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In an age of extreme political polarization and waning of reasoned debate across political divides, Capitalism for Realists carefully explores the inner workings of capitalism in a consciously non-partisan and balanced way. Does the modern capitalist economy alleviate poverty and exploitation, or exacerbate them? What, exactly, is ‘neoliberalism,'and how well or poorly has it performed in the past 40 years? Does capitalism undermine democracy, or is it rather one of its key necessary conditions? How have altruism, cooperation, tolerance, violence, and trust fared under the influence of the modern market society? Should we analyse capitalism through the mainstream economic lens or a more critical Marxist perspective? This book offers answers to these questions.Synthesizing decades of research across disciplines, Capitalism for Realists offers an overarching perspective on the modern economy by theoretically unifying many of the claims and conclusions about it offered by various traditionally rivalrous social science paradigms, such as institutional, neoclassical, and public choice economics on the one hand, and Marxist sociology on the other. The book presents and critically assesses the latest data and debates on such crucial contemporary issues as the relationship between poverty, exploitation, inequality, and capitalism, the nature of ‘neoliberalism'and the successes and failures of both state-led industrial policy and the Washington consensus, capitalist peace theory, historical origins of modern capitalism, and more. What emerges is a clear picture of the merits and demerits of the modern economy too nuanced to be simplified and categorized by the prevailing political discourses.Rich in empirical detail, this lively, accessible book will appeal to undergraduate and graduate students with interests in sociological theory, political theory, economics, and political and economic sociology.

This pioneering Handbook offers a state-of-the-art exploration of the social structure of accumulation theory, a leading theory of stages of capitalism, expertly summarising its development to date. It breaks new ground in several areas, including econometric evidence for the theory and developing institutional analyses of technology and the environment.Expert international contributors offer an in-depth treatment of the theory of social structures of accumulation, extending this analysis to areas of the world where the application of the theory has previously been underexplored such as Western and Eastern Europe, Latin America, and India. It offers a detailed discussion of global neoliberalism, and many of the important individual institutions constituting social structures of accumulation, including in the areas of criminal justice, urban policy, technology, and corporate management.Thought-provoking and insightful, the new ground covered in this Handbook will be a key resource for heterodox economists who are interested in social structures of accumulation, long waves, and stages of capitalism. The comprehensive background analysis on current issues will also be of interest to sociologists,political scientists, and historians.

A new history of Rotary International shows how the organization reinforced capitalist values and cultural practices at home and tried to remake the world in the idealized image of Main Street America.Rotary International was born in Chicago in 1905. By the time World War II was over, the organization had made good on its promise to “girdle the globe.” Rotary International and the Selling of American Capitalism explores the meteoric rise of a local service club that brought missionary zeal to the spread of American-style economics and civic ideals.Brendan Goff traces Rotary's ideological roots to the business progressivism and cultural internationalism of the United States in the early twentieth century. The key idea was that community service was intrinsic to a capitalist way of life. The tone of “service above self” was often religious, but, as Rotary looked abroad, it embraced Woodrow Wilson's secular message of collective security and international cooperation: civic internationalism was the businessman's version of the Christian imperial civilizing mission, performed outside the state apparatus. The target of this mission was both domestic and global. The Rotarian, the organization's publication, encouraged Americans to see the world as friendly to Main Street values, and Rotary worked with US corporations to export those values. Case studies of Rotary activities in Tokyo and Havana show the group paving the way for encroachments of US power—economic, political, and cultural—during the interwar years.Rotary's evangelism on behalf of market-friendly philanthropy and volunteerism reflected a genuine belief in peacemaking through the world's “parliament of businessmen.” But, as Goff makes clear, Rotary also reinforced American power and interests, demonstrating the tension at the core of US-led internationalism.

Should human organs be bought and sold? Is it right that richer people should be able to pay poorer people to wait in a queue for them? Should objects in museums ever be sold? The assumption underlying such questions is that there are things that should not be bought and sold because it would give them a financial value that would replace some other, and dearly held, human value. Those who ask questions of this kind often fear that the replacement of human by money values – a process of commodification – is sweeping all before it. However, as Nicholas Abercrombie argues, commodification can be, and has been, resisted by the development of a moral climate that defines certain things as outside a market. That resistance, however, is never complete because the two regimes of value – human and money – are both necessary for the sustainability of society. His analysis of these processes offers a thought-provoking read that will appeal to students and scholars interested in market capitalism and culture.

