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The private rental housing market plays an important and growing role in the advanced economies. Providing accommodation for a wider range of households than before the global financial crisis, rental housing is also a key asset class for private individuals and companies, while the rise of Airbnb lettings has pushed up rents and reduced the number of homes available to residents.
This edited collection by leading experts in the field analyses recent changes in the private rental market, using case studies from the UK, Europe, Australia and the USA, and assesses the initial impacts of the COVID-19 pandemic.
This book examines the evolution of digital platform economies through the lens of online gaming.
Offering valuable empirical work on Valve’s ‘Steam’ platform, Thorhauge examines the architecture of this global online videogame marketplace and the way it enables new markets and economic transactions. Drawing on infrastructure, software, platform and game studies, the book interrogates the implications of these transactions, both in terms of their legality, but also in how they create new forms of immaterial labour.
Shedding new light on a previously under-explored branch of the study of digital platforms, this book brings a unique economic sociology perspective into the growing literature on videogame studies.
In the context of sustained economic and environmental crises, marked by extreme inequalities of wealth, rising xenophobia, racism and precarity, never has the need for a radical change of system been so pressing.
This book is an invitation to think the world otherwise. The author breathes new life into socialist thought through the deployment of an intersectional lens, bringing diverse struggles for emancipation both within and outside the Global North into dialogue with one another.
In doing so, he offers the kind of bold and holistic thinking the present situation calls for.
Insurance is an important – if still poorly understood – mechanism for dealing with a broad variety of risks associated with modern life.
This book conducts an in-depth examination of one of the largest and longest-established private insurance industries in Europe: British life insurance. In doing so, it draws on over 40 oral history interviews to trace how the sector is changed since the 1970s, a period characterised by rampant financialisation and neoliberalisation.
Combining insights from science and technology studies and economic sociology, this is an unprecedented study of the evolution of insurance practices and an invaluable contribution to our understanding of financial capitalism.
Why is finance so important? How do stock markets work and what do they really do? Most importantly, what might finance be and what could we expect from it?
Exploring contemporary finance via the development of stock exchanges, markets and the links with states, Roscoe mingles historical and technical detail with humorous anecdotes and lively portraits of market participants.
Deftly combining research and autobiographical vignettes, he offers a cautionary tale about the drive of financial markets towards expropriation, capture and exclusion. Positioning financial markets as central devices in the organisation of the global economy, he includes contemporary concerns over inequality, climate emergency and (de)colonialism and concludes by wondering, in the market’s own angst-filled voice, what the future for finance might be, and how we might get there.
The COVID-19 pandemic is a Rorschach test for society: everyone sees something different in it, and the range of political and economic responses to the crisis can leave us feeling overwhelmed.
This book cuts through the confusion, dissecting the new post-coronavirus capitalism into several policy areas and spheres of action to inform academic, policy and public discourse.
Covering all the major aspects of contemporary capitalism that have been affected by the pandemic, Andreas Nölke deftly analyses the impacts of the crisis on our socio-economic and political systems. Signposting a new era for global capitalism, he offers alternatives for future economic development in the wake of COVID-19.
