Suchergebnisse

This article tracks the rise of a new speculative form of 'profit fetishism' in the American stock market in the late 20th century as the control of American corporations shifted decisively from production-oriented managers to earning-oriented stockholders. During these years, speculative capitalists made the trading price of corporate stock the primary focus of corporate management. The heightened focus upon stock price coincided with a convergence of stock market actors upon the capitalized earnings model as the primary frame used to value corporate stock, displacing two formerly dominant frames, which focused (respectively) on hard assets and dividend payouts. Despite the notoriously unreliable and unstable nature of speculative accounting with respect to projected future earnings, such accounting profits have become the fetish of an age of speculative finance capital.

Classical critical institutionalism is compared to recent `neo-instititutionalism' in economics, sociology and organizational studies. Both approaches developed during a regime change within capitalism, crisis periods of economic change and destabilized relationships between capitalist sectors and social institutions. Unlike mainstream economics, institutional approaches map these changing connections between capitalist sectors (finance and industrial capital, for instance) and between economic and social institutions. The critical institutionalists were much more critical of society, mainstream economics and finance capital as a destructive force, a stance that has continuing utility for the analysis of global capitalism and neo-liberal finance capital. The new institutionalists, while uncritically positivist and administrative in their orientation to the capitalist system, have nevertheless devised useful concepts and theories of economic organization and structure. A new, condensed critical institutionalism is needed to better analyze neo-liberal finance capital in this era of globalization.

Abstract In this essay, the emergence of the "New Synthesis" of economics and sociology is explored and analyzed in the context of the classical writings in economic sociology ("Old Synthesis"). The aim is not to provide an exhaustive survey, but rather a selective assessment that introduces readers to the most important questions, answers, and contributions of this emerging and important specialized literature. The essay seeks to i) translate faithfully the internal logic of this active specialty field into a language and problematic that can be appreciated by non‐specialists, ii) identify central assumptions and themes in the New Synthesis writings that seem particularly promising for the appreciation of contemporary economic happenings, and iii) indicate opportunities for the development of further theoretical richness by incorporating Old Synthesis approaches.

We conceptualize racialized and geopolitical contexts of reception as a comprehensive framework for understanding the incorporation of recent immigrants in new destinations. Racialization is the fluid assignment of racial meanings to physical characteristics, religion, cultural presentation, and language. Geopolitics encompasses national boundaries, border security, regulation of border crossers, and populist–nativist anxieties about identity. We use data derived from a documentary film depicting the 2001 contact between Somali immigrants and a host community in Maine. The reception of these immigrants was profoundly racialized due to their sudden arrival and stark differences in phenotypic, cultural, religious, and linguistic characteristics, all of which were racialized by the host community. The context was geopolitically charged by local memories of the US intervention in Somalia and by the aftermath of 9/11. This study underscores the importance of racialization and geopolitics as intertwined factors that significantly shape immigrant contexts of reception.

Marx's (1844) estranged labor manuscript maps processes that stultify spontaneous human relations under the division of labor in the regime of capital accumulation. For Marx, negating absolutes would put 'Man' back on its natural trajectory toward positive freedom. Such evacuation of mediating 'substances' results in either frivolity or pragmatic barbarism rather than positive freedom. Marx's political imaginary rejected philosophical mysticism but overlooked finer points of Hegel's dialectic that contribute to an immanent critique of Marxist political ideology. Missing from Marx's thought is the logic of post-capitalist mediation and a trace of the subjective modalities that correspond with the objective forms of alienation. Lacking an adequate psychology, Marx did not see that he had constructed a communism that mirrored the subjective spirit of bourgeois society. We draw upon philosophical, sociological, and psychoanalytic currents to remap the genome of Marxist political philosophy with a Whitmanesque imaginary congenial to free, poetic social mediation.

Klaus Theweleit's Male Fantasies has generated broad interest in the literature of several academic disciplines. His analysis of the symbolic and gender dynamics of the leaders of the German Freikorps (German paramilitary mercenary units of the period 1918-1923) has been widely generalized into a theory of modern masculinity. Two issues inadequately explored in Theweleit's work nonetheless must be read through more recent empirical and theoretical work in history and sociology: (1) the formative role of colonial military experience in the careers of the German Freikorps officers who provide the material for his analysis and (2) the complex historical problem of the facticity of rape in Freikorps activity.