Market analysis beyond market fetishism

2019 ◽  
Vol 52 (1) ◽  
pp. 27-45 ◽  
Author(s):  
Damien Cahill
Keyword(s):  
Social Relations ◽  
Global Economy ◽  
Market Analysis ◽  
Production Of Space ◽  
Social Foundations ◽  
Unique System ◽  
Starting Point ◽  
The Social ◽  
Capitalist Firm ◽  
Embedded Economy

This article responds to Peck’s call for a heterodox economic analysis of markets that is sensitive to their sociality and spatiality with Polanyi’s work as a starting point. It is argued that while Polanyi’s concept of the socially embedded economy offers a useful heuristic for apprehending the social foundations of economic activity, his analysis exhibits ‘market fetishism’ – a tendency to treat markets as things in and of themselves, without a proper appreciation of their inherently social foundations – and that this is reflected in broader scholarly discourses with respect to markets. Thus, it is argued, we need to augment Polanyi’s framework with other heterodox economic insights. The article outlines a four-step approach to ‘de-fetishizing’ markets. First, the article foregrounds the specifically capitalist nature of the global economy, and the ‘unique system of market dependence’ to which capitalist social relations give rise. Second, it is argued that de-fetishizing markets requires that an agent-centred approach be adopted. Rather than viewing markets as ‘things’ it is argued that they are most usefully understood as the interactions between agents, the most significant of which, within the contemporary global economy, is the large capitalist firm. Third, the interaction between such agents is structured by pervasive frameworks of rules. Fourth, it is argued that markets are inherently spatial phenomena. They are spatially constituted and contribute to the production of space.

scholarly journals Make development great again? Accumulation regimes, spaces of sovereign exception and the elite development paradigm of China's Belt and Road Initiative

2019 ◽  
Vol 21 (4) ◽  
pp. 487-513 ◽  
Author(s):  
Ruben Gonzalez-Vicente
Keyword(s):  
Social Relations ◽  
Belt And Road Initiative ◽  
Social Foundations ◽  
The Social ◽  
Public Resources ◽  
Uneven And Combined Development ◽  
Local Actors ◽  
Belt And Road ◽  
Development Paradigm ◽  
Do So

AbstractThis article studies what I describe as “state-coordinated investment partnerships,” an investment modality central to the deployment of China's Belt and Road Initiative (BRI). These partnerships bring together state and business actors to export overcapacity and address infrastructural demands in underdeveloped markets. To do so, they require accumulation and sovereignty regimes that mirror, in contingent ways, similar social arrangements within China. The superposition of such regimes and the interests and social imaginaries of local actors produces forms of uneven and combined development and shapes the contours of the BRI's emerging developmental and geoeconomic footprints. The BRI exports also an elite development paradigm which promotes urbanization, connectivity and economic growth over participatory approaches. This paradigm projects a depoliticized version of China's present into the BRI's future to justify social and environmental dislocations, and shields Chinese firms from civil society scrutiny. My analysis rejects this elite perspective and favors a labor-centric approach that unearths the social foundations of the BRI. From this perspective, despite relevant differences in format, the BRI's quintessential investment modality is closely aligned to a contemporary global current of public-private partnerships endeavored to mobilize public resources and state power for the expansion of capitalist social relations.

scholarly journals Für einen labour turn in der Umweltbewegung

2017 ◽  
Vol 47 (189) ◽  
Author(s):  
Oliver Pye
Keyword(s):  
Social Relations ◽  
Production Networks ◽  
Global Production Networks ◽  
Labour Movement ◽  
Social Ecological ◽  
Accumulation By Dispossession ◽  
Starting Point ◽  
The Social ◽  
Rapid Changes ◽  
Ecological Landscape

Oliver Pye: For a labour turn in the environmental justice movement. Struggles over the social relations of nature and strategies for social-ecological transformation. This article discusses struggles in the social relations of nature and how these relate to strategies of socialecological transformation and calls for a labour turn in the environmental and climate justice movement. Taking the rapid changes to the social-ecological landscape of the Kapuas River in Indonesia as a starting point, it shows how this “accumulation by dispossession” is connected to a “corporate food regime” that is embedded within global “postfordist relations of nature”. I then argue that the global production networks linking appropriation to exploitation should themselves be viewed as alienated steps in the social metabolism with nature. Struggles against accumulation by dispossession need to connect to the labour movement, which holds the key to overcome the alienated work that lies at the heart of society’s alienation with nature.