Thirty years after its global triumph, neo-liberalism is an abject failure. While its advocates have succeeded in convincing citizens that no other way is possible, that no left turn can be made without an economic collapse, they have not fulfilled their promises of a better world and the result has been more inequality, insecurity, and speculation. Many have sought solace in collective goals – nationalism, narrow religion, and gender politics – while notions of universal solidarity, idealism, and humanism have all but disappeared. In Capitalism and the Alternatives Julius H. Grey seeks to rehabilitate economic equality as a fundamental social goal built on universal values such as individualism, liberty, and even romanticism. To achieve this, he argues, it is necessary to move away from national, ethnic, religious, and even gender loyalties. The importance in each society of common culture and widely accepted moral values, Grey suggests, cannot be overstated. With its rampant political correctness, the modern left seems to have lost sight of morality and individual freedom. While most commentators stake out a partisan position in their criticism, Grey's notion of individual romanticism as the basis of a socially progressive society and his stress on free will, culture, classical education, and the right to dissent demand an overhaul of both the right and the left. A fundamental rethinking of the social, political, and economic foundations of modern industrial society, Capitalism and the Alternatives proposes freedom from identity, instead of communitarianism and tradition, as a condition for liberty and justice.

Shortlisted for the Financial Times/McKinsey Business Book of the Year AwardFrom one of the most important economic thinkers of our time, a brilliant and far-seeing analysis of the current populist backlash against globalization.Raghuram Rajan, distinguished University of Chicago professor, former IMF chief economist, head of India's central bank, and author of the 2010 FT-Goldman-Sachs Book of the Year Fault Lines, has an unparalleled vantage point onto the social and economic consequences of globalization and their ultimate effect on our politics. In The Third Pillar he offers up a magnificent big-picture framework for understanding how these three forces--the state, markets, and our communities--interact, why things begin to break down, and how we can find our way back to a more secure and stable plane. The'third pillar'of the title is the community we live in. Economists all too often understand their field as the relationship between markets and the state, and they leave squishy social issues for other people. That's not just myopic, Rajan argues; it's dangerous. All economics is actually socioeconomics - all markets are embedded in a web of human relations, values and norms. As he shows, throughout history, technological phase shifts have ripped the market out of those old webs and led to violent backlashes, and to what we now call populism. Eventually, a new equilibrium is reached, but it can be ugly and messy, especially if done wrong. Right now, we're doing it wrong. As markets scale up, the state scales up with it, concentrating economic and political power in flourishing central hubs and leaving the periphery to decompose, figuratively and even literally. Instead, Rajan offers a way to rethink the relationship between the market and civil society and argues for a return to strengthening and empowering local communities as an antidote to growing despair and unrest. Rajan is not a doctrinaire conservative, so his ultimate argument that decision-making has to be devolved to the grass roots or our democracy will continue to wither, is sure to be provocative. But even setting aside its solutions, The Third Pillar is a masterpiece of explication, a book that will be a classic of its kind for its offering of a wise, authoritative and humane explanation of the forces that have wrought such a sea change in our lives.

Project Society After Money is an interdisciplinary project between commons theory, evolutionary political economy, media studies and sociology, that enter into a dialogue with one another in order to look at their specific theories and criticisms of money. Conceived as the beginning of a necessary interdisciplinary dialogue, the possibilities of post-monetary forms of organization and production are taken into account and examined. On one hand there is a lot of talk about'digital revolution','mediatized society','networks','Industry 4.0'. On the other hand the present is described in terms of crisis:'financial crisis','economic crisis','planetary boundaries'. At once there is the description of a media-technological change along with massive social and ecological disruptions. Society After Money is based on the premise that there might be a conflict between digital media/digital technology and the medium of money – and perhaps new digital possibilities that allow alternative forms of economy. It criticizes what is normally seen as self-evident and natural, namely that social coordination has to be done by the medium of money. We're left with a highly innovative collection of contributions that initiates a broader social discourse on the role of money in the global society of the 21st century.

