New Spirit Of Capitalism Research Articles

Le nouvel esprit du capitalisme aux prises avec les nouvelles radicalités professionnelles

The period 2008-2009 has seen a spate of workplace conflicts obeying a common logic in terms of the modes of mobilisation. The conflicts emerge inside the sphere of production. They occur in the wake of the announcement of a partial or total suspension of production and their stated goal is to save jobs and/or to negotiate redundancy payments going beyond the legal entitlement. The aim of the article is to confront the paradigm which Luc Boltanski and Eve Chiapello formulated in The New Spirit of Capitalism in order to articulate the concepts of the civic and the critical to the features of the new discursive protocols which have emerged in the context of these recent conflicts. The article addresses two questions. The hypothesis put forward is that the discursive protocol which those promoting militant action draw upon goes beyond a model of intelligibility that is fundamentally built around the reference to a corrective critique and thus fails to take account of the place in which the discourse of radical critique is actually rooted.

O retorno ao “social”: estudos de teoria social e cultura da produção

Neste artigo, argumenta-se que os estudos de produção devem utilizar o estudo de caso fundamentado para examinar e reformular as teorias clássicas da produção à luz da fase atual do capitalismo tardio. Para comprovar o argumento, apresento uma pesquisa de campo com a equipe de escalação dos participantes de um reality show que falha na função de produção do “elenco” para o programa. Neste caso, o erro da equipe deve ilustrar como a alienação é vivida no processo de produção televisiva.

Lost in translation: Bringing Hirschman's concept of voice back into the spirit of capitalism

The New Spirit of Capitalism relied heavily upon the theory of organizational decline and the concepts of exit and voice developed by Albert O. Hirschman in his seminal essay, Exit, Voice, and Loyalty from 1970. As a result, capitalism and its spirit were thought within an organizational paradigm. However, the integration of Hirschman's theory was not unproblematic, since voice was excluded from the level of organizations, resulting in a failure to account for internal critique. By revisiting Hirschman's theory, the context in which it developed, and by juxtaposing this with the theory of The New Spirit of Capitalism, it is argued that the spatial metaphors of ‘inside’ and ‘outside’ of capitalism should be revised, along with a revision of the analogy between capitalism and an organization. Ultimately, critique always comes from ‘within’.

Gegenstrategien als (neue) Systemressource des Kapitalismus?

Criticism, resistence and subversion are discussed to have developed from counter strategies to resources of capitalism recently. This diagnosis is highly popular, finding its theoretical and conceptional roots in Foucauldian Governmentality Studies, in labour-market related approaches to subjectivation in post-fordism as well as in Boltanski/Chiapello “The new spirit of capitalism”. This article shows problematic aspects of this diagnosis, without denying its inspiring facets. It is based on the assumption that the over-hasty and over-generalized abandonment of the subversive potentials of counter strategies prevents the development of a well-founded and context-related theory of resistance. As a conclusion central steps towards a sociology of resistence are delineated.

Depression — A Social Pathology of Action

This article argues that the epidemic of depression is to be understood alongside the normative conditions of self-realisation associated with the emergence of the new spirit of capitalism. In the new spirit of capitalism, active realisation of the authentic self is an institutionalised demand, which is expected to be converted into praxis. This is interesting in relation to the phenomenon of depression, as it means that contemporary depression may be understood, not as a clinical and subjective condition, but as a mode of action. What is applauded in today's society is precisely what depressive individuals lack – namely the ability to realise themselves in accordance with contemporary normative values. Thus, within present-day society, depression and the institutionalised/capitalist demands for self-realisation have become each other's antitheses.

Sport management, gender and the ‘bigger picture’: Challenging changes in Higher Education—A partial auto/ethnographical account

This paper focuses mainly on a the author's current experience of Higher Education and of a module concerned with gender, difference, sport and leisure made available to students studying for sport and leisure management degrees. It reviews the changed nature of the curriculum in the shifting socio-economic climate, suggesting that the neo-liberal 1 1 I refer here to neo-liberalism as, ‘associated with the extension and enhancement of the market economy during the late 1990s and early twenty-first century’ (David, 2005: 113 [David, M. (2005). Feminist values and feminist sociology as contributions to higher education pedagogies and practices. In S. Robinson & C. Katulushi (Eds.), Values in higher education (pp. 107–116). Shropshire: Aureus Publishing Ltd]). The main aspects of neo-liberal ideology might be identified as the rule of the market, cutting public expenditure for social services, deregulation, privatisation and so forth. Chiapello and Fairclough [Chiapello, E., & Fairclough, N. (2002). Understanding the new management ideology. A transdisciplinary contribution from critical discourse analysis and new sociology of capitalism. Discourse and Society, 13(2), 185–208] critically analyse Neo-liberal Discourse and its hegemonic practices in management, providing a theoretical framework for the ‘new spirit of capitalism’. Capitalism is slippery, ‘it constantly transforms itself’. turn influencing Higher Education in UK is reinforcing an organisational (university) culture which is counter productive to fostering critical gender and race awareness in both staff and students within restructured sport management programs. The approach I adopt in writing this paper is partly auto/ethnographic and as such, on occasion, it looks at the previous research and current experiences through the eyes and emotions of a senior woman academic located within a changing ‘new’ university culture. Auto/ethnography as research approach and autobiography as learning medium are considered. Like this abstract, I move in and out of centring myself in the text whilst interweaving writing in a more neutral ‘academic’ form.

