This article contains reflections on the further structural transformation of the public sphere, building on the author’s widely-discussed social-historical study, The Structural Transformation of ...the Public Sphere, which originally appeared in German in 1962 (English translation 1989). The first three sections contain preliminary theoretical reflections on the relationship between normative and empirical theory, the deliberative understanding of democracy, and the demanding preconditions of the stability of democratic societies under conditions of capitalism. The fourth section turns to the implications of digitalisation for the account of the role of the media in the public sphere developed in the original work, specifically to how it is leading to the expansion and fragmentation of the public sphere and is turning all participants into potential authors. The following section presents empirical data from German studies which shows that the rapid expansion of digital media is leading to a marked diminution of the role of the classical print media. The article concludes with observations on the threats that these developments pose for the traditional role of the public sphere in discursive opinion and will formation in democracies.
Mordecai Kurz develops a comprehensive integrated theory of the dynamics of market power and income inequality. He shows that technological innovations are not simply sources of growth and progress: ...they sow the seeds of market power. Technological market power tends to rise, increasing inequality of income and wealth.
This thesis proposes a theory of cartographic abstraction as a framework for investigating cartographic viewing, and does so through engaging with a series of contemporary artworks concerned with ...cartographic ‘ways of seeing’ (Berger 1972). Cartographic abstraction is a material modality of thought and experience that is produced through cartographic techniques of depiction. It is the more-than-visual register that posits and produces the ‘cartographic world’, or what John Pickles has called the ‘geo-coded world’ (2006). By this I mean the naturalized apprehension of the earth as a homogeneous space that is naturally, even necessarily, understood as regular, consistent and objective. I argue for identifying cartographic techniques of depiction as themselves abstract, and cartographic abstraction as such as the modality of thought and experience that these techniques produce. Abstraction within capitalism comes to be socially real and material, taking place outside thought. I propose a series of viewpoints, that are posited by the relations of viewing enacted by the selected artworks themselves. I analyse these viewpoints in relation to modes of cartographic viewing offered by theorists. Through close readings of cartographic artworks, I expand the current possibilities for understanding cartographic abstraction and its effects, through proposing a range of viewpoints that are both deployed in, and themselves problematize, cartographic viewing. I connect cartographic abstraction to debates about abstraction in Marxist and materialist approaches to philosophy, arguing for interpreting cartographic viewing as an abstract practice through which subjects are positioned and structured in relation to the ‘viewed’. This study discerns ‘real abstraction’ functioning in a particular area of ‘the operations of capitalism’; that is, modes of visual, and epistemological, abstraction that we can identify by exploring artworks concerned with cartographic depiction and conceptualisation. This approach to abstraction explores how cartographic knowledge can be theorized through recognising cartographic abstraction as a material modality of thought and experience.
Can Africa develop businesses beyond the extractive or agricultural sectors? What would it take for Africa to play a major role in global business? By focusing on recent changes, Scott D. Taylor ...demonstrates how Africa's business culture is marked by an unprecedented receptivity to private enterprise. Challenging persistent stereotypes about crony capitalism and the lack of development, Taylor reveals a long and dynamic history of business in Africa. He shows how a hospitable climate for business has been spurred by institutional change, globalization, and political and economic reform. Taylor encourages a broader understanding of the mosaic of African business and the diversity of influences and cultures that shape it.
Between the Civil War and World War I the United States underwent the most rapid economic expansion in history. At the same time, the country experienced unparalleled rates of immigration. InThe Rise ...of Multicultural America, Susan Mizruchi examines the convergence of these two extraordinary developments. No issue was more salient in postbellum American capitalist society, she argues, than the country's bewilderingly diverse population. This era marked the emergence of Americans' self-consciousness about what we today call multiculturalism.Mizruchi approaches this complex development from the perspective of print culture, demonstrating how both popular and elite writers played pivotal roles in articulating the stakes of this national metamorphosis. In a period of widespread literacy, writers assumed a remarkable cultural authority as best-selling works of literature and periodicals reached vast readerships and immigrants could find newspapers and magazines in their native languages. Mizruchi also looks at the work of journalists, photographers, social reformers, intellectuals, and advertisers. Identifying the years between 1865 and 1915 as the founding era of American multiculturalism, Mizruchi provides a historical context that has been overlooked in contemporary debates about race, ethnicity, immigration, and the dynamics of modern capitalist society. Her analysis recuperates a legacy with the potential to both invigorate current battle lines and highlight points of reconciliation.
