Why do markets exist? How are they maintained? What are market systems and how are they formed? This book addresses these fundamental questions and challenges the traditional view that markets and market systems are 'natural', asserting instead that they are ideologically coloured and of dubious scientific value.

Financialisation and the Financial and Economic Crisesprovides comparative, empirical case studies of a diverse set of eleven countries. In particular, the book helps in understanding the current (mal)performance of Euro area economies by explaining the causes of the shifts in growth regimes during and after the crises. It goes well beyond the dominant interpretation of the recent financial and economic crises as being rooted in malfunctioning and poorly regulated financial markets. The contributions to this book provide detailed accounts of the long-term effects of financialisation and cover the main developments leading up to and during the crisis in eleven selected countries: the US, the UK, Spain, Greece, Portugal, Germany, Sweden, Italy, France, Estonia, and Turkey. The introductory chapter presents the theoretical framework and synthesizes the main findings of the country studies. Furthermore, the macroeconomic effects of financialisation on the EU as a whole are analyzed in the final chapter. Offering an illuminating overview and invaluable alternative perspective on the long-run developments leading to the recent crises, this book is essential reading for researchers, students and policymakers and an ideal starting point for further research. Contributors:S. Bahçe, R. Barradas, C.A. Carrasco, H. Cömert, G. Cornilleau, J. Creel, D. Detzer, N. Dodig, N. Erdem, T. Evans, J. Ferreiro, G. Gabbi, C. Gálvez, C. Gomez, A. González, E. Hein, E. Juuse, E. Karaçimen, A.H. Köse, S. Lagoa, E. Leão, J. Lepper, Ö. Orhangazi, G. Özgür, R. Paes Mamede, M. Shabani, A. Stenfors, E. Ticci, J. Toporowski, L. Tserkezis, J. Tyson, Y. Varoufakis, P. Vozzella, G.L. Yalman

Presenting a critical approach to the study of public policy and policy analysis, this book presents a postpositivist foundation that challenges empiricist and technocratic approaches to policy studies. Frank Fischer advances deliberative policy argumentation and the logic of practical reason, exploring how this approach can be used as a framework for interpreting the interaction of normative and empirical arguments in policy politics.

Why our workplaces are authoritarian private governments—and why we can’t see it One in four American workers says their workplace is a “dictatorship.” Yet that number almost certainly would be higher if we recognized employers for what they are—private governments with sweeping authoritarian power over our lives. Many employers minutely regulate workers’ speech, clothing, and manners on the job, and employers often extend their authority to the off-duty lives of workers, who can be fired for their political speech, recreational activities, diet, and almost anything else employers care to govern. In this compelling book, Elizabeth Anderson examines why, despite all this, we continue to talk as if free markets make workers free, and she proposes a better way to think about the workplace, opening up space for discovering how workers can enjoy real freedom.

Drawing on original research I conducted in the late 1980s, the book argues for a critical approach to the study of children and television. It begins with critical reappraisals of previous empiricist and interpretative studies to set the ground for a different theoretical inquiry which links biography with history. The situated activity of children’s television viewing therefore has to be related to the broader historical and cultural formations in post-Mao China. By way of a methodological pluralism of questionnaire survey, in-depth interviews and observation, the book provides the reader with a thorough critical analysis of the rise of the new commercial ethic in Chinese society in general, and in the sector of media and communications in particular, at the very historical turning point of the late 1980s. Soon after that, Deng Xiaoping made his significant tour to south China, reckoning a big step forward towards further liberalization and started to form a brave new world in China ever since. ​

