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Of Capitalism (of + capitalism)

Distribution by Scientific Domains

Humanities and Social Sciences	100%

Selected Abstracts

Geographies of Financialization in Disarray: The Dutch Case in Comparative Perspective

ECONOMIC GEOGRAPHY, Issue 1 2010
Ewald Engelen
abstract The securitization crisis that started in mid-2007 has demonstrated that we are indeed living in a "global financial village" and are all subject to the vagaries of financialization. Nevertheless, the fallout from the credit crisis has not been homogeneous across space. That some localities were hit harder than others suggests that there are distinct geographies of financialization. Combining insights from the "varieties of capitalism" literature with those from the literature on "financialization studies," the article offers a first take on what may explain these different geographies on the basis of an informal comparison of the trajectories of financialization and their political repercussions in the United States, Germany, and the Netherlands. The article ends with some reflections on how economic geography could be enriched by combining comparative studies on institutionalism and financialization, while its distinct research focus,detailed spatial analysis endowed with a well-developed sensitivity for geographic variegation,may help overcome the methodological nationalism of much comparative institutionalism. [source]

Coordination as a Political Problem in Coordinated Market Economies

GOVERNANCE, Issue 1 2006
KATHLEEN THELEN
The purpose of this article is to explore the political dynamics of employer coordination in three well-known "coordinated market economies." We examine differences in how employer coordination has been organized in Sweden, Germany, and Japan in the area of industrial relations, and we examine the extent to which such coordination represents a self-sustaining equilibrium, as some of the most influential treatments suggest. To preview the findings, we argue that precisely the intensification of cooperation between labor and management in some firms and industries (that the "varieties of capitalism" literature correctly emphasizes) has paradoxically had deeply destabilizing collateral effects that have undermined or are undermining these systems as they were traditionally constituted. All three cases are characterized not so much by a full-blown breakdown of coordination so much as a very significant reconfiguration of the terms and scope of such coordination. Specifically, all three countries feature the emergence of new or intensified forms of dualism,different in each case based on different starting points,in which continued coordination within a smaller core has in some ways been underwritten through the breaking off of other, more peripheral, firms and workers. [source]

Probing the "moralization of capitalism" problem: Democratic experimentalism and the co-evolution of norms

INTERNATIONAL SOCIAL SCIENCE JOURNAL, Issue 185 2005
Christian Arnsperger
The most fundamental issue raised by any discussion around the ,moralization of capitalism' is the puzzle of second-order morality: How exactly is it possible to pass a moral judgement on our categories of moral judgement? How can our norms of morality be said to be immoral, thus calling for (re-)moralization? The answer depends on the observation that norms and interaction structures in capitalism have co-evolved, and hence can be taken neither as autonomous with respect to one another nor as obeying a hidden functionality. This implies that, paradoxically, the moralization problem cannot be solved in moral terms, but calls for a political approach, to make best use of which we need to come to terms with capitalism as a fully fledged cultural system. The ideology inherent in that cultural system can only be attacked from within the system itself, through decentralized processes of democratic decision-making rather than by mere prophetic denunciation or moral invectives. Because the particular version of the capitalist culture in which we live now is a radically contingent result of history, it makes sense to support a framework of democratic experimentalism which embeds multiple institutional experimentation within a system of experience-building and experience-formation analogous to the system of information-utilisation and information-dissemination offered by the Hayekian market. Only by thus creating the real and concrete democratic presuppositions for alternative capitalist practices can we begin to make sense of the puzzle inherent in the "moralization of capitalism" problem. [source]