scholarly journals Beyond rentiership: Standardisation, intangibles and value capture in global production

2021 ◽  
pp. 0308518X2199783
Author(s):  
Elena Baglioni ◽  
Liam Campling ◽  
Gerard Hanlon
Keyword(s):  
Intangible Assets ◽  
Division Of Labour ◽  
Step Change ◽  
Value Capture ◽  
Social Division ◽  
The Past ◽  
Indirect Control ◽  
The Social ◽  
Technical Division ◽  
Circuit Of Capital

We examine corporate rentiership in the contemporary economy and suggest that the idea we are in a moment of step-change within capitalism may be premature. Implicit in arguments for a step-change is the claim that the present-day economy emphasises unproductive or rentier forms rather than the more productive and entrepreneurial forms of the past. In contrast, we argue that to understand our current situation we need to focus on the division of labour and most especially on processes of standardisation and the rise of intangible assets. Moving from Marx’s understanding of rent as a class relation, we re-embed rent within the circuit of capital and the realm of value distribution to investigate the class dynamics (among labour, capital and the state) through which giant firms seem to generate value out of rentierism. We argue that these class dynamics include the crucial and unexplored relation between standardisation and intangibles. We suggest standardisation within the division of labour renders people, places, and things interchangeable and that, in contrast, intangible assets differentiate them. When intangible assets emerge as new forms of property, they enable owners to generate scarcity and exert direct and/or indirect control over the wider division of labour. Through examining the combined rise of standardisation and intangible assets within the technical division of labour, we demonstrate how hierarchy within the social division of labour empowers some corporations to capture value produced elsewhere within the circuit of capital.

Transgressing between consumption and production: Materialistic outlook on the digital labour of prosumers

2019 ◽  
Vol 43 (2) ◽  
pp. 339-356 ◽  
Author(s):  
Bartosz Mika
Keyword(s):  
Private Property ◽  
Division Of Labour ◽  
The Internet ◽  
Social Division ◽  
Exchange Value ◽  
Production And Consumption ◽  
The Social ◽  
The Subject

This article explores the subject of unpaid digital labour on the Internet. Often presented as co-creation or prod-using the work of that kind is the matter of much controversy. The article tries to critically refer to the most popular concepts, reaches out to the authors using the Marxian dictionary, detail their arguments, and finally propose their own typology. The text treats the hypothesis about the vanishing boundaries between production and consumption as unprofitable. The distinction between personal and private property and the use and exchange value are highlighted to precisely define the place of quasiwork in the social division of labour.

From Production Systems to Learning Systems: Lessons from Japan

1993 ◽  
Vol 25 (6) ◽  
pp. 797-815 ◽  
Author(s):  
J Patchell
Keyword(s):  
Production Systems ◽  
Governance Structure ◽  
Division Of Labour ◽  
Learning Systems ◽  
Social Division ◽  
Goods And Services ◽  
Trade Offs ◽  
The Social ◽  
External Governance ◽  
The Creation

The need to advance the conventional understanding of production systems as fixed flows of goods and services to dynamic systems based on learning is discussed. The theory advanced is based on research on the Japanese robot industry. The paper opens with a discussion of the meaning of flexibility in a dynamic economy to expose the social division of labour as the foundation of the creation and evolution of production systems. Production systems are established to obtain the scale and scope economies offered by the independent firms of the social division of labour. The necessity to organize production requires the creation of some type of an internal or external governance structure. The Japanese have developed a social technology that resolves the transaction cost trade-offs confronting North American industry between internal and external governance structures. Asanuma's relation-specific skill is discussed as the crux for comprehending the shift from production systems to learning systems.

Émile Durkheim’s Restitutive Humanitarianism: from Organic Solidarity to the ‘Solidarity of Things’

2020 ◽  
pp. 60-78
Author(s):  
Magdalena Zolkos
Keyword(s):  
Division Of Labor ◽  
Normal State ◽  
Division Of Labour ◽  
Social Effects ◽  
Social Fabric ◽  
The Past ◽  
The Social ◽  
Organic Solidarity ◽  
Traditional Societies ◽  
Industrial Societies

This chapter analyses the legal-sociological trope of restitutive justice in Émile Durkheim’s 1893 The Division of Labor in Society, as well as in his later anthropological studies on punitive institutions and laws. It shows that Durkheim theorizes restitution in terms of the social effects of intensified division of labour in industrial societies, which is identifiable within the domain of law, and which consists of corrective and remedial response to wrongdoing that aims to do justice for, and to repair, the consequences of wrongdoing for the social fabric. This is expressed in the metaphor of a clock that is turned back, as if expressing the underlying desires of the restitutive law to ‘restore the past’ to ‘its normal state’. It is situated as a binary opposite to the categories of ‘repressive law’ or ‘punitive law’, which are said to characterize traditional societies, and which aim at making the wrongdoer suffer. In turn, in his later writings Durkheim makes a conceptual and philosophic link between restitution and humanitarianism. This shows that the corrective and remedial workings of modern law operates upon activation of humanitarian affects: what sets restitution in motion, is the extent to which such wrongs coincide with sites of suffering.

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