Cash Nexus Research Articles

Ian Mortimer, The dying and the doctors: the medical revolution in seventeenth-century England, Royal Historical Society Studies in History, Woodbridge and New York, Boydell Press, 2009, pp. xiv, 232, £50.00, $95.00 (hardback 978-08-619-3302-0).

Ian Mortimer, The dying and the doctors: the medical revolution in seventeenth-century England, Royal Historical Society Studies in History, Woodbridge and New York, Boydell Press, 2009, pp. xiv, 232, £50.00, $95.00 (hardback 978-08-619-3302-0).

Comment: Debt and Migration

Stoll has provided us with a tragic portrait of people desperately seeking to improve their economic fortunes by incurring debt in the slim hope of finding employment in the United States. The story is a familiar one and has parallels to the practice of indentured servitude in the seventeenth and eighteenth cen turies; indeed, I would not be surprised to find evidence of debt-financed migration going back to the origins of debt itself (mentioned numerous times in the Old Testament). The tragedy Stoll brings to our attention is that the debt incurred by the Ixil, rather than providing them with the leverage to increase their earnings through employment in the United States, has had the effect of creating a greater financial burden, reducing their assets (already close to zero), and destroying familial and social bonds. As tragic as this story is, it is not new or unique to the Ixil; it is simply another instance of the ongoing evo lution of capitalist relations, sacrificing social bonds on the altar of the cash nexus.

Relatives as paid care-givers: how family carers experience payments for care

ABSTRACTPayments for care, by which people in need of long-term care directly employ care workers, have been introduced in many European countries. In The Netherlands, care dependants are allowed to use these payments to hire relatives to perform care tasks. Care-givers who are employed by their relatives are in a hybrid position, because they are contracted as employees in the informal setting of a family home and its affective care relationships. This paper reports a qualitative study of relatives' experiences of payments for care and how these affect their care-giving. In-depth interviews were undertaken with 17 paid carers: they were asked to respond to three fictional vignettes of contrasting care trajectories. It was found that the cash nexus had mixed and partly contradictory implications for the paid care-givers. On the one hand, the care-givers were satisfied with the arrangement, as the payments recognised and raised their status as carers, and were seen as reward and reciprocation for their care work. Some carers had found that the contract helped manage strained relationships, by enabling a clearer differentiation of care tasks from affection. On the other hand, some who regarded themselves as employees and saw their role as equivalent to formal carers felt a greater obligation to provide high-quality care, and found that they were thanked less often and received fewer tokens of gratitude.

Berlin, Moscow, Warsaw: a century of sibling rivalry expressed in urban form

The troubled, historical relationship between Russia, Poland and Germany is revealed in their struggles for dominance over borderland territories. Berlin, Moscow and Warsaw boast scars left by dynastic wars and cultural skirmishes between these nations before 1914. The final Partition of Poland (1795), making Warsaw the third largest city in the Russian empire, and its destruction in 1944–5, epitomise their deadly rivalry. WWI was a watershed: Imperialism and the belle époque in architecture were replaced by socialism and modernism; the urban working class demanded security against a system founded on the ‘callous cash nexus’. This socialist phase was, like its predecessor, memorialised in monuments and statues, buildings, architecture and urban design. The fall of the Berlin Wall symbolised the opening of the era of choice, quintessentially expressed in the Mallification of public spaces. The concomitant of choice is risk, whose antidote may not be sought in class-based actions but in pre-socialist, nationalist narratives.

Blue-Collar Aristocrats? General Motors Autoworkers and Oppositional Class Consciousness

Postwar social theorists (Goldthorpe, Lipset, Giddens, Hout, Brooks and Manza) have typically portrayed members of the Western industrial working-class as accommodative and suggest that an affluent proletariat has seen its oppositional working-class consciousness subverted and transformed by the ‘cash nexus’ into various forms of social integration. With reference to Mann's (1973) measures of class-consciousness I explore expressions of proletarian consciousness among organized workers at one of Canada's largest industrial union locals, the Canadian Auto Workers Local 222 of General Motors, Oshawa, Canada. Here I tested for the existence and degree of working-class imagery, proletarian identity and oppositional working-class consciousness using a survey questionnaire (N=102), in-depth interviews and participant observation. I found a shared view of class relations as primarily characterized by conflict, a clear working-class self-identification and measurable forms of oppositional working-class consciousness among this group. My findings confirm the hypothesis that Oshawa autoworkers' relative material advantage is insufficient to completely transform their proletarian consciousness. In this context I discuss the 1996 Oshawa plant occupation as an example of elevated oppositional class consciousness among Oshawa autoworkers.

