Flexible Capitalism

Flexible Capitalism PDF Author: Jens Kjaerulff
Publisher: Berghahn Books
ISBN: 1782386165
Category : Business & Economics
Languages : en
Pages : 295

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Book Description
Approaching “work” as at heart a practice of exchange, this volume explores sociality in work environments marked by the kind of structural changes that have come to define contemporary “flexible” capitalism. It introduces anthropological exchange theory to a wider readership, and shows how the perspective offers new ways to enquire about the flexible capitalism’s social dimensions. The essays contribute to a trans-disciplinary scholarship on contemporary economic practice and change by documenting how, across diverse settings, “gift-like” socialities proliferate, and even sustain the intensified flexible commoditization that more commonly is touted as tearing social relations apart. By interrogating a keenly debated contemporary work regime through an approach to sociality rooted in a rich and distinct anthropological legacy, the volume also makes a novel contribution to the anthropological literature on work and on exchange.

Flexible Capitalism

Flexible Capitalism PDF Author: Jens Kjaerulff
Publisher: Berghahn Books
ISBN: 1782386165
Category : Business & Economics
Languages : en
Pages : 295

Get Book Here

Book Description
Approaching “work” as at heart a practice of exchange, this volume explores sociality in work environments marked by the kind of structural changes that have come to define contemporary “flexible” capitalism. It introduces anthropological exchange theory to a wider readership, and shows how the perspective offers new ways to enquire about the flexible capitalism’s social dimensions. The essays contribute to a trans-disciplinary scholarship on contemporary economic practice and change by documenting how, across diverse settings, “gift-like” socialities proliferate, and even sustain the intensified flexible commoditization that more commonly is touted as tearing social relations apart. By interrogating a keenly debated contemporary work regime through an approach to sociality rooted in a rich and distinct anthropological legacy, the volume also makes a novel contribution to the anthropological literature on work and on exchange.

The Disrupted Workplace

The Disrupted Workplace PDF Author: Benjamin H. Snyder
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 0190203498
Category : Business & Economics
Languages : en
Pages : 265

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Book Description
The twenty-first century workplace compels Americans to be more flexible, often at a cost to their personal well-being. In The Disrupted Workplace, Benjamin Snyder examines how three groups of American workers construct moral order in a capitalist system that demands flexibility. Snyder argues that new scheduling techniques, employment strategies, and technologies disrupt the flow and trajectory of working life, transforming how workers experience time. Work can feel both liberating and terrorizing, engrossing in the short term but unsustainable in the long term. Through a vivid portrait of workers' struggles to adapt their lives to constant disruption, The Disrupted Workplace mounts a compelling critique of the price of the flexible economy.

The Self as Enterprise

The Self as Enterprise PDF Author: Peter Kelly
Publisher: CRC Press
ISBN: 1317016416
Category : Business & Economics
Languages : en
Pages : 259

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Book Description
Twenty first century, flexible capitalism creates new demands for those who work to acknowledge that all aspects of their lives have come to be seen as performance related, and consequently of interest to those who employ them (or fire them). At the start of the 21st century we can identify, borrowing from Max Weber, new work ethics that provide novel ethically slanted maxims for the conduct of a life, and which suggest that the cultivation of the self as an enterprise is the life-long activity that should give meaning, purpose and direction to a life. The book provides an innovative theoretical and methodological approach that draws on the problematising critique of Michel Foucault, the sociological imagination of Zygmunt Bauman and the work influenced by these authors in social theory and social research in the last three decades. The author takes seriously the ambivalence and irony that marks many people’s experience of their working lives, and the demands of work at the start of the 21st century. The book makes an important contribution to the continuing debate about the nature of work related identities and the consequences of the intensification of the work regimes in which these identities are performed and regulated. In a post global financial crisis (GFC) world of sovereign debt, austerity and recession the author’s analysis focuses academic and professional interest on neo-liberal injunctions to imagine ourselves as an enterprise, and to reap the rewards and carry the costs of the conduct of this enterprise.

World of Possibilities

World of Possibilities PDF Author: Charles F. Sabel
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 9780521894432
Category : Business & Economics
Languages : en
Pages : 526

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Book Description
This book retells the history of Western industrialization, revealing possibilities unexplored in the nineteenth century, variants of which have come to transform present day economies. It shows that economic actors have historically been more aware of the great strategic choices they faced than standard theory credits them with being, and this surprising acuity allows them to imagine and put into practice solutions which current theories of industrial organization have scarcely anticipated. The book is therefore at one and the same time a contribution to a substantive revision of the history of mechanized production and a propaedeutic in a form of explanation that approximates the knowledge of the actor to the knowledge of the theorist. The volume groups essays presented by a multinational team of historians and social scientists drawing on intensive primary research on a wide range of firms, regions, sectors and national economies in Western Europe and the United States from the eighteenth century to the 1990s.

