Paul DU GAY & Glenn MORGAN (2013) New Spirits of Capitalism? Crises, Justifications and Dynamics. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Taking Max Weber's conception of the modern capitalist world system as a classical precedent, and with reference to a series of analytical schemas on capital formation, this essay takes three recent books as a starting point for examining the revival of critical theoretical attention to 'the new capitalism'. The Social Structures of the Economy by Pierre Bourdieu focuses on the erosion of the separation between business and household economies by providing a case study of the construction boom in single-family dwellings which replaced the public housing movement in 1980s France. Also concentrating on recent French history, Luc Boltanski and Eve Chiapello, in their monumental book The New Spirit of Capitalism, argue that the post-industrial restructuring of 'formally free' labour was provoked by countercultural protest in the 1960s and further justified by managerial discourses advocating postmodern 'flexibilization' in the 1990s. Finally, Nigel Thrift's Knowing Capitalism enumerates recent examples demonstrating how the 'rational' accounting of economic capital is increasingly expanded and intensified by commodified cultural circuits which facilitate flows of information between business schools, management consultants and entrepreneurial gurus and in a variety of everyday spaces and ordinary practices. While each of these works convincingly projects the resurrection of 'the spirit of capitalism' on local and global scales, they have less to say about the underlying political dynamics or emerging alternatives to this process.

Purpose: To analyze the relationship between the rise of the retirement preparation programs (RPP) and the transformations in the ideological environment of organizations associated with the advent of the spirit of neoliberal capitalism. Originality/value: Few studies of Brazilian literature have addressed the dissemination of RPP from critical perspectives and, especially, in the business environment. Most of the research has addressed public institutions. Concerning international literature, the article innovates by associating the rise of the idea of active aging with the thesis of the new spirit of capitalism, developed by Luc Boltanski and Ève Chiapello. Unlike existing international studies, the analysis focuses on RPP as instruments for disseminating the dominant order in the organizational sphere. Design/methodology/approach: To meet the proposed objectives, qualitative research was carried out. Data were collected from nine informants from five consultancies that work in the structuring of corporate RPP and two companies that have recently structured their programs. A thematic content analysis was performed. Findings: The results reveal that the developed RPP promote conceptions of active aging in line with the new spirit of capitalism and changes in the forms of work organization driven by neoliberalism, which made it possible to conceptualize RPP as an object that incorporates and facilitates the diffusion of active aging and constructing an active retirement. The study advances in the understanding of the implications of new discourses on old age for organizations and stimulates a more critical comprehensionof RPP in public and private organizations.

This paper analyses the phenomenon of free and open source software (FOSS) in the light of Luc Boltanski and Ève Chiapello's The new spirit of capitalism. It argues that collaborative FOSS production by volunteer software developers is a species of critical social practice in Boltanski and Chiapello's sense: rooted in resistance to capitalist social relations, and yet also a source of values that justify the new routes to profitability associated with contemporary network capitalism. Advanced via collective projects that are sustained by hacker norms and privately legislated ‘copyleft’ law, the FOSS ethos is apparently antithetical to private property-based accumulation. Yet it can be shown to embody the ‘new spirit of capitalism’ in its most distilled form; moreover FOSS developers have instituted new forms of property and new modes of profit creation around software that are in the process of being adapted for use in other economic sectors. Meanwhile, the private law constraints on profit-seeking that have emerged from the FOSS movement are counteracting some of the social pathologies that accompany network capitalism only to consolidate others. The paper concludes by identifying likely bases for a renewal of critique given these realities.

More than a decade ago, critical ecopedagogue Richard Kahn expressed his fears and hopes regarding Education for sustainable development (ESD). He feared that ESD would be short lived and marginalized and would develop an instrumental pedagogy of one-sided transmission of knowledge, yet hoped for ESD to encompass three types of “ecoliteracies”: technical/functional, cultural and critical. After an assessment of current ESD, as reported by UNESCO, this paper concludes that his two first fears were unfounded, while his hopes regarding ESD’s pedagogical content were largely not met. To better understand the result, Luc Boltanski’s and Éve Chiapello’s analysis of “the new spirit of capitalism” is mobilized. According to it, current capitalism integrates “artistic critique” on e.g., lack of autonomy and creativity with greater ease than “social critique” with respect to e.g., poverty and inequality. This might explain what ecoliteracies that are integrated into ESD.