A Confession of Faith: Notes Toward a New Humanism

A Confession of Faith:Notes Toward a New Humanism Eileen A. Joy (bio) and Christine M. Neufeld (bio) "To dwell in the ruins of the University is to try to do what we can, while leaving space for what we cannot envisage to emerge . . . [and] resources liberated by the opening up of disciplinary space, be it under the rubric of the humanities or of Cultural Studies, should be channeled into supporting short-term collaborative projects of both teaching and research (to speak in familiar terms) which would be abandoned after a certain period, whatever their success." —Bill Readings, The University in Ruins (176) "This will no doubt be like a profession of faith: the profession of faith of a professor who would act as if he were nevertheless asking your permission to be unfaithful or a traitor to his habitual practice." —Jacques Derrida,"The University Without Condition" (202) In his important book The University in Ruins, published two years after his untimely death in 1994, Bill Readings argued that, partly due to a certain state of affairs which he termed both "Americanization" and "globalization," whereby "the rule of the cash nexus" has replaced "the notion of national identity as a determinant in all aspects of social life," the University [End Page 161] has become a "transnational bureaucratic corporation" and "the centrality of the traditional humanistic disciplines to the life of the University is no longer assured" (3). Further, the University "is no longer linked to the destiny of the nation-state by virtue of its role as producer, protector, and inculcator of an idea of national culture," and as a result, "the grand narrative of the University, centered on the production of a liberal, reasoning subject, is no longer available to us" (3, 9). Ultimately, the University is "a ruined institution, one that lost its historical raison d'etre," but which nevertheless "opens up a space in which it is possible to think the notion of community otherwise, without recourse to notions of unity, consensus, and communication" (19, 20). This is a space, moreover, where the University "becomes one site among others where the question of being-together is raised, raised with an urgency that proceeds from the absence of the institutional forms (such as the nation-state), which have historically served to mask that question" (20). Although Readings' argument in The University in Ruins has been subject to carefully considered counter-critique,1 it remains today, we would argue, a powerful spur to thought and action for those working within the academy who are concerned with the future of humanistic teaching and scholarship. One could say, as we do, that Readings' emphasis on (and hope for) the University as "one site among others where the question of being-together is raised" is an emphasis (and hope) that is under a certain pressure from work within the humanities, social sciences, and sciences on posthumanism, post-individual personhood, and even, post-histoire.2 For before we can even begin to raise the question of being-together we must first raise the question of the being that could find or wish itself with others, and to what end? In her classical defense of a reform in liberal education that would emphasize global citizenship and a deep sensitivity to and embrace of human diversity, Cultivating Humanity, Martha Nussbaum argues that becoming an educated citizen means, in addition to "mastering techniques of reason," also "learning how to be a human being capable of love and imagination" (14). But how can this singular human being to whom Nussbaum refers situate herself in a world where, as the philosopher of religion John Caputo writes, "one has lost one's faith in grand récits," and "[b]eing, presence, ouisa, the transcendental signified, History, Man—the list goes on—have all become dreams?" (6). For Caputo, "we are in a fix, except that even to say 'we' is to get into a still deeper fix. We [End Page 162] are in the fix that cannot say 'we'," and yet, "the obligation of me to you and of both of us to others . . . is all around us, on every side, constantly tugging at our sleeves, calling upon us...

