This book depicts the need for an economics that addresses social provisioning in the context of power and culture. Such an approach is necessary to the development of an analysis that treats human wants and technology as endogenous variables, thereby avoiding the atavism inherent in conventional economics epistemology. Only in this way can the requisite re-viewing of the place of economy in society be brought to bear in an economic analysis capable of addressing the seemingly intractable problems of the democratic capitalist societies.
Grounded in a conviction that anthropological knowledge implies critique and that engaging in anthropology is also ultimately an act of praxis, various contributors explore the ways in which the precepts of Marxism continue to illuminate and enhance our understanding of culture, economy, and politics. They focus on the question of epistemology to examine the process of anthropological intellectual production in different national settings and analyze the ways in which hierarchies of power and forms of state domination figure in the formation of subjectivities in different ethnographic contexts. The authors also reflect upon how class, gender, ethnicity, racialized forms of ethnicity, as well as regional and national identities, are configured through the relationships involved in making a living under late capitalism.
Why Enlightenment culture sparked the Industrial Revolution During the late eighteenth century, innovations in Europe triggered the Industrial Revolution and the sustained economic progress that spread across the globe. While much has been made of the details of the Industrial Revolution, what remains a mystery is why it took place at all. Why did this revolution begin in the West and not elsewhere, and why did it continue, leading to today's unprecedented prosperity? In this groundbreaking book, celebrated economic historian Joel Mokyr argues that a culture of growth specific to early modern Europe and the European Enlightenment laid the foundations for the scientific advances and pioneering inventions that would instigate explosive technological and economic development. Bringing together economics, the history of science and technology, and models of cultural evolution, Mokyr demonstrates that culture—the beliefs, values, and preferences in society that are capable of changing behavior—was a deciding factor in societal transformations. Mokyr looks at the period 1500–1700 to show that a politically fragmented Europe fostered a competitive "market for ideas" and a willingness to investigate the secrets of nature. At the same time, a transnational community of brilliant thinkers known as the “Republic of Letters” freely circulated and distributed ideas and writings. This political fragmentation and the supportive intellectual environment explain how the Industrial Revolution happened in Europe but not China, despite similar levels of technology and intellectual activity. In Europe, heterodox and creative thinkers could find sanctuary in other countries and spread their thinking across borders. In contrast, China’s version of the Enlightenment remained controlled by the ruling elite. Combining ideas from economics and cultural evolution, A Culture of Growth provides startling reasons for why the foundations of our modern economy were laid in the mere two centuries between Columbus and Newton.
Since sociologists returned to the study of culture in the past several decades, a pursuit all but anathema for a generation, cultural sociology has emerged as a vibrant field. Edited by three leading cultural sociologists, The Oxford Handbook of Cultural Sociology presents the full theoretical and methodological vitality of this critically significant new area.The Handbook gathers together works by authors confronting the crucial choices all cultural sociologists face today: about analytic priorities, methods, topics, epistemologies, ideologies, and even modes of writing. It is a vital collection of preeminent thinkers studying the ways in which culture, society, politics, and economy interact in the world.Organized by empirical areas of study rather than particular theories or competing intellectual strands, the Handbook addresses power, politics, and states; economics and organization; mass media; social movements; religion; aesthetics; knowledge; and health. Allowing the reader to observe tensions as well as convergences, the collection displays the value of cultural sociology not as a niche discipline but as a way to view and understand the many facets of contemporary society. The first of its kind, The Oxford Handbook of Cultural Sociology offers comprehensive and immediate access to the real developments and disagreements taking place in the field, and deftly exemplifies how cultural sociology provides a new way of seeing and modeling social facts.
A comparative study of economic development policy, and its relationship with local power structures and cultural and social relations, in two Maryland towns that have rejected development.
