Academic Capitalism and the New Economy: Markets, State, and Higher Education

As colleges and universities become more entrepreneurial in a post-industrial economy, they focus on knowledge less as a public good than as a commodity to be capitalized on in profit-oriented activities. In Academic Capitalism and the New Economy, higher education scholars Sheila Slaughter and Gary Rhoades detail the aggressive engagement of U.S. higher education institutions in the knowledge-based economy and analyze the efforts of colleges and universities to develop, market, and sell research products, educational services, and consumer goods in the private marketplace.

Slaughter and Rhoades track changes in policy and practice, revealing new social networks and circuits of knowledge creation and dissemination, as well as new organizational structures and expanded managerial capacity to link higher education institutions and markets. They depict an ascendant academic capitalist knowledge/learning regime expressed in faculty work, departmental activity, and administrative behavior. Clarifying the regime's internal contradictions, they note the public subsidies embedded in new revenue streams and the shift in emphasis from serving student customers to leveraging resources from them.

Defining the terms of academic capitalism in the new economy, this groundbreaking study offers essential insights into the trajectory of American higher education.

Why did the development of capitalism and technology fail in China? Does it matter? Has the West trumped the deck in favour of itself through selective interpretation of events? China and Historical Capitalism tells us it is more important to look beyond finding reasons in order to find out what actually happened in China after the fork in the road of economic development.

The essays are reflections of current thinking on the 'post-Needham' project by well established scholars using, if I can stretch the terminology, post-marxist analytical tools and language. Joseph Needham, and his lifetime work on Science and Civilisation in China, is, of course, the backdrop for the essays. The chronology of the essays begins with the development of European capitalism and is completed with the identification of a market economy in pre-modern China.

My favorite essay is that of Francesca Bray, "Towards a critical history of non-Western technology." Perhaps it is because I read her book, The Rice Economies of Asia (University of California Press, 1986). But it is also because she is probably one of the more qualified persons to bridge Needham's work with post-Needham work given that she produced Volume VI of Needham's series. Parts of her essay deal with basic definitions of technology, economy and capitalism. In essence it provides clear guideposts to reinterpret Needham's work by showing the development of technology beyond the cut-off period that signals the rise of the West. The following chapter, by R. Bin Wong, goes on to narrate the development of China's market economy, where Europe's economic development is the usual topic of study.

Having experienced the development of the internet over the last half decade, one can't help but look back at the exercises in this book as also partly misguided. The authors state at the beginning that they do not address current economic development in Asia, but instead focus on how capitalism "has been conceived as a European social formation" and how capitalism, "as a world system has shaped knowledge of China." Yet, so often, the assumptions that underlie their uses of terms such as 'capitalism' result in freezing time to suit their needs and to leave the West in a category of cultural and social development that built the world outside into an image of what it wanted to see. They do not to see capitalism and technology as systems that can develop beyond their experience to date. Neither do they consider current (or even recent) interaction between technological development and society in China. Certainly, it is another large topic. But a peak at the issues would help.

Ultimately, the reality they build comes with its own set of distortions. Perhaps its the nature of the beast, but it would be nice to leave the door open and say: "Hey, Needham, Weber and all the social scientists and thinkers pre-Foucault or Pre-Habermas, etc. just had a different set of problems than we have today. ... But we recognize that we are also missing part of the picture. ... and here is where we need to focus next."

Great Economic Thinkers is a collection of audio presentations that explain, in understandable language, the major ideas of historys most important economists. Special emphasis is placed on each thinkers attitude toward capitalism, revealing their influence in todays debate on economic progress and prosperity.

