
\n\n
\n
Pure means becomes ultimate ends. This means moment of action take on the character of final goals:
\n“We are supposed to treat life as if each of its moments were a final purpose; every moment is supposed to be taken to be so important as if life existed for its sake. At the same time, we are suppo sed to live as if none of its moments were final, as if our sense of value did not stop with any moment and each should be a transitional point and a means to higher and higher stages” p. 232.
\n\n
“The teleological sequences, to the extent that they are directed towards what can be realised in this world, come to a standstill not with their realisation but rather in accordance with their inner structure” p. 235.
\n\n
- modern society ends up having some instrumentally achieved version of the final goal; eg. A justice system, which is not identical with justice.
\n\n
Because it is the most abstract of means, the ultimate means, money seems to offer an escape route from this finitude. Money starts to look like the final purpose that otherwise never appears in modern life. By being the ultimate symbol of relativity, it transcends relativity itself; it renders other things relative, but achieves absoluteness itself.
\n\n
[internet as well?]
\n\n
Greed
\nGreed and avarice represent money becoming a final purpose which reorganises all other pleasures.
\n\n
Money is stored up as a form of power – it is sheer potentiality, possibility. One possesses nothing at all, except potential. One has certainty that satisfaction will occur, should one want it.
\n\n
Unlike other possessions that disappoint us once we have them, those who fixate on only (and not on things) cannot be disappointed because it is empty of substance. What it gives them is empty possibility, which cannot fail because it has no particularity.
\n\n
“the purest form of avarice is that in which the will does not really go beyond money” p. 245
\n\n
Extravagance
\nExtravagance is not so very different from greed – it delights in impractical, pure enjoyment of money qua means, without sense of what the ends are.
\n\n
Luxury goods do not sit in the realm of need or practicality. They lend themselves to the philosophy of money because they are useless.
\n\n
Poverty
\nPoverty can become a mark of ethical commitment; money an object of horror. But this only confirms its status.
\n“The tremendous and wide-reaching power of the process by which money is elevated from its intermediary position to importance is best illuminated by the fact that the negation of its meaning is elevated to the identical form” p. 254.
\n\n
\n
\n
SYNTHETIC PART
\n\n
Chapter 4
\n\n
Freedom is obligation imposed by the ego – Kant
\n\n
Relationships with masters become totally depersonalised once pure money is used to pay for services, and no longer paid in kind. This is freedom.
\n\n
“In such cases of the replacement of natural services by money payments the advantage is usually mutual” p. 289
\n\n
“When the stage of exchange appears as the form of change in ownership, or as stated earlier as a mere consequence of the equal power of both parties, then this would be evidence of the greatest progress mankind could have made… man is the exchanging animal” p. 291
\n\n
This is in contrast to theft and gifts, which involve power imbalances. [but what of inequality? Subscribing to the neo-classical fallacy…]. Then addresses this.
\n\n
Money has – divisibility and unlimited convertability, both of which mean it breaks down asymmetrical relationships. P. 292
\n\n
\n
“Even though we are much more dependent on the whole of society through the complexity of our needs on the one hand, and the specialisation of our abilities on the other, than are primitive people who could make their way through life with their very narrow isolated group, we are remarkably independent of every specific member of this society, because his significance for us has been transferred to the one-sided objectivity of his contribution, which can be just as easily produced by any number of other people with different personalities with whom we are connected only by an interest that can be completely expressed in money terms” p. 298
\n- durkheim…
\n\n
Freedom does not mean absence of others, but a particular type of relationship to them, in which we are in a crowd, yet independent.
\n\n
It is where obligations become aligned with our choices that we are free – money enables this.
\nWage labour is not quite freedom, but it is closer to it than peasant labour, in which the peasant is tied to the employer.
\n\n
--
\n\n
Property is an act:
\n“The static concept of property is nothing but the active enjoyment or treatment of the object transposed into a latent condition, and the guarantee for the fact that one can at any time enjoy it or act upon it” p. 304
\n\n
Property cannot be separated entirely from uses and subjective pleasure. The concept of property in the abstract is a lie. Property is simply the sustained opportunity to control things.
\n\n
But money IS an abstraction; it lies over and above all objects of possession. It lacks use or particularity, and is therefore the highest goal of all possession.
\n\n
--- MONEY SEPARATES HAVING FROM BEING; YOU CAN HAVE IT WITHOUT DOING ANYTHING WITH IT; NOT TRUE OF ANYTHING ELSE.
\n\n
This separation of owning from being means a realm of society is possible that approximates to Kant’s kingdom of ends – people treated as noumenal, moral entities, rather than objective, phenomenal bodies….
\n\n
\n
When money starts to be moved around in very large quantities, in finance, then it takes on qualitative characteristics, and lends itself to certain personalities.
\n\n
\n
Adopts Kantian idea of freedom, as pure rational autonomy; obedience of self to internal moral law. By splitting having from being, money enables us to be motivated by something without any particularity. We become free from causality of objects, because money is like no other object. P. 313.
\n\n
Argues that intellectual labour is made possible by this – work which involves no objective use values at all. Exist in a pure economic state, of pure exchange values and the intellect – anticipating the post-industrial economy. P. 315.
\n\n
\n
Money makes possible a form of economic justice, in which a price reflects the full social objectivity of the situation, rather than being swayed by local circumstances – some form of categorical imperative is at work here. P. 319
\n\n
“Only the reduction to a common denominator provides that uniformity among all elements of an individual situation, which would allow their concurrence for the determination of prices according to just standards” p. 319.
\n\n
--- Posner? Rawls and neo-classical economics… neo-liberalism. The market as the universal.
\n\n
\n
\n
“To understand the concept of property it is decisive to recognise that the rigid demarcation between it and the self, between internal and external life, is quite superficial and that it should be made more fluid for the purpose of deeper interpretation” p. 322
\nn when we own stuff, we are intertwined with the objective world. Not the case with money. Possessions are simply projections of the ego, of pleasure, of self, upon the world of things. Property is a dragging of ourselves outwards into a psychic relationship – sounds like commodity fetishism; freud… Shopping.
\n\n
“This explains the strange phenomenon that sometimes the sum total of possessions appears to be identical with the totality of personality.” P. 324.
\n\n
But ownership runs up against its limit once the object ceases to yield to the ego p. 324. They become conditions of limitation, not of freedom.
\n\n
Money does anything we expect of it, and yet it does nothing at all. By being a pure means, it offers us total freedom… but to do nothing. P. 325.
\n- this then becomes the Hegelian critique of Kant’s moral philosophy. The freedom is empty.
\n“Money means more to us than any other object of possession because it obeys us without reservation – and it means less to us because it lacks any content that might be appropriated beyond the mere form of possession” p. 325
\n\n
As an extension of personality, this is unique – it allows us to do everything, extending our personality, but not to do anything in particular. Sheer potentiality.
\n\n
---
\n\n
Distancing of individuals from possessions:
\n- spatially – p. 333
\n- globalisation, finance capital, David Harvey – Nigel Thrift on money/space
\n\n
Products are created for ‘the market’ without a clear idea of who that might be; jobs are for ‘the labour market’ as an abstract entity. P. 335
\n\n
Workers are liberated by being given cash per hour.
\n\n
The money economy allows people to offer only a limited part of themselves. Alienation is a form of freedom – Ian Curtis quote
\nTraditional economies forced people to bring all of themselves to work; the money economy allows us to interact without any personal interaction.
\n\n
“In contrast to this unified form, the money economy has made possible innumerable associations that either only take money contributions from their members or tend to pursue merely monetary interests. This is particularly true of the joint stock company whose shareholders are united solely in their interest in the dividends, to such an extent that they do not even care what the company produces” p. 343
\n\n
n prostitution?
\n\n
Lack of necessary commitment is liberating. P. 344. The same is now recognised about the internet in the realm of voluntary behaviour and gift-giving – collaborating without any shared identity or commitment.
\n\n
Then argues that this is soulless and heartless – romantic critique; views this as basis of socialist critique p. 346…
\n\n
\n
p. 347 – money expands the size of social groups; trade. Exchange is how we break out of gemeinschaft into gesellschaft
\n\n
\n
\n
Chapter 5 – the money equivalent of personal values
\n\n
The ban on placing values on human life is the height of culture. Christianity and western individualism do not permit slavery or blood money.
\n\n
[what about the law and economics movement? Money starts to become capable of dealing with nearly any crime again… what would Posner make of murder?]
\n\n
Fines as a punishment are not compensation in modern society. Fines are for minor offences, because money is not adequate to deal with serious crimes. Money becomes more and more inadequate as society becomes more sophisticated.
\n\n
Prostitution is the worst instance of treating human beings as ‘mere means’ as Kant had it. The “nadir of human dignity” p. 377
\n\n
Sale of personal values (love, sex, revenge etc) is the “direct opposite of self-respect” p. 389
\n\n
Distinction: being impervious to quantification or comparison. But modernity threatens to flatten qualitative differences, and make incomparable things comparable. Prices relativise, even luxury items.
\n\n
“The exchangeability that is expressed in money must inevitably have repercussions upon the quality of commodities themselves, or must interact with it” p. 393
\n\n
Converting obligations into financial transactions creates a form of freedom – p. 400. But this new freedom is empty, without substance. Negative freedom to do anything, but not to do something. Modern freedom is freedom from any commitment to anything else. We lose our bonds to those who dominate us, but also lose our bonds to our own possessions. We gain and lose in equal measure.
\n\n
\n
Section on Labour value - p. 409; mental contribution, manual contribution
\n\n
\n
\n
Chapter 6 – the style of life
\n\n
The money economy leads to an inversion of means and ends. We treat ends as means (people), and means as ends (money). We grow to focus on how to do things, not things themselves.
\n\n
“The conceivable elements of action become objectively and subjectively calculable rational relationships and in doing so progressively eliminate the emotional reactions and decisions which only attach themselves to the turning points of life, to the final purposes” p. 431
\n\n
n Weberian instrumental rationality.
\n\n
\n
Money eliminates substance and colour. [constant reference to metaphor of colour]
\n\n
‘objective life’ – life lived without concern for identity or substance.
\n\n
This corresponds to intellectual/theoretical life. Money’s blandness and universal quality mirrors theory’s emptiness.
\n\n
“Just as he who has money is superior to he who has the commodity, so the intellectual person as such has a certain power over the more emotional, impulsive person. For however much the latter may be more valuable as a whole person, and however much his powers may ultimately surpass the other, he more one-sided, more committed and prejudiced than the intellectual person; he does not have the superior view and the unlimited possibilities of the use of all practical means that the purely intellectual person has” p. 436
\n\n
>> what is he saying about the relationship between money and philosophy? Is it simply an analogy? Some recognition of Kantian sociology or performativity of Kantian philosophy? P. 440 says it is “analogous”….
\n\n
“… the objectivity and indeterminacy of character that was common to both…” p. 437
\n\n
\n
To resist the intellect with will is a confession of inferiority p. 438. What would Freud make o f this?! He is trapped in a Kantian frame which he himself recognises as unfortunate (not unlike Adorno). This intellect is empty, rationalist, without specific desires (like money).
\n\n
\n
Intellect and money both have a negative character – they lack determinateness, identity, emotion, commitment.
\n\n
\n
Intellectualism accumulates in the same way that money does – p. 442 [almost hinting at human capital]
\n\n
Modern psychology is calculative – is he searching for some vaguely Foucaultian notion of the episteme in all of this? The historical a priori?
\n\n
Money is the essence of the economy:
\n“Money expresses, as it were, the purely commercial element in the commercial treatment of things, just as logic represents comprehensibility with reference to comprehensible objects” p. 445.
\n\n
\n
CULTURE
\n\n
Art is pure objective value, but culture creates objective and subjective value simultaneously. We change ourselves by changing the world.
\n\n
Through the 19th century, objective culture has overtaken subjective culture. Things develop faster than people.
\n\n
“If one looks at society as a whole, that is if one arranges the objectified intellectuality in a temporal-objective complex, then the whole cultural developments, assuming it has a uniform representative, is richer in content than each of its elements. For the achievement of each element is incorporated in the total heritage, but this heritage does not permeate each element” p. 453
\n\n
>> like congealed labour in Marx, only its congealed concepts. Almost like Foucaultian analysis. Or Hegelian. An idealist account of modernism, whereas Hegel offers an idealist account of modernity?
\n\n
\n
Division of labour exacerbates this. Where art is a single product by a single person, division of labour splits the unity of subjective and objective value creation.
\n\n
“It becomes more and more plausible for the worker to consider his work and its effect as purely objective and anonymous, because it no longer touches the roots of his whole life-system” p. 455 – very Marxian
\n\n
Alienation: “the fact that labour now shares the same character, mode of valuation and fate with all other commodities signifies that work has become something objectively separate from the worker, something that he not only no longer is, but also no longer has” p. 456
\n\n
“So far the division of labour has been interpreted as a specialisation of personal activities. Yet the specialisation of objects themselves contributes no less to the process of their alienation from human subjects, which appears as an independence of the object, as the individual’s inability to assimilate it and subject to his or her own rhythm.” P. 459
\n\n
>> Modernity is a collective cultural achievement too large and complex for any individual to match up to. There is too much to take in.
\n\n
Exceptions occur where objective progress unleashes even great subjective progress – as with marriage and women’s liberation.
\n\n
\n
In the differentiated, objective world, the mind is active at the expense of the soul. The intellect is something that can interact without commitment, and with reserve. We can participate in pol itics, but only a small bit. We split our attentions rationally in several directions at once, and never give all of ourselves to anything, nor ever take all of something. We are multi-tasking…
\n\n
\n
The style of life, general way of living, is circumscribed by the question of whether the subjective culture is in any kind of harmony with objective culture. Can the individual stay afloat in amongst an over-whelming, larger, objective mind that engulfs him?
\n\n
\n
MONEY:
\nMoney becomes a way of insulating individual existence from the objective culture of modernity. We create sanctums for ourselves using money, in amongst a world that evades our comprehension and is too diverse for any single individual to master.
\n\n
“If modern man can, under favourable circumstances, secure an island of subjectivity, a secret, closed-off sphere of privacy – not in the social but in a deeper metaphysical sense – for his most personal existence, which to some extent compensates for the religious style of life of former times, then this is due to the fact that money relieves us to an ever-increasing extent of direct contact with things, while at the same time making it infinitely easier for us to dominate them and select from them what we require” p. 469
\n\n
\n
Money overpowers us AND frees us; it is on the side of both objective AND subjective culture in modernity:
\n“The significance of money for the style of life is not negated but enhanced, not refuted but demonstrated by the fact that it favours both possible relations between the objective and the subjective mind” p. 470
\n\n
\n
Style is the mediation of objective and subjective culture
\n\n
“Style [in art], as the manifestation of our inner feelings, indicates that these feelings no longer immediately gush out but take on a disguise the moment they are revealed. Style, as the general form of the particular, is a veil that imposes a barrier and a distance in relation to the recipient of the expression of these feelings” p. 473
\n\n
Naturalism is a style; historical materialism is a style… society is only available to us culturally, and under conditions of the modern problematic – that objective culture has an autonomy and pace that subjective culture largely lacks.
\n\n
Modernity sees new forms of cultural proximity and distantiation – proximity and distance to the world are played with in art and culture. Money assists with the overcoming of distance. Credit exacerbates the abstraction of relations.
\n\n
Space is one determinant of the style of life…
\n\n
Technology – Weberian irrationality of rationality.
\n\n
\n
Temporality, rhythm is the second determinant of the style of life…
\n“Rhythm satisfies the basic needs for both diversity and regularity, for change and stability” p. 486
\n\n
Modernity overcomes time as well as space – the routines and traditions of life are transcended.
