Popular Capitalism Research Articles

Islamic Economic Thoughts And Their Relevance In Society 5.0 Era Of Zainal Abidin Ahmad

Islam has a concept of a universal, integral, and comprehensive way of life. This concept governs all aspects of human life, from the simple to the complex, including social, economic, political, educational, artistic, and cultural aspects. This research discusses the contribution of Islamic economics to national economic development, particularly in Indonesia, the largest Muslim-majority country in Asia. Islamic economics aims to create social justice, equitable income distribution, and economic sustainability within the context of Islam.The thoughts of Zainal Abidin Ahmad, a Muslim thinker from Indonesia, on Islamic economics, are explained in this research. Zainal Abidin Ahmad presents his views on Islamic economics as a distinct perspective from the popular capitalism and socialism of his time. Despite his comprehensive and profound thinking, Zainal Abidin Ahmad's ideas have received less attention from intellectuals, economists, and scholars. This article emphasizes the importance of studying and developing the thoughts of Zainal Abidin Ahmad in the current era. In this research, the researcher highlights the importance of studying and developing the ideas of Zainal Abidin Ahmad and previous Islamic economists relevant to the present era, particularly in the context of Islamic economics in the Society 5.0 era. Through in-depth research and study of these ideas, understanding will be enhanced, and relevant concepts of Islamic economics will be developed to address the challenges of the time.

Are We Rich Yet? The Rise of Mass Investment Culture in Contemporary Britain. By Amy Edwards

What makes Amy Edward’s study of the ways that finance soaked into everyday life and cultural norms in the 1980s so charming is its attention to social history. Alongside financial history, the reader is treated to a history of artifacts like the Filofax, the suits of the Yuppy, board games (The Stock Exchange Game, Ratrace), newspaper financial advice columns and their radio and TV equivalents (such as BBC’s The Money Programme). Edwards likewise draws attention to how a mass investment culture was imbued in other forms—TV dramas, sitcoms and various shows (such as The Antiques Roadshow, although curiously, not ITV’s Minder) as well as plays like Caryl Churchill’s Serious Money. But such sources are more than just charm, for Edwards is also detailing how the monetization that captured Britain and Britons was not simply a process that trickled down from the initiatives of financial elites and political ideologues. This was ground-level, popular capitalism, a culture of neoliberalism, as much as some abstract idea(s) of political economy. Edwards is thus part of the current historiographical re-thinking—see, for example, Davies, Jackson and Sutcliffe-Braithwaite’s The Neoliberal Age? (UCL Press, 2021)—of the neat and tidy narrative that nestles neoliberalism, Thatcherism and the 1980s together. And it folds developments in investing into a broader, longer narrative of consumerism—what Edwards dubs “financial consumerism.” Are We Rich yet? reads like a British version of the new histories of capitalism (Bethany Moreton, Louis Hyman and more) that emerged in the U.S. in the last decade or two. If Edwards is practicing something of a material (re)turn in cultural history, her preferred name for the field is “economic humanities.”

Progressive sovereign wealth funds

Equity and efficiency can both be promoted, under some circumstances, by means of a sovereign wealth fund that mainly invests in the world stock market and whose gains are earmarked to a social dividend. A simple overlapping generation model with a fraction of hand-to-mouth agents is developed in which the government uses public debt to create such a fund. The socially optimal size of the fund is strictly positive and determined according to a formula that can be empirically implemented. While this policy is similar to popular capitalism in aiming at a more egalitarian distribution of capital income, it is predicated on a different notion of good society.

Selling ‘The World’s Favourite Airline’: British Airways’ privatisation and the motives behind it

This article investigates the motives behind one of the earliest airline privatisations in history, that of British Airways. The British Airways privatisation experience highlights the dynamic characteristics of privatisation policymaking from the perspective of a flag carrier, including the various motives behind the sale, competing interests, and sale structuring, among other. The principal British Airways privatisation motives were reducing company borrowing, stimulating efficiency, and achieving popular capitalism. These received priority at different times given the long privatisation process. The initial motives were reducing public sector borrowing and stimulating efficiency, followed later by the aim of extending wider share ownership. Curbing union power and fostering domestic competition were not privatisation motives.

The Residents Meet the Weird

ABSTRACT The article discusses the notion of strangeness evoked by the works of the Residents. It situates the group’s unique use of the tradition of the weird beyond the Freudian uncanny and makes the case for viewing it in terms of recycling and appropriation. Understanding these practices as creative strategies allows us to view the collective’s artistic production as one driven by a contemporary poetics of repetition. It is also argued that the effects produced by their freakish, intermedial works, together with and the group’s conscious (and often ironic) handling of the laws governing the music business, reveal weird and eerie aspects of popular culture and capitalism itself.