Amazon e-commerce operations rely upon the living labor of thousands of workers. In the company’s warehouses, barcodes allow commodities to be construed as information to be managed. Work is thus ...mediated and organized digitally, as algorithms assign tasks and surveil workers. But it would be futile to analyze the technical organization of labor without studying the authoritarian nature of work under capitalist relations. Interviews with workers and managers unearth the material and cultural infrastructures that underpin Amazon labor. Early Italian operaismo, or workerist theory, offers a framework to analyze digital capitalism’s strategies to secure workers’ cooperation with machinery. Algorithms datafy worker activity and incorporate it in machinery. Management enacts a form of despotism mediated and augmented by digital tools and cultures. The technical and political rationalities deployed in the warehouse aim at satiating digital capitalism’s appetite for the labor of others.
Myanmar's much lauded but short-lived transition to a liberal capitalist order was marked by an upsurge in Islamophobia, anti-Muslim riots and the violent expulsion of hundreds of thousands of ...Rohingya into Bangladesh. Amid this conflagration, debates over ethnic inclusion, privilege and nationalism were prominent. Yet within these debates, even seemingly antagonistic positions incorporated the class-blindness characteristic of US liberal white privilege theory. In this article, we engage these debates by recalling an earlier radical theorisation of racial privilege that later liberal conceptions went on to displace. Taking capitalist class relations seriously, we argue that, for the poor Burman, ethnic privilege has been deeply ambiguous and ultimately harmful. Burman supremacy, in short, has served as ideological-material scaffolding for the enduring subjugation of the Burman proletariat itself. In order to elaborate our argument, we tell a critical history of Burman chauvinism in Myanmar - a history that reveals "Burman-ness" as a sign not simply of ethnic/racial privilege, but of class privilege as well.
Recent formulations of state capitalism tend to present it as a distinct system, anchored in China, in opposition to a neoliberal model represented by the United States and its global armatures. As ...an alternative to this binarism, this paper argues for Gillian Hart's relational-comparative approach to the geographies of the new state capitalism. It outlines three of Hart's theoretical-methodological principles—multiple trajectories, conjunctural analysis, and articulation—and demonstrates how they can be used to analyze the interrelations between “statist” and “liberal” development trajectories, through an empirical account of conjunctural struggles in and between China and the World Bank during the Tiananmen Square crisis. It argues that Tiananmen was an inflection point in the relation between the development trajectories of the Chinese state and the World Bank, where conflicts over the continuity of economic reform were simultaneously struggles over the boundaries of the state. Examining these institutions conjuncturally shows that China's “state capitalism” is not an opposite of the Bank's liberal model, but has been, in part, produced through power-laden contests over the meaning and materiality of state and market in multiple arenas.
'Capitalism after the Crises', the essay written by Treasurer Dr Jim Chalmers' for 'The Monthly' (Chalmers 2023), elicited critical responses from across the political spectrum. On the one hand, it ...was interpreted as an admission that the Albanese government is devoted to the management and facilitation of private capital as a strategy of political control (Rundle 2023). On the other, Chalmers was accused of wanting to redesign capitalism by the end of 2023 through the socialisation of the economy (Cater 2023). Although distilling a single signal from an article susceptible to such contradictory interpretations would be a fool's errand, evaluating Chalmers' stated opposition to neoliberalism and his alternative policy prescriptions is an important element in understanding Labor's approach to policy formulation.
This essay presents an argument for critical organization studies scholars to more seriously address the phenomenon of corporate branding as a central, constitutive feature of organizing in ...contemporary capitalism. While brands and branding have historically been the domain of marketing and consumer studies researchers, I argue that a focus on the intersection of branding and organizing enables critical researchers to more effectively address the ways in which neoliberal capitalism and post-Fordist organizational forms mediate processes of meaning construction and human identity formation. Taking up Böhm and Land’s claim that neoliberal capitalism is characterized by a ‘new hidden abode of production’, I adopt Dean’s conception of ‘communicative capitalism’ to explore how branding processes are ‘hidden in plain sight’ as a key, constitutive element of this ‘new hidden abode’. As such, branding can be explored as a particular case of ‘organizing beyond organization’. The essay develops three elements of the branding and organizing relationship as medium and outcome of communicative capitalism: (1) floating signifiers and nodal points, (2) communicative labor, and (3) communication and affect.
