A Few Bad Apples or the Logic of Capitalism?

2021 ◽  
Vol 39 (4) ◽  
pp. 8-24

This article investigates how neoliberal globalization has been mediated through audiovisual narratives since the 2000s. It identifies a cluster of films, produced by and circulating on German public television, which use the generic conventions of the popular crime genre to constitute a sub-genre—the televisual economic crime drama. Using a content and textual analysis that focuses on the backdrop of historical context and genre norms, the article examines key tropes to assess the critical potential of this sub-genre. The analysis demonstrates that both the containment theme of “a few bad apples” and a systemic critique can structure these narratives of neoliberalism. At its best, the televisual economic crime drama argues that alternatives to neoliberalism are possible by referencing Germany’s history of the social market economy and by featuring characters as well as images of active citizenship, solidarity, and collective action in the workplace.

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Sergey Nevskiy ◽  
Aleksandr Hudokormov ◽  
Mihail Pokidchenko ◽  
Irina Chaplygina ◽  
Al'fred Shyuller ◽  
...  

The monograph traces the history of the development of German neoliberal economic thought from the origins of the Freiburg School in the 1930s to the first results of the practical implementation of the concept of a social market economy in West Germany in the late 1940s-early 1960s. The author demonstrates the broad historical context of the development of German ideas about the theory and practice of the policy of order (Ordnungstheorie und Ordnungspolitik), shows the features of the formation and spread of the scientific and intellectual economic tradition in Germany, as well as beyond its borders, starting with the birth of the German historical school and the perception of its heritage by Russian socio-economic thought in the second half of the XIX — early XX century and ending with the practical implementation of the concept of order of the Freiburg school and the correlation of its ideological and spiritual and moral foundations with the social teaching of Catholicism and liberalism of Friedrich von Hayek. Special attention is paid to some controversial issues of the formation of the theory of ordoliberalism during the period of national socialism and the problems of the social market economy in modern Germany. The book is intended to fill the shortage of specialized scientific literature on relevant issues and to acquaint the Russian reader, primarily students, teachers and researchers, with the variety of ideological and scientific-theoretical foundations of the socio-economic system of the post-war Germany.


2018 ◽  
Vol 6 (1) ◽  
pp. 87-98
Author(s):  
Flavio Felice

Abstract What do we mean by “civil” and “civil society”? This paper attempts to describe a complex notion of “civil economy” in Sturzo’s theoretical perspective of the social market economy. According to this political theory, “civil” is not opposed to “market,” which is not opposed to “the political” (the state). Rather, instead of being the transmission belt between the state and market, civil is the galaxy in which we find also the market and the state (but not only), each with its own functions. This tradition – rooted in Christianity – was able to oppose both Nazi and communist totalitarianism, while many Catholics made an impossible attempt to exhume corporatism.


2018 ◽  
Vol 6 (1) ◽  
pp. 63-74
Author(s):  
María Guadalupe Martino ◽  
Christian Müller

Abstract The civil economy approach is an attempt to reconcile economic market interactions with the normative standards of traditional virtue ethics. We analyze critically some of its main elements with a special focus on the concept of reciprocity, which plays a central role in the whole approach. Its strengths include, among others, virtue orientation, emphasis on happiness rather than utility, and in particular the notion of reciprocity. However, we argue that this concept of reciprocity would on average not be incentive compatible, and from a methodological point of view, the implied hypothesis of a homo reciprocans is not a viable alternative to the standard model of homo oeconomicus. We also consider that the approach is not entirely new, as it shares many characteristics with the social market economy conception.


Author(s):  
Svetlana Yurievna Abdulova ◽  
Olga Anatolievna Gavrilova

The article dwells upon the continued decrease of income level of the Russian population as a result of the financial crisis and rising inflation, which is followed by yearly contraction of needs and savings. The analysis of the income structure of the Russian people confirmed the growth of the share of wages while reducing income from the use of property, business income, and social benefits. The tendencies to changing the income level in the different industries and regions of the Russian Federation have been identified. The average income level of the population of the Astrakhan region has been defined, the finance dynamics for the period from 2016 to 2018 has been evaluated. The tendencies to changing individual components of the population income in the Astrakhan region have been investigated: wages, business income, employment of property, social benefits. There has been estimated the average monthly wage in the region (in nominal and real terms) and the rate of its changes over the studied period. The estimation of the size of social payments to the population of the Astrakhan region has been made. The main part in the total volume of social payments to the population comes to pensions (74.8%). The criteria of the subsistence minimum both in the country and in the region have been given. It has been inferred that the living cost in the country is greatly underestimated, actually, in half, compared to the real living cost, which is related to saving the budget. In the Astrakhan region a great proportion of the population has incomes below the minimum subsistence level: 16.0% of the region’s population is below the poverty line. To reduce the level of poverty, to increase incomes of the population and to reduce the share of citizens with incomes below the subsistence minimum there have been proposed a number of that will help to reach a higher standard of living in accordance with the requirements of the social market economy.


Author(s):  
Rolf H. Funck ◽  
Harry Böttcher ◽  
Jan S. Kowalski

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