Capital Accumulation Strategies Research Articles

Between Consumption and Liberation – A Critical Analysis of Women’s Legal Trajectory of Emancipation, Regulation and Gender Pricing

ABSTRACT Law is always perceived as pivotal to women’s emancipation. Women gaining any form of legal recognition is construed as a step towards gender equality. Therefore, when looking to address issues around gender pricing – charging consumers differently for the same product or service because of their gender – experts turn to law as an obvious solution. Legal scholars suggest anti-discrimination regulation as the answer to liberation, and economists argue women should make better consumer choices. However, neither of these approaches addresses the problem in its entirety. In this article, instead of presenting anti-discrimination as a solution, I take gender pricing as a case study to map the intersection among law, gender, and capital and understand why the law might not be the answer leading women to emancipation. Through Queer Marxist lenses, I start by presenting gender pricing as a burden affecting women in the consumption sphere. In the second part, I focus on consumption and its relevance for the imposition of gendered subjectivities as part of an accumulation strategy. In the third part, I draw a parallel between the stages of women’s emancipation trajectory and the forms of backlash they face in their liberation struggle. As a case study, gender pricing allows me to understand consumption as an instance or site of regulation of gendered identities that goes beyond the formal equality achieved in law. The conception of women as consumers, mainly in the global North, reinforces particular subjectivities according to a historical process and is part of capital accumulation strategies. While corporations profit from gender pricing commodities, women are comparatively impoverished by gender pricing and other economic burdens, thus allowing men to maintain their hierarchically superior economic position.

A Life's Work? Unpacking the Existential Meaning of Educational Mobilities for Migrant Families

ABSTRACTIt is axiomatic that middle‐class Asian migrant families invest heavily—practically and emotionally—in their children's education. Scholarship has linked this investment to strategies of capital accumulation. There has been little discussion, however, about the transformative nature of these strategies and how they might be framed in terms of migrants' whole lives. This paper applies theoretical concepts from migration studies and a framework proposed by philosopher Charles Taylor, to argue that educational migration should be seen as profoundly life shaping.

Imperial Past, Neoliberal Present, Dependent Future: A Political-Economic Approach to Urban Development of Bursa

Urban spaces, as the material representatives of past capital accumulation strategies, survive or get replaced on the basis of actors' strategies and partnerships. Periodization allows conceptualising these decisions and subsequent spatial change with respect to evolving local and national settings. The study focuses on expanding such approaches to Türkiye's experience beyond the two primate cities Istanbul and Ankara by the example of a secondary city, Bursa. The study uses maps, plans, official documents and newspapers corresponding to the periods and literature to form the connections between the actors' decisions and the spatial changes. The results highlight that while the previous periods' urban fabric and heritage is being replaced during the neoliberal era in parallel with the national experience, the problems faced as a secondary centre in close proximity to a primate city reduces local agency much more severely, leaving the urban space more vulnerable to exogenous influences.

The power to transform structures: power complexes and the challenges for realising a wellbeing economy

This article draws on different strands of existing scholarship to provide an analytical framework for understanding the barriers to achieving a well-being economy. It explores the interplay between agential and structural power, where some actor-coalitions can reproduce or transform pre-existing structures. Conversely, these structures are strategically selective, favouring some actors, interests, and strategies over others. Making sense of this interplay between agential and structural power, the article introduces the notion of power complexes—time-space-specific actor-coalitions with common industry-related interests and the power to reproduce or transform structures in a given conjuncture. To understand the historical “becoming” of today’s political-economic terrain, the article provides a regulationist-inspired history of the rise, fall, and re-emergence of four power complexes: the financial, fossil, livestock-agribusiness, and digital. They pose significant threats to pillars of a wellbeing economy such as ecological sustainability, equ(al)ity, and democracy. Subsequently, today’s structural context is scrutinised in more detail to understand why certain actors dominate strategic calculations in contemporary power complexes. This reveals strategic selectivities that favour multi- and transnational corporate actors over civil society, labour movements, and public bureaucracies. The article then examines firm-to-state lobbying as a strategy employed by corporate actors within today’s structural context to assert their interests. It presents illustrative cases of Blackstone, BP, Bayer, and Alphabet. Finally, it explores implications and challenges for realising a wellbeing economy based on post-/degrowth visions. It emphasises the double challenge faced by such a wellbeing-economy actor-coalition. On one hand, it has to navigate within contemporary modes of regulation that favour corporate strategies of capital accumulation while, on the other, it must confront the self-expanding and extractive logic of capital. In this context, three key challenges are outlined: the need to form unconventional strategic alliances, operate on various spatial dimensions simultaneously, and institutionalise alternatives to firm-to-state lobbying to influence policymaking.

