Forms Of Capital Accumulation Research Articles

Google Capitalism

This paper analyzes Google’s political economy. In section 2, Google’s cycle of capital accumulation is explained and the role of surveillance in Google’s form of capital accumulation is explained. In section 3, the discussion if Google is “evil” is taken up. Based on Dallas Smythe’s concept of the audience commodity, the role of the notion of Internet prosumer commodification is stressed.

Google Capitalism

This paper analyzes Google’s political economy. In section 2, Google’s cycle of capital accumulation is explained and the role of surveillance in Google’s form of capital accumulation is explained. In section 3, the discussion if Google is “evil” is taken up. Based on Dallas Smythe’s concept of the audience commodity, the role of the notion of Internet prosumer commodification is stressed.

Higher Education and Economic Development in Africa: A Review of Channels and Interactions

While the numbers with completed tertiary level education are low in Africa, both relative to other countries and in absolute terms, they have been growing very rapidly. Three questions are addressed in this paper. The first is how higher education links to other forms of capital accumulation in a process that leads to economic growth. The second is how higher education links to job outcomes, in particular the role of the public sector and self-employment as outcomes for graduates. The third is whether and how an expansion of skilled jobs can create its own demand. The paper draws on both macro and micro evidence to answer those questions which are placed in a long-run historical context. It is argued that growth has been more closely linked to investment in physical capital than in education and this may well reflect the fact that education is most valuable when it is linked to technology which requires higher skills. Data from thirty-two African countries are used to show that the returns to education, measured both by macro production functions and by micro earning functions, are highest for those with higher levels of education. A contrast is drawn between the role of higher education in providing access to public sector employment and the increasing importance of self-employment in Africa. The paper concludes by asking whether Africa can use its investment in higher skilled labour to effect a service-based growth revolution.

POLITICAL ECONOMY OF INFORMALIZATION

ABSTRACT This article has two main aims. The first is to problematize the dominant view of the informal economy as a sort of separate economy, related primarily to (immigrant) small business and distinct from the so-called formal economy, which for the most part encompasses big companies as well as state economic activities. In contrast, the present article assumes that all economic actors are increasingly ready to adopt informal economic strategies to secure their economical survival. In line with this assumption, the second aim of the article is to contribute to our knowledge of the causes of, as well as the actors within, the current informalization trends that characterize Western economies. The article concludes that the informalization of contemporary advanced economies in general terms is a result of a structural conflict between new economic trends and old regulatory frameworks. These frameworks, with their focus on decommodification, have become too restrictive for new forms of capital accumulation, with their focus on flexible adaptation, which include an increasing demand for the re-commodification of labour. The conflict emerges and intensifies, among other reasons, because of the radically different internal operational logics, agendas and priorities that characterize these two social processes.

Muslim entrepreneurs in public life between India and the Gulf: making good and doing good