Clerks All! Or, Slaves with Cash

Clerks All! Or, Slaves with Cash Walter Johnson (bio) Douglas Egerton's fascinating article begins with an image of slave rebels in Charleston in 1822 planning to rob a bank. And, indeed, it speaks volumes that such an image should be interesting in and of itself, as it surely is. We have focused intensively in the literature on slavery and slave revolts to discern underlying tendencies and long-term transformations, but there is much about the everyday life of slavery (and especially of enslaved resistance) about which we know next to nothing. And apparently when slave rebels thought about revolt one of the practical steps they considered was to take over banks and steal the money inside (if, of course, taking that money from those banks could be called stealing given that it represented, in congealed form, labor that had been wrung from their bodies). Egerton asks why they began with the banks. Ranging widely and comparatively in time and space, Egerton proposes a big answer composed of several smaller arguments. To wit: Urban environments that hosted banks were shaped by structures and practices that both suggested and supported collective revolt as a solution to the problem of slavery. Eighteenth- and nineteenth-century cities, Egerton points out, were geographically complex: They provided a lot of places to hide and a lot of places to encounter subversive ideas and discontented people. And they provided enslaved people with a lot of ways to make money. The urban economy was sufficiently complex that it required flexible terms of employment even for slave labor. The skilled labor of a cabinet-maker would never be needed all the time by one [End Page 641] owner, but through hiring out, it might be useful to any number of clients and transformed into an income stream. Likewise, a man trying to set up a tavern in his front room might not have had the money to invest in buying a slave, but hiring a slave for a year at a time might have been a way to begin to make that money. And, finally, there were all the petty bribes and small cash incentives through which notionally unpropertied slaves were daily and regularly coaxed into labor everywhere in the Americas.1 And this money, Egerton argues, was meaningful. It was the lubricant that offered slaves an entrée to the treating and drinking of the multiracial tavern life of the docks, a world that Egerton's wonderful books on the revolts in Richmond in 1800 and Charleston in 1822 demonstrates was full of the subversive ideas and rough characters that made the idea of revolution believable. But there was more to money than that, for money, Egerton suggests, shaped the aspirational structure of revolt. The experience of having had money in their hands, Egerton argues, was, for slaves an experience of freedom: of possibilities that were otherwise foreclosed, of crossing boundaries that were in principle defined by race, but in practice, it turned out, defined by the cash nexus. Of buying fine clothes, or standing for a round of drinks, of experiencing the tonic power of [End Page 642] being able to choose, to evaluate, consider, compare, linger. Of behaving like a clerk. For Egerton, this experience was one of "psychological independence" of the very sort that made it possible to imagine revolution and freedom. I must admit that it took me a while to get used to this idea, but after my initial skepticism, I did so, and it is, of course, a really bright and interesting idea. Enslaved people lived in a society where power and beauty and sanctity and all sorts of other virtues were experienced and expressed as control over commodities. And the only irony in the fact that some of them—many of them?—might have joined their owners in imagining that the achievement of human freedom could be indexed by the possession of things is the most obvious one. It seems utterly sensible to try to imagine a world in which enslaved people could care for themselves and express their love for one another by pursuing money and purchasing goods. And, indeed, it seems utterly sensible to try to imagine a...

‘Working of the Train Gang’: Alienation, Liminality and Communitas in the UK Preserved Railway Sector

The article initially draws upon the notion of non‐alienated labour to explain the motivations of volunteers who offer their time and expertise freely to the running of steam and diesel locomotives within UK preserved railways. It suggests that in this instance the concept is flawed in that volunteers operate outside the cash nexus. In drawing upon the anthropological concepts of liminality and communitas it aims to develop the notion of non‐alienated labour by adding a subjective dimension. It argues that volunteers working on preserved railways are modern‐day pilgrims through their moving in and out of different identities as they seek solace in the certainty of operating and working in complex and highly satisfying workplaces.