Development of Media Technologies as “New Media” from the Perspective of a Critique of the Political Economy of the Media

This paper analyses the emergence and development of new media technologies based on the approach of the Critique of the Political Economy of the Media. First, a critical overview of approaches to the genesis and diffusion of technologies is given. Second, the connection between media technologies and capital accumulation is discussed. Third, the role of media technologies in capitalism as a means of investment, production, distribution, and consumption is analysed. Fourth, the connection between innovation, commodity aesthetics, and planned obsolescence is discussed. Fifth, the antagonistic character of the media system’s convergence, universalisation and diversification is shown. The article shows that technological development is not autonomous but depends on and is shaped by the development of capitalist society. In capitalism, factors such as capital accumulation strategies, crises, competition, advertising and marketing, market research, the state’s economic, technology and media policies, and science and engineering influence the emergence and development of new media technologies.Acknowledgement: This article was first published as book chapter: Manfred Knoche. 2005. Entwicklung von Medientechnologien als „Neue Medien“ aus der Perspektive einer Kritik der politischen Ökonomie der Medien. In Alte Medien – neue Medien: Theorieperspektiven, Medienprofile, Einsatzfelder. Festschrift für Jan Tonnemacher, edited by Klaus Arnold and Christoph Neuberger, 40-62. Wiesbaden: VS Verlag für Sozialwissenschaften. Translated and published with permission by SNCSC.

Cosmopolitan pathways from the Global South: How non‐middle‐class students become desirable Fulbright applicants

AbstractInternational student mobility (ISM) is largely interpreted as a global middle‐class capital accumulation strategy. Cosmopolitanism, which is the named outcome and effect of these mobile forms of social and cultural capital, is therefore disproportionately available to already privileged students. This study moves beyond this prevailing interpretation by examining how students from working‐ or lower‐middle‐class families with limited resources in Global South countries combine bottom‐up cosmopolitanism with educational mobility to get selected into highly competitive spaces, such as the Fulbright Foreign Student Program, the most prestigious educational and cultural program in the United States. Based on 20 in‐depth interviews with successful Fulbright applicants and participant observation, my findings suggest that working‐ and lower‐middle‐class applicants are largely successful because of their cosmopolitan dispositions which they cultivate in creative and agentive ways. This article adds texture and complexity to existing discussions on middle‐class hegemony in ISM and cosmopolitan subject‐making.

Capital ideas: optimal capital accumulation strategies for a bank and its regulator

We formulate a continuous-time model of a deposit taking bank, operating subject to capital adequacy regulation, and where the bank's loans are exposed to default risk. The bank maximises its market value of equity by appropriately controlling loan and equity issuance, dividend payments, and endogenous closure. Of interest to regulators, we show how the bank responds to the span of capital adequacy requirements and to changes in default variance. We find a nonmonotonic response of bank lending to increased capital requirements (initially increasing and then decreasing). We also find that the probability of early closure (through either insolvency or endogenous closure) can be minimised for a well-chosen capital adequacy ratio. Moreover, the level of capital requirement that minimises the probability of early closure and maximises lending is fairly robust to changes in the bank's default variance/risk; contributing to the ongoing discussion on optimal bank capital.

New Multilateral Development Banks and Green Lending: Approaching Scalar Complexities in the Global South

ABSTRACTNewly established multilateral development banks promote green finance and support a green transition in the global South. This article examines the new multilateral development banks using a dynamic view and documents the projects and lending preferences of New Development Bank (NDB) in Brazil and Asian Infrastructure Investment Bank (AIIB) in Turkey. While AIIB and NDB have made it easier for global South actors to access infrastructural investment funding and are committed to expanding green lending, their commitment rests on the use of country systems and national financial intermediaries. This results in extending loans for projects with significant risk and ignoring the broader connections of the projects to the environmentally hazardous strategies of capital accumulation. Despite their strong green discourse, their design and the way their mandates have been interpreted render new multilateral development banks prone to business as usual.