Weber's thesis that the spirit of capitalism was preexistent to the rise of capitalism itself inspired many sociologist to search for the cultural background of contemporary forms of capitalism. In this paper, the author focuses on and makes comparisons of three approaches of such kind. The one approach draws from Luc Boltanski and ?ve Chiapello who examine the development of 'new spirit of capitalism' by focusing on the interrelation of two macroactors - capitalism and critique; the other one is of Nigel Thrift who relates the rise of 'soft capitalism' to the strengthening of 'cultural circuit of capital'; and finally, Richard Sennett's approach analyzes the culture of 'new capitalism' and work ethic of the 'mp3 organizations'.

Boltanski and Chiapello argued that creativity is a required attribute of managers emanating from the ideology of the ‘New Spirit of Capitalism’. Ideology provides the justification for work practices and brings material consequences in relation to the experience of time. This article explores both the ideology and the links between the ideological and the experience of time by assessing whether male managers prioritise creativity and whether this is related to their working hours, driving them to work longer hours than other workers and longer hours than they actually want. Men’s dominant position in work organisations puts them at the centre of this exploration. Using multilevel linear and logistic models on 2010 data from the European Social Survey ( N = 7049), we show that male managers prioritise creativity more than other workers do. There are consequences for the experience of time as valuing creativity in combination with being a manager increases working hours above the large and significant effect of being a manager. The feeling of overwork is raised independently for those who value creativity and for those who are managers.

This chapter examines the normative changes that have taken place in attitudes to work since the events of May ’68 in France. The chapter explores the ‘crisis of work’ that shook France in the 1970s as the ‘artistic critique’, examined in previous chapters, finally found a large following among workers and young people who resisted or outright rejected the post-war social framework of labour and consumption. At the same time, it considers how, towards the end of the 1970s, a ‘new spirit of capitalism’ (Boltanski and Chiapello) began to gradually emerge that incorporated many aspects of the ‘artistic critique’ back into capitalism. The chapter concludes with a consideration of contemporary critiques of ‘abstract labour’ such as that of Jean-Marie Vincent.

The article develops a theoretical framework for the critical examination of cinematic tourist design. Considering ‘film-induced tourism’ as part of a bigger system involving the design of mobilities, it interrogates the connection between the aesthetic and ethical principles that end up informing the engineering of national hospitality in media platforms. The design, which is managed by a ‘worldmaking authority’ or network encompassing the host nation state and international tourist and media markets, conforms to the rationalised rules of what Boltanski and Chiapello termed the ‘new spirit of capitalism’, which mobilises romantic ideals of individual freedom to sell landscapes and exotic cultural characters. The phased development of such mobilities conforms to contingency and is indifferent to the welfare of particular social groups. The model is exemplified through the phased design of mobilities out of two films with virulent sexist and antisemitic content centred on the journeys of the fictional Kazakh journalist Borat to the United States.

The neoliberal developments over the past 30 years have received much support from a set of ideas that can be defined as “the new spirit of capitalism”. These ideas have offered powerful legitimisations of neoliberalism, conceived as a progressive force that has replaced the supposedly bureaucratic structures of earlier Keynesian welfare states with market-driven network structures that allow innovations, creativity and entrepreneurship to flourish. In this article, I will critically examine the constituents of the new spirit of capitalism, in particular its intimate association with liberal discourses of innovation. I will then focus on how such ideas have come forward in recent information society thinking via a discussion of Manuel Castells's influential network society theory. This is followed by a critique of mainstream understandings of innovation from a neo-Marxist perspective, with an eye towards new information and communication technology and critical media research in times of a growing contestation of neoliberal hegemony.