Muslim entrepreneurs from Kerala, South India, are at the forefront of India's liberalizing economy, keen innovators who have adopted the business and labour practices of global capitalism in both Kerala and the Gulf. They are also heavily involved in both charity and politics through activity in Kerala's Muslim public life. They talk about their ‘social mindedness’ as a combination of piety and economic calculation, the two seen not as excluding but reinforcing each other. By promoting modern education among Muslims, entrepreneurs seek to promote economic development while also embedding economic practices within a framework of ethics and moral responsibilities deemed to be ‘Islamic’. Inscribing business into the rhetoric of the ‘common good’ also legitimizes claims to leadership and political influence. Orientations towards self‐transformation through education, adoption of a ‘systematic’ lifestyle, and a generalized rationalization of practices have acquired wider currency amongst Muslims following the rise of reformist influence and are now mobilized to sustain novel forms of capital accumulation. At the same time, Islam is called upon to set moral and ethical boundaries for engagement with the neoliberal economy. Instrumentalist analyses cannot adequately explain the vast amounts of time and money which Muslim entrepreneurs put into innumerable ‘social’ projects, and neither ‘political Islam’ nor public pietism adequately captures the possibilities or motivations for engagement among contemporary reformist‐orientated Muslims.RésuméLes entrepreneurs musulmans de l’état indien du Kerala sont en première ligne dans l’économie indienne en voie de libéralisation. Ces innovateurs ont adopté les pratiques d’entreprise et de gestion de la main‐d’œuvre du capitalisme global, aussi bien dans le Kerala que dans le Golfe Persique. Ils sont également très engagés dans la bienfaisance et la politique, par leur activité dans la vie publique des musulmans du Kerala. Ils parlent de leur « esprit social » comme d’une combinaison de piété et de calcul économique, lesquelles sont perçues non pas comme mutuellement exclusives mais comme se renforçant mutuellement. En promouvant une éducation moderne des musulmans, ils tentent de favoriser le développement économique tout en plaçant leurs pratiques économiques dans un cadre d’éthique et de responsabilités morales considéré comme « islamique ». En inscrivant les affaires dans la rhétorique du « bien commun », ils légitiment du même coup leurs revendications de leadership et d’influence politique. L’orientation vers la transformation de soi par le biais de l’éducation, l’adoption d’un mode de vie « systématique » et une rationalisation généralisée des pratiques ont été largement adoptées parmi les musulmans sous l’effet de l’influence croissante des réformistes, et elles sont à présent mobilisées à l’appui de nouvelles formes d’accumulation de capital. Dans le même temps, on invoque l’islam pour fixer des limites morales et éthiques à l’engagement dans l’économie néolibérale. Les analyses instrumentalistes ne suffissent pas à expliquer la masse de temps et d’argent que les entrepreneurs musulmans consacrent à d’innombrables projets « sociaux ». Ni l’islam « politique » ni le piétisme public ne peuvent non plus rendre compte de façon adéquate des possibilités ou motivations d’engagement des musulmans réformistes contemporains.

FEIRA LIVRE: Territorialidade popular e cultura na metrópole contemporânea

Abstract The Brazilian market place is a peculiar experience of street sociability. A kind of urban tradition which has became old-fashioned because the diffusion of automobile and modern retail, but in struggle to survive in the urban landscape. Through the popular territoriality of market places, we aim to develop a broad thinking about some general trends of contemporary metropolis, as a holder of new form of capital accumulation and present conditions of material survival, as well cultural claim and search of citizenship exercise. Key-Words: territoriality, culture, public space, modernity .

Disciplining death: hypertension management and the production of mortal subjectivities

Medicine powerfully mediates the relationship between life and death. This article argues that in the name of health, modern medicine constitutes a pathological mortal subjectivity, encouraging individuals to experience death as disease, to understand mortality as morbidity, and to approach living instrumentally as a means to longevity. This article uses the example of hypertension management to illustrate how this vision of death is transformed into a form of life. Through the analysis of a number of disciplinary technologies--from technical definitions of health to blood pressure monitoring--it illustrates how individuals are incited to relate to death in an antagonistic, impersonal, and technical fashion. While contemporary forms of capital accumulation in the health field require an intensification of such relations, this article suggests that there much to be gained from exploring visions of health that are not at odds with death.

The Role of Urban Governance in Re-constructing Place, Economic Function and Social Relations in Urban Waterfront Regeneration: The Case of Port Adelaide, South Australia

The Port Adelaide waterfront is symbolic of a distinctive form of entrepreneurial urban governance that emphasises specific forms of capital accumulation. As in waterfront projects elsewhere in Australia and overseas, depicting Port Adelaide as an ‘urban problem’ has been critical in legitimating the public–private market-based approach to regenerating the waterfront site. This paper outlines how the ascendancy of urban governance in Australian political sensibility is coinciding with and facilitating a particular urban form in waterfront developments. This involves transforming the Port's disused industrial and maritime landscape from a site of production to one of consumption. This urban makeover signifies a radical reconstitution of place identity, economic function and social relations. This paper also investigates the impact on the pre-existing social structure, built form and economic activity base of the location and suggests that the potential for this significant waterfront project is not confined to the re-imagining of the discursive identity of the place but extends to meeting wider institutional metropolitan and regional planning objectives.

Timber access in the Indian Himalaya: Rethinking social capital in public policy

Timber access in Himachal Pradesh (India) is formally regulated by state policy. However, actual access is determined through a complex network of informal social relations developed and maintained over time, which form a critical resource that allows particular forms of capital accumulation. This essay shows that the nature of policy execution in India necessitates the development and use of this type of social capital. However, existing social hierarchies compartmentalise social space and create differential opportunities for social agents to establish and nurture such networks. While supporting critiques of currently popular understandings of social capital that draw on Putnam and Coleman, this essay makes a case for the relevance of Bourdieu's conception of social capital in understanding the process of social differentiation.