\n\n
Symmetry (space) and rhythm (time) help reason to structure the world. This is the most basic cultural intervention. But with objective culture, the rhythm becomes an alien one that is not the individual’s – the factory has a rhythm, but it belongs to machines, not to people. The culture of the whole is in conflict with the culture of the part…
\n\n
“The individual strives to be an organic totality, a unity with its own centre from whence all the elements of his being and his action derive a coherent and consistent meaning. But if the supra-individual whole is supposed to be independently coherent and to realise its own objective notion of itself with self-sufficient significance, then it cannot possibly tolerate any independence on the part of its members” p. 494
\n\n
“The typical conflict between the individual and supra-individual existence can be interpreted as the irreconcilable striving of both elements to attain an aesthetically satisfying expression” p. 495
\n\n
\n
Money alleviates this conflict, because of its liquidity – it mediates between the whole and its parts, without contradiction:
\n“Money is the most decisive and completely indifferent means for transposing the supra-individual rhythm in the conditions of life into the harmony and stability that allow a freer, more individual and more objective confirmation of our personal energies and interests” p. 495.
\n\n
\n
Money affects the pace of life. As the money supply increases, people transact faster because they become more fearful of the money losing its value. [interest rate cuts lead to growth, but no greater security]
\n\n
\n
\n
Concentration – recognises that monetary transactions tend to concentrate in a few places.
\n\n
\n
Money has to be in constant motion, or it ceases to exist. The point is that it will be given away, then moved on. It is both very stable (it is the same no matter what) and constant flux (it is always moving).
\n\n
Sheer relativity (back to the opening…
\n\n
\n
\n
\n
\n
\n
\n
", "tags": [], "relations": {}, "dateAdded": "2010-10-13T12:24:19Z", "dateModified": "2010-10-13T12:24:19Z" } }, { "key": "PCDUNXJR", "version": 1, "library": { "type": "group", "id": 28207, "name": "economicsociology", "links": { "alternate": { "href": "https://www.zotero.org/groups/economicsociology", "type": "text/html" } } }, "links": { "self": { "href": "https://api.zotero.org/groups/28207/items/PCDUNXJR", "type": "application/json" }, "alternate": { "href": "https://www.zotero.org/groups/economicsociology/items/PCDUNXJR", "type": "text/html" }, "up": { "href": "https://api.zotero.org/groups/28207/items/TQEQGPDF", "type": "application/json" } }, "meta": { "createdByUser": { "id": 236280, "username": "willda5", "name": "Will Davies", "links": { "alternate": { "href": "https://www.zotero.org/willda5", "type": "text/html" } } }, "numChildren": 0 }, "data": { "key": "PCDUNXJR", "version": 1, "parentItem": "TQEQGPDF", "itemType": "note", "note": "
Beacon Press (1994) [1957]
\n\n
\n
\n
\n
“The key to the institutional system of the nineteenth century lay in the laws governing market economy. Our thesis is that the idea of a self-adjusting market implied a stark utopia”, p. 3.
\n\n
\n
The nineteenth century was extraordinarily peaceful by historical standards. Major powers did not go to war between 1815-1914. Why?
\n“The backlash of the French Revolution reinforced the rising tide of the Industrial Revolution in establishing peaceful business as a universal interest”, p. 7.
\n\n
\n
But a social mechanism was needed to support this cooperation: the financial system.
\n- “Haute finance… functions as the main link between the political and the economic organisation of the world in this period”, p. 10
\n- The gold standard was what hid the socially constructed nature of this.
\n\n
\n
Financiers and governments had over-lapping interests. The political and the economic became merged, but the political remains primary – “power had precedence over profit”, p. 12.. There remained ways that governments could thwart interests of finance, but not vice versa.
\n\n
The biggest threat to financiers was a major war. Colonial disputes gradually undermined the economic organisations that had produced a peace interest.
\n\n
Once currencies became free-floating, the social construct of the market appeared. People were afraid, and protectionism took hold. Capitalism started to undermine itself.
\n\n
“The whole arsenal of restrictive measures, which formed a radical departure from traditional economics, was actually the outcome of conservative free trade purposes”, p. 27.
\n\n
“The origins of the cataclysm lay in the utopian endeavour of economic liberalism to set up a self-regulating market system”, p. 29.
\n\n
\n
\n
“It should need no elaboration that a process of undirected change, the pace of which is deemed too fast, should be slowed down, if possible, so as to safeguard the welfare of the community”, p. 33.
\n\n
Only in the 19th century was it natural to look at all events through the lens of economics.
\n\n
“A belief in spontaneous progress must make us blind to the role of government in economic life”, p. 37
\n\n
“Market economy is an institutional structure which, as we all too easily forget, has been present at no time except our own, and even then it was only partially present”, p. 37
\n\n
Historically speaking, reciprocity and redistribution are important preconditions of production and exchange. The household also provides a check on and precondition of the market economy. The social constructs which underlie the market economy are cooperative; cooperation is a precondition of market competition, not vice versa.
\n\n
\n
\n
What is a market? “A market is a meeting place for the purpose of barter or buying and selling”, p. 56
\n(NB it is a place…)
\n\n
“The true starting point is long-distance trade, a result of the geographical location of goods, and of the “division of labour” given by location”, p. 58.
\n- trade is actually about mobility and transport; the extent to which we trade is determined by how little we can access locally [consider new urbanism]
\n\n
Three types of trade exist:
\n\n
Cities are characterised by a severance of local trade and long-distance trade. “This peculiar fact forms the key to the social history of urban life in western Europe”, p. 63
\n\n
\n
“A self-regulating market demands nothing less than the institutional separation of society into an economic and political sphere”, p. 71
\n\n
\n
\n
Labour markets:
\nThe creation of a labour market was delayed in England by the Speenhamland Law 1795 which set wages. Not until 1834 Act of Settlement was there a competitive labour market in England.
\n\n
In the late 18th century, commentators became obsessed with the causes of poverty. Few recognised these as being connected to the structure of the economy. The truth lay in the fact that industrialisation was creating a large army of unemployed people with low skills. Without a labour market, rising wages were creating unemployment.
\n\n
This question was where consciousness of ‘society’ arose from. ‘Why is there poverty?’ was a sociological question. People were seeking laws of society, rather than laws of nature or laws of government.
\n\n
This led to the development of economics, leading to a sphere of human interaction in which other moral and social priorities were excluded. Explanations of poverty became structural, rather than psychological or moral. [cf Foucault on What is Enlightenment?]
\n\n
“The foundations of economic theory were laid down during the Speenhamland period, which made appear as a competitive market economy was actually was capitalism without a labour market,” p. 124
\n\n
\n
\n
Markets destroy the very resources they depend on. Man and nature (labour and land) are consumed and reordered by markets.
\n\n
A ‘double movement’ is necessary as a result. Liberalism opens markets, conservatism protects the core assets. These were the two great tensions underlying 19th century society: liberalism vs protectionism; class vs class.
\n\n
\n
- Economic liberalism:
\nBy the 1820s, the three central tenets of liberalism were entrenched:
\n\n
This laissez-faire model had to be constructed. “The road to the free market was opened and kept open by an enormous increase in continuous, centrally organised and controlled interventionism”, p. 140 [cf John Grey, False Dawn]
\n\n
(Irony: laissez-faire was carefully planned, whereas restrictions on it were actually spontaneous. The opposite of the rhetoric of the liberal economist, although even they accept that the state must intervene on anti-trust and trade union law.)
\n\n
- Land/labour:
\nIntervention in the labour market saved it. The whole purpose of social security and trade unions and labour laws was to make human capital/labour sustainable. Law tended to start as free market, then become gradually more conservationist over the 19th century.
\n\n
Just as human beings had to be reconceived as an organised into a labour market, nature had to be reconceived as an organised into a real estate market.
\n\n
The expanding urban population changed the economic function of land. Production was primarily for sale on a market, rather than for consumption. This gradually expanded until every part of the world was co-opted to free trade in produce.
\n\n
The main difference between land and labour protection was that those conserving land would seek compromises with the market system, whereas labour had the tendency to disobey it altogether.
\n\n
Business/money
\nBusinesses are undermined by an irregular money supply. Inflation can wipe out profits. The gold standard was a good way of regulating this.
\n\n
Internationally, this was very effective. But domestic markets benefit from looser monetary policy. The gold standard and central banks were in conflict with one another. You can’t have exchange rates stable, but domestic money supply fluctuating.
\n\n
The rise in central banking was a further affront to the presumed purity of the market – in this instance, money was what was showing this. Money was proof that the separation of the political and economic spheres was a myth.
\n\n
Central banking is how nations protect themselves against the shocks of international fluctuations. The gold standard imperilled national welfare. It was abandoned by Britain in 1931 and the US in 1933.
\n\n
\n
Counter-liberal trends
\n\n
Protectionism advanced on all three fronts of labour, land and money. But monetary policy was the most significant. No matter what cultural, political or legal barriers there were to economic integration, a stable monetary system had been the interlocking language. “The more difficult it became to shift actual objects, the easier it became to transmit claims to them”, p. 206
\n\n
“While in imagination the nineteenth century was engaged in constructing the liberal utopia, in reality it was handing over things to a definite number of concrete institutions the mechanisms of which ruled the day”, p. 211
\n\n
Protectionism afflicted first the international market place, and then the domestic. “More and more were individuals replaced by associations, men and capital united to non-competing groups”, p. 218
\n\n
Social protections and currency interventions became synonymous in the 1920s – inflation became the norm. Democracy was pulling states away from the gold standard. The New Deal forced Roosevelt out of the Gold Standard.
\n\n
The 20s was a battle between liberalism and socialist interventionism. The split between economic and political spheres made it very difficult to achieve compromises - it was one or the other.
\n\n
Fascism: this re-energised the economy by destroying the sphere of politics. Its legitimacy was never political, but cultish or artistic. It represented not a movement but an emotional trait. “Fascism like socialism was rooted in a market society that refused to function. Hence it was world-wide…” p. 239. Fascism appears and disappears where the market economy fails and thrives. The first action taken by Hitler was to exit the gold standard
\n\n
“In its struggle for political power fascism is entirely free to disregard or to use local issues at will. Its aim transcends the political and economic framework: it is social” p. 241
\n\n
\n
Hitler squandered gold reserves, and undermined the system further. “Germany at first reaped the advantages of those who kill that which is doomed to die”, p. 246 Britain, meanwhile, still had the gold standard mindset.
\n\n
“The social unit of the nation proved, in the long run, even more relevant than the economic unit of class”, p. 246
\n\n
\n
The question is – can we have freedom without the free market? Or does the lesson of the 20s and 30s say otherwise?
\n\n
We need a new international settlement in which countries have more control over their domestic economic policy, and less control over international political agency.
\n\n
“every move towards integration in society should thus be accompanied by an increase in freedom; moves towards planning should comprise the strengthening of the rights of the individual in society”, p. 255
\n\n
\n
Three key objects of knowledge have been disclosed to the human race over time
\n\n
\n
In each instance, man decides whether to passively accept this discover, or to take charge of it. The discovery of death is met with culture and mourning, not with passive acceptance. The same is needed for the discovery of society. “The discovery of society is thus either the end or the rebirth of freedom” p. 258
", "tags": [], "relations": {}, "dateAdded": "2010-10-13T12:24:19Z", "dateModified": "2010-10-13T12:24:19Z" } }, { "key": "STEWXZ4V", "version": 1, "library": { "type": "group", "id": 28207, "name": "economicsociology", "links": { "alternate": { "href": "https://www.zotero.org/groups/economicsociology", "type": "text/html" } } }, "links": { "self": { "href": "https://api.zotero.org/groups/28207/items/STEWXZ4V", "type": "application/json" }, "alternate": { "href": "https://www.zotero.org/groups/economicsociology/items/STEWXZ4V", "type": "text/html" }, "up": { "href": "https://api.zotero.org/groups/28207/items/PBEKTRBP", "type": "application/json" } }, "meta": { "createdByUser": { "id": 236280, "username": "willda5", "name": "Will Davies", "links": { "alternate": { "href": "https://www.zotero.org/willda5", "type": "text/html" } } }, "numChildren": 0 }, "data": { "key": "STEWXZ4V", "version": 1, "parentItem": "PBEKTRBP", "itemType": "note", "note": "Cambridge: Polity (2002)
\n\n
\n
\n
\n
Four approaches are taken here:
\n\n
\n
\n
\n
\n
\n
Capitalism cannot secure its own conditions. The political is not reducible to the economic, precisely because the economic is dependent on something other than itself.
\n\n
\n
Labour, land, money and knowledge are ‘fictitious commodities’ as Polanyi argued. Each depends on non-economic support, and none can be commoditised without successful political/collective intervention.
\n\n
The nature of capitalism – contradictions, incomplete spatio-temporal projects – means that it cannot reach equilibrium on its own. Market failures and crises occur, which requires regulation. The reasons capitalism needs regulating are:
\n\n
\n
\n
Paradoxically, capitalism can never succeed entirely. It needs non-commodities to commodify. Use value has to be maintained – state mediates between the two, safeguarding use values.
\n\n
\n
This goes on beyond the state also, in the form of bourgeois socialisation, meaning:
\n“the relative subordination of an entire social order to the logic and reproduction requirements of capital accumulation” p. 23. This takes place in four ways:
\n\n
\n
\n
Borrows form-analytic, strategic-relational state theory from Poulantzas:
\n“the state can be defined as a relatively unified ensemble of socially embedded, socially regularised, and strategically selective institutions, organisations, social forces and activities organised around (or at least involved in) making collectively binding decisions for an imagined political community” p. 40
\n\n
The separation of the political from the economic (which is necessary for capitalism) makes the state-market relation tense and problematic. Yet the state is a necessary component of capitalism.
\n\n
\n
New forms of state intervention are required at macro, meso, micro scales. These scales are constantly changing. These interventions may not necessarily occur in the interests of capital accumulation – other governmentalities going on here.
\n\n
Because capitalism’s contradictions are insoluble in the abstract, they are resolved through the selection of specific strategies, discourses and narratives to bind them together. These are spatio-temporal fixes, such as Fordism, KBE etc.
\n\n
Similar to Rose’s and Thrift’s contentions that managers/policy-makers don’t really know what they’re doing.
\n\n
\n
The Keynesian welfare national state (KWNS)
\n\n
K: demand management, public spending
\nW – social policies, generalising norms of mass consumption
\nN – privileging of the national scale
\nS – mixed economy of market and state
\n\n
\n
Not all crises lead to the downfall of a spatio-temporal fix. The same problems confronted many countries in the 80s and 90s, but they differed as to whether they viewed this as a crisis IN atlantic fordism, or a crisis OF atlantic fordism.
\n\n
Why is KWNS fordist?
\n\n
“The distinctive contribution of the KWNS to the regulation of Atlantic Fordism was its capacity to manage, displace or defer, at least for a while, the contradictions in the different forms of the capital relation and their strategic dilemmas as these were expressed in Fordist accumulation regimes” p. 75
\n\n
How?
\n- wages viewed as source of demand, rather than a cost; so rising wages was tolerated
\n- the state was happy to ignore wage costs
\n- evening spatial inequalities; spatial Keynesianism
\n- money’s primary role was as national credit, rather than international exchange. Public borrowing was the purpose of printing money; employment was the yard-stick of performance, not monetary value. Only when stateless money emerged did this result in stagflation.
\n- There was a virtuous circle between KWNS and fordism
\n\n
\n
Crisis in KWNS
\n- internationalisation: capital and industry off-shoring to escape regulation
\n- institutional rigidity: capital had been unable to exert sufficient influence over labour
\n- The wage started to be viewed as a cost, and money as form of capital rather than source of credit.