Many economists now accept that informal institutions and culture play a crucial role in economic outcomes. Driven by the work of economists like Nobel laureates Douglass North and Gary Becker, there is an important body of work that invokes cultural and institutional factors to build a more comprehensive and realistic theory of economic behavior. This book provides a comprehensive overview of research in this area, sketching the main premises and challenges faced by the field. The first part introduces and explains the various theoretical approaches to studying culture in economics, going back to Smith and Weber, and addresses the methodological issues that need to be considered when including culture in economics. The second part of the book then provides readers with a series of examples that show how the cultural approach can be used to explain economic phenomena in four different areas: entrepreneurship, trust, international business and comparative corporate governance.
Community economic development is conventionally explained using one of two models: a market model that assumes individuals always attempt to maximize their wealth, or a growth model that assumes land use is controlled by real estate developers who invariably pursue outside investment as a way of increasing land values and creating jobs and opportunities. In the first edition of Community, Culture, and Economic Development, Meredith Ramsay's close study of two small towns on Maryland's Lower Shore demonstrated that neither model can explain why these communities, alike in so many ways, responded so differently to economic decline or why archaic hierarchies of race, class, and gender remain deeply embedded and poverty seems nearly intractable. Ramsay showed how the lack of economic progress in Somerset, Maryland's poorest county, can best be explained by factoring history, culture, and social relations into the investigator's research. In this second edition she discusses changes that have taken place in the county since the early 1990s, including the dramatic legal victory of the "Somerset Six" and the Maryland ACLU, which ultimately paved the way for the election of an African American to a top county position for the first time in history.
We live in a time of great uncertainty about the future. Those heady days of the late twentieth century, when the end of the Cold War seemed to be ushering in a new and more optimistic age, now seem like a distant memory. During the last couple of decades, we’ve been battered by one crisis after another and the idea that humanity is on a progressive path to a better future seems like an illusion. It is only now that we can see clearly the real scope and structure of the profound shifts that Western societies have undergone over the last 30 years. Classical industrial society has been transformed into a late-modern society that is molded by polarization and paradoxes. The pervasive singularization of the social, the orientation toward the unique and exceptional, generates systematic asymmetries and disparities, and hence progress and unease go hand in hand. Reckwitz examines this dual structure of singularization and polarization as it plays itself out in the different sectors of our societies and, in so doing, he outlines the central structural features of the present: the new class society, the characteristics of a postindustrial economy, the conflict about culture and identity, the exhaustion of the self resulting from the imperative to seek authentic fulfillment, and the political crisis of liberalism. Building on his path-breaking work The Society of Singularities, this new book will be of great interest to students and scholars in sociology, politics, and the social sciences generally, and to anyone concerned with the great social and political issues of our time.
This volume emphasizes the economic aspects of art and culture, a relatively new field that poses inherent problems for economics, with its quantitative concepts and tools. Building bridges across disciplines such as management, art history, art philosophy, sociology, and law, editors Victor Ginsburgh and David Throsby assemble chapters that yield new perspectives on the supply and demand for artistic services, the contribution of the arts sector to the economy, and the roles that public policies play. With its focus on culture rather than the arts, Ginsburgh and Throsby bring new clarity and definition to this rapidly growing area. - Presents coherent summaries of major research in art and culture, a field that is inherently difficult to characterize with finance tools and concepts - Offers a rigorous description that avoids common problems associated with art and culture scholarship - Makes details about the economics of art and culture accessible to scholars in fields outside economics
The attention economy is a notion that explains the growing value of human attention in societies characterised by post-industrial modes of production. In a world in which information and knowledge become central to the valorisation process of capital, human attention becomes a scarce and hence increasingly valuable commodity. To what degree is the attention economy a specific form of capitalist production? How does the attention economy differ from the industrial mode of production in which Marx developed his critique of capitalism? How can Marx’s theory be used today despite the historical differences that separate industrial from post-industrial capitalism? The Attention Economy argues that human attention is a new form of labour that can only be understood through a systematic reinterpretation of Marx. It argues that the attention economy belongs to a general shift in capitalism in which subjectivity itself becomes the territory of production and exploitation of value as well as the territory of the reproduction of capitalist power relations.