Building Knowledge Cultures: Education and Development in the Age of Knowledge Capitalism (Critical Education Policy and Politics)

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Building Knowledge Cultures: Education and Development in the Age of Knowledge Capitalism (Critical Education Policy and Politics)
A.C. (Tina) Besley
Manufacturer: Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, Inc.
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Paperback

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ASIN: 0742517918

The authors examine balances between the competitive and cooperative activities of firms and governments in major industrialized countries from perspectives of efficiency and social justice. They advocate cooperation to overcome internationalized market failures and policy failures, and to reduce imbalances in the spread of gains from global commerce. This advocacy is based especially on comparisons between corporate and policy level activities in the USA and the EU, and between the USA and the EU. The potential advantages of strengthening cooperation are stressed with emphasis on imperatives being set by continuing technological advances.

Alliance Capitalism and Corporate Management will be required reading for all scholars and students of international management and international political economy, business leaders and corporate managers, and decision makers in the fields of industrial and competition policy.

Capitalism, Socialism and Knowledge: The Economics of F.A. Hayek

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Capitalism, Socialism and Knowledge: The Economics of F.A. Hayek

Manufacturer: Edward Elgar Pub
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Hardcover

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ASIN: 1858980127

Consuming Fictions: Gender, Class and Hunger in Dickens's Novels

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Consuming Fictions: Gender, Class and Hunger in Dickens's Novels
Gail Turley Houston
Manufacturer: Southern Illinois University
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Binding: Hardcover

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In this remarkable study, Gail Turley Houston examines the rich interplay of consumption as alimental process, medical entity, psychological construct, and economic practice in order to explore Charles Dickens’s fictional representations of Victorian culture as he presents it in his novels. Drawing from medical, historical, economic, psychoanalytic, and biographical materials from the Victorian period, Houston anchors her work in the belief that if class and gender are fictional constructions, real people’s lives are affected in complex and coercive ways by such constructions.

Proceeding chronologically, Houston traces particular patterns throughout ten of Dickens’s major novels: The Pickwick Papers, Oliver Twist, The Old Curiosity Shop, Martin Chuzzlewit, Dombey and Son, David Copperfield, Bleak House, Little Dorrit, Great Expectations, and Our Mutual Friend. Houston maintains that Victorian codes of behavior prescribed for gender and class regarding sexual and alimental appetites were so extreme and complicated that numerous consequent eating disorders and related diseases developed. Ideologies about consumption translated into medically defined consumptions, such as anorexia. Using anorexia and its etiology as representative of an underlying cultural dynamics of consumption, Houston examines anorexia as a deep structure of the Victorian period.

Further, consumption as economic process is reflected in the expansion of individual material desires at the expense of the designated body politic. In other words, extravagant consumption occurs in society only if certain groups—usually consisting of lower-class men and women and, in Dickens’s novels, women in general—are severely limited in their consumption.

To support her approach, Houston turns to Rita Felski’s Beyond Feminist Aesthetics, agreeing with Felski’s argument that it is necessary to recognize the complex dialectics that take place between the individual and society. Not only does culture construct human beings, but human beings also construct culture. Felski’s theory aids Houston in emphasizing that Dickens not only influenced but was also greatly influenced by the Victorian dynamics of consumption. In fact, Houston argues that while Dickens dismantles Victorian ideologies about class and hunger by demonstrating the unnaturalness of expecting one class to starve so that another might gluttonize, he nevertheless accepts and perpetuates the Victorian identification of woman as the self-sacrificing, always-nurturing "angel in the house" without need of nurture herself.

This extraordinary book will appeal to literary scholars, as well as to scholars in the social sciences, history, humanistically oriented medicine, and women’s studies.

The Culture of Capital brings together leading literary critics and historians to reassess one of the defining features of early modern England-the idea of "capital." The collection reevaluates the different aspects of the concept as it emerged amidst the profound economic, social, and technological changes typical of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. As the essays move from the birth of private property and the rise of cities to the appearance of the printed book and the claims of modern science, the contributors reveal the nuanced relationships among economic value and other forms of religious, cultural, political, and intellectual value, as well as the persistence of objects, activities, and concepts that resisted becoming "capital" in a modern sense. Offering exemplary models of rigorous theoretical, literary, and historical work, the volume maps the ground for a new, enriched, interdisciplinary history of early modern England.