The high-quality academic books, upper-level student texts and journal articles on our Business, Management and Economics list offer fresh perspectives on the economy, the future of work and organisations, and the relationship between business and addressing global social challenges.
The list is home to a number of series including Organizations and Activism and Feminist Perspectives on Work and Organization, all of which are edited by leading scholars from the field, along with our journals in the area: Journal of Public Finance and Public Choice, Work in the Global Economy and Global Political Economy.
Business, Management and Economics
One of the greatest impacts of Braverman’s Labour and Monopoly Capital is the discovery of a ‘control imperative’ within the capitalist production process. Whereas his equation of capitalist domination and Taylorism has been heavily criticized early on, the capabilities of the expanded use of digital technologies at the workplace have raised the question of whether a Taylorist mode of control is on the advance once again. The article challenges this perspective by addressing managerial problems that go beyond the problem to transform labour power into actual labour. Taking up Sohn-Rethel’s theory of ‘dual economics’, we argue that the necessity to reconcile contradictory requirements of the ‘economics of the market’ and the ‘economics of production’ poses an equally crucial challenge for management. Whereas that ‘problem of reconciliation’ remained latent in the Fordist era, tensions between the two logics of economics have now increasingly become a problem to solve within the course of controlling the labour process. Drawing on our own research on ‘the inner marketization of the firm’ over the last 15 years, we discuss ‘indirect control’ as a mode of control that precisely addresses the problem of reconciliation and considers recent changes in the course of digitalization. On the basis of our empirical findings, we describe the contradictory forms of activating and restricting subjectivity in the digital workplace and its implications for the legitimation of managerial power and capitalist domination.
Expansion of the platform economy has given rise to a paradox in the literature on gig work: Given capital’s imposition of algorithmic controls, why do so many platform workers express support and appreciation for gig work, viewing it as enhancing their autonomy? Approaches toward this question have advanced numerous explanations, such as gamification, neoliberal norms, and entrepreneurial culture. We find these efforts only partially successful, as they fail to explain why ideological incorporation so readily succeeds. We argue that responses to gig work are a function of the class positions that gig workers hold in the wider society, which lead to distinct orientations that they bring to gig work. For workers with a foothold in the middle class, gig work provides access to job rewards that may no longer be available via the conventional economy alone. They consequently experience gig work as a labour of affirmation – a stark contrast with the experience of those gig workers who hold subordinate positions in the class structure. Interview data with 70 respondents in the ride-hail, grocery-shopping and food-delivery sectors supports this approach. Consent to gig work is strongest among our better-off respondents, who hold more secure positions in the conventional economy and use gig work as a culturally-sanctioned mechanism of class reproduction. The implication is that class-based divisions among the platform workforce warrant greater attention than labour process theory has allowed.
China has undergone profound social and economic transformations over the last four decades. Deeply influenced by globalisation and capital-oriented marketisation, China has transitioned from a planned economy under state socialism to a market economy integrated into the global economy. As China becomes the ‘world’s workshop’, it has also experienced rapid industrialisation, the transformation of work and employment, and the reformation of the Chinese working class. Based on a review of the engagement of labour process theory (LPT) in China labour studies, this article suggests that the LTP has provided important insights and a theoretical framework for scholars to understand the empirical reality of the changing nature of work and employment in China in the reform era. The LPT’s capacity to connect the workplace to a broader political economy has allowed it to continue to expand its scope of analysis and engage with new developments and emerging issues in the Chinese workplace, such as the rise of digital platform labour, informal and precarious work, and workplace regimes in global value chains. Meanwhile, China labour scholars have made important contributions to the LPT by adapting it to the Chinese context and theorising the Chinese experience. Through a workplace-based approach, China labour scholars have theorised the role of the Chinese central and local states in shaping various factory regimes, expanded on Chinese workers’ diverse subjectivities in research on labour process, and developed new concepts such as the ‘dormitory labour regime’ that connects productive and social reproductive spheres.