The production of space at Nineveh

Iraq ◽  
2004 ◽  
Vol 66 ◽  
pp. 187-197 ◽  
Author(s):  
Stephen Lumsden
Keyword(s):  
Social Relations ◽  
Active Role ◽  
Alternative View ◽  
Social Production ◽  
Production Of Space ◽  
Social Scientists ◽  
Spatial Production ◽  
The Social ◽  
Objectively Measured

Space, or spatiality, has generally been relegated to the background by historians and social scientists (Soja 1989). The Cartesian worldview demands a separation between thinking and the material world, between mind and matter. In this view space is seen simply as something that can be objectively measured, an absolute, a passive container (Merrifield 1993: 518).An alternative view, propounded mainly by postmodern geographers, regards space as a “medium rather than a container for action”, something that is involved in action and cannot be divided from it (Tilley 1994: 10). Space is not an empty, passive container, but an active process that is both constituted and constitutive (Merrifield 1993: 521). So, in this view the social, historical, and the spatial are interwoven dimensions of life (Soja 1999: 263–4). History and society are not understood if space is omitted; there is, in fact, no unspatialised social reality (Soja 1989: 131–7; 1996: 46, 70–6).The philosopher Henri Lefebvre's concept of the social production of space plays an important part in this latter view of the active role of space in social processes. Lefebvre criticises the notion that space is transparent, neutral and passive, and formulates in its place an active, operational and instrumental notion of space (Lefebvre 1991: 11). He argues that it is the spatial production process that should be the object of interest rather than “things” in space, and that space is both a medium of social relations and a material product that can affect social relations (Lefebvre 1991: 36–7; Gottdiener 1993).

scholarly journals „Wenn ich es nicht tue, dann macht's ein anderer“ – Subjektwerdungen und Verantwortung

2019 ◽  
Vol 74 (1) ◽  
pp. 113-124
Author(s):  
Klaus Geiselhart ◽  
Tobias Häberer
Keyword(s):  
Social Relations ◽  
Personality Development ◽  
Social Situations ◽  
Central Idea ◽  
Autonomous Action ◽  
The Enlightenment ◽  
Starting Point ◽  
The Social ◽  
The Mind

Abstract. Poststructuralist theory focuses largely on describing how and why subjects reproduce the social conditions they have internalised. This is a deconstruction of the central idea of the Enlightenment, the human capacity for autonomous action. At the same time, however, it also denies all individuals any responsibility and ultimately leads criticism into a crisis. Pragmatist philosophy offers the possibility of determining the role of the mind in processes of becoming a subject without abandoning the achievements of the poststructuralist concept of subjectification. The concept of transaction describes how actors constitute each other as subjects within social situations. The relationships that arise through such processes depend, among other things, on the personalities of those people involved. Accordingly, it is possible to identify the responsibility of individuals to govern their social relations and personality development. Since these aspects can only be determined in localised individual cases, this offers a particularly suitable starting point for geographical critic.

scholarly journals Personnel Behaviour Management Through Social Communications

2021 ◽  
Vol 39 (5) ◽  
Author(s):  
Olena Tkachenko ◽  
Iryna Zhylenko ◽  
Nataliya Poplavska ◽  
Olha Mitchuk ◽  
Halyna Kuzmenko ◽  
...  
Keyword(s):  
Personnel Management ◽  
Social Relations ◽  
Global Scale ◽  
Communication Process ◽  
Social Foundations ◽  
Social Communications ◽  
The Social ◽  
The One ◽  
The Relationship

Today is characterised by the formation and development of an open, civilised society; there are fundamentally new forms of communication-based on the social and personal partnership, competition, legal and social foundations of formal equality of all citizens, the rational regulation of social relations. The quantity and quality of communications are continually growing, a significant number of people are involved in the communication process, the relationship between individual communications becomes close, the action of communications whose network has reached a global scale is growing. Modern communication society is characterised by a constant increase and globalisation of communications. The consequence of this development of society is the extremely limited financial resources, significantly narrowing the range of measures and tools to improve the management of the organisation as a whole and its staff, in particular, on the one hand, and changes in the emotional and mental spheres of the employee. Therefore, in their study, the authors considered the concept of communication, types of communication, their impact on the management process of the organisation and identified the role and functions of social communications in personnel management. The authors studied and analysed the methods of personnel management in detail. Based on the theoretical and methodological analysis, the authors proposed a system for managing the behaviour of staff through social communications; proposed a matrix for the distribution of responsibilities and this system and proposed a method for evaluating its effectiveness.

Civic Organization beyond the ‘Open Society’ Battle: Cases from Hungary

2020 ◽  
Vol 27 (2) ◽  
pp. 158-177
Author(s):  
Ágnes Gagyi ◽  
Márton Szarvas ◽  
András Vígvári
Keyword(s):  
Civil Society ◽  
Social Relations ◽  
Central And Eastern Europe ◽  
Open Society ◽  
Civic Organization ◽  
Governmental Organizations ◽  
Social Settings ◽  
Starting Point ◽  
The Social ◽  
Public Debates

Our paper aims to contribute to the understanding of civil society in Hungary by looking beyond the struggles around open society and international NGOs, a topic that has dominated public debates on civil organizations in Hungary for the last decade. Our starting point follows the literature that has broadened the understanding of NGOs in the post-socialist space with the perspective of their insertion in global hierarchies in terms of unequal knowledge and resource transfer, material dependencies and the effects in local social settings. More attention recently has been given to the social positions of domestic civil organizations and the political and material dependencies they operate within. The analysis of organizations which represent and defend different interests within different social strata is crucial to understanding civil society in Central and Eastern Europe (CEE). Following this thread of discussions, we look at three segments of civil society which were previously understudied, to expand on how social relations structure civil society in contemporary CEE: 1) nationalist but anti-governmental organizations, for example in the field of housing; 2) urban and rural informal self-organization in order to cope with material hardships collectively has been significantly growing in the recent years; 3) rural civil organizations aligned with local elites, embedded in material dependencies, which have been present since 1990, but occupy a more and more significant role after the illiberal turn. We think that adding these segments to the study of civil society in CEE can help to broaden the analysis beyond the discursively and ideologically thematized struggles around NGOs, and contribute to a better understanding of illiberal regimes and the counter-movements they produce.

