Orthodox Political Economy Research Articles

Game Playing in the Platform Society: A Cultural-Political Economy Analysis of the Live Streaming Industry in China

Abstract With the continuing innovation of digital technologies and mobile multimedia terminals, the live steaming industry still has its relatively enormous market share in China. However, the aura of the platform profit-making period seems to glow faintly after 2016, the year regarded as “the booming year of the Chinese live streaming industry”. As the user bonus fades, the growth of the online live broadcasting industry becomes stable, and the industry development returns to rationality. This work poses several questions: in what ways can the survived platforms move forward to seek profits? What type of potential transformations have happened during the monetization for capital accumulation in the digital economy blended with diverse cultures? How can the labor rights of common people be ensured among the persistent chess-play in the virtual live streaming world? By jumping out from techno-optimistic research rhetoric and orthodox political economy discourse, this study stems from a macroscopic perspective of cultural political economy (CPE) with systematical consideration of broader functional factors. Netnography, online in-depth interview, and walkthrough qualitative methods are also conducted to analyze the transformation development in China’s live streaming industry. Results disclose that a gameplay still exists at the core of the dystopian cyberspace, especially residing among different context factors in the platform society, and this academic disclosure can be viewed from cultural and political economy dimension.

Knowledge/Power in (Post)Colonial India 1870–1920: Indian Political Economy as Counter-Knowledge and the Transformation of the Colonial Order

In the late 19th and early 20th centuries South Asian intellectuals began to develop a specifically Indian political economy – ostensibly grounded in Indigenous interests, values, norms, knowledge systems, and practices – as a response to the failure of the British colonial government to bring ‘moral and material improvement’ to the subcontinent. The article examines the relationship between colonial knowledge/power and the anti-hegemonic project of an Indian political economy, which claims to assert ‘Indigenous’ knowledge as <italic>counter</italic>-knowledge, but continues to share the same discursive space as orthodox political economy. The contribution explores how the alterity and indigeneity of Indian political economy was justfied and discusses the power relations in which the legitimacy of this alterity was enmeshed. Finally, the article analyses the limits set to the emancipatory impetus of such an ‘indigenous, postcolonial critique’.

Property in the Commons

This paper reflects on historical debates about creating property in the commons and how the debaters have approached the topic. It does so by systematizing existing insights, especially those provided by Richard Schlatter in his book, Private Property: A History of An Idea (1951). The analysis shows that Hardin’s widely quoted paper is not the founding essay that attacked the commons. Also, it demonstrates that there is no “property rights approach” in political economy but several property rights approaches not only between heterodox and orthodox political economy but also within heterodox perspectives. The evidence is clearly that not much has changed in the debates about the commons except, perhaps, the geographical emphasis and the identity of the dramatis personae fanning the attacks on the commons, but not the economic interests supporting the decimation and dissipation of the commons.

‘Discipline and Interference’: Ruskin's Political Economy, Natural Law, and the Moral Disorder of Victorian England

When Ruskin turned from art and architectural studies towards political economy in the late 1850s works such as Unto This Last, Munera Pulveris and Time and Tide met with negative critical reactions. In these works he attempted to restore to the language of Victorian political economy the moral content which, he argued, had been lost since the time of Adam Smith, under a cloak of misleading scientific terminology associated with utilitarian ‘orthodox political economy’. In doing so, he resorted to pre-Enlightenment sources of political and economic practice. His study of classical, Biblical, medieval and selected renaissance texts led him to gradually embrace older natural law arguments which contrasted sharply with the assumptions of post-Enlightenment positivist forms of natural law and science. These older and more organic natural law based understandings informed the principles by which he established his ideas on economics as well as his late social experiment, the Guild of St George. The charter and...