Cross-border mobilities: mobility capital and the capital accumulation strategies of Palestinian citizens of Israel

Over 10,000 Palestinian citizens of Israel – approximately half of whom are women – cross the Green Line on a regular basis to study at universities in the West Bank. Challenging views that would dismiss these cross-border flows as illustrative of their relatively privileged legal, material and socio-economic status as citizens, this paper engages the concept of mobility capital as well as the work of feminist scholars on the capital investment strategies of women and minorities to reveal the more limited capacity of Palestinian citizens to cross the Green Line as well as the defensively-oriented mobilising strategies which they have adopted not only to move but to maintain their presence, access their rights, and secure their future livelihoods in Israel. Arguing that these cross-border student mobilities should be seen as both a counter-hegemonic and ‘stacked’ form of capital accumulation that is heavily reliant on the bridging work of informal networks, this paper seeks to advance recent calls to centre settler colonialism within the field of mobilities while drawing attention to the more complex interconnections that exist between mobility and capital in the everyday life struggles of indigenous communities.

Mining the Ocean Genome: Global Bioprospecting Expeditions and Genomic Extractivism on the Oceanic Frontier

The article follows the ongoing transformation of genomic science into an industry – dedicated to the systematic extraction, abstraction and manipulation of genetic material – and considers the new types of oceanic exploration that genomic research both presupposes and fosters. We argue that emergent practices of ocean bioprospecting are sparking new ways of thinking, living and exploiting marine ecosystems as «genomic mines». We chart the recent history of genomic bioprospecting operations in the global ocean – focusing on the Sorcerer II expedition (2004-2006) and the Tara Oceans project (2009-2013) – and recount the rise of the «ocean genome» as an object of knowledge and a target of extractivist practices. Finally, we theorize the peculiar global mobility of bioprospecting vessels as constituting a practice of social construction of the ocean: a peculiar form of scientific navigation, which is already engendering new social uses of marine biodiversity, new strategies of capital accumulation, as well as innovative representations of ocean ecosystems.

National cultural capital as out of reach for transnationally mobile Israeli professional families – making a ‘return home’ fraught

ABSTRACT The potentiality of converting capitals in new national fields following migration has been the focus of a number of studies. Another, much smaller, literature examines experiences of return migration. In this paper, we follow 15 Israeli families (where both mothers and children have been interviewed) who have been globally mobile for professional reasons. We examine cultural capital accumulation strategies for the children and how these facilitate the occupation of advantageous social positions while abroad. Having returned to Israel, partly due to the COVID pandemic, the national cultural capital the families have so actively cultivated in their children is evaluated as not authentic enough. Meanwhile, the cosmopolitan cultural capital that has been so valorised abroad, is not recognised as something the children can draw on to position themselves either. The paper contributes to the study of return migration, with a unique focus on globally mobile families returning ‘home’. We also examine how national cultural capital is conceived and differentially assessed as families move from a more transnational space to that of their home country.

Financializing urban infrastructure? The speculative state-spaces of ‘public-public partnerships’ in Jakarta

Mega city-regions in the global South facing challenges posed by rapid urbanization have turned to infrastructural solutions, steeped in speculative ‘global-city’ imaginaries and national developmental aspirations, in order to unclog catch-up growth. This infrastructural imperative for growth reflects a broader infrastructure fix, as creditor states and development banks with geopolitical and geoeconomic interests advance competing market-based and state-led models to finance and develop infrastructure. In Jakarta, Indonesia, I examine the coming together of these models as they articulate with the political-economies of city and state, and their path-dependent restructuring following the 1997 Asian Financial Crisis. In Jakarta's speculative state-space political interests and developmental objectives of state and city governments are entangled with the capital accumulation strategies of State-Owned Enterprises. With a number of rail transit projects in the city-region driving a boom in Transit-Oriented Development, State-Owned Enterprises speculate on market conditions and the ‘world-class city’ dreams of middle-class residents to leverage their property assets. This financial speculation is equally premised on political speculation around the planning and execution of infrastructure projects, framed by the developmental politics of affordability and accessibility to the city. I examine how these strategies, practices and tensions come together to produce innovative governance arrangements in the provision and management of transport and housing through Public-Public Partnerships.