Garment Production in Canada: Social and Political Implications1

The garment industry is often held out as the first victim of globalization and the movement of capital and jobs from North to South. But Roxana Ng’s article “Garment Production in Canada: Social and Political Implications” reveals that, contrary to expectation, the Canadian garment industry may in fact be growing, and it is taking increasingly different forms within various Canadian cities. For Ng, the contradictory and unexpected developments within the garment industry raise questions about the forms of capital accumulation and the effects of globalization. Mapping the complex links between the restructuring of the garment industry, and Canadian immigration policy and the North American Free Trade Agreement, Ng considers how the experiences of this industry may provide a grounding for researchers, educators, and policy analysts to engage in more forward-looking and proactive response to capital accumulation.

Dynamics, Efficiency and Network Industries: A Special Issue of the Review of Network Economics (Introduction and Overview)

The primary purpose of this special issue of the Review of Network Economics is to address issues related to the dynamics of firm behavior and efficiency in network industries. A secondary purpose, where relevant, is to analyze the relationship between the nature of the regulatory regime and the performance over time of the firms subject to that regime. Topics include: the evolution of price-cost margins, the incentives to undertake investment, innovation and the implications for productivity growth, the dynamics of firm interaction and strategic behavior, and the development and effectiveness of regulatory regimes. Network industries are so-named because they typically require the utilization of a network or infrastructure capital to deliver their (retail) services. The most obvious examples include: electricity, natural gas, railways, telecommunications, video programming (such as satellite and cable television), but others involve components of the transportation sector, such as airfields and seaports, as well as waterways, pipelines and aspects of financial intermediation, such as check-clearing networks. The papers in this special issue address a cross section of network industries, including telecommunications, electricity, video programming, and airlines. In addition, the papers are methodologically diverse by design, ranging from analytical/theoretical to empirical/econometric to industry surveys. The general topic of dynamic efficiency within network industries is an important area of research for a number of reasons. First, the long run competitive pricing standard is generally not the sole objective of regulatory authorities. Typically, the regulator strives to balance the public policy goals of encouraging static efficiency (which includes optimally relating prices to marginal costs) and promoting dynamic efficiency, which in part concerns optimal cost-reducing and product development activities. An example of this balancing act is the following. A firm’s incentive to invest in infrastructure is a function of the returns that it expects from this investment relative to other forms of capital accumulation. Hence, regulatory constraints that serve to constrict price-cost margins (to improve static efficiency) may be expected to reduce the returns that a regulated firm could expect from its infrastructure investment, and thereby weaken incentives to improve dynamic efficiency, holding all other factors constant. Conversely, a regulated firm facing pressure on its price-cost margins could be driven to expand infrastructure capital, thereby improving dynamic efficiency to sustain profitability. Also, in a vertically integrated industry context, regulating low access prices

Water and the potential for social instability: Livelihoods, migration and the building of society

In much of the Third World, access to secure water for irrigation, particularly groundwater, reduces vulnerability, stabilizes livelihoods,alleviates poverty and ‘entitles’ populations to education and other forms of capital accumulation. Water resource development can, as a result, be used as a key tool for addressing the social roots of instability. The reverse is also true — problems such as groundwater overdraft contribute to poverty and are often at the root of forced migration and the creation of underemployed and unstable displaced populations. Water is fundamental to regional as well as local security.The benefits of water resource development and the risks associated with unsustainable use patterns are particularly critical in arid regions. Patterns of water use that are unsustainable can play a positive role in the transition of populations from nomadic or migratory to stable communities, where people have access to education and asset accumulation. The exit is, however, as important as the entry. In many regions, the majority of the population now need to make the transition from agriculture to non–agricultural livelihoods. Many people, particularly the wealthy, may already be doing this. Understanding and enabling transition represents one of the most important policy challenges for coming decades.Using examples from India, Yemen, Saudi Arabia and other countries, this article documents some of the connections between water and security and clarifies the importance of effective solutions to water problems and to social transition in arid regions.

