concept is taken more or less for granted across disciplines. I will introduce an economic-sociological perspective on markets to address what characterizes them in comparison with other types of economic organization, and to define markets as fields populated by ‘incumbents’ and ‘challengers’ who act strategically to maintain or challenge a certain market order. I then return to the notion of platforms as multi-sided markets on the basis of this framework to clarify some of the ambiguities with regard to the relationship between markets and platforms. To do this, I
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As the US contends with issues of populism and de-democratization, this timely study considers the impacts of digital technologies on the country’s politics and society.
Timcke provides a Marxist analysis of the rise of digital media, social networks and technology giants like Amazon, Apple, Facebook and Microsoft. He looks at the impact of these new platforms and technologies on their users who have made them among the most valuable firms in the world.
Offering bold new thinking across data politics and digital and economic sociology, this is a powerful demonstration of how algorithms have come to shape everyday life and political legitimacy in the US and beyond.
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.
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.
Do you know where your money is? More importantly, do you know what your money is doing?
Most of us feel confident that we know what money is. But few of us feel confident in taking responsibility for what our money does. We hand over the power of money to banks and mainstream finance with real, often damaging, consequences for people and planet.
A unique collaboration between an academic and a practitioner, this book tells the story of money, from ancient Athens to the Bitcoin revolution, to explain how crowdfunding is the way for people to reclaim the power of their money in pursuit of a fairer and greener society.
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.
This collection offers a comprehensive review of the origins, scale and breadth of the privatisation and marketisation revolution across the criminal justice system.
Leading academics and researchers assess the consequences of market-driven criminal justice in a wide range of contexts, from prison and probation to policing, migrant detention, rehabilitation and community programmes. Using economic, sociological and criminological perspectives, illuminated by accessible case studies, they consider the shifting roles and interactions of the public, private and voluntary sectors.
As privatisation, outsourcing and the impact of market cultures spread further across the system, the authors look ahead to future developments and signpost the way to reform in a ‘post-market’ criminal justice sphere.
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.
Chapter 10 is available Open Access under CC-BY-NC-ND licence.
This interdisciplinary collection charts the experiences of young people in places of spatial marginality around the world, dismantling the privileging of urban youth, urban locations and urban ways of life in youth studies and beyond.
Expert authors investigate different dimensions of spatiality including citizenship, materiality and belonging, and develop new understandings of the complex relationships between place, history, politics and education. From Australia to India, Myanmar to Sweden, and the UK to Central America, international examples from both the Global South and North help to illuminate wider issues of intergenerational change, social mobility and identity.
By exploring young lives beyond city, this book establishes different ways of thinking from a position of spatial marginality.
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.