Strategies of Capital Accumulation in Times of Land Scarcity. A Field Perspective on Social Housing Construction in Vienna

Recently, cities across Europe have experienced rising prices for land, construction and increasing housing costs. The question of how companies providing social housing mediate housing policies in light of increasing market challenges has been widely neglected. The article takes the case of Vienna to explore how limited-profit housing associations – the current main providers of social housing – navigate market changes. Following Bourdieu, the article employs a field approach to map the power relations governing the field of social housing construction and explore their influence on strategies for capital accumulation. Drawing on multiple correspondence analysis and qualitative interviews, the article shows that the city’s introduction of competitive tenders for building plots strengthened cultural and social capital over economic capital within the field. It provides an in-depth analysis of the market effects of housing policy instruments by locating their structuring effects in relational market configurations rather than solely focusing on housing market outcomes.

The Development of the State‐Owned Enterprises in Turkey: 1923–1980

AbstractThis article seeks to re‐interpret the development of state‐owned enterprises (SOEs) in Turkey from 1923 to 1980. The article shows that the dominant strong state tradition (SST) literature, which interpreted the development of SOEs as an independent project of the state to maintain its control over society, had been unable to fully explain the development processes of SOEs because it treated the state as an external entity distinct from (and even opposing to) the social classes. Employing an alternative Poulantzian framework, the article argues that the development of SOEs in Turkey was driven by class‐industry interest and appeared as a precondition of the development of capitalism in Turkey. As such, relations between SOEs and the social classes were internal and complementary, rather than external and antagonistic. The SOEs were providing the bulk of industrial inputs and investment capital to the bourgeoisie fractions within the constitutive context of domestic capital accumulation strategies at the time (e.g. capitalist consolidation in 1930s, capitalist expansion in 1950s, capitalist expansion with duty losses in 1960s and 1970s). The SOEs were also benefiting the laboring and popular classes in terms of employment opportunities and higher wages.

Finance's Social License? Sugar, Farmland and Health.

Background: This paper examines the exclusion of public health from social license narratives within an increasingly financialised food system, through a case study of foreign ownership in the Australian sugar industry. As finance actors such as asset management firms, pension funds, private equity funds, state owned enterprises and sovereign wealth funds engage in speculative farmland investment, commodity futures trading, and the conversion of farmland into a financial asset, power within agro-industrial food supply chains becomes increasingly concentrated. This has been associated with increased food prices and more processed food, contributing to obesogenic diets, hunger, and poorer health outcomes for many. The potential for negative social and environmental impacts has prompted awareness of the need for financial actors to demonstrate sustainability, responsibility and accountability in their farmland investments. Methods: This paper uses thematic analysis of qualitative interviews and key documents to assess four recent acquisitions of sugarcane land in North Queensland. We consider how companies’ efforts to establish or maintain a social license to operate (SLO) intersect with their capital accumulation strategies. Results: Our findings demonstrate that the link between the commodification of ‘unhealthy’ food inputs (such as sugar) and financialisation remains outside the purview of financiers. Instead, agribusiness firms use narratives centred on biofuels investment and energy/food security to justify their legitimacy in the sugar sector. We organise our findings according to two ‘narratives:’ constructing trust and credibility through ethical compliance; and, biofuels expansion as a legitimate response to climate change. The concept of social license is much stronger in the second narrative, but health is largely missing. Conclusion: The ‘distancing’ between responsibility and health outcomes highlights the limits to principles of responsible financial investment, and to the legitimacy of finance to claim an SLO – the ongoing approval and acceptance by society to conduct its activities.

‘Good men don’t elope’: Afghan migrant men’s discourses on labour migration, marriage and masculinity

ABSTRACT This article explores the intersections between masculinity, migration and marital strategies through both a historical and ethnographic focus on the everyday lives of Turkmen men from Northern Afghanistan working in Turkey. While the economic rationales of migration (in response to war and poverty) have been studied previously, this is the first time the intertwined nature of the marital and migratory strategies of Afghan men have been examined in a diaspora context. This involves examining the connections between strategies of self-making as adult males through marriage and strategies of capital accumulation as migrant workers. Moreover, providing for one’s family, rather than the desire for individual fulfilment, is a key signifier of a caring and loving man and one of the many ways in which men in Afghanistan assert and perform their masculinity. The argument presented in this article seeks to go beyond the notion that young Turkmen men from Afghanistan are merely conservative in their attitudes to marriage in terms of compliance to parental choice of partners. Rather, it seeks to highlight the importance of the maintenance of social networks that require the upholding of moral and material obligations towards familial and kin elders to the livelihood strategies of these men. This argument integrates Afghan men (and especially Turkmen men) into wider discussions of patriarchy and family life in globalizing contexts rather than simply treating them as an exception to broader socio-economic trends.