\n- Fiscal crisis.
\n\n
Political crisis:
\n- demise of corporatism
\n- new social movements on a local and global scale
\n- new risks such as pollution
\n- dependency ideas
\n- social needs grew more complex and more costly to deal with – therapy; minute care; severe deprivation in inner cities.
\n\n
The initial response was to spend even more. Then came the dilemma of monetarism or protectionism?
\n\n
Competing social and political narratives emerge at a time of crisis – like Kuhn – and these tend to have different views on what sort of crisis it is. The one that wins may be the one with the most plausible explanation of why there was a crisis at all. The New Right achieved this in the 80s.
\n\n
\n
\n
\n
Competition state “aims to secure economic growth within its borders and/or to secure competitive advantages for capitals based in its borders, even where they operate abroad by promoting the economic and extra-economic conditions that are currently deemed vital for success in competition with economic actors and spaces located in other states” p. 96
\n\n
It sits within the global marketplace, acting strategically.
\n\n
Fordism relied on economies of scale. Post-fordism uses flexible production techniques to achieve:
\n- economies of scope: diversity of products, constant innovation of products.
\n- economies of networks: positive externalities, associated with infrastructure networks, especially ICT.
\n\n
\n
There is no post-fordist model of societalisation, of the sort that drove fordism into US society in the 50s and 60s to legitimise it.
\n\n
Factors of production are now located in the extra-economic, and so contradictions in capitalism spread. Contradictions in post-fordism are either inversions of those in fordism, or exacerbations of them.
\n\n
\n
\n
\n
\n
\n
\n
\n
Argues that globalisation is:
\n- multi-centric: emanates from many places
\n- multi-scalar: there are many units entangled
\n- multi-temporal
\n- multi-causal
\n- multi-form: it isn’t just neoliberalism
\n\n
\n
The global is not the new scale to replace the nation state. “The global more often services as the ultimate horizon of action rather than the actual horizon of action” p. 116
\n\n
“Failure to take strategic account of the global, even if actions remain confined to other scales, could well lead to a more or less rapid loss of competitiveness” p. 116
\n\n
\n
\n
(cf Block and Kenyon (2001) The meaning and measurement of international competitiveness in Creating and Internationally Competitive Economy).
\n\n
Static vs dynamic competitive advantage – Static is in the sense of comparative advantage, as described by Ricardo.
\n\n
Forms of competitiveness:
\n- Ricardo – natural assets, static
\n- List – state nurturing; protectionist
\n- Schumpeterian – permanent innovation; Porter
\n- Keynes – full employment was indicative of competitiveness
\n\n
\n
Schumpeter:
\n- new things are introduced to the economy - ‘new combinations’
\n- Profits recede gradually after innovation, so either IPR is needed or a new innovation is required.
\n\n
\n
The state has to respond. The “self-image” of the competition state defines its identity. P. 124. States want multiple ends:
\n- inward investment
\n- protection for domestic MNCs
\n- to rework the international agenda
\n- to push the innovative agenda into the extra-economic
\n\n
\n
States are divided between those that promote incentives to innovate (IP) and those which safeguard the intellectual commons.
\n\n
“States engage in the pursuit of technological rents on behalf of capital. This leads in turn to the subordination of the totality of socioeconomic fields to the accumulation process so that economic functions come to occupy the dominant place within the state” p. 132
\n\n
The discourse of the KBE is crucial to achieve this.
\n\n
\n
Welfare spending has resisted calls to roll it back in the face of crisis.
\n\n
Most studies of comparative welfare regimes look at them in isolation from the economic systems they inhabit. They view change in welfare principally as quantitative, rather than as qualitative. They fail to identify the function that welfare performs within economic policy more generally.
\n\n
The post-fordist state puts social policy at the bequest of economic policy – active labour market policy. Especially education policy.
\n\n
Workfare policies sit on a continuum between flexploitation (workers hired and fired) and flexicurity (workers constantly reskilled). UK vs Holland.
\n\n
\n
- New forms such as PPP and privatisation mediate collective consumption.
\n- There is a rescaling, and devolution of services.
\n- New organisational norms affect the public sector, as it mimics the private sector.
\n\n
\n
\n
The state comes to adopt a role of enabling people to self-organise. This is a shift from government to governance. State becomes a form of metagovernance, overseeing forms of governance in which all sectors are involved.
\n\n
\n
Modes of governance include:
\n- liberalism and the market, with its presumed spontaneity
\n- Corporatism – social democratic model
\n- Statism – weberian notion of the state as police officer; rare for this to be an active player (until now…)
\n\n
\n
All three are subject to failure – market failure; public sector failure in the form of waste and corruption. People tend to treat market and state failure as a zero sum game – where the state is removed, there the market enters; and vice versa.
\n\n
\n
Hetarachy represents a 3rd way: “heterarchic governance institutes negotiation around a long-term consensual project as the basis for both negative and positive coordination among interdependent actors” p. 229
\n\n
It is dialogic, pluralist, pragmatic: defined against the notion of unitary governance agenda. Networking is viewed as a response to fuzziness and complexity. By no means immune to failure, but potentially it offers a better basis for reaching agreement and cooperation (although what would failure look like?). Castells claims this has become pre-eminent governance mechanism thanks to ICT.
\n\n
\n
Before something can be governed, it must first be imagined. Imagined economies are required, for a spatio-temporal fix to be developed.
\n\n
Metagovernance consists in transforming other governance mechanisms from above:
\n- meta-exchange: reorganisation of markets through use of consultants
\n- meta-organisation: re-engineering of government and public sector
\n\n
\n
“The organisation of the conditions of governance and involves the judicious mixing of market, hierarchy and networks” – but if all three fail, so will metagovernance.
\n\n
Conclusions:
\n\n
", "tags": [], "relations": {}, "dateAdded": "2010-10-13T12:24:19Z", "dateModified": "2010-10-13T12:24:19Z" } }, { "key": "IK44QEHH", "version": 1, "library": { "type": "group", "id": 28207, "name": "economicsociology", "links": { "alternate": { "href": "https://www.zotero.org/groups/economicsociology", "type": "text/html" } } }, "links": { "self": { "href": "https://api.zotero.org/groups/28207/items/IK44QEHH", "type": "application/json" }, "alternate": { "href": "https://www.zotero.org/groups/economicsociology/items/IK44QEHH", "type": "text/html" }, "up": { "href": "https://api.zotero.org/groups/28207/items/HHVZ9KRJ", "type": "application/json" } }, "meta": { "createdByUser": { "id": 236280, "username": "willda5", "name": "Will Davies", "links": { "alternate": { "href": "https://www.zotero.org/willda5", "type": "text/html" } } }, "numChildren": 0 }, "data": { "key": "IK44QEHH", "version": 1, "parentItem": "HHVZ9KRJ", "itemType": "note", "note": "
\n
Accounting as social and institutional practice: an introduction
\nPeter Miller
\n\n
\"Accounting can now be seen as a set of practices that affects the type of world we live in, the type of social reality we inhabit, the way in which we understand the choices open to business undertakings and individuals, the way in which we manage and organize activities and processes of diverse types, and the way in which we administer the lives of others and ourselves\" p. 1.
\nThree aspects:
\n\n
This field only dates to the 1980s.
\n\"Accounting is one of the key ways in which attempts have been made to exert influence on individuals through indirect means. Such modes of government can be regarded as characteristic of liberal democratic societies\" p. 29.
\n\n
\n
Governing the calculable person - Peter Miller and Ted O'Leary
\nStandard costing emerged within firms between 1900-1930, at the same time as a discourse of 'national efficiency' was emerging, and scientific management. Coincided with ideal of government by expertise of US progressives and British Fabians...
\nBetween 1911, when plans to standardise counting of costs were being advocated, and 1930, costs became things that varied, offering an accurate picture of what was actually taking place. Previously, costs were only talked about in terms of theoretical/presumed costs. This became the basis with which to measure and govern the efficiency of individual workers.
\n\n
Taylorism set out to improve national efficiency by working on individual movements and time use. The worker was represented as inefficient, until he had been acted on. But this scientific management was trapped within a relatively primitive technology - the time and motion study.
\nBritain's sense of national crisis in the early 1900s was viewed as tied up with a deficit of efficiency. This was a moral crisis. But it was played out in particular groups and locales - the firm, the school, the family.
\nThe emergence of social science, and a new class of professional experts, were viewed as the best hope in the US and the UK. In the US, progressives were inspired by pragmatism to look to expertise to shape a new better form of democracy, in which citizens were governed on the basis of sound knowledge. Accountants, psychologists and economists could all play a role in improving efficiency.
\n>> cf. Khurana on business schools.
\nThe private enterprise becomes a crucial locale for the articulation and pursuit of national goals.
\n\n
The politics of economic measurement: the rise of the 'productivity problem' in the 1940s by Jim Tomlinson
\nThe word productivity shifted from academic discussion to government during WW2. Three areas in which it arose as a policy concern:
\nDuring WW2, government became involved in trying to raise output at both industry and enterprise level.
\nQuestion of what data to collect and how to process it rose following the war - complaints that the data wasn't there. Started by focusing on individual, manpower outputs.
\nBut this leaves open an additional policy question - what can be done about it? Atlee government wasnt sure that productivity of enterprises was something that they should care about.
\nThe fact that British industry lacked any standards for accounting for costs and outputs was deemed part of its problem. But many businesses thought this was just interference from administrators.
\n\n
Value-added accounting and national economic policy - Anthony Hopwood, Stuart Burchell and Colin Cubb
\n
Surge in interest in VA in the late 1970s.
Definition of VA emerged over the 1970s, but left considerable diversity of how to calculate VA.
\nVA stressed that the wealth creation of a company was more than the sum of its parts - so it highlighted the cooperative aspect of bringing together different people and factors of production. But it was highly disputed, and claimed by people from very different political positions in different ways. Its ambiguity ultimately rendered it useless. This article looks at how the VA 'event' came about...
\n\n
Accountants:
\nThe fact that the concept also implied something about industrial democracy and participation helps explain how this 'event' occurred, without any consensus on the definition.
\nA constellation of different actors with different interests and strategies, converged on this concept for reasons that were not forseeable or predictable.
\n\"An accounting constellation is thus formed by the purposive actions of a multiplicity of different actors in diverse arenas. Each of these actors may have specific, non-overlapping, and sometime conflicting interests in the accounting practice the are utilizing and only partial knowledge of both its consequences and the resistance that its use will engender\" p. 227.
\nInterest in VA waned suddenly in the early 1980s. Industrial relations became viewed differently - the fact that VA was so technically weak, now became reflected in its political and economic profile in debate. It was dropped rapidly. Market pressures became viewed as more important than firm level cooperation. Democracy and efficiency no longer viewed as reinforcing. Leadership, not participation.
\n\n
>> so normative and political circumstances condition the rise and fall of accounting practices; but their technical viability is also important.
\n\n
\n
\n
\n
", "tags": [], "relations": {}, "dateAdded": "2010-10-13T12:24:19Z", "dateModified": "2010-10-13T12:24:19Z" } }, { "key": "2T66WTR4", "version": 1, "library": { "type": "group", "id": 28207, "name": "economicsociology", "links": { "alternate": { "href": "https://www.zotero.org/groups/economicsociology", "type": "text/html" } } }, "links": { "self": { "href": "https://api.zotero.org/groups/28207/items/2T66WTR4", "type": "application/json" }, "alternate": { "href": "https://www.zotero.org/groups/economicsociology/items/2T66WTR4", "type": "text/html" }, "up": { "href": "https://api.zotero.org/groups/28207/items/ZGTVNXU2", "type": "application/json" } }, "meta": { "createdByUser": { "id": 236280, "username": "willda5", "name": "Will Davies", "links": { "alternate": { "href": "https://www.zotero.org/willda5", "type": "text/html" } } }, "numChildren": 0 }, "data": { "key": "2T66WTR4", "version": 1, "parentItem": "ZGTVNXU2", "itemType": "note", "note": "
\n
Prices don't just have symbolic effects, as studied by Simmel and Marx. They are also technological artefacts, as Callon et al have shown.
\nLets study prices for non-market goods - these are administratively constructed.
\nParsons pact is over - economics can study anything. Yet so can sociology:
\n\n\nsociology’s critique of economics must shift away from a
\n
focus on economic markets, in which the value problem remains confined to things
that are effectively traded, to a focus on economic valuation processes, where the value problem is
much more general and encompasses everything that people care about (or are believed and made
to care about).
\n
Commodification is a concrete practice - money is pushed into additional spheres of society through tangible means. E.g. the legal system.
\nIn the case of law, economics defines value, rather than analyses it:
\n\n\nWhat I am suggesting, instead, is that
\n
economics performs a “definitional” role: it participates in the very conceptualization of the things to
compensate for and subjectively value. In other words, it is also performative of legal
categories themselves, and beyond them of the categories ordinary citizens can
legitimately rely upon to mobilize around, and “think” about the worth of things
around us –in their both subjective and monetary dimensions.
\n
Contingent valuation raises various issues:
\n1. It is individualistic and privational - reducing goods to individual perceptions of utility.
\n2. A great deal of framing is needed to make this work - the survey has to set up a very unusual type of choice.
\nA new relationship to nature is being constructed.
\n\"Non-market valuation methods are profoundly dual, all at once objective and
subjective. They thrive on inarticulate and eminently collective forms of worth but act
as if none of these characteristics was relevant. They seek to make the ineffable
concrete and calculable while maintaining some of its ineffable character.\"
The performativity of economics is riddled with politics. The results of non-market valuation surveys are very sensitive to how they are put together.
\n", "tags": [], "relations": {}, "dateAdded": "2010-10-13T12:24:19Z", "dateModified": "2010-10-13T12:24:19Z" } }, { "key": "96DTK6XN", "version": 1, "library": { "type": "group", "id": 28207, "name": "economicsociology", "links": { "alternate": { "href": "https://www.zotero.org/groups/economicsociology", "type": "text/html" } } }, "links": { "self": { "href": "https://api.zotero.org/groups/28207/items/96DTK6XN", "type": "application/json" }, "alternate": { "href": "https://www.zotero.org/groups/economicsociology/items/96DTK6XN", "type": "text/html" }, "up": { "href": "https://api.zotero.org/groups/28207/items/I9F92R42", "type": "application/json" } }, "meta": { "createdByUser": { "id": 236280, "username": "willda5", "name": "Will Davies", "links": { "alternate": { "href": "https://www.zotero.org/willda5", "type": "text/html" } } }, "numChildren": 0 }, "data": { "key": "96DTK6XN", "version": 1, "parentItem": "I9F92R42", "itemType": "note", "note": "
\"Commensuration is the expression or measurement of characteristics normally represented by different units according to a common metric. Utility, price, and cost-benefit ratios are common examples of commensuration, although the logic of commensuration is implicit in a very wide range of valuing systems: college rankings that numerically compare organizations; censuses and social statistics that make cities and nations numerically comparable; actuarial projects that attempt to quantify and compare vastly different kinds of risks; commodity futures that make uniform units out of products that may not yet exist; voting, and the pork-barrelt radingo f diverse interestst hat often lies behind it; calculation of different kinds of work in terms of labor costs;\"
\np. 315
\n\"Commensuration transforms qualities into quantities, difference into magnitude\" p. 316
\nMore than just standardisation - it provides a common metric. It brings two separate things together with a third.
\nPlato: commensuration makes us more stable and less passionate. We recognise that value is relative.
\nAristotle: the uniqueness of things and of others must be safeguarded.
\nMarx: labour is what commensurates under capitalism. But money comes to stand in its place as the commensurator.
\nWeber: accounting enables capitalism (General Economic History).