A Sacralized Cosmopolitanism? Alexander S. Panarin’s Russian Orthodox Political Economy as a Response to Globalization

A Sacralized Cosmopolitanism? Alexander S. Panarin’s Russian Orthodox Political Economy as a Response to Globalization

Durkheim's sociology, Simiand's positive political economy and the German historical school

During the nineteenth century, French political economy eluded the historical method. In the light of such context, the way Emile Durkheim and François Simiand interpreted the contribution of the German historical school is worth considering. Following Durkheim's sociological approach, Simiand occupies center stage when it comes to examining how much this historical method has to offer to ‘positive political economy’ considered as an alternative to ‘orthodox political economy’ and to the new conception of economic history which was finding its way through the Annales' school.

Politics, Morality and the Bourgeoisie: The Work of Paul Leroy-Beaulieu (1843-1916

According to the eleventh edition of the Encyclopaedia Britannica (published in 1911), Paul Leroy-Beaulieu was 'the leading representative in France of orthodox political economy'. Recent commentators have been less generous in their praise. Joseph Schumpeter dismissed him and his followers with the comment: 'They were antietatistes ... they indulged in a belief... that the main business of economists is to refute socialist doctrines and to combat the atrocious

History and the Economic Past: An Account of the Rise and Decline of Economic History in Britain

Is economic history a branch of economics or a part of history? The fusion of history and political economy attempted by the writers of the Scottish Enlightenment was destroyed when nineteenth-century English writers confined history to the political and constitutional past and attempted to make political economy an abstract science. This study of the rise and decline of economic history in Britain since the 18th century examines the emergence of economic history as an academic subject in opposition to both orthodox history and orthodox political economy. Discussing the 20th-century split between the reformists and the neutralists, Coleman traces the remarkable boom in the subject after World War II and its decline in popularity in the last decade.

Management Science in the USSR: The Role of "Americanizers"

Soviet studies of organization and management have evolved, in part, through purposive organizational activities designed to recreate the behavioral patterns of a referent, namely, the United States. This study examines the penetration of a reputedly closed societythe USSR-by ideas and methods popularized in American administrative science. In the early 1960s, domestic actors in the Soviet Union (Americanizers) began to use the prestige of the U.S. discipline, usually considered the world's most advanced, as a political resource to enhance their own influence at home. Making substantive adaptation to select U.S. ideas-business games, case methods, optimal decision-making techniques-Americanizers later on would utilize those ideas in socialist theorizing. Their role as agents of change over the past two decades reveals an ongoing policy process which has been augmented significantly through national-international linkages connecting administrative specialists in both countries. In that process, Americanizers have enjoyed certain institutional as well as informal bargaining advantages, including unusual access to the current regime's leadership. Not only do Americanizers play an influential role in policyrelevant matters, but they have undercut orthodox political economy views on administrative questions. Consequently, Americanizers have succeeded in changing the pace and direction of management science in the USSR-the field has at long last entered the mainstream of world developments. And, on the conceptual plane, this study concludes that models and approaches ignoring transnational phenomena can seriously underestimate the permeability of the Soviet system.

V. Mechanics' Institutes and the Working Classes, 1840–1860

The history of mechanics’ institutes ‘is at once beautiful and terrible to read', Christopher Charles Cattell, the Birmingham radical republican, told the members of his Eclectic Institute in 1854. Contemporaries of the mechanics’ institute movement in the mid-nineteenth century were acutely aware of this terrible history. ‘The banquet was prepared for guests who did not come …,’ wrote Robert Elliott in 1861. J. W. Hudson referred to ‘The universal complaint that Mechanics’ Institutions are attended by persons of a higher rank than those for whom they were designed…’ The Westminster Review continued the lament, Samuel Smiles, Lloyd Jones and J. M. Ludlow joined the chorus, and later historians have followed the tune. E. P. Thompson, for example, writes: ‘After the mid-Twenties the tendency was general for the custom of artisans to give way to that of the lower middle class, and for orthodox political economy to come into the syllabus.

Frederic Harrison and the “Positivist” Attack on Orthodox Political Economy

Frederic Harrison and the “Positivist” Attack on Orthodox Political Economy