Capitalism and justification

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

Review Essay: Beginnings and Ends: For, Against and Beyond '68

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

Criticisms of capitalism, budgeting and the double enrolment: Budgetary control rhetoric and social reform in France in the 1930s and 1950s

This article is a contribution to the study of the spread of management innovations, methods and rhetorics. It particularly concerns the influence of ideological and political factors, which have so far mostly escaped in-depth study. In particular, we seek to understand to what extent a critique of society developed by social reformers can be a source of inspiration for managers, leading them to change their practices and experiment with new devices. Relying on the framework of historical change in management practices developed by Boltanski and Chiapello [Boltanski, L., & Chiapello, E. (2005). The new spirit of capitalism. London: Verso (Translation of Le nouvel esprit du capitalisme, Paris: Gallimard, 1999)], we study the specific development of budgetary control in France, examined in the light of the general political and economic history of the 20th century. This framework simultaneously encompasses the dissemination of a new accounting practice, the transformation of capitalist institutions and mo des of regulation in a given period and country, and the programmatic discourses [Miller, P., & Rose, N. (1990). Governing economic life. Economy and Society, 19(1), 1–31] associated with the historical move. More exactly, what interests us is a double enrolment process. The business world promoters of budgetary control use the rhetorics of social reformers to present budgetary control as a solution to the economic and social problems of their time; conversely, social reformers promote budgetary control as a realistic, efficient tool that can change the world. Ultimately, a degree of alliance is possible around this management tool, although the extent to which the meanings each group attributes to its action are shared may remain unclear. Based on an analysis of the writings of budgetary control promoters of the 1930s and the 1950s, we show the close links between their discourse and the reforming ideas of their time, and how we can trace through this corpus the evolution of this kind of political rationalities [Miller, P., & Rose, N. (1990). Governing economic life. Economy and Society, 19(1), 1–31] associated with governing and managing corporations we call the spirit of capitalism [Boltanski, L., & Chiapello, E. (2005). The new spirit of capitalism. London: Verso (Translation of Le nouvel esprit du capitalisme, Paris: Gallimard, 1999)].

Contextualising new modes of governance in activation policies

PurposeThe first part of the paper aimed to interpret the changes addressed by the concepts of governance and activation in their context, in order to grasp the larger picture of the societal transformation underlying them: the starting point is the assumption that new modes of governance in activation policies are a fruitful entry point for effectively understanding deep waves of change of contemporary society. The second part aims to briefly introduce the papers included in this issue.Design/methodology/approachThe paper insists on a perspective according to which there are two main dimension characterising the context of addressed transformations: the paradoxical torsion of the historical process of individualisation in the new spirit of capitalism; the profound redesign of the institutional programme, implying a new horizon for the instances of publicness.FindingsDifferent and contradictory trends are pointed out in the actual pursuing of objectives of governance and activation, as far as the process of individualisation and the redesign of publicness are concerned. The impossibility of finding an abstract and universal evaluation of these transformations and the necessity of situated empirical inquiries are stressed.Originality/valueThe paper demonstrates the relevance of deepening the normative underlying dimensions (with regard to individualisation and publicness) of social processes for a better understanding of concrete transformations (specifically: operational and substantive changes introduced by new modes of governance in activation policies).

The polis of projects at work. Open source software development and the “new spirit of capitalism”

Der Beitrag geht der Implementation normativer Aspekte in Open-Source-Projekten empirisch nach. Welche normativen Dispositionen dort ins Spiel kommen, wie die Akteure ihre Beitrage anerkennen und ihre Verkehrsformen regeln, ist in der Literatur vergleichsweise unterbelichtet. Theoretisch dient die Projektpolis, wie Boltanski und Chiapello sie im „neuen Geist des Kapitalismus“ (2003) beschreiben, als Analyseraster einer normativen Ordnung fur projektformige, wissensintensive Arbeits-und Kooperationszusammenhange. Insbesondere das Konzept der „Bewahrungsprobe“ scheint geeignet, um die Geltung von Rechtfertigungsordnungen im situierten Handeln zu uberprufen.

The New Spirit of Capitalism

The New Spirit of Capitalism

Spirits of Late Capitalism

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

Legitimationsprozesse wirtschaftlichen Handelns – Normativer Wandel im Anschluss an „Der neue Geist des Kapitalismus“

zfwu Zeitschrift für Wirtschafts- und Unternehmensethik , Seite 57 - 71

The New Spirit of Capitalism

The New Spirit of Capitalism

Projektwelten

Projects are as much an ambiguous as a widespread mode of individual agency and social cooperation. The fact that today almost everything can become a project sheds light on how people understand their activities and their relations to others as well as to themselves. The form “project” can be seen as a basic element of contemporary modes of government and self-government. — The essay traces the genealogy of project making starting with Daniel Defoe’s “Essay upon Projects“ up to the trade and housing projects in the alternative movement of the Seventies. Discussing Luc Boltanksi’s and Eve Chiapello’s “The New Spirit of Capitalism” it then sketches out the job specification of a present-day’s project collaborator, adding an analysis of the technologies which are used to optimize project management and individual self-fashioning as “project ego”.

The New Spirit of Capitalism

The New Spirit of Capitalism

FROM CALVIN TO SPINOZA

Max Weber employed the concept of a spirit of capitalism only in the context of the historical emergence of modern capitalism. Following Luc Boltanski and Ève Chiapello this article presents a transformed concept that applies also to established capitalisms. The concept includes justificatory orders of worth, the “grammars” of which are articulated by political philosophy. According to Boltanski and Chiapello a New Spirit of Capitalism has emerged since the 1980s. The new spirit is founded on a “project-oriented” order of worth, which, they argue, does not yet have a grammar. Extending their argument, Spinoza is proposed as the grammarian. This implies the paradox that Spinoza, the philosopher of immanence, is turned into a grammarian of a transcendent order of worth. However, this paradox exactly preserves a central ingredient of Weber's concept: transcendence.