\nRational choice theory assumes that commensuration is possible - that different goals can be compared, and different outcomes weighed, given relative amounts of effort/utility.
\n\"This form of valuing denies the possibility of intrinsic value, pricelessness, or any absolute category of value\"
\np. 324
\nDefining something as incommensurable is a special form of valuation. It represents a political statement against economics/pricing/commensuration. E.g. friendship consists partly in the fact that it is not commensurable.
\n>> what about externalities? Are they commensurable or not?
\nQuestions:
\n- to what extent does a commensuration technique become institutionalised?
\n- what are its politics? Does it strengthen elites, or open things up to non-elites? It is a technique of inclusion and transparency, that can undermine power - but also one of discipline that can be used to prop it up.
\n- When do we identify incommensurables?
\n>> also, what about boundary objects of commensurability - or the grey areas between commensurable and incomensurable stuff. This matters to what Cochoy terms qualculation, and to my own analysis of hybridity as an alternative to externalities.
\n>> what about the Boltanski & Thevenot aspect? Incommensurability between different regimes of commensurability...?
\nFeminism: making housework and labour commensurable is a long standing ambition of feminists.
\n>> a different, progressive example of economic colonisation.
\nPolitics: normal politics IS commensuration. It involves combining lots of heterogeneous interests, via parties, voting, etc. Though not all forms of commensuration are acceptable to achieve this - buying votes, for example.
\nThe New Left can be understood as a 'great refusal' to engage in traditional forms of commensuration, to assert difference and the incommensurability of political interests.
\n", "tags": [], "relations": {}, "dateAdded": "2010-10-13T12:24:19Z", "dateModified": "2010-10-13T12:24:19Z" } }, { "key": "HHEXN4NT", "version": 1, "library": { "type": "group", "id": 28207, "name": "economicsociology", "links": { "alternate": { "href": "https://www.zotero.org/groups/economicsociology", "type": "text/html" } } }, "links": { "self": { "href": "https://api.zotero.org/groups/28207/items/HHEXN4NT", "type": "application/json" }, "alternate": { "href": "https://www.zotero.org/groups/economicsociology/items/HHEXN4NT", "type": "text/html" }, "up": { "href": "https://api.zotero.org/groups/28207/items/APPSSENJ", "type": "application/json" } }, "meta": { "createdByUser": { "id": 236280, "username": "willda5", "name": "Will Davies", "links": { "alternate": { "href": "https://www.zotero.org/willda5", "type": "text/html" } } }, "numChildren": 0 }, "data": { "key": "HHEXN4NT", "version": 1, "parentItem": "APPSSENJ", "itemType": "note", "note": "
\"Measures are reactive. Measures elicit responses from people who intervene in the objects they measure.\"
\nReactivity typically viewed as a problem - where measuring something impacts upon it unintentionally. Particularly that individuals alter their behaviour in response to being measured.
\nTwo views follow:
\n1. REactivity is a problem - it undermines the independence of knowledge
\n2. Reactivity can be harnessed productively to change behaviour for the better
\n\n
Universities have been ranked for over 100 years, but by and for universities themselves. They only became focus of public/media rankings in the 1980s, for benefit of 'consumers'
\nBusiness Week began ranking colleges in 1988
\n\n
Rankings are exmples of Mertonian self--fulfilling prophecies:
\n\n
Rankings are examples of commensuration
\n\"The radical simplification of commensuration produces decontextualized, depersonalized numbers that are highly portable and easily made public. Numbers circulate more easily and are more easily remembered than more complicated forms of information.\" p. 18
\nRankings \"reduce distinctiveness to magnitude\" p. 19. They reduced fragmentation of a field
\n2. Commensuration invites people to reflect on the numbers and what they represent...people end up being probed to think about the gap between the number and the reality.
\nDesrosiere identifies 4 attitudes towards numbers:
\n\n
What kinds of reactivity occur?
\nThe extent to which schools resist ranking depends on leadership, having some other strong vocation, being well known in some qualitative sense. etc.
\nAspiration is that study of reactivity could transcend science studies, organisational sociology, psychology and anthropology...
\n\"Reactivity is one form of interaction that reveals how difficult
it is to maintain sharp distinctions between measures and objects of measurement, description and inscription, science and society, the social and the natural. It suggests why scientific authority that is grounded in these sorts of dualisms remains a perpetual and perennially incomplete project.\" p. 35
>> a bit like counter-performativity
\n(how did neo-classical economics survive for as long as it did?? Or are its mutations under-explored...?)
\nPerformance measures, like concepts of 'normality', are important devices for shifting between is and ought. They therefore possess important forms of power.
\n", "tags": [], "relations": {}, "dateAdded": "2010-10-13T12:24:19Z", "dateModified": "2010-10-13T12:24:19Z" } }, { "key": "IK7ZHFQF", "version": 1, "library": { "type": "group", "id": 28207, "name": "economicsociology", "links": { "alternate": { "href": "https://www.zotero.org/groups/economicsociology", "type": "text/html" } } }, "links": { "self": { "href": "https://api.zotero.org/groups/28207/items/IK7ZHFQF", "type": "application/json" }, "alternate": { "href": "https://www.zotero.org/groups/economicsociology/items/IK7ZHFQF", "type": "text/html" }, "up": { "href": "https://api.zotero.org/groups/28207/items/MGFZK9UB", "type": "application/json" } }, "meta": { "createdByUser": { "id": 236280, "username": "willda5", "name": "Will Davies", "links": { "alternate": { "href": "https://www.zotero.org/willda5", "type": "text/html" } } }, "numChildren": 0 }, "data": { "key": "IK7ZHFQF", "version": 1, "parentItem": "MGFZK9UB", "itemType": "note", "note": "
INTRODUCTION: CONTESTED RATIONALITIES
\nRational choice theory:
\nJohn Steinbrunner identifies three elements of a rational choice theory:
\n1. separate dimensions of values are integrated via trade-offs. Different values can be commensurated.
\n\"The concept of utility is, at least conceptually, a mechanism for integrating values; it is a measure of absolute value, an ideal measure that would subsume all dimensions of value and provide a basis for making comparisons between choices. Cost-benefit ratios are a common form of value integration in policy decisions.\" p. 23
\n2. Alternative outcomes are analysed and evaluated.
\n3. People's expectations are adjusted as more is known about alternative outcomes.
\n\n
\"Commensuration is concerned with measuring different properties normally represented by different units with a single, common standard or unit\" p. 24.
\nCommensuration is a particular form of standardisation - one key difference is that standardisation can occur in discrete, unconnected steps, but commensuration is always a process. It always pursues the attainment of a single number via which to compare two things.
\nIt is also \"a system for throwing away information\" p. 25.
\n\n
Commensuration assumes fundamentally that form does not matter: that things retain their meaning when presented in entirely different ways, or when qualities are converted into quantities.
\n>> issue about SWB: there are those who do not wish to see SWB be a commensurating tool, and there are those who DO. Economists want to have a new basis for value; the psychologists and sociologists are less concerned. Happy not to commensurate, and to operate within the realm of comparative statistics; or HMT's technique.
\n'Constitutive incommensurables': things which help to define us, as the holocaust might for a jew. Things which we value through refusing to commensurate.
\nPolitical science assumes what needs to be explained: rationalities and interests are not given, but culturally produced.
\nLessons for rational choice:
\n\n
For Weber, something is never intrinsically irrational, but only viewed as such from some other rational perspective. Substantive rationality - ethical commitments, incommensurables, traditions, affect - are only irrational if viewed from the perspective of moder rationality (multiple lifeworlds...)
\nProblem for Weber was that modern thought could do nothing to help us stand outside of such relativity, and identify what was truly Reasonable, or good. Only history of rationality can help us. But the history of rationalisation in differet fields varies hugely.
\nSociology needs to analyse rationality in its historical contexts in order to \"find out whose intellectual child the particular concrete form of rational thought was\" quoted p. 37.
\nWeber also concerned to understand - what happens when forms of rationalisation converge? Weber was too pessimistic however about the potential to politicise rationality, and thereby resist it or reshape it.
\n\n
CONCLUSION
\nRational choice theory reconceives all commitments as preferences... p. 223.
\n\n
", "tags": [], "relations": {}, "dateAdded": "2010-10-13T12:24:19Z", "dateModified": "2010-10-13T12:24:19Z" } }, { "key": "QPGV8NSP", "version": 1, "library": { "type": "group", "id": 28207, "name": "economicsociology", "links": { "alternate": { "href": "https://www.zotero.org/groups/economicsociology", "type": "text/html" } } }, "links": { "self": { "href": "https://api.zotero.org/groups/28207/items/QPGV8NSP", "type": "application/json" }, "alternate": { "href": "https://www.zotero.org/groups/economicsociology/items/QPGV8NSP", "type": "text/html" }, "up": { "href": "https://api.zotero.org/groups/28207/items/ITTXPJ3H", "type": "application/json" } }, "meta": { "createdByUser": { "id": 236280, "username": "willda5", "name": "Will Davies", "links": { "alternate": { "href": "https://www.zotero.org/willda5", "type": "text/html" } } } }, "data": { "key": "QPGV8NSP", "version": 1, "parentItem": "ITTXPJ3H", "itemType": "attachment", "linkMode": "linked_url", "title": "Amazon.com Link", "accessDate": "2010-05-10T08:16:41Z", "url": "http://www.amazon.co.uk/dp/0199296928", "note": "", "contentType": "text/html", "charset": "", "tags": [], "relations": {}, "dateAdded": "2010-10-13T12:24:19Z", "dateModified": "2010-10-13T12:24:19Z" } }, { "key": "NWGEZ7US", "version": 1, "library": { "type": "group", "id": 28207, "name": "economicsociology", "links": { "alternate": { "href": "https://www.zotero.org/groups/economicsociology", "type": "text/html" } } }, "links": { "self": { "href": "https://api.zotero.org/groups/28207/items/NWGEZ7US", "type": "application/json" }, "alternate": { "href": "https://www.zotero.org/groups/economicsociology/items/NWGEZ7US", "type": "text/html" }, "up": { "href": "https://api.zotero.org/groups/28207/items/ZQNHH2EU", "type": "application/json" } }, "meta": { "createdByUser": { "id": 236280, "username": "willda5", "name": "Will Davies", "links": { "alternate": { "href": "https://www.zotero.org/willda5", "type": "text/html" } } }, "numChildren": 0 }, "data": { "key": "NWGEZ7US", "version": 1, "parentItem": "ZQNHH2EU", "itemType": "note", "note": "
Weber went furthest in attributing the birth of capitalism to rational accounting.
\n\"Accounting makes it possible for capitalists to evaluate rationally the
consequences of their past decisions. They can calculate exactly the resources
currently available to them and those that will be forthcoming
in the future. Capitalists can use the information provided by an account
to assess and compare various alternatives for investments.\"
p. 32
\nIt makes money the main unit of account - this is also picked up by Schumpeter.
\n[So money in itself is lacking in something, until it has a discursive-semiotic system to mirror it, represent it in some way...]
\n\n
\"We contend that rationalization, even as a general historical process,
has an important rhetorical aspect.' The rationalization of life has been
more than an overall increase in the \"calculability\" or rationality of
decisions. It has also been a change in the rhetoric used to represent
decisions. The commonsense meaning of the term \"rationalization\" highlights
this aspect8 A double-entry account is an \"account\" or interpretive
framing of some set of business transactions, and it has a rhetorical
purpose.\"
p. 35
\nACCOUNTS AS JUSTIFICATION:
\nEvery transaction gets entered twice, once as a credit and once as a debit. This explains the origins of credit and debit in modern business thinking.
\nEarly Aristotelian and Thomist views on money and lending prohibited charging of interest (usury), stating that all exchanges had to be egalitarian. Neither side could dominate the other. In this tradition, accounts begin in order to demonstrate that credit and debit cancel each other out - it is a moral account, of the legitimacy of the business.
\nAccounts no longer convey this message - but they are still an attempt to convince an audience of something.
\nAdopting double-entry book keeping was a way of upholding certain moral and psychological attributes. (Early on included regular appeals to god that it was honest/legit). It was also a way of dealing with principle-agent problems - those managing the money/businesses of wealthy families in the 16th century.
\nDouble entry system began in mercantile Italy, where Schumpeter identifies the origins of capitalism, because businesses required more capital than a single individual could invest. Keeping track of who owned how much or had lent how much became critical.
\n\"Accounting standards are conventional,
and remain arbitrary to a degree. They are neither right nor
wrong, but only \"generally agreed upon.\" p. 48
\n
ACCOUNTS AS RHETORIC/SYMBOLIC SYSTEM:
\nThere is a question of audience: an account can only convince an audience, if the audience is numerate. It is a strange language, that was not well understood in its early years. Only thanks to dissemination of scholarly works on numeration etc did an audience develop, capable of being convinced by business accounts.
\nInstitutionalisation: only supported by professions and state in the 19th century. In the early years it was education and mercantile networks that spread the necessary language skills. The merchants were mobile, and thereby able to spread this new framework.
\n[cf. Latour: science is like a B52 bomber, which needs a landing strip already prepared]
\nFor centuries, double entry accounting was not used or enforced very strictly, but appealed to as a moral capacity - an aspiration. This is used to criticise Weber. But it confirms the notion that accounting needs to be viewed as a rhetorical capacity.
\nACCOUNTS AS CLASSFICATIONS
\n\"To provide an account is to provide a classificatory
scheme. It is a cognitive device that sorts, orders, and names.
Accounts frame an economic reality in a particular way. This raises the
possibility that accounting did not simply react to economic development
or the changing demands of changing audiences; it helped to shape them.\"
P. 56
\nAccounting frameworks 'absorb uncertainty'. Through organising events and haphazard phenomena spatially, they are granted a supposed fixed meaning. By being written, they claim objectivity.
\nQualities converted into quantities. Commensurability is achieved between different things.
\n\"Accounts, like the more recent decision trees and cost-benefit ratios,
are often more important as justifications for decisions already made than
as tools to make rational decisions. Rationality has become a compelling
institutionalized creation myth for decisions.\"
p. 61
\ncf March 1981 article on how rationality is a symbolic ritual inside organisations.
\nWays in which rhetoric needs to be accounted for
\n", "tags": [], "relations": {}, "dateAdded": "2010-10-13T12:24:19Z", "dateModified": "2010-10-13T12:24:19Z" } }, { "key": "TBX5Q94Q", "version": 1, "library": { "type": "group", "id": 28207, "name": "economicsociology", "links": { "alternate": { "href": "https://www.zotero.org/groups/economicsociology", "type": "text/html" } } }, "links": { "self": { "href": "https://api.zotero.org/groups/28207/items/TBX5Q94Q", "type": "application/json" }, "alternate": { "href": "https://www.zotero.org/groups/economicsociology/items/TBX5Q94Q", "type": "text/html" }, "up": { "href": "https://api.zotero.org/groups/28207/items/S9QNAZ6R", "type": "application/json" } }, "meta": { "createdByUser": { "id": 236280, "username": "willda5", "name": "Will Davies", "links": { "alternate": { "href": "https://www.zotero.org/willda5", "type": "text/html" } } }, "numChildren": 0 }, "data": { "key": "TBX5Q94Q", "version": 1, "parentItem": "S9QNAZ6R", "itemType": "note", "note": "
J. Carrier & D. Miller (eds)
\nOxford: Berg (1998)
\n\n
\n
\n
\n
Abstraction = the disembedding of economy
\nVirtualism = the making real of economic abstractions
\n\n
\n
There can be practical abstractions, where people are actively decontextualised – for instance through giving them a number rather than a name,
\n\n
Fordism was active abstraction – space was redesigned around industrial production techniques, rather than skills or communities.
