Market Imperatives Research Articles

Who Drives Rural Spatial Commodification? A Case Study of a Village in the Mountainous Region of Southwest China

Against the historical background of the rural revitalization strategy and coordinated regional development, rural characteristic industries constitute the fundamental impetus and strategic avenue for rural spatial commodification processes in the mountainous region of southwest China. As a crucial pathway for enhancing rural spatial value, the driving mechanisms and implementation approaches of rural spatial commodification require urgent theoretical elucidation. This study employs spatial production theory as its analytical framework and adopts a case study approach focusing on Zhongxin Village in the mountainous region of southwest China. Through in-depth interviews, participatory observations, and textual analyses, this study endeavors to unpack the intricate internal logic underpinning the process by which rural characteristic industries propel rural spatial commodification. The research findings demonstrate that under the collaborative mechanism of “government guidance–elite mobilization–villager participation–market penetration,” the systematic synthesis of regional resource endowments, cultural legacies, and market imperatives has culminated in the reconfiguration of local economic structures and the reproduction of rural landscapes. This study further elucidates the structural constraints and potential solutions encountered in the process of rural spatial commodification in southwest China’s mountainous hinterlands. This research provides region-specific implementation pathways for developing characteristic industries and advancing spatial commodification in these regions with geographical location disadvantages and weak economic development, offering significant policy implications for rural revitalization strategies.

FemTech markets

This article examines the emergence and growth of the FemTech industry, which aims to address healthcare disparities affecting women by offering targeted technological solutions. Despite its promising goals, FemTech’s reliance on venture capital and financial markets has led to a business model prioritizing profitability and scalability over equitable healthcare access. Drawing from extensive fieldwork and financialization studies, this article reveals how financial capital shapes FemTech’s development, influencing product design, target markets, and consumer accessibility. Venture capital requirements and market imperatives often push FemTech firms to focus on high-income consumer segments, favouring products like wellness apps and fertility tracking tools while under-serving populations with complex or less profitable healthcare needs. This dynamic raise critical questions about FemTech’s capacity to democratise healthcare, as it risks reinforcing existing healthcare inequalities by catering primarily to affluent and digitally connected users. The study argues for regulatory frameworks that prioritise health equity, suggesting that without intervention, FemTech’s alignment with venture capital will continue to shape it as a sector more invested in consumer capture than in addressing fundamental health injustices.

Labour Market Regulation and the Economics of Precarious Knowledge Work

This study examines how evolving labour market regulations and economic drivers shape the proliferation of precarious employment in knowledge and communication sectors. Drawing on a critical cultural political economy framework, we map the deregulatory shifts eroding collectively negotiated rights and imposing “compulsory flexibility” that amplifies worker vulnerability. We extend Sum and Jessop’s analysis by integrating institutional economics and power-relations theory to capture the market imperatives underpinning precariatisation. Our refined conceptualisation highlights how economic structures, regulatory frameworks, and information-system dynamics converge to generate insecure work. Through a synthesis of Foucauldian analytics, phenomenological insights, and economic analysis, we illuminate the lived experiences of knowledge workers and the systemic forces driving precarity. We illustrate these dynamics with examples from academic and communicative sectors, demonstrating the universal relevance of precariatisation across knowledge economies. This tighter economic lens reveals actionable pathways for equitable labour regulation, offering policy recommendations to stabilise working conditions and rebalance power in knowledge-driven market

Data solutionism at work: When public institutions meet data-driven firms

In recent years, public institutions have turned to data-driven firms for solutions to the many complex operational challenges they face. This study explores the growing ties between public institutions and data-driven firms by focusing on the case of the Tel Aviv Municipality and a (data-driven) startup accelerator it established in the city. Based on semi-structured interviews with the Municipality staff and with representatives of the data-driven firms in the accelerator, I present a grounded framework that outlines the characteristics of the resulting collaboration and describes the mechanisms that facilitate and contain the dynamic thereof. The framework contributes to existing research on tech companies’ involvement in public organizations by suggesting two analytical dimensions, which I term orientation and action. On both, I note various tensions, which are bound to be endemic to collaborations between a public institution and a data firm, and which account for two main motivations behind the Municipality’s actions vis-a-vis its partner data-driven firms, driven by both market imperatives and its overarching aim to benefit the public.