Our study casts doubt on whether the managerial literature on corporate social responsibility is currently capable of developing a persuasive discourse to bring about change in corporate capitalism. By applying the framework and methodology of the spirit of capitalism, introduced by Boltanski and Chiapello, to a corpus of managerial books, we suggest that corporate social responsibility exhibits the core characteristics that together exemplify the ‘spirit of capitalism’. However, corporate social responsibility deals inadequately with the two key characteristics of the spirit of capitalism—security and fairness—by disregarding individual security and tangible rewards for workers who play decisive roles in enacting the spirit. The lack of consideration for workers could weaken the potential of corporate social responsibility to grow into a new spirit of capitalism and to bring about changes envisioned by critical management studies in corporate capitalism.

The importance of being earnest - In this highly personal and largely non-technical discussion article, based on a public comment at the Zonder Maskers symposium, I engage in a radical exercise of the dialogue to which sociologists of the TOR-team have invited moral philosophers. I consider the results of the survey as very disquieting, contrary to what the authors seem to think. I start by raising questions about the moral competency of the surveyed youth, and try to find out in what way more adequate survey scales could have avoided some problems. After dismantling the notion of Self, which prominently figures in the beliefs, attitudes and values of the surveyed youth, I try to connect the form of "false consciousness' reflected in what the authors call 'self-ideology' to the 'new spirit of capitalism', by means of some insights crudely drawn from the outstanding and complex work by Luc Boltanski and Eve Chiapello.

Kristin Ross, May '68 and its Afterlives, Chicago, University of Chicago, 2002, 238pp. Julian Bourg, From Revolution to Ethics: May 1968 and Contemporary French Thought, Montreal, McGill-Queen's University Press, 2007, 468pp. Luc Boltanski and Eve Chiapello, The New Spirit of Capitalism, London, Verso, 2007, 601pp. Serge Audier, La pensee anti-68, Paris, La Decouverte, 2008, 380pp. Francois Cusset, Contre-discours de Mai. Ce qu'embaumers et fossoyeurs de 68 ne disent pas a ses heritiers, Arles, Actes, 174pp. Gregory Elliott, Ends in Sight: Marx/Fukuyama/Hobsbawm/Anderson, London, Pluto, 2008, 148pp. As a political date, 1968 arguably rivals far more momentous years (1789, 1848, 1871, 1917, 1956 ...) for sheer magnitude of bibliography. Especially in its Parisian guise, it continues to call forth innumerable chronicles, confessions and genealogies, of widely varying quality and scope. This fortieth anniversary has not been short of publications. However, as the primacy of the personal narrative wanes and younger generations of scholars and intellectuals who 'weren't there' take the stage, there are signs of greater perspicacity and insight, especially as concerns the location of '68 within various strands of cultural, social and political history. (1) In this review essay, I'd like to consider a number of recent attempts, both Anglophone and Francophone, to tease out certain intellectual lineages from the tangled web of positions and arguments that stem, in one way or another, from the events of that year (and of its metonymic month, May). In books such as Audier's La pensee anti-68 and Bourg's From Revolution to Ethics this explicitly takes the guise of intellectual history; in Cusset's Contre-discours de Mai and Ross's earlier May '68 and its Afterlives we are dealing with an overtly partisan and critical history, wanting to counter the 'embalming' and 'burial' of the political potentialities of '68 by memoirists and sociologists, for the sake of the present (and the future); in Boltanski and Chiapello's The New Spirit of Capitalism (only considered here to the extent that it focuses on '68) we are instructed instead about how '68 may be understood as a crucial fulcrum for the contested recomposition of capitalism and its normative codes; finally, I have included a discussion of Elliott's Ends in Sight, a book which is not expressly preoccupied with '68, in order to draw into relief the contrast between the sense of a beginning commonly associated with '68 and the sense of an ending that has pervaded a certain strain of Left thinking faced with the predominance of an imperial neoliberalism. These books are also the occasion to home in on certain themes which belong to the vital legacy of '68: the tension between political and social thought; the role of modality in our understanding of systemic change; the politics of time; the irreducibility of experience to explanation; the relationship between socio-political upheavals and the reproduction of capitalism. In order to sketch out what I think is at stake in a number of these debates, I have also made reference to some crucial contributions that were made in the heat of the moment (Tom Nairn's 'Why it Happened') or in the dispassionate hindsight of earlier anniversaries (Regis Debray's 'Modest Contribution'). THE IMPOSSIBLE EVENT 'Is it still possible?' This question, adorning a poster for one of the innumerable recent commemorations of 'May '68', seems to succinctly capture the drive behind the compulsive attentions that this often under-specified and yet over-determined moment continues to garner. As many have noted, the general tendency of an epoch to project its hopes and anxieties into past events is exacerbated when it comes to the phenomena rather gnomically encapsulated in the signifier 'May '68'. In an interview with Peter Hallward, Alain Badiou has noted that the strange formality or hollowness of its name is a sign of the obscurity of the occurrence it strives to indicate: I'm very struck by the fact that today everyone says 'the events of May 1968', but if we say that the event has 'event' as its name, it means that we haven't yet found its name. …