The elimination of political demands: Ordoliberalism, the big society and the depoliticization of co-operatives

This paper focuses on the British state’s attitude towards co-operatives, focusing mainly on the Thatcher (1979–1990) and Cameron (2010–2015) governments. After the 2008 crisis, the Cameron-led government, under the umbrella of its Big Society project, developed measures to shift responsibility on British society for the development of the co-operative model as a contribution to self-help, the pursuit of economic growth and the rebuilding of social bonds. We trace the origins of these efforts to the Thatcher governments, where these attitudes towards workers’ cooperatives were consolidated. In so doing, we find the concept of ordoliberalism rather than neo-liberalism alone, particularly useful for explaining the nuances of the governments’ relationship with the cooperatives; including the symbolic backing of co-operatives for their perfect embodiment of self-help and the entrepreneurial spirit, integrating them into a social policy of total competition and economic growth and the constant legislative and financial control of state support. This exemplified and operationalized a larger governmentality later also pursued by the coalition, aimed at entrenching a competitive order and the bourgeois spirit of self-sufficiency through the deployment of the agenda of popular capitalism. Both the Thatcher and Cameron governments, in the spirit of ordoliberalism, instrumentalized cooperatives as part of a project that sought to govern through society to reshape and depoliticize it. This was an attempt to simultaneously eliminate British society’s political demands while recasting the role that the state is expected to play in social and economic policy.

TCBH Duncan Tanner Essay Prize Winner 2018 Financing the Information Age: London TeleCity, the Legacy of IT-82, and the Selling of British Telecom.

This article is a history of the privatization of British Telecom. BT's privatization occupies a central position in histories of Thatcherism as a pivotal moment in Thatcherism's ideological focus on popular capitalism. These histories, however, overlook the important intersection of financial institutions and information technology policy in shaping BT's privatization. Financial institutions in the City of London formed a lobbying group, the City Telecommunications Committee, that pressured for BT's privatization and secured preferential treatment for the City from BT, ending a decades-long policy of uniform telecommunications services across Britain. Margaret Thatcher's government positioned BT's privatization as central to the success of two of Britain's information industries, electronics manufacturing and the City of London. Her government also cast BT's privatization as essential to an 'information revolution' that, through personal, networked computing, would further personal freedom and free markets. BT's privatization thus performed two important and related functions. First, it oriented Britain's telecommunications network to the City of London's needs, and secondly, it enacted an 'information revolution' that was portrayed as essential to the success of the City of London and British electronics. I label this fusion of City finance, neoliberal politics, and British telecommunications the 'London ideology', and this ideology shaped the broadly-held assumption that privatizing telecommunications was essential to reaching the 'information age'.

King Caz: Cazenove, Thatcherism, and the 1980s financial revolution.

This article shows how elite stockbrokers Cazenove and Co. responded to the 'Big Bang' deregulation of the financial sector in 1986, using social networks and inherited practices to navigate an ostensibly technical and modernizing revolution. The Thatcher administration's reform of the London Stock Exchange was an economic enterprise intended to end restrictive practices and open the City to competition. A more open meritocratic financial sector marked the 'death of gentlemanly capitalism' and coalesced with a political agenda for entrepreneurialism and popular capitalism. Yet this case study shows how Cazenove's culture drove its strategy, that privilege and hierarchy were sustained by influential cross-sector networks, and that there was resistance to change, even though technological change and new financial instruments were embraced as part of a strategy which mixed innovation with tradition. Essentially, elite networks persisted in the 1980s deregulated economy, as established relationships were used to optimum effect and became more important after Big Bang. A more mutually supportive relationship between finance and industry than has hitherto been imagined is also demonstrated. By showing how a modernizing revolution was navigated using social networks and traditions, this article restores the role of culture to financial history. It also contributes to a body of work in twentieth-century British history which challenges the perception that neoliberal ideas were consistently applied under Thatcherism and complicates the notion of a coherent Thatcherite project.

Historiography of the Privatization Processesin Great Britain During the Reign of M. Thatcher in 1979-1990

The article summarized and systematized documentary and historiographical sources of the privatization process in the UK government in times of conservative government under Margaret Thatcher. Used different genres historiographical sources of domestic and foreign origin, memoirs, collective and individual monographs, historical essays, political biographies, articles and specialized intelligence information pressed. Based on this study the concept of historiography problem causes "neoconservative revolution", its theoretical basis, the state of the British economy for dominance keysianskoyi economic model British model of privatization of periods, forms, tools pozytive and negative side, the possibility of borrowing the British privatization experience in Ukrainian realities.
 Keywords: Historiography, neo-conservatism, monetarism, economicliberalism, Margaret Thatcher, privatisation, the «popular capitalism»

‘Financial Consumerism’: citizenship, consumerism and capital ownership in the 1980s