Ali Smith’s <em>Companion Piece</em> and the Value of Close Reading

Ali Smith’s Companion Piece (2022) expands on the exploration of apathy and anomie undertaken in the Seasonal Quartet, further connecting these experiences to a pervasive sense of despair in contemporary society. Once again, Smith reflects on the role of the arts, seeing in them a vehicle for hope and change. In an interesting twist, Companion Piece focuses specifically on the effects of close reading, pointing to the way it opens opportunities for unexpected connections that can escape the divisive competitiveness of contemporary neoliberalism. I suggest that the novel’s preoccupation with close reading responds to the intense debates in literary studies about post-critical methods of reading, while entering a dialogue with I. A. Richards’s notion of practical criticism. Yet Companion Piece revises Richards's framework, extending the target of close reading to include a variety of artworks, material objects and natural phenomena. It also widens the focus from individuals to the relationships between them, depicting close reading as a catalyst for intersubjective bonding. The transposition of Richards’s argument to a contemporary neoliberal context broadens the role of close reading, granting it greater relevance and urgency. For Smith, the aimless attentiveness of close reading becomes an act of rebellion against the market imperatives of speed and efficiency. As it highlights the anomaly of close reading in the neoliberal milieu, Companion Piece implies that it can unsettle the neoliberal profit-maximizing paradigm, boost the imagination, and enable new ways of connecting with people, animals, and even the environment.

The Making of Modern Sheep. The New Pastoral Regime and Its Discontents

Although pastoralism has a special place in Romanian history and national mythology, shepherds “occupy a complicated position” (O’Brien and Crețan 2019) in contemporary technoscientific capitalism (Birch and Muniesa 2020). As their age-old shepherding routes shrink (Săgeată et al. 2022), new devices need to be adopted and associated with traditional shepherding methods to meet the new market challenges and industrialised model of sheep farming. Opting for an approach that combines science and technology studies (STS) and anthropology, our paper examines how a New Pastoral Regime (NPR) was assembled with the help of a small piece of technology: the ear tag. EU norms, market imperatives, scientific innovation, financial subsidies, political interests, and technical devices become entangled in a political and scientific network of governing nature and the future that produces different kinds of sheep as techno-natural entities. By opening the black box of ear tagging technology our paper reveals what was left out, what was included, and with what consequences.

Beyond Journalism About Journalism?: Assessing the Impact of Metajournalistic Discourse on Journalism Studies

ABSTRACT This article presents a systematic review of the literature examining metajournalistic discourse, a term proposed by Carlson to encompass all public utterances about the nature and boundaries of journalism. After collecting all scholarly output (N = 77) between 2015 and 2023, a content analysis of the articles was conducted, with particular attention paid to two key areas: the components (actors, sites/audiences, and topics) and interpretive processes (definitional control, boundary-work, and legitimation) of discourse. Our findings allow us to make a number of observations regarding the current state of research: 1) the study of metajournalistic discourse is dominated by a Western bias; 2) research approaches remain journalist-centric; 3) boundary-work concerns above all the relationship of journalism to technology and market imperatives; 4) the democratic/societal role of journalism emerges as the main legitimation strategy; 5) the topics of metajournalistic discourse have organic and prompted origins.

Women on Women in Contemporary Romanian Documentary Film

Guy Standing (2016) observes how in Eastern Europe, the post-1989 neoliberal order determined the working class to morph into what he names the precariat. This newly formed segment of society has to adapt to forever changing market imperatives in order to survive. Concomitantly, the Romanian state apparatus abruptly mutated from an overwhelming patriarchal structure into an all-out absent one (Bucur and Miroiu 252), thus making it more difficult for women to manage both patriarchally imposed roles and to find a workplace. Women filmmakers like Ana Căpățână-Juller (Aici…adică acolo [Here… meaning there], 2012) and Teodora Mihai (Waiting for August, 2014) decide to turn their cameras onto women characters engaged in a struggle for survival. Both filmmakers deal with the same theme, the lives of children who have to raise themselves, as their parents have gone abroad in order to gain better incomes than in Romania. Working with Sybille Krämer’s “second person model of witnessing,” where testimony is associated with concepts such as social interaction manifested through trust and authority (Krämer 34), I will examine how the two filmmakers particularly engage with their subjects and the differences between two directorial perspectives: one that approaches reality from a top down perspective, while the other is enmeshed with the characters in the historical world.

The Worlds of Labor in Ghana’s Gold Mining Industry, c. 1895–1957

Abstract The global turn has contributed to a revitalization of labor history. Historians have become increasingly attentive to the varied forms of labor commodification that existed under capitalism. Many historians have welcomed this approach which challenges the universalism of “free” wage labor. Critics, however, have warned that global labor history risks re-inscribing the power of capital at the expense of local specificities, particularly in terms of the plurality of labor’s worlds and its (dis)connections with capital. This is not a new debate within African studies. Since the 1980s, historians of Africa have questioned the privileging of wage labor at the expense of other forms of labor and the focus on (post)colonial workplace relations to the exclusion of other relational power structures which shaped the behavior of African men and women. This article takes up these debates by focusing on different forms of labor connected to the gold mining industry in colonial Ghana. The article argues that African men and women involved in the mining sector, including mineworkers, petty traders, and sex workers, responded to their experience of commodification in ways that were about more than just their status as abstract sellers of labor power. What emerges from this analysis is a more nuanced understanding of the strategies and aspirations of African labor which was connected to the mining sector. That is to say, where colonial officials saw working patterns that were purportedly symptomatic of the “lazy” and “ill-disciplined” character of African labor, this article demonstrates otherwise. The behavior of African labor associated with the mining sector was indicative of choices that were made in accordance with individual and collective needs connected to issues of class, gender, and generation, which, in turn, were “entangled” with capitalist market imperatives but not necessarily determined by them.