The neglected moral benefits of the market

Jerry Z. Muller I~ our society, defenses of the market come primarily rom those concerned with economic and material well-being. Those who see themselves as the protectors of morality are more likely to be antipathetic to the market. But what about the positive moral effects of the market that tend to get o v e r l o o k e d in na r rowly economistic discussions about production and distribution? To be sure, many of these benefits also have potential costs. But since these costs tend to receive the most attention from moralists, I will note them here without dilating upon them, not because they are less significant but because they are likely to be more familiar. One perennial pitfall in thinking about the moral effects of capitalism is the issue of comparison. When philosophers ask about the morality of capitalism, they too rarely ask "compared to what"? Of course, capitalism is morally inferior to many a philosophical utopia. And our comparative evaluation of capitalism is further skewed by the fact that when we compare capitalism to past regimes, it is often implicitly from the perspectives of those who profited most and suffered least in past systems--from the perspectives of lords rather than serfs, of masters rather than slaves, aristocrats rather than commoners. With that caveat in mind, let me turn to the first argument about the positive moral effects of the market, namely the link between individual autonomy and selfsupport through legally free labor. Adam Smith famously wrote: "It is not from the benevolence of the butcher, the brewer, or the baker, that we expect our dinner, but from their regard to their own interest. We address ourselves, not to their humanity but to their self-love, and never talk to them of our own necessities but of their advantages. Nobody but a beggar chooses to depend chiefly upon the benevolence of his fellow-citizens." This passage is most famous as a statement of the potential utility of self-interest. But notice its assertion that dependence upon the benevolence of others is morally degrading and hence something we should try to avoid if possible. Thomas Carlyle--and later Marx and Engels--would decry this system of mutual appeals to self-interest as "the cash nexus." But the flip side of the cash nexus is first of all the freedom and self-determination that comes from having cash; and second, the fact that relations based on cash do not involve the total subordination of one individual to the will of another-the characteristic forms of human relations under slavery or serfdom. Nor does it involve the subordination of the individual to the will of the state and its officials, characteristic of socialism. That is why Hegel insisted that supporting oneself by earning a living is one of the most important ways in which men get a sense of themselves as autonomous individuals. What he called "the ethic of bourgeois society," includes a commitment to "the activity of supporting oneself through reason and industriousness." All of this has dark sides, potential and real. It may lead us to a mindless commitment to work at the expense of other goods. It may lead to the belief that personal value comes only from paid labor, leading to a fear of dependence on others, or leading us to underinvest our time in vital but unpaid activity. The second argument asserts that the moral quality of self-support derives in good part from the fact that it so often extends beyond the individual, to his or her family and descendants. This argument reminds us not to confuse self-interest with selfishness, for the "interests" we pursue in the marketplace often involve more than just ourselves. As Edmund Burke put it, "The power of perpetuating our property in our families is one of the most valuable and interesting circumstances belonging to it, and that which tends the most to the perpetuation of society itself. It makes our weakness subservient to our virtue; it grafts benevolence even upon avarice."

Editors' Note

Editors' Note Jean Allman and Antoinette Burton As the end of our first full year as co-editors of the Journal of Women's History comes into view, we marvel at how fast it has gone and how much we have learned since our road trip from Columbus to Champaign-Urbana, when we transported all the file boxes and looked forward to the challenges ahead. We've now experienced the life cycle of many manuscripts, warmed to the rhythms of scheduling, copyediting, and proofreading, and all but perfected the balancing act of all the phases of production that must be entertained at once. As always, we remain both indebted to and in awe of our managing editors, Rebecca McNulty and Jen Edwards, who run the day-to-day operations and succeed in doing so with apparently inexhaustible reserves of efficiency, patience, and goodwill. We are continually humbled by their ability to juggle the demands of journal with their own dissertation work, and to help us shape the directions it will take. Most if not all of the essays that appear below come from the bulging "pipeline" we inherited from the last year of Leila Rupp and Donna Guy's co-editorship. We've grouped them into two sections, the first of which, "Accounting for Women," focuses on a wide variety of women's work—from the managing of household money to conservation reform to the doing of manicures—and raises questions about the relationship of such activities to the social, cultural, and political contexts in which they took place. Susan Rimby's "Better Housekeeping Our of Doors" tells the story of the State Federation of Pennsylvania Women, a Progressive-era group that was active in all manner of local and regional conservation efforts. Although the literature on American conservation has focused on famous men (like Gifford Pinchot, Commissioner of Forestry under Theodore Roosevelt) and on projects in the west and south (like national and state parks), Rimby makes a case for unearthing the work of northeastern women like Mira Lloyd Dock, a trained botanist who promoted local clean-up initiatives and, through the SFPW, supported health and welfare programs that targeted community girls and women. Nor were the Pennsylvania women unique. As Rimby demonstrates, civic clubs and women's organizations "cleaned up" countless communities across the region, improving towns, suburbs, and cities and leaving new spaces such as playgrounds both as boons to working-class neighborhoods and as enduring evidence of white middle-class women's investment in the environment and quality of life issues. If accounting for Mira Dock and her contemporaries compels us to rethink the narratives of American conservation history, Ellen Hartigan-O'Connor's essay invites us to refigure the relationship between domestic [End Page 6] labor, economic activity, and the realm of affect and emotion. "Abigail's Accounts" excavates the record books of an early-nineteenth-century Quaker woman who presided over her family's account books and in the process, left us an invaluable archive of the operations of daily life two hundred years ago. Drawing on the riches offered by Abigail's books, Hartigan-O'Connor reads debits and credits against the backdrop of a vibrant market economy and mines the payment of servants' wages, gift giving, and charity for what it can tell us about the emotional dimensions of economic transactions. So, for example, we see how Abigail's relationships with her domestics, her friends, and even her young relatives drew her into the cash nexus, even as they developed in her a fine-tuned and highly "flexible understanding of values and exchange" at both the monetary and the symbolic level. Hartigan-O'Connor's work adds welcome nuance to debates about the history of women's work, and especially to scholarship on the labor and economic value of housework, by suggesting that we will cease to exceptionalize domestic labor as unpaid or disconnected from market forces only if we work to materialize the "web of financial and affective connections" and thereby to view economic life as a whole. Julie Willett's piece on manicurists, aptly titled "Hands Across the Table," provides a more modern account of the social and cultural worlds...