This work puts forth the argument that, in the Haitian diaspora in the USA, a new Haitian identity has emerged among the youth, which is tied to the practical consciousness of the black American underclass. Black Americans in the postindustrial capitalist world-system of America are no longer Africans. Instead, their practical consciousnesses are the product of two identities: the black bourgeoisie, or African Americans, on the one hand, under the leadership of educated professionals and preachers, and the black underclass, on the other hand, under the leadership of street and prison personalities, athletes, and entertainers vying for ideological and linguistic domination of black America. These two social class language games were, and still are, historically constituted by structural differentiation and different ideological apparatuses, the church and education on the one hand and the streets, prisons, and the athletic and entertainment industries on the other, of the global capitalist racial-class structure of inequality under American hegemony, which replaced the African ideological apparatuses of Vodou, peristyles, lakous, and agricultural production as found in Haiti, for example. Among Haitian youth in the US after 1986, following the topple of Jean-Claude “baby doc” Duvalier, the latter social class language game, the black American underclass, came to serve as the bearer of ideological and linguistic domination against Haitian bourgeois purposive-rationality, and agents of the Vodou Ethic and the spirit of communism.

The Discretionary Economy argues that we do in fact control our own political and economic destinies. As a community, we have discretion over policies that determine whether an economic process adequately provides for the necessities of life. We also determine who participates in normative public judgments and whether decisions distinguish between what is and what ought to be. Tool argues that we must continuously organize the institutional structures through which economic and political functions in the social process are carried on. We must exercise discretion by creating and modifying institutions that coordinate our behavior. To exercise discretion effectively requires that we employ distinctively American economic, political, and philosophical theory. In this volume, the pivotal twentieth-century contributors to this encompassing theory of political economy are Thorstein Veblen, John Dewey, Clarence Ayres, and R. Fagg Foster. This volume presents, in detail, their analytical and philosophical perspective on social change. A major purpose of this volume is to compare and contrast the American tradition with the traditions of capitalism, Marxism, and fascism, demonstrating that the former can resolve compelling economic and political problems and the latter two cannot. This book explains how to identify and analyze social, economic, and political problems confronted in all communities, and how to go about framing and implementing structural adjustments in the political economy. It will be of interest to students in non-traditional courses in political economy including institutional economics, contemporary social problems, economics and social policy, methodology, and contemporary economic thought.

This book is the first contemporary book to compare and integrate the various ways geographers think about and use scale across the spectrum of the discipline and includes state-of-the-art contributions by authoritative human geographers, physical geographers and GIS specialists. Provides a state of the art survey of how geographers think about scale. Brings together recent interest in scale in human and physical geography, as well as geographic information science Places competing concepts of scale side by side in order to compare them. The introduction and conclusion, by the editors, explores the common ground.

Using a variant of structuration theory, what Paul C. Mocombe calls phenomenological structuralism, this work explores and highlights how the African religion of Vodou and its ethic, i.e., syncretism, materialism, communal living or social collectivism, democracy, individuality, cosmopolitanism, spirit of social justice, xenophilia, balance, harmony, and gentleness, gave rise, under the leadership of oungan yo, manbo yo, gangan yo, and granmoun yo, to the Haitian spirit of communism and the “counter-plantation system” (Jean Casimir’s term) in the provinces and mountains of Haiti. What Mocombe calls the Vodou Ethic and the spirit of communism of the African people of Haiti would be juxtaposed against the Catholic/Protestant Ethic and the spirit of capitalism of the white, mulatto, gens de couleur, and petit-bourgeois free black classes of the island. This latter worldview, the Catholic/Protestant Ethic and the spirit of capitalism, Mocombe goes on to argue, exercised by the free bourgeois blacks and mulatto elites, Affranchis, on the island undermined the revolutionary and independence movement of Haiti commenced by subjects/agents, oungan yo, manbo yo, gangan yo/dokté fey, and granmoun yo, of the Vodou ethic and the spirit of communism, and made it the poorest, most racist, and tyrannical country in the Western Hemisphere.

This work uses the theory of phenomenological structuralism to put forth the argument that neoliberal globalization represents a Durkheimian mechanicalization of the world via the Protestant Ethic and the spirit of capitalism under American hegemony. It concludes that America attempts to “enframe” nation-states around the latter form of social integration via the systemicity of the dollar backed by the world’s commodities, which it privatizes. Amidst reactionary nationalism and fascism, which emerges to protect the citizenry of the world from the exploitative effects of the whole process, climate change threatens the American globalist project.