An exit out of the 'hive': post-apocalyptic fictions of data capitalism and technological acceleration

Digital technologies have come to frame the everyday interactions of our world, meshing together public and private spaces into seamless singular platforms for work, socialisation and leisure. At the centre of these transformations are the market imperatives of companies who trade in predictions based upon behavioural data, utilising a range of surveillance strategies to capture information that shapes the most effective corporate interventions into our lives. Shoshana Zuboff's 2019 book The Age of Surveillance Capitalism: The Fight for a Human Future at the New Frontier of Power provides a thorough overview of these issues, constructing a new vocabulary with which to identify the forces that shape political, financial, and social processes on a global scale. However, the book maintains a liberal political alignment which reaffirms the powers of the right, advocating for a partial technological deceleration which preserves the violent political-economic foundations underpinning surveillance and digital control. This article examines Margaret Atwood's The Testaments and Richard K. Morgan's Altered Carbon, two contemporary novels which test out the predictions of technodeterminist logic in unequivocal ways, in order to interrogate the imaginative limitations prevalent in responses to data capitalism.

The Crisis of Transcendent Values: Higher Education at a Crossroads

ABSTRACT The faith in progress that propelled the West for over four centuries is in decline due to its own success. The emergence of capitalism with its novel market imperatives has created both the poverty that causes political crises and the material growth that has destabilized the Earth’s climate. There is a growing sense that we are dominated by the technologies and social organizations that we hoped would liberate us. Individualism and secularity have left people feeling isolated and without a sense of higher purpose, leading some to reject Enlightenment values in favor of traditionalisms and even neofascism. In universities, faculty struggle to prove their utility and relevance, because they cannot guarantee their graduates a decent living in a world of automation and globalized production. As a result of these trends, the West’s ability to produce responsible citizens is in question. Our students are largely inured to appeals to transcendent values because they are urged to be “practical.” Faculty are no longer encouraged to care about the character-building nature of a liberal education. United States universities are in danger of not having an independent voice, as those departments that can consistently get major external funding seek commercial applications for the products of their research. In the United States, ideologically based harassment and censorship of unpopular ideas takes place regularly and is a major deterrent to pursuing a career in higher education. Given these challenges, can intellectuals still make a difference in universities? Many have taken to social media and other ways of getting their ideas around the increasingly steep paywalls of academic publications and the de facto censorship in their institutions. Some of the most vibrant exchanges of ideas are now happening in other places, largely online. These venues draw in people who are trying their best to learn something they are unlikely to learn at universities. But are such alternatives truly sustainable or good enough? Higher education is at a crossroads in which even this “retreat and regroup” strategy is highly problematic.

Escaping capitalist market imperatives: commercial coca cultivation in the Colombian Amazon

ABSTRACT The illicit coca economy has become a bulwark for smallholder farming in Colombia. This article helps explain why. Analysis of the social relations surrounding coca production in one of the country’s most important coca-producing municipalities shows that capitalist market imperatives are weak within this economy. Pressures to increase productivity are muted by fluid access to land, non-interest-bearing debts, and the lack of price competition between producers. Coca-growers are ‘improving’ production, but they mostly respond to opportunities rather than imperatives. In the context of multiple agrarian crises, the coca economy allows even less well-off producers to survive.

ISO 50001-Based Energy Management Systems as a Practical Path for Decarbonization: Initial Findings from a Survey of Technical Assistance Cohort Participants

Organizations face rising pressure to take action to reduce their climate-affecting emissions (i.e., decarbonize). While many responses are possible, an essential approach—strategically managing their energy consumption as an essential business practice via an ISO 50001-based energy management system—is not yet widely recognized as a framework for decarbonization. This study analyzes interim survey results from 24 organizations (a 48% response rate) implementing a rigorous energy management system, one deployed by the U.S. Department of Energy as “50001 Ready”, to test whether participating organizations perceive the energy management system under development as an essential aspect of their decarbonization efforts. The results are preliminary in nature, given the ongoing nature of the program and associated data collection; however, they are sufficient to refute our hypothesis that energy management systems are perceived by organizations participating in 50001 Ready cohorts to primarily affect energy performance with little-to-no connection regarding decarbonization efforts. Major findings include that participants’ decarbonization targets and commitments are driven by market imperatives (highlighting the importance of ISO 50001 as a management system tool) and that they see energy efficiency as vital to decarbonizing. We conclude by suggesting future research directions to further establish the premise that energy management systems are an effective, efficient, and long-lasting decarbonization strategy.