Structuration of Indian Information Technology Professionals’ Migration to Australia: An Ethnographic Study

Information Technology (IT) is leading to a new form of capital accumulation as is clearly evident in the IT industry. Regardless of its origin and amount, capital can be circulated and accumulated on a global scale, at an unprecedented speed and therefore with extreme volatility. An urgent task of the study of globalization and migration is to understand the international labour system of the “new economy”.This article is an ethnographic study of those agents who have been the main means by which Indian IT professionals move globally. “Body shopping” is the practice whereby a firm recruits IT workers and then farms them out to clients for a particular project, though the firm itself is not involved in the project.The key players in “body shopping” are a series of recruitment agents. They form “agent chains” where they depend on each other and assume different functions in dealing with the market, the state and the workers. “Body shops” rely on ethnic networks. Their practices have led to the emergence of a flexible international labour supply system that benefits some IT professionals but also imposes costs.

Has Firm Level Analysis Reached its Limits? Time for a Rethink

Entrepreneurship research has concentrated almost exclusively on small organizations and the firm as the unit of analysis. As a result, researchers have overlooked the real wealth-creating activities of established business owners. Current work does not pay enough attention to ownership patterns and the accumulation, control, and transmission of capital, which should be central questions in a free enterprise, capitalist economy. Argues that small and medium-sized enterprises are part of the process of wealth creation and capital accumulation, which is entrepreneur based and operates at all scales. Underlying most research to date are four assumptions: the firm (rather than the entrepreneur) is the unit of definition and analysis, the differences between large and small firms are paramount; starting and growing firms is the best way to conceptualize wealth and job creation; and starting firms is separate from firm growth. The thesis herein is that the process of wealth creation and capital accumulation is entrepreneur- rather than organization-based, and that the process and all stakeholders should be the focus of study. Research into multiple business owners (portfolio entrepreneurs) in Scotland in 1994-95 was designed to establish the contribution of existing business to new firm creation. Of 7,316 new companies, 45 percent had directors of other companies; people starting new companies are significantly associated with activities of existing businesses; and a substantial number of new firms interlock with existing companies, forming clusters. While individual firms in a cluster may not grow, the cluster does. Diversification may be a growth and survival strategy. Starting and growing new firms may be a form of capital accumulation. Focus at the level of small firms overlooks the political and social aspect of business: the issues of who owns and controls, gains and loses power and jobs, and how capital is structured. The new awareness will provide better answers and make clearer the real contributions of entrepreneurs to the economy, as well as the implications of taxation and regulation. (TNM)

After the Frontier: Problems with Political Economy in the Modern Brazilian Amazon

The theoretical interpretation of social and economic change in the Brazilian Amazon has been dominated by a political economy in which the notion of the frontier, variously defined, has been central. Brazil is of course not the only country where a fuzzily defined idea of frontier development has been important, and we can think, as Turner did for the United States, of a Brazilian frontier thesis. It can be boiled down to a simple contention, although the arguments are often complicated: the frontier, now restricted to Amazonia, is the absorption of peripheral regions by an expanding capitalism. This perspective, fundamental to numerous studies of Amazonia, sees a tendency towards homogeneity in economic structure and social relations in the cycle of frontier development, with capitalism ending up as the dominant force. It regards the key subjects in the dynamic of the frontier as the peasantry, who are acted upon by the bourgeoisie and the state, and argues that the dynamic of events within the frontier is determined outside it, in the forms of capital accumulation in the national economy and the way regional economies are articulated to it. Although first formulated in the 1970s, it remains overwhelmingly the most influential theoretical approach to explaining Amazonia's modern history, irrespective, one is sometimes tempted to think, of the direction that history has actually taken.

Flexible Accumulation and the Rise of Business Services

In spite of the economic and social significance of the switch to service employment in recent decades, the role of services in modern processes of spatial transformation is still theoretically marginalized. Service changes are clearly implicated in the emergence of new forms of capital accumulation, and therefore in modem patterns of spatial inequality. Business service functions form a growing element in the expertise supporting rhodem capitalism, which also includes that directly employed by their client organizations. Business service growth is seen as one facet of the 'flexible' use of skilled labour resources, possessing its own powerful dynamic, based in expertise that even large organizations cannot command. Capitalist accumulation is increasingly dominated by the contract between capital and expert labour. Among the important implications for contemporary change of the growth of business services, those considered here relate to trends in the organization of production, in patterns of technological change, in the relative roles of large and small firms, and in employment. Socially and geographically, the growth of independent business service functions exerts strong pressures towards the polarization of the quality of labour demand and economic opportunity.