Immer wieder liest man, dass Hersteller ihre Produkte bewusst so konstruieren, dass sie vorzeitig kaputtgehen. Die Leidtragenden: die Kunden. Viele Hersteller aber wollen den Verschleiß hinauszögern. Wie gehen sie vor, um Obsoleszenz zu planen? Der Band präsentiert erstmals die Sicht und die Erfahrungen derer, die Produkte entwickeln, konstruieren und fertigen. Die Beiträge beschäftigen sich mit Reparierbarkeit als Geschäftsmodell, Product Lifecycle Management, Obsoleszenz als Managementthema, der Rolle staatlicher Einflussnahme und den gesellschaftlichen Treibern der Kurzlebigkeit von Konsumartikeln.

World-system analyses have recast the study of between- and within-nation country inequality as constituent aspects of a single field of inquiry: the study of inequality and social stratification as processes that always have been global in their very essence. World-system analyses maintain that global social stratification pivots around institutional arrangements that render distributional outcomes as simultaneously “national,” “gendered,” “racialized,” and “global” processes.This book takes stock of some of the enduring theoretical and empirical contributions of a world-system perspective, and identifies promising directions for future inquiry and discussion. Some chapters reassess the scope and methodologies of world-system analysis around several key problems (e.g., the spatial and temporal boundaries of global commodity chains, the construction and challenge of various dimensions of social inequality, systemic and antisystemic social movements). Others take stock of areas in which world-systems are promoting methodological innovation and/or generating useful global data, and identify questions that demand additional methodological and empirical attention for future research.In different ways, this book help us to critically reconsider some of the enduring legacies within a world-system perspective (such as Karl Polanyi's concept of the “double movement,” or the distinction drawn by Giovanni Arrighi or Immanuel Wallerstein between systemic and antisystemic movements). As argued by many of the authors in this book, a world-historical approach calls for greater sensitivity to the manifold ways in which conceptual boundaries change over time and space. Taking seriously the issue of unit of analysis, this book explores critically productive ways for better understanding global patterns of continuity and change.

This book incorporates classic and contemporary readings in economic sociology and related disciplines to provide students with a broad understanding of the many dimensions of economic life. It discusses Max Weber's key concepts in economics and sociology.

»Design Thinking« gilt als universell anwendbares Problemlösungskonzept. Durch ein emphatisches Vorgehen sollen Waren und Dienstleistungen entstehen, die wahre Bedürfnisse stillen. Damit ist das Selbstverständnis verbunden, die Welt zu verändern. Tim Seitz war als Ethnograph in der Welt einer Berliner Innovationsagentur, wo er mit Wissenspraktiken und Transformationsversprechen gleichermaßen konfrontiert wurde. Er analysiert das Verhältnis dieser Praktiken und Diskurse und kommt in einer theoretischen Suchbewegung von der Praxistheorie zum Pragmatismus. »Design Thinking« wird so als Phänomen der Gegenwart und als Kind des neuen Geistes des Kapitalismus verstehbar.

Walter Mosley is one of America's bestselling novelists, known for his critically acclaimed series of mysteries featuring private investigator Easy Rawlins. His writing is hard-hitting, often limned with a political subtext—aimed at a broad audience.When Mosley was working on a doctorate in political theory, he envisioned himself writing very different kinds of books from the ones he writes now. But once you've been tagged as a novelist, and in Mosley's case, a genre writer, even a bestselling one, it is hard to get an airing of ideas that cross those boundaries. Folding the Red into the Black has grown out of Mosley's public talks, which have gotten both enthusiastic and agitated responses.Mosley's is an elastic mind, and in this short monograph he frees himself to explore some novel ideas. He draws on personal experiences and insights as an African-American, a Jew, and one of our great writers to present an alternative manifesto of sorts:'We need to throw off the unbearable weight of bureaucratic Capitalist and Socialist demands; demands that exist to perpetuate these systems, not to praise and raise humanity to its full promise. And so I propose the word, the term Untopia.'