The Future of Capitalism

The Future of Capitalism PDF Author: Paul Collier
Publisher: HarperCollins
ISBN: 0062748661
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 369

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Book Description
Bill Gates's Five Books for Summer Reading 2019 From world-renowned economist Paul Collier, a candid diagnosis of the failures of capitalism and a pragmatic and realistic vision for how we can repair it. Deep new rifts are tearing apart the fabric of the United States and other Western societies: thriving cities versus rural counties, the highly skilled elite versus the less educated, wealthy versus developing countries. As these divides deepen, we have lost the sense of ethical obligation to others that was crucial to the rise of post-war social democracy. So far these rifts have been answered only by the revivalist ideologies of populism and socialism, leading to the seismic upheavals of Trump, Brexit, and the return of the far-right in Germany. We have heard many critiques of capitalism but no one has laid out a realistic way to fix it, until now. In a passionate and polemical book, celebrated economist Paul Collier outlines brilliantly original and ethical ways of healing these rifts—economic, social and cultural—with the cool head of pragmatism, rather than the fervor of ideological revivalism. He reveals how he has personally lived across these three divides, moving from working-class Sheffield to hyper-competitive Oxford, and working between Britain and Africa, and acknowledges some of the failings of his profession. Drawing on his own solutions as well as ideas from some of the world’s most distinguished social scientists, he shows us how to save capitalism from itself—and free ourselves from the intellectual baggage of the twentieth century.

The Corrosion of Character: The Personal Consequences of Work in the New Capitalism

The Corrosion of Character: The Personal Consequences of Work in the New Capitalism PDF Author: Richard Sennett
Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company
ISBN: 0393078523
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 177

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Book Description
A Business Week Best Book of the Year.... "A devastating and wholly necessary book."—Studs Terkel, author of Working In The Corrosion of Character, Richard Sennett, "among the country's most distinguished thinkers . . . has concentrated into 176 pages a profoundly affecting argument" (Business Week) that draws on interviews with dismissed IBM executives, bakers, a bartender turned advertising executive, and many others to call into question the terms of our new economy. In his 1972 classic, The Hidden Injuries of Class (written with Jonathan Cobb), Sennett interviewed a man he called Enrico, a hardworking janitor whose life was structured by a union pay schedule and given meaning by his sacrifices for the future. In this new book-a #1 bestseller in Germany-Sennett explores the contemporary scene characterized by Enrico's son, Rico, whose life is more materially successful, yet whose work lacks long-term commitments or loyalties. Distinguished by Sennett's "combination of broad historical and literary learning and a reporter's willingness to walk into a store or factory [and] strike up a conversation" (New York Times Book Review), this book "challenges the reader to decide whether the flexibility of modern capitalism . . . is merely a fresh form of oppression" (Publishers Weekly, starred review). Praise for The Corrosion of Character: "A benchmark for our time."—Daniel Bell "[A]n incredibly insightful book."—William Julius Wilson "[A] remarkable synthesis of acute empirical observation and serious moral reflection."—Richard Rorty "[Sennett] offers abundant fresh insights . . . illuminated by his concern with people's struggle to give meaning to their lives."—[Memphis] Commercial Appeal

Bankruptcy and Debt Collection in Liberal Capitalism

Bankruptcy and Debt Collection in Liberal Capitalism PDF Author: Mischa Suter
Publisher: University of Michigan Press
ISBN: 047212885X
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 337

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Book Description
Drawing on perspectives from anthropology and social theory, this book explores the quotidian routines of debt collection in nineteenth-century capitalism. It focuses on Switzerland, an exemplary case of liberal rule. Debt collection and bankruptcy relied on received practices until they were standardized in a Swiss federal law in 1889. The vast array of these practices was summarized by the idiomatic Swiss legal term “Rechtstrieb” (literally, “law drive”). Analyzing these forms of summary justice opens a window to the makeshift economies and the contested political imaginaries of nineteenth-century everyday life. Ultimately, the book advances an empirically grounded and theoretically informed history of quotidian legal practices in the everyday economy; it is an argument for studying capitalism from the bottom up.

The Sharing Economy

The Sharing Economy PDF Author: Arun Sundararajan
Publisher: MIT Press
ISBN: 0262034573
Category : Business & Economics
Languages : en
Pages : 255

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Book Description
The wide-ranging implications of the shift to a sharing economy, a new model of organizing economic activity that may supplant traditional corporations.

Flexible Citizenship

Flexible Citizenship PDF Author: Aihwa Ong
Publisher: Duke University Press
ISBN: 9780822322696
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
Languages : en
Pages : 346

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Book Description
Ethnographic and theoretical accounts of the transnational practices of Chinese elites, showing how they constitute a dispersed Chinese public, but also how they reinforce the strength of capital and the state.

The Conscience of the Eye: The Design and Social Life of Cities

The Conscience of the Eye: The Design and Social Life of Cities PDF Author: Richard Sennett
Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company
ISBN: 9780393308785
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 292

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Book Description
Sennett's brilliant study of the physical fabric of the city as a mirror of Western society and culture was originally published (cloth) in 1990 by Alfred A. Knopf. Annotation copyrighted by Book News, Inc., Portland, OR