\n\n
Trade followed a similar route. Initially shopping was embedded in existing relationships – pre-market. Fixed pricing and open-ticketting removed the cultural and personal aspect of shopping, i.e. haggling.
\n\n
The emergence of a competitive retail market leads inexorably towards supermarkets.
\n\n
Credit relationships between shops and customers were replaced by credit cards, a further abstraction.
\n\n
\n
\n
The triumph of economics: or ‘rationality’ can be dangerous to your reasoning – Ben Fine
\n\n
The reunification of economics and other social sciences has only strengthened the abstractions of the former. In three ways:
\n\n
\n
\n
Consumer choices are viewed as a given; they are viewed as rational and utility-maximising; ‘goods’ are all comparable, regardless of whether they are necessary or luxury.
\n\n
For Gary Becker:
\n“Not only are there no boundaries in this individualistic application of the economic approach to social life in general; there is also no analytical differentiation between economic and social activities except in so far as they are a more or less direct source of utility” p. 51
\n\n
\n
“Economics is “characterised by the reduction of choice and behaviour to demand for physical objects, because of the discipline’s methodological individualism, and its assumption that preferences are given exogeneously and that motivation is only utility maximisation” p. 52
\n\n
\n
Becker et al have colonised other social sciences in two ways:
\n\n
\n
Choices can change over time according to Becker, but if we extend our notion of utility over time, it turns out that they are fixed after all. There is no behaviour that might not ultimately be utility maximising, even addiction. He denies the possibility of a gap between actual and desired preferences (e.g. wishing one were a healthier eater).
\n\n
Human capital = personal capital + social capital
\n\n
According to Becker “the social does not exist independently of the individuals who compose it, but evolves over time in the light of the aggregated choices that individuals make” p. 57
\n\n
It is a feature of this approach that “as much as possible should be explained by as little as possible” p. 59
\n\n
The extended utility function extends not just over time and space, but into the social and natural sciences!
\n\n
“Methodological individualism is incapable of addressing the social except through infinite regress, either to biological determinism or to some historical moment” p. 64
\n\n
“Colonisation has been able to proceed because the analytical environment in the other social sciences is too weak to resist economic encroachment or, more likely, is sufficiently flexible to be able to accommodate it” p. 67. Postmodernism doesn’t care, and can easily flip straight into uncritical realism.
\n\n
In new Keynesianism, “The state ceases to be the source of social provision on a non-individualistic basis in anything but name, and becomes an alternative, possibly more equitable and efficient, form of private provision” p. 70.
\n\n
\n
\n
The virtualism of neoclassical theory has policy in the developing world in a vice.
\n- loans are subject to abstract restructuring
\n- sweatshops are justified through recourse to logic of the market
\n\n
“The privileging of the global market over national markets involves a double fiction: it dissolves the historically-specific political cultures, and it replaces them with an economic abstraction”
\n\n
Monetarism was a powerful force for virtualism.
\n\n
The world bank has belatedly recognised the problem of embeddedness, by turning its attention to social capital and governance. But even then, they are in the service of the economic.
\n\n
\n
\n
economic model of fishing in Iceland
\n\n
Linguistics and economics are analogous to each other. Both suffer from virtualism and idealism.
\n\n
Virtualism extends neo-classical theory into areas of policy where it can create more problems than it solves, such as the environment.
\n\n
Using quotas to limit access to the commons doesn’t just aim to protect it; from an economists’ point of view, it enables a market in quotas which should maximise allocative efficiency.
\n\n
Quotas become a form of property (like IP). Reality is inverted – the abstract is taken as true, and the socio-economic is treated as an illusion. Sounds like the spectres of capitalism – or society of the spectacle.
\n\n
This does raise questions as to what a real account of the economy might look like. Why is virtualism a feature of economics, rather than just of language in general?
\n\n
\n
“The neo-classical model holds that the extension of commoditisation is a prime means to unearth the ‘natural economy’, the environment in which homo oeconomicus best operates” p. 123
\n\n
Pareto optimality: if at least one person is better off, and nobody is worse off, this pareto optimal. But this then reduces to a tautology: if things happen in a free market situation, then they must be done for a reason, which must be utility maximisation. This underlies the logic of transferable quotas.
\n\n
Iceland fishing quotas: the quotas become centralised in the hands of a few large businesses. Many companies buy them in order to lease them out, thereby playing the market like a derivatives market. Speculators arrive. The public are appalled that people are claiming property rights in fish that are not yet caught, which appears to defy innate Lockean logic. But economists argued that the public were being irrational, and losing sight of their real interests.
\n\n
An anthropology of economic life is required to push back virtualism. Economists assume “that the economy is constituted in the act of naming it” p. 132
\n\n
Daniel Miller – Conclusion
\n\n
He defends Hegel: “Today, rather more than at the time in which Hegel lived, there exist forces of such power and global reach that certain trends have become ubiquitous, and hence that we can talk meaningfully, perhaps for the first time, about history having a direction” p. 189
\n\n
Consumption is immanent negation of capitalism; a contradiction of capitalist homogeneity.
\n\n
“were we to use dialectical theory properly, we should seek historical processes that were created by capitalism, processes that emerged as internal contradictions within capitalism and negated it” p. 193
\n\n
“This century has shown that it is in consumption, and not, as Marx had argued, in production, that commodities can be returned to the world as the embodiment of human potentiality” p. 193
\n\n
\n
“While Marx had to tease out the abstract logic of capitalism, today the greater abstraction of academic economics is quite transparent and constantly confirmed by its practitioners” p. 196
\n\n
“The very power of this new form of abstraction is that it can indeed act to eliminate the particularism of the world” p. 196
\n\n
Capitalism remains worldly, but theory does not – this is the problem. The IMF & WB exert a quasi-transcendent authority, beyond mere logic (cf. Susan George). Economics has exited academia, but without exiting theory.
\n\n
\n
Features of the new virtualism:
\n- the audit society creates a new mode of governmentality
\n- Auditting tends to occur in the name of the consumer, in terms of efficiency savings. But it tends to result in cuts in services.
\n- Auditting acts in the interests of ‘virtual consumers’ and never in the interests of actual consumers. The cost-benefit analysis is wholly abstract.
\n- Postmodernism acts on behalf of a virtual minority, never an actual one.
\n\n
\n
“I would define postmodernism as the branch of social analysis that proclaimed the advent of a new superficiality and managed simultaneously to constitute itself as the prime example of what it proclaimed” p. 206
\n\n
", "tags": [], "relations": {}, "dateAdded": "2010-10-13T12:24:19Z", "dateModified": "2010-10-13T12:24:19Z" } }, { "key": "UXIUURSC", "version": 1, "library": { "type": "group", "id": 28207, "name": "economicsociology", "links": { "alternate": { "href": "https://www.zotero.org/groups/economicsociology", "type": "text/html" } } }, "links": { "self": { "href": "https://api.zotero.org/groups/28207/items/UXIUURSC", "type": "application/json" }, "alternate": { "href": "https://www.zotero.org/groups/economicsociology/items/UXIUURSC", "type": "text/html" }, "up": { "href": "https://api.zotero.org/groups/28207/items/RHXZF76G", "type": "application/json" } }, "meta": { "createdByUser": { "id": 236280, "username": "willda5", "name": "Will Davies", "links": { "alternate": { "href": "https://www.zotero.org/willda5", "type": "text/html" } } }, "numChildren": 0 }, "data": { "key": "UXIUURSC", "version": 1, "parentItem": "RHXZF76G", "itemType": "note", "note": "
The Laws of Markets
\nMichel Callon (ed)
\nBlackwell: Oxford 1998
\n\n
\n
\n
\n
\n
\n
The marketplace is a place. Economics has strayed from the economy and become an abstraction. But the problem is more complicated than economic sociology tends to acknowledge:
\n\n
“economics, in the broad sense of the term, performs, shapes and formats the economy, rather than observing how it functions”, p. 2.
\n\n
\n
He praises Polanyi for interweaving economic history with the history of economics.
\n\n
Following Guesnerie, the question is: if a market is a calculative agency, “What is a calculative agency?”
\n\n
- how does a system work, that allows strangers to interact then depart? The answer can’t lie either in psychology or in culture (i.e. either with reference to just agency, or with reference to just structure). Attempts to explain it from either basis fail: we have to presume that there is always something prior to the market.
\n\n
- this is the embeddedness of markets.
\n\n
\n
\n
Granovetter has a specific way through the dilemma of economics vs. sociology:
\n“the agent is neither immersed in the network nor framed by it; in other words, the network does not serve as a context. Both agent and network are, in a sense, two sides of the same coin” p. 8.
\n\n
Third parties are critical. Embeddedness means that my ability to calculate is neither psychological or cultural, but determined by my position in a network. The concept of social capital ruins this insight of social network analysis, by then splitting agent from network again.
\n\n
This then explains how we calculate: being caught up in a network makes us calculative.
\n\n
\n
What then do we make of a gift in this situation? Surely we cannot assume that calculativeness is a given or primordial.
\n\n
The best answer comes from Bourdieu. The gift lies in the delay between the gift and the counter-gift. The lapse before a gift becomes a gift economy. The time lag is everything – the longer the time-lag, the more gift-like the exchange is.
\n\n
\n
‘Framing’ determines which acts are taken into account, i.e. whether we acknowledge the return gift or not.
\n\n
“The difference between calculated action and uncalculated action is thus reduced to its simplest expression: it is encompassed in the taking into account or not of the return gift” p. 15.
\n\n
Things which lie outside of the frame are what economists term ‘externalities’. Complete framing never succeeds. But empty frames are possible, where everything is an externality – the pure gift.
\n\n
Commodification exists in cutting ties with the producer or the user. The process of framing ends and a transaction occurs – regardless of externalities.
\n\n
Money: “provides the currency, the standard, the common language which enables us to reduce heterogeneity, to construct an equivalence and to create a translation between a few molecules of a chemical substance and human lives” (using the example of pollution)
\n\n
Economics helps to construct the calculative tools that make the marketplace what it is. Stockmarket traders have to constantly be aware of the impossibility of finally framing something. There will always be externalities – things affecting the calculation from the outside [cf White and exogeneous shocks]
\n\n
- tools such as accountancy and marketing construct the market.
\n- “mediators between economics and the economy” p. 28. There is a dialogue between the economy and economics.
\n\n
\n
“Economy is embedded not in society but in economics, provided one incorporates within economics all the knowledge and practises, so often denigrated, that make up for example accounting or marketing” p. 30.
\n\n
“The market is a process in which the calculative agencies compete and/or cooperate with one another” p. 32.
\n\n
\n
Critics of market capitalism argue that eventually it will implode, due to the impoverished nature of its calculative tools. External factors of production have to be factored in somehow. But they are, we just need to look properly. Even money has some overflow of social relations; it is not entirely abstract. “Money has no use value, but it is a trail, a wake, a visible materialisable, traceable trajectory” p. 35. Ear-marking banknotes; tracing credit cards; special coins…
\n\n
Simmel and Marx are wrong to buy into the myth of money as total abstraction. It fails to entirely frame that which it claims to.
\n\n
Calculative and non-calculative agencies live side by side in any society, be it modern or not (agreeing with Polanyi).
\n\n
“The advantage of this anthropology of entanglement is that it frees us from the irritating and sterile distinctions between state and market, or between global economy and national economy” p. 40.
\n\n
The state constitutes the economy rather than intervenes in it.
\n\n
\n
It is critical to markets that they have various non-market dimensions:
\n“One of the weapons of competition, in fact its main weapon, is precisely for an agent to refuse disentanglement”, p. 43.
\n\n
[similar to Burt’s notion of competitive advantage]
\n\n
“We cannot show more clearly that the very nature of competition is to rarefy competition” p. 44
\n\n
“The calculative power of an agency depends on that of its calculating tools. These are characterized above all by the number and variety of relations and agents which they are able to take into account” p. 45
\n\n
\n
Competition exists also between calculative agencies – it “is largely determined by the respective qualities of the calculating devices” p. 45
\n\n
\n
[so presumably the ability to abstract is a powerful property? A tool that was of broad cultural use would beat one which wasn’t… which is what disembedding means]
\n\n
“Imposing the rules of the game, that is to say, the rules used to calculate decisions, by imposing the tools in which the rules are incorporated, is the starting point of relationships of domination which allow certain calculating agencies to decide on the location and distribution of surpluses” p. 46
\n\n
Because economics is part of the economy – contributing to the framing process – it will not explain the shift of one economic system to another as this necessarily is a result of externalities.
\n\n
[interesting question: what are those externalities? What is the political will that dictates that we must win in this context? Why be number 1, why not have another agenda?]
\n\n
\n
Lock-in: the processes whereby the path travelled by an economy becomes less and less reversible. This isn’t a perverse or bad. It is a condition of a market. Without it, contingency would be explicit the whole time. Lock-in is a condition of tolerable flexibility [white as well]
\n\n
The purpose of economic sociology should not be to correct economics, but to understand how and why it triumphed in the first place. The abstractions are in a sense real [Marx]
\n\n
\n
\n
\n
“Negative externalities imply social costs that are not taken into account by private decision-makers; positive externalities discourage private investment by socialising the benefits” p. 248.
\n\n
Framing is a way of demarcating – but it does not mean total abstraction. Total abstraction is not socially possible. Frames are themselves framed. Football happens within a football pitch, but also within a stadium; the rules of football do not entirely frame a game, because they themselves are framed by institutions etc.
\n\n
Economic theory supposes that framing generally successful; constructivism supposes that framing is rarely successful, and overflows are the norm. But the perspective from embeddedness suggests that overflows constitute the frame.
\n\n
\n
A completely framed social act would be vacuous, as there would be no external referents to constitute it; a completely unframed social act would be unintelligible because there would be no definition.
\n\n
\n
Overflows need new frames in order that they themselves can be calculated; this is where sociology can be useful. It can question existing frames, and provide broader frames that can encompass more content, including economic frames. [such as social capital or public value]
\n\n
\n
Things come along and break the frame – this is an intermediary; it has to be a thing of some kind. New research emerges or new risks.
\n\n
\n
We confront two types of situations:
\n- hot situations where controversy engulfs the intermediary; global warming; intellectual property.
\n- Cold situations, where there is easy agreement on intermediary and how to deal with it. These are becoming less common.
\n\n
\n
“the work of economists is becoming ever more arduous because the actors they are tracking are faced by non-calculable decisions” p. 263.
\n\n
", "tags": [], "relations": {}, "dateAdded": "2010-10-13T12:24:19Z", "dateModified": "2010-10-13T12:24:19Z" } }, { "key": "TZKEVTV7", "version": 1, "library": { "type": "group", "id": 28207, "name": "economicsociology", "links": { "alternate": { "href": "https://www.zotero.org/groups/economicsociology", "type": "text/html" } } }, "links": { "self": { "href": "https://api.zotero.org/groups/28207/items/TZKEVTV7", "type": "application/json" }, "alternate": { "href": "https://www.zotero.org/groups/economicsociology/items/TZKEVTV7", "type": "text/html" }, "up": { "href": "https://api.zotero.org/groups/28207/items/DAEKCKH7", "type": "application/json" } }, "meta": { "createdByUser": { "id": 236280, "username": "willda5", "name": "Will Davies", "links": { "alternate": { "href": "https://www.zotero.org/willda5", "type": "text/html" } } }, "numChildren": 0 }, "data": { "key": "TZKEVTV7", "version": 1, "parentItem": "DAEKCKH7", "itemType": "note", "note": "
Andrew Barry & Don Slater (eds)
\nOxford: Routledge (2005)
\n\n
\n
\n
\n
\n
Yet “economic sociology has marginalised or ignored the role of economic knowledge itself” p. 2
\n\n
But if economic knowledge is performative, what implications does this have for the place of knowledge in the economy?