Sales Work under Marketization: The Social Relations of the Cash Nexus?

In lightly regulated economies many jobs are becoming subject to a process of ‘marketization’ involving an externalization of the employment relationship in the context of intensified product market competition. At the same time, a number of front-line jobs are becoming redefined to encompass more proactive sales aims. This study examines two sites at an intersection of these trends — sites where financial service jobs have been marketized and redefined to revolve around proactive sales activity. It examines the key social relations of the sales workers — relations with managers, immediate colleagues, back-office staff, customers and referrers — in considering how far marketization leads to the social relations of the cash nexus along bare market principles. It is found that one group of workers is enmeshed in a dehumanized, instrumental and antagonistic set of relations, while another, smaller, group of workers is insulated against such relations by the functioning of tight trust-based referral networks. It is concluded that the texture of the social relations of sales work under marketization is centrally influenced by the social constitution of the specific product market in which sales workers act. In addition, it is argued that the process of marketization tends to corrode the factors that support the functioning of tight trust-based networks.

Jamii ya wahalifu. The growth of crime in a colonial African urban centre: Dar es Salaam, Tanganyika, 1919-19611

This article contains a description of the growth of a ‘modern’ criminal culture in Dar es Salaam under British rule. It provides an analysis of the possible causes of increasing criminality in colonial Tanganyika: including urbanisation, shifting definitions of criminality arising from state intervention, the penetration of the cash nexus and economic differentiation. The growth and changing shape of property crime in the city are outlined, as are the emerging criminal networks that helped foster this phenomenon. This is followed by a discussion of the nature of those individuals engaging in crime, assessing the extent to which a ‘professional’ criminal type emerged. Neither the incidence or nature of crime in colonial Dar es Salaam were particularly grave, however, it is hoped that as an example of locally unprecedented forms of criminality emerging in a novel (colonial) socio-economic context the article will be of comparative use to historians of crime elsewhere in Africa and further afield.

Notes on Contributors

Glen O'Hara is Lecturer in Modern History at New College, Oxford. He is the co-author, with Niall Ferguson, of ‘The Myth of the Feelgood Factor’, in N. Ferguson, The Cash Nexus: Money and Power in the Modern World Since 1700 (London, 2001). He is currently working on a book on British economic and social planning in the 1960s.