Today, when it seems like everything has been privatized, when austerity is too often seen as an economic or political problem that can be solved through better policy, and when the idea of moral values has been commandeered by the right, how can we re-imagine the forces used as weapons against community, solidarity, ecology and life itself?In this stirring call to arms, Max Haiven argues that capitalism has colonized how we all imagine and express what is valuable. Looking at the decline of the public sphere, the corporatization of education, the privatization of creativity, and the power of finance capital in opposition to the power of the imagination and the growth of contemporary social movements, Haiven provides a powerful argument for creating an anti-capitalist commons. Capitalism is not in crisis, it is the crisis, and moving beyond it is the only key to survival.Crucial reading for all those questioning the imposition of austerity and hoping for a fairer future beyond it.

Work is, and always will be, a central institution of society. What makes a capitalist society unique is that it treats the human capacity to engage in labor as a basic commodity. This can be a source of dynamism, as when innovative firms raise wages to attract the best and brightest. But it can also be a source of misery, as when one's skills are suddenly rendered obsolete by forces beyond one's control. Jeffrey J. Sallaz asks us to rethink our basic assumptions about work. Drawing on cutting-edge theories within economic sociology and through the use of contemporary examples, he conceptualizes labor as embedded exchange. This draws attention to issues that all too frequently are overlooked in our public discourse and private imaginations: how various forms of work are classified and valued; how markets for labor operate in practice; and how people can challenge the central fiction that their work is simply a commodity to be bought and sold. This readable and engaging book is suitable for both graduate and advanced undergraduate students. It will be of interest to economic sociologists, scholars of labor, and all of those who find themselves working for a living.

Développer une économie verte au-delà du capitalisme vert, est-ce pensable? Les auteurs, se nourrissant des réflexions émises au Forum international des dirigeants de l'économie sociale (FIDES), présentent des analyses, mais surtout des propositions pour agir dès maintenant en ce sens.

The Economics of Identity and Creativity aims to sythesize naturalistic evolutionary theory while discussing new developments in economics. The author's approach reexamines fundamental assumptions about how a capitalist economy works, from the relation between producers and consumers to the functioning of intellectual property rights. In the creative economy, the author argues, identities merge with the flow of creative action. To explain these changes, he draws upon a range of theories from analytical philosophy to biology, and from economics to sociology.The first part of the book examines the role of language in the naturalistic approach to cultural science. Hermann-Pillath draws on Darwinian evolutionary theory to map a concept of knowledge. Part Two offers a systematic approach to creativity and identity from the naturalistic point of view developed in Part One. Here the author builds a theory of creativity from the ideas of conceptual blending in the cognitive sciences.Herrmann-Pillath presents a theory of identity based on analytical philosophy, and looks at the problems in fixing the boundaries of an individual identity both in biological evolutionary theory and brain sciences. He takes the concept of identity through the current economic approaches, examining the distinction between social and personal identity. This fascinating interdisciplinary work provides a precise argument that the foundations of economics can be found in cultural science, and it has evolved to become the cultural institution at the core of the modern economy.

Description based on print version record.

Le temps de la sortie de crise est le plus précieux des moments historiques. La force d'inertie est momentanément affaiblie, la capacité de changement momentanément décuplée. Les décisions prises pendant cette période auront des conséquences pour toute l'époque qui s'ouvre. La crise du capitalisme financier, puis du capitalisme tout entier entamée en 2008 se superpose à la crise écologique latente, celle d'une marche à peine freinée vers un réchauffement irréversible de la planète qui causera de nombreux bouleversements. Les décisions qu'auront à prendre au cours des cinq prochaines années les peuples et leurs décideurs sont donc plus lourdes de conséquences que celles qui attendaient leurs prédécesseurs, après la crise de 1929. Cet ouvrage a l'ambition d'apporter des analyses et propositions nouvelles à ce temps propice aux changements. L'ancien premier ministre français Lionel Jospin propose d'abord une lecture sans fard des causes historiques de la crise et souligne les graves insuffisances des solutions avancées jusqu'ici par les pays du G20. A sa suite, une douzaine de chercheurs québécois et étrangers réunis par le CÉRIUM évaluent l'impact de la crise sur le travail des économistes, la gauche, le mouvement altermondialiste et explorent d es pistes de changement. En seconde partie, l'ouvrage propose une revue des propositions actuelles de sortie et de réforme du capitalisme et se termine par un appel à un programme commun international sur quelques propositions phares.