\n\n
Four claims:
\n\n
\n
Actor Network Theory began as a critique of constructivist understandings of technology. It now converges with economic sociology in four ways:
\n\n
\n
Callon’s work abandons economic sociology as a critique of economics, and replaces it with an attempt to understand the work/use of economics. At the same time, he loses any belief in the idea of a structure to the economy outside of economics – no notion of capitalism.
\n\n
But there is still politics:
\n\n
The term ‘new economy’ is as much a re-representation of economic life as an empirical claim.
\n\n
“It is high time for economic sociology both to address the full range of economic knowledges in a sociological, rather than a merely critical, agenda and to acknowledge itself as yet another agency of economic knowledge and intervention” p. 23.
\n\n
\n
\n
\n
Economic life is reflexive and dependent on “hybrid forums” in which its practises are discussed. These contain agents and not just experts.
\n\n
“Professional economists no longer have the direct or indirect monopoly (assuming they did ever have it) on authorised and legitimate discourse” p. 29
\n\n
\n
Distinguishing the identity of a product is critical to the market system. This is especially critical where services are concerned. This has to be achieved cooperatively [cf Harrison White on difference and market niches]
\n\n
‘Goods’ relate to human needs; ‘products’ relate to capabilities/production [again: goods are the perspective upstream, while products are the perspective downstream, in White’s terms]
\n\n
How do we define a good? This relies on measuring equipment – e.g. one wine is more acidic than another.
\n\n
Products are goods with a career. They go through mutations to achieve the right quality. Goods are stabilised products – when something goes from being a product to a good, it has achieved the right quality and sticks with it.
\n\n
\n
Chamberlain argues that competition depends on co-construction of qualities. Consumers determine quality as much as producers. This cooperation can be either unconscious or deliberate [upstream and downstream meet: supply=demand is reduced to a tautology according to White]
\n\n
The ‘economy of qualities’ is how the product is constantly re-qualified. How does a consumer eventually accept a given quality?
\nThrough distributed cognition:
\n\n
On the supply-side, this is supplemented through market research, market testing, hard work.
\n\n
Competition is about detaching a consumer from one product and re-attaching them to your own. Some consumers are easier to detach because they engage in the requalification process. Firms want to do this, to destabilise consumers. They act on the collective, in which the consumer is immersed.
\n\n
Advertising, presentation and media has to induce the consumer to requalify their preferences, and then to select (or re-select) a product. The marketplace is constant intimacy and distance entwined, coupling, de-coupling and re-coupling.
\n\n
\n
Services “corresponds to forms of organisation of markets in which the qualification of products is a central and constant concern” p, 40.
\n\n
Services are like other goods, but they are more relational and thereby more reflexive. Consumers become part of the product they are buying. The qualification process is part of the relationship, which is part of the product – not so with a car (other than in terms of additional services perhaps).
\n\n
e.g. e-commerce is constant dialogue between suppliers and customers to requalify service. This requires both higher levels of intimacy – such as keeping data on customers – and higher levels of detachment (for when the customer steps back to requalify).
\n\n
\n
There is a paradox here: routinised attached consumers represent a constant opportunity to rivals to detach them. So the seller needs to unsettle their own customer, and then reattach them themselves (e.g. New soap powder constantly offered, despite long term customers)
\n\n
“In the economy of qualities it is preferable for the service provider to cooperate with the consumer and therefore to deal with a calculating consumer, at least on a regular basis without long intervals in-between” p. 44.
\n\n
\n
\n
\n
\n
The economy is subject to a double abstraction:
\n- economic formalism
\n- abstractions of capitalism/the real economy
\n\n
\n
Daniel Miller’s critique of Callon is that the disentangling of actors from cultural influences never occurs in any actual market setting. Economic calculation is not real in the sense suggested by Callon.
\n\n
We can rescue Callon from Miller’s critique if we stress alienation over calculation. Pure calculation never actually happens – but alienation does. It is the infrastructure of individualisation that is most significant – having access to tools and frameworks that allow anonymous interaction at scale that matters.
\n\n
“It is through the cut-off represented by externality, the limits that are imposed on obligation, that what we recognise as the economic is accomplished” p. 55. This is Callon’s main insight, not calculation.
\n\n
Economic interaction is the ability to bracket things; to shut out bits and pieces that don’t’ fit our frames. Slater is saying that this is the fundamental point, not that calculation is ever successful at achieving this (after all, eventually externalities have to be costed in some way).
\n\n
Slater argues: “there really is such a thing as a market… because there is such a thing as a commodity exchange which is characterised by specific forms of property right” p. 56.
\n\n
\n
Disentanglement is not the same as disembedding. The fact that markets enable us to transact as strangers does not meant that culture plays no part in how this transaction occurs.
\n\n
Marketing, for instance, is based on ‘cultural calculations’. Non-economic frames are at work in the market, along with economic ones. This doesn’t stop it being a market, and nor does the fact that something is a market mean that non-economic frames can’t be used.
\n\n
\n
Callon uses ‘economics’ in the way Foucault uses ‘governmentality’. The question is how we distinguish from the expert macro-economist and the small businessman, making calculations. The analysis risks collapsing expert and practitioner. (Although in governmentality, this is fine, as it includes the concept of translation – Rose. There is a sense, borrowed from ANT, that the difference between the two is technical, not ontological).
\n\n
\n
Advertising
\nMarketing and advertising are testimony to the fact that the market is not only made-up of economic forms of calculation which disentangle. In the case of advertising, “the calculative, disentangling question is: can this object be culturally entangled?” p. 63
\n\n
[similar sense with geography: can I make this the place to do x? Calculated romanticism]
\n\n
Economic life is neither total as Marx argued, nor just cultural as Miller argues. It combines economic and cultural factors at once.
\n\n
\n
\n
\n
\n
\n
The anti-political economy – Andrew Barry
\n\n
Just as economy relies on techniques and institutions of economics, politics needs devices to frame it and prevent it over-flowing into every corner of society. We want to contain disagreement in political spheres, using technologies.
\n\n
\n
‘Politics’ refers to the spaces and technologies used to govern. ‘The political’ refers to the sphere of contestation. Politics can be profoundly anti-political, in the way that it frames the political, and seeks to bracket it from society.
\n\n
Politics attempts to put things outside the realm of contestability, so as to create peace, institutions and durability. But the political will bleed back in.
\n\n
“The divisions between the realm of political contestation, on the one hand, and the realms of law, administration, science and the economy on the other are always temporary and, in principle, contestable” p. 87
\n\n
\n
How do markets either become or avoid becoming political?
\n\n
Calculation depoliticises them: “when situations become calculable it is taken to indicate the fact that political contestation has ended” p. 87
\n\n
Where an over-flowing occurs, new calculations have to be introduced with bigger frames.
\ne.g. government factors pollution into the regulation of cars, which then plays out in the calculation of an individual MOT certificate.
\n\n
\n
Calculation can have political effects as well as anti-political effects – where new data and metrics unsettle an existing regime, this is political. What Callon calls “hot situations” is evidence of politics.
\n\n
\n
Measurement
\n“Metrology… multiplies realities by creating objects that can be regarded neither as reflections of reality, nor the expressions of the social subjects who created them” p. 92
\n\n
“Far from creating a clean and secure connection between the world of politics and the world of economy, measurement becomes a conduit for contamination” p. 95
\n\n
\n
\n
Technology, Politics and the market – interview with Callon
\n\n
Q: is there a notion of citizenship in his work?
\n\n
A: “If you consider overflows, you don’t know who is concerned. Is it an individual? Is it a group of individuals? Is it a hybrid collective, mixing humans and non-humans? Nobody is able to answer this question. So it’s a principle of uncertainty about what the collective is made of, or will be made of” p. 103
\n\n
The fact that the market is no longer an over-arching category demonstrates that it has become political again.
\n\n
Economy is cultural and calculative at the same time; it is empty and filled, formal and substantive. In order for alienation to occur, we have to cooperate on mechanisms of alienation.
\n\n
“To disentangle, you have first to entangle better” p. 108
\n\n
\n
Structure?
\n“I would say that we no longer have macro-structures” p. 110
\n\n
“What has to be explained is precisely the progressive construction of connections, and of localities that are able to control other localities. What could replace the vision of society marked by class conflict is an account of the competition between different ways of connecting, controlling and framing localities” p. 110
\n\n
“It doesn’t mean that there is no structuring process, but that the structuring process as such is at stake” p. 111
\n\n
\n
Capitalism doesn’t exist: its “an invention of anti-capitalists” p. 113 Social scientists are also performers; Marxism performs capitalism as a concept. Economics performs calculations.
\n\n
“I think that sociologists should try to identify the actors who are able to transform the frames in which they are located, and to transform other places because they are located in a very strategic place” p. 117
\n\n
\n
“Sociological knowledge is a co-production between actors and social scientists” p. 120
\n\n
- in which case, what is the normative project of sociology? Opening up spaces of invention and experimentation in a focuaultian sense?
\n\n
\n
\n
\n
Cultural political economy: the knowledge-based economy and the state – Bob Jessop
\n\n
\n
Cultural political economy is “an emerging post-disciplinary approach that adopts the ‘cultural turn’ in economic and political inquiry but nonetheless affirms the importance of the interconnected institutional materialities of economics and poltics” p. 143.
\n\n
Institutions and economic relationships need constant work to maintain them, discursively, technologically etc. But they do exist.
\n\n
The rules of economic conduct are always spatially and temporally limited – regulation theory.
\n\n
Jessop distinguishes between the substantive material economy, and the imagined narratives of economies. But the two are co-dependent.
\n\n
“Economic imaginaries identify, privilege and seek to stabilise some economic activities from the totality of economic relations and transform them into objects of observation, calculation and governance” p. 145.
\n\n
\n
The economy depends on extra-economic factors for its coherence. The reproduction of capitalist forms cannot depend only capitalism itself.
\n\n
\n
Marx and ANT have some overlaps:
\n- the social and the technological are co-dependent, but not reducible to each other
\n- the institutions of capitalism are constantly liable to be broken open from within.
\n- Denial of a rigid distinction between the global and the local; macro and micro.
\n\n
\n
Critique of ANT: it falls into soft economic sociology. It views markets as simply there, embedded in society. No recognition of structure (if Marx is better on structure than he is on contingency, then ANT is better on the inverse).
\n\n
\n
Gramsci points out the role of intellectuals in reinforcing Fordism; the same will be true in whatever comes to replace it. Intellectuals, political parties, mass media, social movements gather and struggle to define a new paradigm. This needs to be capable of shaping strategy at every level between the firm and the supra-national scale (has translation properties).
\n\n
The idea of the Knowledge-based economy (KBE) may be this new paradigm. It began in the US as a potential response to growing competition from Europe and Asia. This offered a paradigm that the US could thrive in, and which Western Europe would support also:
\n- the key issue was that it would induce countries to respect IP
\n\n
\n
The OECD, IMF, WTO and co all lauded the KBE (while other counter-hegemonic models of a KBE also developed such as the Finnish one).
\n\n
Knowledge has consequently become a fictitious commodity like those identified by Polanyi. The State has three key roles here:
\n\n
\n
\n
Each state will vary over whether it promotes 2 or 3.
\n\n
\n
“The transition to new accumulation regimes is typically associated with public campaigns to adopt new bodily, production and consumption practises and to share new visions of economic, political and social life” p. 160
\n\n
An “imagined economic community” is required. A research agenda based on cultural political economy would address:
\n“how do new spatio-temporal fixes serve as socially-constructed institutional frameworks for displacing and deferring the contradictions and dilemmas of capital accumulation beyond their prevailing spatial boundaries and temporal fixes” p. 161
\n\n
\n
\n
Performing finance – Clark, Thrift, Thickell
\n\n
Financial news has acquired an audience, and shifted out from very small professional circles. It is now subject to the same rules as other mass media:
\n- creates stories rather than offers facts
\n- creates celebrities and gossip
\n- offers infotainment
\n\n
\n
The audience is more financially literate and more materially involved in financial markets than traditional tv audiences. But variations in economic education make herd behaviour harder to predict. Irrational exuberance can last longer than expected.
\n\n
Companies start to invest in financial PR, and buttering up star investment analysts.
\n\n
The excess of information about the market ironically makes it harder to judge what’s actually going on – it creates noise and feedback loops.
\n\n
Reflexivity is emerging: institutional investors are beginning to get trained in social psychology, to think about behavioural norms. They are trying to anticipate the psychological biases of other participants, including non-experts.
\n\n
“Commonplace assumptions about the necessary rationality of market agents have had to be rejected in favour of formulating models of decision-making that are sensitive to context, cognition and opinion” p. 177
\n\n
Q: Should regulation start to consider consumers, not just hard data, now that financial information is subject to narratives and gossip for a mass audience??
\n\n
\n
\n
\n
\n
\n
\n
\n
\n
", "tags": [], "relations": {}, "dateAdded": "2010-10-13T12:24:19Z", "dateModified": "2010-10-13T12:24:19Z" } }, { "key": "BSSRT3U2", "version": 1, "library": { "type": "group", "id": 28207, "name": "economicsociology", "links": { "alternate": { "href": "https://www.zotero.org/groups/economicsociology", "type": "text/html" } } }, "links": { "self": { "href": "https://api.zotero.org/groups/28207/items/BSSRT3U2", "type": "application/json" }, "alternate": { "href": "https://www.zotero.org/groups/economicsociology/items/BSSRT3U2", "type": "text/html" }, "up": { "href": "https://api.zotero.org/groups/28207/items/VHENXRXD", "type": "application/json" } }, "meta": { "createdByUser": { "id": 236280, "username": "willda5", "name": "Will Davies", "links": { "alternate": { "href": "https://www.zotero.org/willda5", "type": "text/html" } } } }, "data": { "key": "BSSRT3U2", "version": 1, "parentItem": "VHENXRXD", "itemType": "attachment", "linkMode": "linked_url", "title": "Amazon.com Link", "accessDate": "2010-05-10T08:22:50Z", "url": "http://www.amazon.co.uk/dp/1844673049", "note": "", "contentType": "text/html", "charset": "", "tags": [], "relations": {}, "dateAdded": "2010-10-13T12:24:19Z", "dateModified": "2010-10-13T12:24:19Z" } }, { "key": "96D53QCE", "version": 1, "library": { "type": "group", "id": 28207, "name": "economicsociology", "links": { "alternate": { "href": "https://www.zotero.org/groups/economicsociology", "type": "text/html" } } }, "links": { "self": { "href": "https://api.zotero.org/groups/28207/items/96D53QCE", "type": "application/json" }, "alternate": { "href": "https://www.zotero.org/groups/economicsociology/items/96D53QCE", "type": "text/html" }, "up": { "href": "https://api.zotero.org/groups/28207/items/VHENXRXD", "type": "application/json" } }, "meta": { "createdByUser": { "id": 236280, "username": "willda5", "name": "Will Davies", "links": { "alternate": { "href": "https://www.zotero.org/willda5", "type": "text/html" } } }, "numChildren": 0 }, "data": { "key": "96D53QCE", "version": 1, "parentItem": "VHENXRXD", "itemType": "note", "note": "
London: Verso (1994)
\n\n
\n
\n
\n
\n
Finance capitalism expands in between phases of accumulation, then dissipates again. These phases are “systemic cycles of accumulation” p. xi
\n\n
\n
\n
Core trends:
\n- 1970s – offshoring to low income countries
\n- 1980s – centralisation of wealth in high income countries
\n- Capital becoming more mobile.