Scoring Ecstasy: MDMA, Consumerism and Spirituality in the Early Fiction of Irvine Welsh

Ecstasy (MDMA) is a drug whose short-term dangers have been demonstrated by a number of deaths, and whose long-term effects are still unknown. It is also illegal. Nevertheless, people continue to take it. This essay aims to address the question of why they do so. I argue that MDMA's ability to enhance communication and offer people a version of religious ritual means that the drug has the potential, at least, to modify subjectivity and intersubjective relationships. In particular, I study how one contemporary novelist and commentator on the club/rave scene, Irvine Welsh, explores this potential in his work. I focus mainly on his novel Marabou Stork Nightmares, the novella “The Undefeated” (from the collection Ecstasy) and the title story of the collection The Acid House. I am especially concerned with how Welsh reads MDMA's problematic relationships to consumer capitalism and to the ecstatic or otherworldly states that are loosely described by his characters as “spirituality.” I also address Welsh's accounts of LSD experience in the same stories in order to show how he situates the identity of the drug user as poised between the sense of self-affirmation and empathy offered by MDMA and the sense of self-annihilation (via an encounter with subjectless language, or Foucault's “thought of the outside”) offered by the LSD experience. I argue that the reason for this bipolar construction of subjectivity in Welsh's work is his wish to explore the drug-using subject's conflicting relationship to consumerism, which offers neither selfaffirmation nor self-annihilation, but a merely passive relation to experience, in which the subject's task is to absorb (consume) images and material goods. I will suggest that in playing out these conflicts, Welsh's stories show how the literary and philosophical tradition linking drug use and mysticism refuses to die; in effect, his work revitalizes the ideas of de Quincey, Huxley, Leary and others, reshaping them for the consumerist age while never being uncritical of house culture or the illicit drug scene. Like Derrida in “The Rhetoric of Drugs”, Welsh seeks a position on the issue that avoids the oversimplifications of much pro- and anti-drug rhetoric. Welsh's work is as much about consumerism and spirituality as about drugs, and his exploration of the subject positions of MDMA users is bound up with a dual critique of late capitalism and house culture that exposes the problematic connexions between them. His work shows, for instance, that Ecstasy does not offer an escape from the cash nexus: it is, is in many ways, just another consumer product tied to the leisure industry. While Ecstasy can initiate a new spiritual awareness in some users, this is best sustained by distancing oneself from the “chaos” of hedonistic excess and reducing the frequency of MDMA use. I conclude that Welsh is not so much an apologist for dangerous illegal drugs as an intelligent critic of consumerism.

Leadership Life and Emotions in Virtual Teams

A major challenge in this millennium will be the management of corporate identity and socialisation processes in a distributed, networked or virtual company where boundaries between and external are increasingly permeable. The nature of company-customer-supplier constellations or value webs require and initiate greater levels of collaboration as well as competition as Paul Saffo noted at the Theseus workshop on the theme of the emergent corporation (1995). Employees a) may be recruited for specific projects or short contract periods b) may never have met superiors or colleagues, c) never have had an unmediated face-to-face interaction with clients/customers. Identity, habitus, esprit de corps, image will require different tools and techniques than those currently employed. Knowledge management for competitive advantage in learning organisations will require collaboration between these empowered professional, information workers. The learning arena and social field of interaction in a digitised environment for such freelancers presupposes that the potential for anomie is counterbalanced by some other means of encouraging collaboration, corporate image-value identification and self-organised learning. Operating via electronically mediated, geographically-dispersed teams, the cash nexus will not remain a sufficient motivation to generate creative relationships with tasks, customers, colleagues and the corporation as a whole. Much of the corporate habitus will be embodied as tacit learning, memory and knowledge. Substantial tacit knowledge conversion and capture will thus be necessary in relatively short time periods for new product development, internal relationship marketing and telephony-based customer service externally. We have carried out a series of consulting and action research projects with local companies in South Wales since 1996. Companies ranged from Small to Medium Enterprises (S.M.E.s) to major financial services corporations. Some projects were in conjunction with the Wales Quality Centre, others with teams of our M.B.A.s as part of their assessed, core module on Strategic Integrated Management Systems (SIMS). From ethnographic data from over 100 reflective logs, diaries plus our own observational data and interviews, we have developed a multi-spiral model of learning in self-organising teams. We have also conceived a prototype beliefs box and walkback technique to enable teams to progress towards achievement of corporate vision and a changed corporate identity. Our results suggest some means to overcome dysfunctionality and anomie. These tools and techniques can also usefully be transferred to digital environments in the future.