Since the publication of Braverman’s seminal Labor and Monopoly Capital (1974), labour process theory (LPT) has become a successful theory-building project driven by empirical expansion and conceptual innovation, operating as the equivalent of a normal science, with a distinctive scope and specific empirical focus on workplace regimes in the context of capitalist political economy. It’s toolkit or conceptual architecture combines underpinning and ordering principles with contingent and flexible operational categories concerning labour power and control. Though LPT has built stronger conceptual connections between workplace and accumulation regimes, changes in the global order have brought new theoretical and empirical challenges that are requiring it to adjust some of its core concepts and boundaries to consider development such as new sources of labour power, migration, and mobility.
This article contends that deskilling is best understood not as a distinct phenomenon, but as a component of a process Marx (1993: 694) called ‘absorption’. Absorption involves not only the extraction of capacities from labour but also their implementation in machines. The article reads Braverman’s (1998) analysis of Taylorism as a demonstration of how absorption entails a specific labour process of its own, which I call the absorption process. The nature of the absorption process is contingent on many social factors. This article focuses on a technical factor: the particular machines used to implement captured skills and knowledge, called here the infrastructure of absorption. Since technological capacities are ever-evolving under capital due to the continual revolutionizing of the means of production, infrastructures of absorption change over time and this necessitates new absorption processes. Braverman (1998: 132) pointed to a qualitative change in absorption with the digital computer, which he described in terms of a new ‘universality of the machine’. While Braverman rightly pointed out the computer as a novel infrastructure, he did not discern qualitative changes to the absorption process, seeing instead the extension of Taylorist processes of capture of knowledge and skill. I contend that a qualitative shift has become apparent since the rise of machine learning in around 2015. Machine learning enables a different absorption process of emergence which does not require the codification of captured knowledge. Much labour process theory (LPT) (and adjacent) research presumes that deskilling and automation operate in terms of a process of capture, however, I show that emergence presents qualitatively different means for both. I suggest that the infrastructure of machine learning presents the possibility of task-agnostic automation.
This develops the role of the economist as barrister, as a storyteller. Different economists should present different views of the world and engage in healthy debate. At any time, there is an inheritance of physical and human capital, along with social capital. This defines the boundaries of what can be done. Instead of making hard decisions over allocating those resources, policy makers have tended to congratulate themselves for policies that postponed the reckoning. This includes monetary policy that always found reasons to keep interest rates low, and pandemic policies that were debt-funded and hugely wasteful. More importantly, those policies have left us not only with extremely high national debt, but with a social and cultural gap facing the ‘pandemic generation’.
An overlooked feature of monetary policy over the last decades is not just that interest rates became low, but that they were consistently declining. Since asset prices are proportionate to the cost of financing (a low interest rate raises asset prices), this made investing a one-way bet. Take housing as an example – the constantly falling interest rate meant that house prices were constantly being bid up. We argue that interest rates should remain at the current 5% (a historically normal rate) to keep asset prices in check. The monetary and fiscal authorities should use policies to raise inflation to bring asset prices back into alignment with wages and goods prices.
Generation Z has grown up with a global financial crisis, a pandemic, the climate emergency, growing autocracy and wars. Survival, not just equity, is at stake.
As debate rages about how to ensure a fairer and sustainable society, this book challenges short-sighted economic policies, asking where we want to be in 20 years’ time and how we might get there.
Offering fresh, and sometimes counter intuitive, thinking on a range of economic issues including monetary policy, housing and university funding, it argues in favour of policy guardrails to protect the future, higher interest rates, and a burst of inflation. Robots and AI should be seen as positive replacements for population growth.
This is an original, readable and entertaining take on how we can change course before it is too late.
The low and decreasing interest rates of the last few decades have led to a consumption boom. We distinguish between the discount rate (how future consumption is weighted against consumption today) and the interest rate. For given preferences for consumption over time, a low interest rate can cause borrowing against the future. The fact that the US and UK money supply has exploded suggests that policy was causing the low interest rates – rather than a hypothetical ‘global savings glut’ or ‘secular stagnation’. We consider how inflation can be an imperfect ‘canary in the mine’ and the extraordinarily high money supply is an inflation accident waiting to happen. While the central banks can use their policy tool of paying interest on financial institution deposits with them, this is extremely costly to them, with the deficit being made up by more government borrowing.