ABSTRACTThe spirit of capitalism shifted throughout the twentieth century, Boltanski and Chiapello place it sometime in the period between the 1960s and 1990s [2005, The New Spirit of Capitalism, Verso, London], for Bell it had happened by the mid-1970s and its contradictions were already apparent [1998, The Cultural Contradictions of Capitalism, Basic Books, New York]. David Harvey is more specific and cites 1979 as the dawn of the new era [2005, The New Spirit of Capitalism, Verso, London]. This paper seeks to build on this scholarship of the changing spirit of capitalism and read it through the development of the heroic figure of the American imagination, through the representation of the capitalist hero. Its aim is to situate the figure of the capitalist hero in the post-crash era and ultimately to understand the seductive power of the new capitalism that enables it to thrive. My thesis is that the seductive power of the new capitalism can be understood as an oscillation between revulsion and awe, we are both morally repulsed by the venality of capitalism yet also captivated by it. Revulsion and awe are at the core of the libidinality of the new capitalism and can be seen through the representation of the heroic object of the capitalist imagination.

[Extract] Where is business ethics today? And with this, where are business ethics today? Where do we find them? Are there enough? These questions strike us today, and present us with our starting points. First of all in considering how business ethics has evolved, and what state it is in. But also, in asking where business and ethics are today and how and where they might be in the future. Starting out with these seemingly innocent questions, we face a set of somewhat more troubling questions about the location of business ethics. For some, business ethics is quite easy to locate. When seen as a business function, an academic discipline or a part of business school education, business ethics is often taken as something that obviously has a location. If business ethics is readily locatable, then it can be disciplined, generalised, taught and instituted as part of best practice and corporate strategy. But are business ethics so easily locatable? Are they a 'something' characterised by a 'thingliness' that might allow them to be taken in hand and put to use? If business ethics are not open to such reification, then we might find that ethics in business involves a basic dislocation relating to phenomenal experiences arising when things are out of place. Business ethics would then take place when, as was sensed by Hamlet, things are 'out of joint'. The experience of whistleblowers and the victims of corporate malfeasance is certainly one of deeply felt dislocation. If we find business ethics in these practices, might ethics also be found in other spaces of dislocation?

Luc Boltanski is one of the most significant and innovative contemporary sociologists and the importance of Boltanski's distinctive orientation to the world is highlighted in this entry, particularly for his rethinking of critique. The long term implications of Boltanski's early collaboration with Pierre Bourdieu and subsequent criticism of Bourdieusian sociology are underlined. Boltanski's book The Cadre is shown to prefigure later themes through its account of the contingent formation of a class and the tensions that beset cadres. With Laurent Thévenot, Boltanski initiated a major new sociological approach and how the theory and methodology of pragmatist sociology of critique developed is explained. A number of sociological pragmatism's key conceptions are detailed and various strands of Boltanski's investigations into moral‐political practices noted. It is argued that the book that Boltanski authored with Eve Chiapello, The New Spirit of Capitalism , is a landmark text and highlights how change was precipitated by critique and contestation. The main arguments of Boltanski's three most substantial recent books are outlined, noting how this entails an innovative reformulation of critique, an exploration of the links between early spy and detective novels, the state, and sociological reasoning, and an interpretation of the centrality of the enrichment of commodities to contemporary capitalism.