Bodies in Space: Spatializing Physical Cultural Studies

2011 ◽  
Vol 28 (1) ◽  
pp. 85-105 ◽  
Author(s):  
Michael Todd Friedman ◽  
Cathy van Ingen
Keyword(s):  
Spatial Analysis ◽  
Cultural Studies ◽  
Social Relations ◽  
The Body ◽  
Potential Contribution ◽  
Henri Lefebvre ◽  
Production Of Space ◽  
Lived Space ◽  
The Social ◽  
Physical Cultural Studies

The purpose of this article is to discuss the potential contribution of spatial analysis within the emerging area of Physical Cultural Studies (PCS). As PCS examines “expressions of the physical (including, but by no means restricted to sport, exercise, fitness, leisure, health, dance, and movement-related active embodied practices),” an understanding of these practices will be substantially enhanced through spatial analysis as the body impacts and is impacted by the environment in which it exists and the social relations evinced. With a perspective informed by Henri Lefebvre, who recognized the centrality of the body within his analysis of the production of space, the body can be much better understood as the environment and social relations are analyzed through spatial/bodily practices, conceptions of space, and lived space.

Critical political economy and the critique of comparative capitalisms scholarship on capitalist diversity

2014 ◽  
Vol 38 (1) ◽  
pp. 3-15 ◽  
Author(s):  
Ian Bruff ◽  
Matthias Ebenau
Keyword(s):  
Social Sciences ◽  
Political Economy ◽  
Social Relations ◽  
The Self ◽  
German Language ◽  
Special Issue ◽  
Significant Potential ◽  
Starting Point ◽  
The Social ◽  
Comparative Capitalisms

This introduction to the special issue focuses on the rise to dominance in debates on capitalist diversity of approaches which take institutions as their starting point, rather than the wider social relations in which institutions sit and are constituted by. However, although this is part of broader trends across the social sciences over the last three decades, the self-marginalisation of critical political economy perspectives from these debates was also a factor, as was the declining dialogue between critical political economy researchers rooted in different geographical and philosophical traditions. Echoing the influence on the emergent Conference of Socialist Economists of German-language debates on the state in the 1970s, we call for renewed dialogue between researchers from different linguistic and intellectual backgrounds in the name of a renewed critique of dominant comparative capitalisms (CC) approaches. In so doing, we emphasise the range of alternative perspectives that can be offered through such dialogues and critiques, and thus the significant potential for further collaboration and advances in our understanding of capitalist diversity.

The Incredible Shrinking World? Technology and the Production of Space

1995 ◽  
Vol 13 (5) ◽  
pp. 529-555 ◽  
Author(s):  
Scott Kirsch
Keyword(s):  
Social Relations ◽  
High Speed ◽  
Production Of Space ◽  
Space And Time ◽  
Time Space ◽  
Technological Advances ◽  
The Social ◽  
The World ◽  
Space Compression

This paper is about the role of technology in the transformation of space, and the ways in which these changes are represented. These processes are explored principally through critical analysis of the work of Harvey and Lefebvre; more specifically, I contrast the place of technology as expressed through their varied emphases on the annihilation of space, and the production of space. The dramatic restructuring of space and time in recent decades, associated with new high-speed geographies of production, exchange, and consumption, has been theorized against the backdrop of a ‘shrinking world’, The popular conception of the world shrinking to a global village is generally seen as the product of technological advances in telecommunications, transportation, and ‘information’. For Harvey, these innovations arc seen as the means through which capital has freed itself from spatial constraints. By placing the ‘collapse of space’ jargon alongside Marx's phrase, the annihilation of space by time, these spatial metaphors serve Harvey as shorthand for the complexities of time-space compression; the shrinking world is seen as a midpoint between a regime of accumulation and a mode of representation. I argue that, although these metaphors help to theorize the relativity of space—as the global impinges on the local—they only do so by obfuscating the relative space of everyday life, and the increasingly technical means through which it is produced. Through an interpretation of Lefebvre's discussion of technology in The Production of Space, I suggest how the role of technology in the transformation of space is not limited to those globalizing processes through which the world has been made increasingly interconnected in space and time. So too, technology has been critical to the domination of conceived space over lived space as social relations are spatialized at the scale of experience. As a foundation for these arguments, the social relations of technology and technological change are theorized through the incorporation of ideas from the social studies of science and technology and from critical human geography.

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