\n\n
\n
GA adopts Braudel’s assertion that it is the flexibility and heterogeneity that defines capital, not its stability. Its essential feature is “its unlimited flexibility, its capacity for change and adaptation” – Braudel quoted p. 4
\n\n
Marx’s MCM formular indicates that capitalists invest in hard capital only for the purposes of increasing liquidity/freedom/flexibility at some point in the future. This is “not just the logic of individual capitalist investments, but also a recurrent pattern of historical capitalism as a world system” p. 6
\n\n
Once Labour and hard capital are no longer viable ways of growing capital, the finance capital becomes the primary target for the capitalist in his efforts to grow his assets. This logically occurs at the end of every cycle.
\n\n
For Braudel, capitalism is what occurs when the State suppresses a genuinely free market economy. Freely trading agents are quashed by capitalism-as-world-system. (Its coercive capability is crucial to its identity).
\n\n
Braudel: “capitalism only triumphs when it becomes identified with the state, when it is the state” p. 11.
\n\n
Following Weber, GA will argue that inter-state competition for mobile capital plays a key role in how expansion occurs.
\n\n
“As a rule, major material expansions have occurred only when a new dominant bloc accrued sufficient world power to be in a position not just to bypass or rise above iinter-state competition, but to bring it under control and ensure minimal inter-state cooperation” p. 12.
\n\n
Power struggles occur not just over who can attract mobile capital, but over who can set the rules for the organisation of capital circulation on a world scale.
\n\n
“Competition for mobile capital among large but approximately equal political structures has been the most essential and enduring factor in the rise and expansion of capitalist power in the modern era” p. 16.
\n\n
Where Marx thought we had to unmask the productive process in order to know capitalism, Braudel believed we have to unmask political processes.
\n\n
\n
He adopts a Gramscian notion of hegemony (national interests represented as universal interests). Not just a static system to be dominated, but a reinvention of the terms of dominance.
\n\n
Hegemony does not rise and fall within the world system, but:
\n“the modern world system itself has been formed by, and has expanded on the basis of, recurrent fundamental restructurings led and governed by successive hegemonic states” p. 31.
\n\n
[like space – a system is the condition of and a consequence of capitalism]
\n\n
\n
Wallerstein: the plurality of states is a precondition of world capitalism (can organise exploitation)
\nGA: the state system does not automatically benefit capital. It depends on which form of competition arises. Political competition and economic competition can contradict one another because “capitalist” and “territorialist” logics are different, p. 33.
\n\n
The territorialist conceives of capital as a means to territory; the capitalist conceives of territory as a means to capital.
\n\n
\n
Genoese, Dutch, UK, US…
\n\n
The UK introduced ‘free trade imperialism’.
\n“Free-trade imperialism… established the principle that the laws operating within and between states were subject to the higher authority of a new metaphysical entity – a world market ruled by its own “laws” – allegedly endowed with supernatural powers greater than anything pope and emperor had ever mastered in the medieval system of rule” p. 55
\n\n
This was a world empire. Control over world money was the most important feature of UK control. It meant that other sovereigns were constrained as well as citizens. Money control provided the basis for a far larger-scale territorial control than anything in history previously.
\n\n
\n
US hegemony began with the German and US challenge to British power. “British territorialism and capitalism had cross-fertilised one another. But US capitalism and territorialism were indistinguishable from one another” p. 59.
\n\n
Size of domestic market started to play a more important role in determining comparative advantage, so US beat Germany (and Germany grew frustrated with its size…). World Wars aided the US further.
\n\n
Following WW2, the US rebuilt the Westphalian system around its own interests. Decolonisation and the UN resulted. Roosevelt’s ideal was sincere, and sought support for humanitarian internationalism. But Cold War pragmatism quickly replaced this, and strategic anti-Soviet liberalism took over. Equally, until the 1980s, the US did not push market liberalism, for fear that this might play into Soviet hands.
\n\n
\n
Trade proved to be less important to US hegemony than investment networks. US capital was exported rather than simply goods. The MNC is key to US control – state boundaries become blurred as corporations become trans-national.
\n\n
This new space of corporations could eventually destroy the State [Hardt and Negri]. The powerful live in places, but are not defined by them, like the non-territorial networks controlled by the Genoese.
\n\n
Capitalism can triumph either through states (places) or through flows (spaces)…
\n\n
\n
Power traditionally was the master of capital. Now capital has become the master of power. The identity of the capitalist class changes from each epoch to the next. They are ousted, and aim to survive as an aristocracy.
\n\n
\n
In the “mercantile economy” there is common interest between competing entities in growing the sphere of trade because economies of scale become possible.
\n\n
Agents in the mercantile economy seek ways of discovering information about distant competitors who they have little contact with.
\n“The evolution of the institutions of the mercantile economy is largely a matter of finding ways of diminishing risks” p. 89
\n\n
\n
In Italy in the 13th and 14th centuries, a capitalist anarchy developed, with larger states eating up smaller ones to expand their trading potential, using war as a weapon of capital accumulation. But where the state runs out of options for aggressive competition it becomes more tempting to strike agreements with competitors. The mercantile economy becomes custom-based (although these agreements have to ensure that future surpluses don’t get invested back into expansion).
\n\n
Creation of sound money was critical to success of Genoese capitalism in 15th century. In 1447, a law was passed specifying the single legitimate unit of currency. This created a distinction between “good money” and “current money” [cf. Marx’s distinction between two functions of money – store of value and lubricant for exchange]
\n\n
As Genoa lost certain territorial advantages, its bourgeoisie started to withdraw their capital to a more local context, leading to over-accumulation. There was no political or territorial protection for this money.
\n\n
Genoese capitalists teamed up with Iberians who offered protection, and needed capital. This flourished. The debts of Ibeian territorialists offered constant opportunities to invest capital for Genoese, who became the bankers of Europe.
\n\n
Schumpeter: “without protection by some non-bourgeois group, the bourgeoisie is politically helpless and unable not only to lead its nation but even to take care of its particular class interest” quoted p. 119.
\n\n
Every system needs its territorialist and capitalist dimension to survive.
\n\n
\n
In the late 16th century, the Dutch were lucky to have demand pumped into their economy – demand for grain and naval stores, and the decline of the Mediterranean helped. Surplus capital developed in Holland, which crucially was not pumped straight back into the same goods, but moved around via a rentier class.
\n\n
Amsterdam became the first permanent stock exchange. It positioned Holland as the home of liquidity, giving it global reach in the longer term. This was the primacy site for reallocating idle capital from all over the world.
\n\n
Like the Genoese, they sought territorialist allies, in this case the English.
\n\n
Dutch companies were given quasi-sovereign rights over foreign territories.
\n\n
Dutch supremacy lasted from around 1610-1730/40. In the end, imitation of its mercantilist policies undermined it. Dutch capitalists retreated further and further into high finance to escape the demise of the territory.
\n\n
The battle that had taken place between the Venetia state/monopoly model of capitalism and the Genoese finance/cosmopolitan model is at the heart of every transition in capitalism. The Dutch model combined the two models – it delegated state power to companies, especially the VOC. The Company was permitted to pursue war in its own interests (i.e. making the region more efficient).
\n\n
The VOC demonstrated that “capitalist techniques of power could beat territorialist techniques on the very terrain of territorialist expansion” p. 157.
\n\n
\n
In the early 19th century a great new wave of MC was initiated driven by the UK. But from 1870, this was followed by a CM phase.
\n\n
In the mid 19th century, Britain had unrivalled control over the world economic system, both in production and finance. For half a century, British haute finance operated as “the main link between the political and the economic organisation of the world”, Polanyi quoted p. 166
\n\n
The Rothschilds had a quasi-governmental role. But like the Dutch before them, they abandoned productive territorial capital as soon as it went into decline, and thereby clung to some of their power for a further 50 years.
\n\n
The depression of 1873-96 was a problem of excessive competition, falling profits and capital exiting production. Wages fell, competition slackened and capital returned. Belle époque began – the death throes of British capitalism. It worked purely because labour was exploited and industrial competition was thwarted.
\n\n
The UK combined financial/cosmopolitan capitalism with monopoly/state capitalism. The state created the conditions for free trade unilaterally.
\n\n
In Britain, production became the chief source of surplus value, rather than rentier type behaviours or trade. Britain was neither a territorialist producer nor a trans-spatial financier, but both (like Venice).
\n\n
- Background to UK hegemony
\nElizabeth 1st established solid money in 1560. It retained its value until the 1920s. This gave Britain some autonomy from the financial cliques that exerted power over European economies.
\n\n
1570: stock exchange was established. This and the creation of stable money marked a new alliance of the state and economy. The pound was a weapon in a battle against the Dutch and the French.
\n\n
Manufacturing was restructured towards high value-add activities. The economy was protected to resist Dutch mercantilism.
\n\n
The dual nature of UK pursuits – MTM and TMT – that created success for the UK over the Dutch. The ‘capitalist nation’ was merged with the ‘territorialist state’, beating the excessively capitalist Dutch model, and the excessively territorialist European model.
\n\n
Merchant banking became critical to the financing of British war and expansion. The British ‘space of flows’ was internal to its own territory (with Empire) unlike either Genoa’s or the US’s later on.
\n\n
\n
Extending the theory
\nEach cycle is shorter than the one that went before it. Capitalist history is speeding up. This is because a competitor must solve the problem of the hegemon in order to challenge it.
\n\n
The British model was a nation state, where the Dutch was just capitalists; the US model is more than just a nation state. There is a see-saw between extensive and intensive regimes:
\n- Genoa/UK – extended capitalism [and China opening up another era of expansionism?]
\n- Holland/US – intensified capitalism
\n\n
Expansion goes from being profit-growing (new territory) to profit-shrinking (new competition). In between, capital over-accumulation occurs as investors all seek to pull out at the same time. Competition goes from being constructive positive-sum to being destructive zero-sum.
\n\n
The logic of capital accumulation and that of trade expansion start to diverge. Expansion starts to be pursued by territorialist organisations, financed by all the surplus capital [US at the moment]. The CM phase includes a switch from trade to finance as a means of extending spatially.
\n\n
\n
US hegemony
\nThe Dutch internalised protection costs, the British internalised production costs – the US internalised transaction costs through the Fordist model.
\n\n
This was an organisational revolution which gave massive comparative advantage, but which couldn’t easily be mimicked. The key organisational model had swung back from free enterprise of small traders, to the vertical mercantilist company of the Dutch era.
\n\n
The UK used and dissolved joint stock companies, as it saw useful for expansion of trade and empire. Otherwise, it was chiefly an SME economy. Competition and cooperation were constrained by the industrial revolution – firms sitting in one part of the production chain were constantly being affected and affecting others in other parts. Cumulative turbulence was constant, and unmanaged.
\n\n
\n
Technological rationality and economic rationality became split. Short-term capitalist logic did not allow for large industrial investment; but large industrial investment led to inflexible production.
\n\n
Britain could survive this contradiction because its empire gave it access to cheap resources and labour, and somewhere to push the turbulent consequences to. Germany didn’t have this, and faced the same contradiction between capitalist logic and technological logic. Instead, German firms coalesced into Cartels, and developed a planned approach to science/technology driven business, which was even less flexible in the face of the market. These were a technological success, but not an economic success.
\n\n
\n
The US was lending on a massive scale from 1914-1929. Eventually the imbalance created the crash - stable currencies and an integrated financial system were abandoned. London was no longer central to the system
\n\n
After WW1, the US controlled 70% of gold reserves, and was physically undamaged by the war, thanks to its geography. Bretton Woods transformed the nature of world money, from being a bi-product of profit-making activities, to being a product of government.
\n\n
Roosevelt launched an assault on banking. But financiers were successful in lobbying for the gold standard, against Keynes.
\n\n
The UK’s decentralised SME economy was a handicap when it came to implementing new production techniques across the production cycle. Ironically, flexible production now operates more along these lines in clusters.
\n\n
The German and US models developed in response to the 1973-96 depression. The US started to integrate firms vertically, partly because anti-trust prevented too much horizontal integration. The US model beat the logic of competition, whereas the German model simply ignored it.
\n\n
- the British controlled the market; the Germans ignored it; the US superseded it.
\n\n
\n
The new organisational model also controlled and suspended competition because it raised new barriers to entry.
\n\n
The US finance community lobbied hard to defend the British market model.
\n\n
After 1950, military expenditure became a substitute for foreign demand. 1950-73 was the greatest age of capitalism ever. It was a massive MC phase. But once competition reached fever pitch, the CM phase kicked in (circa 1968-73) and Bretton Woods inevitably collapsed. Injection of demand into the economy was suddenly resulting in inflation rather than growth – there was too much capital.
\n\n
Military and capitalist priorities started to diverge for the first time – Japan was an ally to one, and a competitor to the other.
\n\n
London became dominant in currency markets, but this only served to increase the power of US banks over the UK government. Floating exchange rates forced firms to become more multinational, as they had to hedge against their losses in any one currency.
\n\n
Loose monetary policy was resulting in more international finance, rather than further production and growth.
\n\n
Reagan represented the ‘belle epoque’ of the US hegemony: as with the Edwardians, a preoccupation with high finance, and growing inequality, were symptoms that this was the last hurrah. Debt spiralled, as with Britain post WW1.
\n\n
The loss of legitimacy of cold war ideology, which began with the Tet offensive in 1968, meant that territorialist claims had to stop. Precisely because the US military build-up was so vast, Americans became less prepared to make sacrifices for the Cold War.
\n\n
\n
From the late 1980s onwards, Washington started to view Wall Street as a potential ally in global power, rather than the rival which Roosevelt had viewed it as. This had drastic consequences for the 3rd world.
", "tags": [], "relations": {}, "dateAdded": "2010-10-13T12:24:19Z", "dateModified": "2010-10-13T12:24:19Z" } }, { "key": "PP9DS9IN", "version": 1, "library": { "type": "group", "id": 28207, "name": "economicsociology", "links": { "alternate": { "href": "https://www.zotero.org/groups/economicsociology", "type": "text/html" } } }, "links": { "self": { "href": "https://api.zotero.org/groups/28207/items/PP9DS9IN", "type": "application/json" }, "alternate": { "href": "https://www.zotero.org/groups/economicsociology/items/PP9DS9IN", "type": "text/html" }, "up": { "href": "https://api.zotero.org/groups/28207/items/KS748VCG", "type": "application/json" } }, "meta": { "createdByUser": { "id": 236280, "username": "willda5", "name": "Will Davies", "links": { "alternate": { "href": "https://www.zotero.org/willda5", "type": "text/html" } } } }, "data": { "key": "PP9DS9IN", "version": 1, "parentItem": "KS748VCG", "itemType": "attachment", "linkMode": "linked_url", "title": "Amazon.com Link", "accessDate": "2010-05-10T08:23:02Z", "url": "http://www.amazon.co.uk/dp/1844672980", "note": "", "contentType": "text/html", "charset": "", "tags": [], "relations": {}, "dateAdded": "2010-10-13T12:24:19Z", "dateModified": "2010-10-13T12:24:19Z" } }, { "key": "IHWXFHA9", "version": 1, "library": { "type": "group", "id": 28207, "name": "economicsociology", "links": { "alternate": { "href": "https://www.zotero.org/groups/economicsociology", "type": "text/html" } } }, "links": { "self": { "href": "https://api.zotero.org/groups/28207/items/IHWXFHA9", "type": "application/json" }, "alternate": { "href": "https://www.zotero.org/groups/economicsociology/items/IHWXFHA9", "type": "text/html" }, "up": { "href": "https://api.zotero.org/groups/28207/items/KS748VCG", "type": "application/json" } }, "meta": { "createdByUser": { "id": 236280, "username": "willda5", "name": "Will Davies", "links": { "alternate": { "href": "https://www.zotero.org/willda5", "type": "text/html" } } }, "numChildren": 0 }, "data": { "key": "IHWXFHA9", "version": 1, "parentItem": "KS748VCG", "itemType": "note", "note": "The Long Twentieth Century
\nGiovanni Arrighi
\nLondon: Verso (1994)
\n\n
\n
\n
\n
\n
Finance capitalism expands in between phases of accumulation, then dissipates again. These phases are “systemic cycles of accumulation” p. xi
\n\n
\n
\n
Core trends:
\n- 1970s – offshoring to low income countries
\n- 1980s – centralisation of wealth in high income countries
\n- Capital becoming more mobile.