Dispossession and Accumulation in the South African Interior: The Boers and the Tlhaping of Bethulie, 1833–61

This article seeks to illuminate some important themes in nineteenth-century South African history by examining the fate of a small chiefdom of difaqane refugees who settled in 1833 just north of the Orange River under the patronage of a French Protestant missionary. It situates the history of the Tlhaping of Bethulie against the background of the expansion of white settlement north of the Orange River and the development of colonial capitalism in the larger region. The processes of white state formation north of the Orange in the middle years of the century, especially the seminal role of British intervention during the period of the Orange River Sovereignty, are examined. The corresponding rise of white elites and the varied primitive forms of capital accumulation employed by the emerging Boer notables are investigated. The article then seeks to provide a concrete study of these themes in a local setting. These encircling developments provided the context for the rising tensions and conflicts at the Bethulie mission station and in the Tlhaping community in the 1850s. The gradual alienation of the Bethulie lands to private ownership eventually led to the destruction of the territory and the break-up of the community. These processes are examined within the context of the rise of local Boer notables and the nature of state structures in the Orange Free State Republic established in 1854. In the end those who orchestrated and benefited from the dismemberment of the Bethulie territory were those who controlled the instruments of patronage and power in the local Boer state.

Research priorities in women's studies in Eastern Africa

Studies of women as a specific object of inquiry began to become popular in the mid-seventies in eastern Africa. This is related to growing concern among state and international agencies about women as a problem in production and reproduction. The economic crises has led to heightened concern about the political consequences of real declines in income, the high rates of malnutrition and infant and child mortality rates, and the deterioration of peasant agriculture combined with the breakdown of peasant family relations. Women became of pivotal concern in the effort to forestall revolution as well as to increase production of food and export crops, given their central role as food producers in the peasant sector, and as providers of nearly all other family needs in cash and in kind.Two opposing lines have emerged in Women's Studies. One, the integration line, is identified with bourgeois feminism which calls for equal participation in education, employment and other spheres of society while maintaining the status quo of society. Women-in-development (WID) research and actions falls into this category. The other line calls for transformation of society through revolutionary struggles organised and led by the progressive segment of the women masses in Africa. This category is far less defined, in part a reflection of the level of class consciousness and organisation in the region and the way in which women intellectuals are divorced from the masses.Analysis of the issues which have arisen in relevant research indicates the significance of class differentiation among women, and the need to distinguish different kinds of male-female relations both within and across the different classes in society. A critical analysis is needed of Women's Studies which is carefully periodized to take into account different stages in the capital accumulation process and different forms of capital accumulation as these relate to concrete struggles of different classes of women.

Comments on peripheral capitalism and its transformation

I. It is necessary to state from the outset a Fundamental coincidence of opinion with Prebisch’s article on “Socio-economic structure and crisis of peripheral capitalism”, if the selection of the critical points chosen by the commentator and tin? content of his remarks are to be intelligible. This area of coincidence can be broken down into two propositions: firstly, that the crisis of the system in the Latin American countries is a structural crisis, a theoretical understanding of which calls for analysis of the specific forms of capital accumulation, and of the social and political conflicts linked with these; and, secondly, that the analysis of the dynamic operation of the structure in question must begin with the internal factors. I understand, and accordingly agree, that this is a matter of the priority of internal over external factors at the start of the analysis, although the latter must not be left out of count. This second point is of great interest for the commentator, because it allows him also to invoke the authority of the article under consideration in discussions of a more punctual character; thus, for example, some time ago certain Argentinian economists, seeking to account for the military coup of 1976, gave a foremost place in their explanation to references to the new trends in the international division of labour (external factors) which would seem to be determining the resolution of internal conflicts. I note in passing that this ranking of the explanatory factors is, in that respect, akin to theoretical analyses such as those of Gramcsi (see Note sul Macchiarelli - Sulla Politica e sullo Stato Moderno), in which, in a few pages, he expounds a methodological proposal for the study of political conjunctures in which for the purposes of analysis internal factors acquire priority.