Based on a timely reassessment of the classic arguments of Weber, Schumpeter, Hayek, Popper, and Parsons, this book reconceptualizes actually-existing capitalism. It proposes capitalism as an impersonal procedural solution to the problems of spontaneously coordinating public institutions that enable durable market-based wealth generation and social order. Few countries have achieved this. A novel contribution of the book is that it identifies a practical sequence of economic and institutional shortcuts to real capitalism.The book challenges current orthodoxies about varieties of capitalism and relativist recipes for economic growth, and it criticizes culturalist and incrementalist viewpoints in institutional economics. It calls on the social sciences to help in constructing dynamic and prosperous open societies of the twenty-first century by reclaiming older ideas of ‘social economics'. Better and faster solutions will emphasize crisis-induced change, rational leadership, ideological persuasion, institutional engineering, rules-based market freedom, and the universalistic formal-procedural impersonality of optimal regulatory systems.

Der Einfluss von Märkten auf die moralischen Orientierungen und Handlungen von Akteuren ist ein in vielen Kontexten diskutierter und problematisierter Sachverhalt. Prominent ist in diesem Zusammenhang die These, dass mit zunehmender Expansion der Märkte die individuelle Bereitschaft steigt, Aspekte des Gemeinwohls in seinem Handeln zu vernachlässigen. Das Orientierungsmuster des Homo oeconomicus mit seiner Leitwertorientierung an ökonomischen Erfolgszielen – so hier die Überlegung – verdränge mit zunehmender Markteinbindung die primär an Gemeinschaft und Gemeinwohl ausgerichteten Orientierungen des Homo communis. Eckhard Burkatzki untersucht diese These auf Grundlage einer empirischen Analyse der Leitwertorientierungen und normbezogenen Orientierungsmuster bei Angehörigen der Erwerbsbevölkerung. Seine Studie zeigt, dass einerseits das Ausmaß der Gemeinwohlorientierung bei Akteuren in Abhängigkeit von bestimmten Formen der Markteinbindung variiert. Andererseits folgt das Verhältnis von Markteinbindung und Gemeinwohlorientierung – entgegen den gängigen Annahmen – keiner eindimensionalen Logik.

Le capitalisme mondialisé est sans adversaire à sa mesure. Désormais seule condition des échanges humains et unique horizon de l'avenir, il nous apparaît dans un règne sans fin. Cet ouvrage est né de la nécessité de répondre à la misère stratégique qui règne dans les échanges économiques et qui nous oblige quotidiennement à la médiocrité. Ce qui nous avait porté en effet à aimer notre travail, à jouir de notre carrière, ne fait plus sens pour nous aujourd'hui. Nous avons ainsi le sentiment de ne plus pouvoir exister dans notre activité professionnelle, d'être privés de notre capacité à rêver dans notre vie quotidienne.

Contemporary Economic Sociology closely examines critical and contemporary issues in the sociology of economic life. Bringing together a range of theoretical perspectives, Fran Tonkiss examines major shifts in the organization of economy and society - from the politics of globalization to the cultural economy, social exclusion and the'end'of class. This new volume is organized around three core themes (globalization, production and inequality) and answers the questions: how are transnational processes re-making contemporary economies? can capitalist globalization be governed or resisted? do class relations still shape people's social identities? how can we think about inequality in national and international contexts? Key changes in each of these domains raise new challenges for analyzing social and economic relations, power, agency and identity. Setting these changes in a transnational context, this book examines how these issues are being re-shaped in contemporary societies, and explores competing frameworks for understanding such changes. Drawing on arguments from economic sociology, politics and policy studies, political economy and critical geography, the text focuses on both conceptual approaches to the social study of the economy, and trans-national processes of social and economic restructuring. The arguments provide a critical overview of current concerns for economic sociology, and extend the boundaries of the discipline to a new set of questions. The text is particularly relevant to undergraduate and graduate students and scholars in the fields of economic and political sociology, politics and government, geography, economics and international relations.

Where does the power of money come from? Why is trust so important in financial operations? How does the swapping of gifts differ from the exchange of commodities? Where does self-interest stop and communal solidarity start in capitalist economies?These issues and many more are discussed in a rigorous, yet readable, manner in Social Foundations of