キャドベリー社における産業福祉と労務管理 (一八九九-一九一四年)

This paper explores the role of industrial welfare in industrial relations, internal labour markets, and the management thought at Cadbury in early twentieth-century England.Welfare provisions by British employers have been hitherto regarded as an expression of philanthropy or gentlemanship in nineteenth-century England, which despised the mammonism. It has been also said that there was no labour management because of craft regulations in British industries. Industrial welfare, therefore, has been considered the only managerial authority of the employers, who could not manage production processes directly.In this paper, industrial welfare is dealt with as a labour strategy. British employers intended to avoid industrial conflict and increase efficiency of work through the various labour policies, such as overseeing, deskilling, piece-wages, and welfare provisions. In these respects, industrial welfare was useful as one means to modify conflicts in employment relations that could not be solved by the cash nexus and to win the loyalty of employees.The case of Cadbury indicates that industrial welfare contributed to reconstructing industrial relations system in the new managerial structure; that the company provisions, including health care and education of employees, provided a solution to recruitment, training, and promotion problems at the company-level; and that industrial welfare contributed to the humanising of labour. The human factor of labour management was emphasised by the employer, who used industrial welfare as a labour strategy at a time, when Taylorism was discussed in England.Finally, industrial welfare at Cadbury was used as one means of labour management based on the physical and mental control of the employees by the employers, who retained traditional authority under a bureaucratic organisation.

Consumption Caught in the ‘Cash Nexus’

During the last thirty years ‘consumption’ has become a major topic in the study of contemporary culture within anthropology, psychology and sociology. For many authors it has become central to understanding the nature of material culture in the modern world, but this paper argues that the concept is, in British writing at least, too concerned with its economic origins in the selling and buying of consumer goods or commodities. It is argued that to understand material culture as determined through the monetary exchange for things – the cash nexus – leads to an inadequate sociological understanding of the social relations with objects. The work of Jean Baudrillard is used both to critique the concept of consumption as it leads to a focus on advertising, choice, money and shopping and to point to a more sociologically adequate approach to material culture that explores objects in a system of models and series, ‘atmosphere’, functionality, biography, interaction and mediation.

Consumption Caught in the `Cash Nexus'

During the last thirty years `consumption' has become a major topic in the study of contemporary culture within anthropology, psychology and sociology. For many authors it has become central to understanding the nature of material culture in the modern world, but this paper argues that the concept is, in British writing at least, too concerned with its economic origins in the selling and buying of consumer goods or commodities. It is argued that to understand material culture as determined through the monetary exchange for things - the cash nexus - leads to an inadequate sociological understanding of the social relations with objects. The work of Jean Baudrillard is used both to critique the concept of consumption as it leads to a focus on advertising, choice, money and shopping and to point to a more sociologically adequate approach to material culture that explores objects in a system of models and series, `atmosphere', functionality, biography, interaction and mediation.

Information society or cash nexus? A study of the United States as a copyright haven

Information society or cash nexus? A study of the United States as a copyright haven

Information society or cash nexus? A study of the United States as a copyright haven

This article looks at a particular context in which information developments can be isolated and studied in relation to economic and social factors: the history of the United States as a copyright haven from 1790 to the Chace Act of 1891. The study is undertaken with a triple intention. First, it has an empirical focus upon the history of the United States as a copyright haven. Secondly, it indicates analogies between the United States' historical practice and the exploitation of United States' intellectual property, without observing copyright, to late 20th century China. Thirdly, the study of the United States as a copyright haven is used to examine the contrast between the idea of a transition to an information society and economic determinism. In the concept of a post-industrial or information society, there has been a stress on the autonomy of information and on the role of theoretical knowledge as a director of social change. In contrast, economic determinism would emphasize the economic basis of social activity. From an information society perspective, copyright practices would be expected to develop autonomously; for economic determinism, copyright should reflect changes in the economic base. In conclusion, it is suggested that legislation governing intellectual property is strongly constrained by the possibilities offered by its historical context; that the empirical evidence examined indicates that economic factors are more primary motivating forces than information; and that information policies and activities tend to be determined rather than autonomous or primary variables. A central claim associated with the information society concept has, then, to be rejected but the concept itself need not be discarded. The idea of the informatization of life is proposed as a productive adaptation.