Inclusive innovation policy as social capital accumulation strategy

Abstract Governments deploy policies that strive to increase the participation rates of under-represented demographic groups (according to gender, ethnicity, sexuality and disability status) in innovative activities. A growing thrust of these policies focuses on accumulating non-financial resources, particularly social capital, as the strategy for improving inclusion. Such policies include mentoring and networking schemes, role model campaigns, competitions and prizes. In contrast to the policies' growing prevalence, only a handful of studies have empirically analysed them, and fewer still offered analytical conceptualizations. In this article, we contribute by applying insights from the extant scholarship on social capital, innovation and entrepreneurship to conceptualize the policies in bonding and bridging social capital terms. We find that bonding strategies foster in-group connections, with the primary aim of encouraging under-represented groups to want to participate, thus focusing on increasing the supply of labour. Bridging strategies, in contrast, strive to link under-represented groups with finance and other centres of power, and to update societal preferences, in order to increase the demand for labour from under-represented groups. Our novel conceptualization emphasizes that policies should be studied according to their bonding or bridging social capital aims, as even the same policy instrument (i.e., mentorship scheme or campaign) can differ significantly in how it is employed.

Universities as financing vehicles of (sub)urbanisation: the development of university towns in Shanghai

This study examines the dynamics of university towns by focusing on the role of universities in China’s (sub)urbanisation. Based on statistical data, the spatial expansion of universities is recognised as an integral component of the capital accumulation strategy at the interface of higher education and urbanisation. An empirical study of Shanghai further details the land-tuition-leverage strategy, the financialisation of universities, and the final government bailouts. In these processes, universities functioned as a financing vehicle for (sub)urban development. Moreover, the financialisation of universities was motivated by opportunity-driven strategies, intertwined with central-local tensions, and it was implemented within the state system and through multiple state agencies. The paper thus suggests the importance of looking at diverse financial contexts, inter-scalar interactions, and concrete mechanisms for understanding the variegated forms of the financialisation of the state and (semi-)public institutions.

Between neoliberal appetence and environmentalist reservations: the political economy of sustainable aviation

As the environmental crisis calls for a state of emergency in dealing with urgent problems like climate change, which is caused by emissions of the gasses that have a greenhouse effect, the contradictory nature of the relationship between growth-dependent neoliberal capital accumulation strategy and environmental commitments becomes more evident. To support this argument, this article analyses the atmospheric carbon dioxide concentration from 1958 to the present with the ARIMA (4, 1, 12) model, and shows that the forecasted carbon dioxide concentration would reach unsustainable levels. Therefore, it is argued that without serious policy intervention, leaving the amount of atmospheric carbon dioxide concentration at the mercy of the market means that the levels of carbon dioxide concentration in the future would significantly endanger natural life. The article discusses this argument in relation to the concept of sustainable aviation that given the future market forecasts of both global airlines and major aircraft manufacturers, and ICAO's reports, it is not possible to combine environmental concerns with existing growth strategies.

Between neoliberal appetence and environmentalist reservations: the political economy of sustainable aviation

As the environmental crisis calls for a state of emergency in dealing with urgent problems like climate change, which is caused by emissions of the gasses that have a greenhouse effect, the contradictory nature of the relationship between growth-dependent neoliberal capital accumulation strategy and environmental commitments becomes more evident. To support this argument, this article analyses the atmospheric carbon dioxide concentration from 1958 to the present with the ARIMA (4, 1, 12) model, and shows that the forecasted carbon dioxide concentration would reach unsustainable levels. Therefore, it is argued that without serious policy intervention, leaving the amount of atmospheric carbon dioxide concentration at the mercy of the market means that the levels of carbon dioxide concentration in the future would significantly endanger natural life. The article discusses this argument in relation to the concept of sustainable aviation that given the future market forecasts of both global airlines and major aircraft manufacturers, and ICAO's reports, it is not possible to combine environmental concerns with existing growth strategies.