\n\n
\n
GA adopts Braudel’s assertion that it is the flexibility and heterogeneity that defines capital, not its stability. Its essential feature is “its unlimited flexibility, its capacity for change and adaptation” – Braudel quoted p. 4
\n\n
Marx’s MCM formular indicates that capitalists invest in hard capital only for the purposes of increasing liquidity/freedom/flexibility at some point in the future. This is “not just the logic of individual capitalist investments, but also a recurrent pattern of historical capitalism as a world system” p. 6
\n\n
Once Labour and hard capital are no longer viable ways of growing capital, the finance capital becomes the primary target for the capitalist in his efforts to grow his assets. This logically occurs at the end of every cycle.
\n\n
For Braudel, capitalism is what occurs when the State suppresses a genuinely free market economy. Freely trading agents are quashed by capitalism-as-world-system. (Its coercive capability is crucial to its identity).
\n\n
Braudel: “capitalism only triumphs when it becomes identified with the state, when it is the state” p. 11.
\n\n
Following Weber, GA will argue that inter-state competition for mobile capital plays a key role in how expansion occurs.
\n\n
“As a rule, major material expansions have occurred only when a new dominant bloc accrued sufficient world power to be in a position not just to bypass or rise above iinter-state competition, but to bring it under control and ensure minimal inter-state cooperation” p. 12.
\n\n
Power struggles occur not just over who can attract mobile capital, but over who can set the rules for the organisation of capital circulation on a world scale.
\n\n
“Competition for mobile capital among large but approximately equal political structures has been the most essential and enduring factor in the rise and expansion of capitalist power in the modern era” p. 16.
\n\n
Where Marx thought we had to unmask the productive process in order to know capitalism, Braudel believed we have to unmask political processes.
\n\n
\n
He adopts a Gramscian notion of hegemony (national interests represented as universal interests). Not just a static system to be dominated, but a reinvention of the terms of dominance.
\n\n
Hegemony does not rise and fall within the world system, but:
\n“the modern world system itself has been formed by, and has expanded on the basis of, recurrent fundamental restructurings led and governed by successive hegemonic states” p. 31.
\n\n
[like space – a system is the condition of and a consequence of capitalism]
\n\n
\n
Wallerstein: the plurality of states is a precondition of world capitalism (can organise exploitation)
\nGA: the state system does not automatically benefit capital. It depends on which form of competition arises. Political competition and economic competition can contradict one another because “capitalist” and “territorialist” logics are different, p. 33.
\n\n
The territorialist conceives of capital as a means to territory; the capitalist conceives of territory as a means to capital.
\n\n
\n
Genoese, Dutch, UK, US…
\n\n
The UK introduced ‘free trade imperialism’.
\n“Free-trade imperialism… established the principle that the laws operating within and between states were subject to the higher authority of a new metaphysical entity – a world market ruled by its own “laws” – allegedly endowed with supernatural powers greater than anything pope and emperor had ever mastered in the medieval system of rule” p. 55
\n\n
This was a world empire. Control over world money was the most important feature of UK control. It meant that other sovereigns were constrained as well as citizens. Money control provided the basis for a far larger-scale territorial control than anything in history previously.
\n\n
\n
US hegemony began with the German and US challenge to British power. “British territorialism and capitalism had cross-fertilised one another. But US capitalism and territorialism were indistinguishable from one another” p. 59.
\n\n
Size of domestic market started to play a more important role in determining comparative advantage, so US beat Germany (and Germany grew frustrated with its size…). World Wars aided the US further.
\n\n
Following WW2, the US rebuilt the Westphalian system around its own interests. Decolonisation and the UN resulted. Roosevelt’s ideal was sincere, and sought support for humanitarian internationalism. But Cold War pragmatism quickly replaced this, and strategic anti-Soviet liberalism took over. Equally, until the 1980s, the US did not push market liberalism, for fear that this might play into Soviet hands.
\n\n
\n
Trade proved to be less important to US hegemony than investment networks. US capital was exported rather than simply goods. The MNC is key to US control – state boundaries become blurred as corporations become trans-national.
\n\n
This new space of corporations could eventually destroy the State [Hardt and Negri]. The powerful live in places, but are not defined by them, like the non-territorial networks controlled by the Genoese.
\n\n
Capitalism can triumph either through states (places) or through flows (spaces)…
\n\n
\n
Power traditionally was the master of capital. Now capital has become the master of power. The identity of the capitalist class changes from each epoch to the next. They are ousted, and aim to survive as an aristocracy.
\n\n
\n
In the “mercantile economy” there is common interest between competing entities in growing the sphere of trade because economies of scale become possible.
\n\n
Agents in the mercantile economy seek ways of discovering information about distant competitors who they have little contact with.
\n“The evolution of the institutions of the mercantile economy is largely a matter of finding ways of diminishing risks” p. 89
\n\n
\n
In Italy in the 13th and 14th centuries, a capitalist anarchy developed, with larger states eating up smaller ones to expand their trading potential, using war as a weapon of capital accumulation. But where the state runs out of options for aggressive competition it becomes more tempting to strike agreements with competitors. The mercantile economy becomes custom-based (although these agreements have to ensure that future surpluses don’t get invested back into expansion).
\n\n
Creation of sound money was critical to success of Genoese capitalism in 15th century. In 1447, a law was passed specifying the single legitimate unit of currency. This created a distinction between “good money” and “current money” [cf. Marx’s distinction between two functions of money – store of value and lubricant for exchange]
\n\n
As Genoa lost certain territorial advantages, its bourgeoisie started to withdraw their capital to a more local context, leading to over-accumulation. There was no political or territorial protection for this money.
\n\n
Genoese capitalists teamed up with Iberians who offered protection, and needed capital. This flourished. The debts of Ibeian territorialists offered constant opportunities to invest capital for Genoese, who became the bankers of Europe.
\n\n
Schumpeter: “without protection by some non-bourgeois group, the bourgeoisie is politically helpless and unable not only to lead its nation but even to take care of its particular class interest” quoted p. 119.
\n\n
Every system needs its territorialist and capitalist dimension to survive.
\n\n
\n
In the late 16th century, the Dutch were lucky to have demand pumped into their economy – demand for grain and naval stores, and the decline of the Mediterranean helped. Surplus capital developed in Holland, which crucially was not pumped straight back into the same goods, but moved around via a rentier class.
\n\n
Amsterdam became the first permanent stock exchange. It positioned Holland as the home of liquidity, giving it global reach in the longer term. This was the primacy site for reallocating idle capital from all over the world.
\n\n
Like the Genoese, they sought territorialist allies, in this case the English.
\n\n
Dutch companies were given quasi-sovereign rights over foreign territories.
\n\n
Dutch supremacy lasted from around 1610-1730/40. In the end, imitation of its mercantilist policies undermined it. Dutch capitalists retreated further and further into high finance to escape the demise of the territory.
\n\n
The battle that had taken place between the Venetia state/monopoly model of capitalism and the Genoese finance/cosmopolitan model is at the heart of every transition in capitalism. The Dutch model combined the two models – it delegated state power to companies, especially the VOC. The Company was permitted to pursue war in its own interests (i.e. making the region more efficient).
\n\n
The VOC demonstrated that “capitalist techniques of power could beat territorialist techniques on the very terrain of territorialist expansion” p. 157.
\n\n
\n
In the early 19th century a great new wave of MC was initiated driven by the UK. But from 1870, this was followed by a CM phase.
\n\n
In the mid 19th century, Britain had unrivalled control over the world economic system, both in production and finance. For half a century, British haute finance operated as “the main link between the political and the economic organisation of the world”, Polanyi quoted p. 166
\n\n
The Rothschilds had a quasi-governmental role. But like the Dutch before them, they abandoned productive territorial capital as soon as it went into decline, and thereby clung to some of their power for a further 50 years.
\n\n
The depression of 1873-96 was a problem of excessive competition, falling profits and capital exiting production. Wages fell, competition slackened and capital returned. Belle époque began – the death throes of British capitalism. It worked purely because labour was exploited and industrial competition was thwarted.
\n\n
The UK combined financial/cosmopolitan capitalism with monopoly/state capitalism. The state created the conditions for free trade unilaterally.
\n\n
In Britain, production became the chief source of surplus value, rather than rentier type behaviours or trade. Britain was neither a territorialist producer nor a trans-spatial financier, but both (like Venice).
\n\n
- Background to UK hegemony
\nElizabeth 1st established solid money in 1560. It retained its value until the 1920s. This gave Britain some autonomy from the financial cliques that exerted power over European economies.
\n\n
1570: stock exchange was established. This and the creation of stable money marked a new alliance of the state and economy. The pound was a weapon in a battle against the Dutch and the French.
\n\n
Manufacturing was restructured towards high value-add activities. The economy was protected to resist Dutch mercantilism.
\n\n
The dual nature of UK pursuits – MTM and TMT – that created success for the UK over the Dutch. The ‘capitalist nation’ was merged with the ‘territorialist state’, beating the excessively capitalist Dutch model, and the excessively territorialist European model.
\n\n
Merchant banking became critical to the financing of British war and expansion. The British ‘space of flows’ was internal to its own territory (with Empire) unlike either Genoa’s or the US’s later on.
\n\n
\n
Extending the theory
\nEach cycle is shorter than the one that went before it. Capitalist history is speeding up. This is because a competitor must solve the problem of the hegemon in order to challenge it.
\n\n
The British model was a nation state, where the Dutch was just capitalists; the US model is more than just a nation state. There is a see-saw between extensive and intensive regimes:
\n- Genoa/UK – extended capitalism [and China opening up another era of expansionism?]
\n- Holland/US – intensified capitalism
\n\n
Expansion goes from being profit-growing (new territory) to profit-shrinking (new competition). In between, capital over-accumulation occurs as investors all seek to pull out at the same time. Competition goes from being constructive positive-sum to being destructive zero-sum.
\n\n
The logic of capital accumulation and that of trade expansion start to diverge. Expansion starts to be pursued by territorialist organisations, financed by all the surplus capital [US at the moment]. The CM phase includes a switch from trade to finance as a means of extending spatially.
\n\n
\n
US hegemony
\nThe Dutch internalised protection costs, the British internalised production costs – the US internalised transaction costs through the Fordist model.
\n\n
This was an organisational revolution which gave massive comparative advantage, but which couldn’t easily be mimicked. The key organisational model had swung back from free enterprise of small traders, to the vertical mercantilist company of the Dutch era.
\n\n
The UK used and dissolved joint stock companies, as it saw useful for expansion of trade and empire. Otherwise, it was chiefly an SME economy. Competition and cooperation were constrained by the industrial revolution – firms sitting in one part of the production chain were constantly being affected and affecting others in other parts. Cumulative turbulence was constant, and unmanaged.
\n\n
\n
Technological rationality and economic rationality became split. Short-term capitalist logic did not allow for large industrial investment; but large industrial investment led to inflexible production.
\n\n
Britain could survive this contradiction because its empire gave it access to cheap resources and labour, and somewhere to push the turbulent consequences to. Germany didn’t have this, and faced the same contradiction between capitalist logic and technological logic. Instead, German firms coalesced into Cartels, and developed a planned approach to science/technology driven business, which was even less flexible in the face of the market. These were a technological success, but not an economic success.
\n\n
\n
The US was lending on a massive scale from 1914-1929. Eventually the imbalance created the crash - stable currencies and an integrated financial system were abandoned. London was no longer central to the system
\n\n
After WW1, the US controlled 70% of gold reserves, and was physically undamaged by the war, thanks to its geography. Bretton Woods transformed the nature of world money, from being a bi-product of profit-making activities, to being a product of government.
\n\n
Roosevelt launched an assault on banking. But financiers were successful in lobbying for the gold standard, against Keynes.
\n\n
The UK’s decentralised SME economy was a handicap when it came to implementing new production techniques across the production cycle. Ironically, flexible production now operates more along these lines in clusters.
\n\n
The German and US models developed in response to the 1973-96 depression. The US started to integrate firms vertically, partly because anti-trust prevented too much horizontal integration. The US model beat the logic of competition, whereas the German model simply ignored it.
\n\n
- the British controlled the market; the Germans ignored it; the US superseded it.
\n\n
\n
The new organisational model also controlled and suspended competition because it raised new barriers to entry.
\n\n
The US finance community lobbied hard to defend the British market model.
\n\n
After 1950, military expenditure became a substitute for foreign demand. 1950-73 was the greatest age of capitalism ever. It was a massive MC phase. But once competition reached fever pitch, the CM phase kicked in (circa 1968-73) and Bretton Woods inevitably collapsed. Injection of demand into the economy was suddenly resulting in inflation rather than growth – there was too much capital.
\n\n
Military and capitalist priorities started to diverge for the first time – Japan was an ally to one, and a competitor to the other.
\n\n
London became dominant in currency markets, but this only served to increase the power of US banks over the UK government. Floating exchange rates forced firms to become more multinational, as they had to hedge against their losses in any one currency.
\n\n
Loose monetary policy was resulting in more international finance, rather than further production and growth.
\n\n
Reagan represented the ‘belle epoque’ of the US hegemony: as with the Edwardians, a preoccupation with high finance, and growing inequality, were symptoms that this was the last hurrah. Debt spiralled, as with Britain post WW1.
\n\n
The loss of legitimacy of cold war ideology, which began with the Tet offensive in 1968, meant that territorialist claims had to stop. Precisely because the US military build-up was so vast, Americans became less prepared to make sacrifices for the Cold War.
\n\n
\n
From the late 1980s onwards, Washington started to view Wall Street as a potential ally in global power, rather than the rival which Roosevelt had viewed it as. This had drastic consequences for the 3rd world.
", "tags": [], "relations": {}, "dateAdded": "2010-10-13T12:24:19Z", "dateModified": "2010-10-13T12:24:19Z" } }, { "key": "TSWTXM3B", "version": 1, "library": { "type": "group", "id": 28207, "name": "economicsociology", "links": { "alternate": { "href": "https://www.zotero.org/groups/economicsociology", "type": "text/html" } } }, "links": { "self": { "href": "https://api.zotero.org/groups/28207/items/TSWTXM3B", "type": "application/json" }, "alternate": { "href": "https://www.zotero.org/groups/economicsociology/items/TSWTXM3B", "type": "text/html" }, "up": { "href": "https://api.zotero.org/groups/28207/items/NC4FP7QJ", "type": "application/json" } }, "meta": { "createdByUser": { "id": 236280, "username": "willda5", "name": "Will Davies", "links": { "alternate": { "href": "https://www.zotero.org/willda5", "type": "text/html" } } } }, "data": { "key": "TSWTXM3B", "version": 1, "parentItem": "NC4FP7QJ", "itemType": "attachment", "linkMode": "linked_url", "title": "Amazon.com Link", "accessDate": "2010-05-10T08:22:35Z", "url": "http://www.amazon.co.uk/dp/0816627932", "note": "", "contentType": "text/html", "charset": "", "tags": [], "relations": {}, "dateAdded": "2010-10-13T12:24:19Z", "dateModified": "2010-10-13T12:24:19Z" } } ]