Remembering Herbert Gutman's Work, Culture, and Society Fifty Years On

Remembering Herbert Gutman's <i>Work, Culture, and Society</i> Fifty Years On

Higher Education Studies Today and for the Future: A UK Perspective

ABSTRACT This article explores the state of higher education studies today, suggesting that in many ways it can be considered a vibrant field. In the UK, this is evidenced by the relatively large number of REF2021 submissions that had a higher education focus, and the emphasis higher education institutions are increasingly placing on conducting their own pedagogical research (in some respects, driven by market imperatives). In addition, the field has become more strongly international in its orientation, with more collaborative work, and a greater number of scholars engaging with issues beyond their own nation-state. However, the article also argues that there are various ‘threats’ bound up with this greater internationalisation – not least, the limited definition of the ‘international’ that is often implicit in our scholarship.

Editors’ Introduction

Editors’ Introduction

How Neofascism Emerges from Neoliberal Capitalism

In this article we argue that neofascism has emerged from the crisis of neoliberal capitalism. We begin by locating neofascism within the contemporary dynamics of capitalist crisis, including the legitimacy crisis of the capitalist state, the relationship between neofascist ideology and capitalist political coalitions, and the similarities and differences between neofascism and earlier varieties of fascism. Toward that end, we analyze neofascism as having a much closer relationship to neoliberal ideology than is commonly understood, especially given the decades long theorizing by neoliberals about how to use the state to prevent democratic movements from interfering with capitalist accumulation and market imperatives. Therefore, our article is intended to sharpen the theoretical, ideological, and empirical relationship between neoliberalism and neofascism. It is also intended to help build an effective political response to defeat neofascism instead of simply recreating the conditions for its perpetual re-emergence.

The multiple ‘epidemic’: debating responsibility in US medicine, media and the law

Summary This article examines the medical, legal and social discourses attached to the so-called multiple ‘epidemic’ in the mid- to late- twentieth-century USA. Such discussions were transformed by the development of the first hormonal remedies for infertility in the early 1960s and the debut of IVF in 1978. These debates, I propose, were shaped by racialised discourses of motherhood on one hand and the market imperatives of US medicine and fertility medicine on the other. These influences coincided to produce a unique emphasis on cost, responsibility and blame in discussions of the multiple ‘epidemic’. In the absence of government regulation, a common response in many European countries, doctors and parents assumed unique ethical burdens in managing multiple pregnancies. Following the debut of multifetal pregnancy reduction in the 1980s, these came to include the difficult decision as to whether they should be brought to term at all.

Financially engineering a “self-generative” political economy of creditworthiness: Expertocratic exemption problems for sustainable debt and democracy

Repeated crises have proven credit rating agency (CRA) models/methods erroneous and “business-as-usual” unsustainable. Nevertheless, considerable dubious “default risk” management and technoscientific capitalist expertise remain unchanged. Unpacking sovereign ratings, we appreciate how “debt sustainability analysis” (DSA) distortions underpin expertocratic CRA (default) anomaly. Their neoliberal “politics of limits” performance helps market (shareholder) imperatives trump those of democratic (stakeholder) politics. Given surging inflation and debt (distress) to remedy Covid-19-induced shocks, ratings aid constitute and (re)validate the subjectivities/affinities and organizational conditions advancing a “self-equilibrating,” “self-generative” agencement political economy of creditworthiness (PEC). Antagonizing sustainable budgetary government’s programmatic/expertocratic and operational/democratic asymmetry, econophysics ratings diminish fiscal sovereignty. Universal PEC management through hybrid credit risk/uncertainty qualculation mitigates negative externality contestation shielding CRAs from serious reform. Ratings procyclicality and contagion reinforce this precarious sociotechnical agencement PEC as the status quo.

Managing human resource management tensions in project‐based organisations: Evidence from Bangalore

Abstract We examine human resource management (HRM) in a large Bangalore project‐based software company. Diverse adaptations of organisation‐level HRM exist in projects, generating heterogeneous HRM practices across the organisation, resulting in management–employee tensions. Paradoxes are managed through a comprehensive, detailed and complementary set of structural and relational coping mechanisms, designed to promote employee commitment. These mechanisms were only partially successful, largely because of ongoing client interventions in project management. The motivations for and directions of client interventions are closely linked to the type of work undertaken in projects. Service market imperatives limit managers' scope to negotiate such interventions.