Popular capitalism provides a useful case study to reveal the overt mechanisms of Thatcherism as well as the concealed and coincidental. The Party’s programmes of council house sales and privatisation have rightly been understood as a central part of popular capitalism. However, Thatcherism relied on far more than just the actions of the Conservative Party alone. This article explores the role of financial institutions in creating an institutional framework which enabled the British public to engage with popular capitalism. In doing so it builds on existing work on Thatcherism as a political and cultural project by considering both the ideological and institutional mechanisms through which economic elements of Thatcherism were normalised. In particular it explores the term ‘financial consumerism’ as a useful moniker for Thatcherism which moves beyond popular capitalism and allows a consideration of wider questions about consumer society, participation and social inclusion.

‘Manufacturing Capitalists’: The Wider Share Ownership Council and the Problem of ‘Popular Capitalism’, 1958–92

‘Manufacturing Capitalists’: The Wider Share Ownership Council and the Problem of ‘Popular Capitalism’, 1958–92

Book Review: General Politics: The Official History of Privatisation, Volume II: Popular Capitalism, 1987–1997

Book Review: General Politics: The Official History of Privatisation, Volume II: Popular Capitalism, 1987–1997

De Mammona iniquitatis. Spiritually poor: the Sturzian roots of the Encyclical “Caritas in veritate” of Benedict XVI

The present work has been done for the scope of Study in honor of Professor Franco Bolognini. SUMMARY: The spirit of the present contribution: “the economics as if the person would count1” – 1. Essential notes on the “popular capitalism” in the thought of Luigi Sturzo - 2. The economical liberty and the rules’ liberalism – 3. Synthesis considerations.

The Body Electric: GE, TV, and the Reagan Brand

As host of NBC's General Electric Theater from 1954 to 1962, Ronald Reagan enacted a new relationship between popular culture, corporate capitalism, and electronic media. Through his affiliation with General Electric and the celebrity he achieved through television, Reagan played an instrumental role in promoting the re-branding of the imagined community of the American nation as a republic of consumption. This phase of Reagan's career was a crucible for the formation of his political persona and political base.

NEO-LIBERALISM AND SOCIAL POLICY

This article explores President George W. Bush's ‘ownership society’ blueprint in comparative and historical perspective. By taking the ‘ownership society’ seriously, it is possible to understand how it is rooted in the US's cultural repertoire, and how it offers a coherent neo-liberal discourse aimed at constructing the ‘need to reform’ existing social policy legacies in the sense of a greater reliance on private savings and home ownership. Although grounded in the US repertoire, President Bush's ‘ownership society’ is inspired by a foreign model: Thatcher's ‘popular capitalism’, another neo-liberal blueprint that featured a similar celebration of personal ownership. Discussing Thatcherism briefly before analysing the debate over President Bush's ‘ownership society’ in the fields of housing and pensions, this article explores the relationship between ideational processes and institutional legacies in policy-making.

Economic Sociology: The Recursive Economic System of J. S. Mill

In a recent paper, R. Ekelund and D. Walker (1996) argue that, “[i]ncentives, utilitarian principles, and the diffusion of property rights are the key to understanding Mill on the statics and dynamics of ‘equity and justice’”(p. 576). Their paper, which deals with John Stuart Mill's views on taxation, reads very much like a modern defense of popular capitalism. From the static point of view, it is imperative not to interfere with the internal relationship between economic variables and thus, distort incentives (proportional income tax). From the dynamic point of view, “inheritance taxes [are] the essential mechanism of an evolutionary change towards anefficiently functioning capitalism” (p. 578, italics added).

Saving pennies for the state. A new role for filipino migrant workers?

This article discusses the promotion of economic “reintegration” programs among migrant domestic workers in Hong Kong. The programs include training migrants in savings and investment, business planning and entrepreneurship, with the immediate aim of helping them to achieve some steady income as an alternative to continued working overseas, and the longer-term objective of channelling migrant savings into national economic development “back home.” The reintegration programs are analysed in the context of hegemonic neo-liberal or popular capitalism, which inter alia, encourages the transformation of citizens with rights into entrepreneurs who can be held responsible for their own failures. It argues that such programs discipline rather than liberate migrant workers and that despite good intentions on the part of progressive non-government organisations (NGOs), represent individualistic solutions to structural problems which may undermine campaigns like the campaign for the rights of migrant workers and their families.

Popular Capitalism and Subalternity

Popular Capitalism and Subalternity

The Idea of a Stake

This paper focuses on illuminating the idea of a stake within stakeholding discourse. To do this involves forming a prior conception of what stakeholding constitutes. Focusing on the individual strand in stakeholding, it will argue that this is best seen as left popular capitalism. Core to this is a developmental view of the self, which occurs through the possession of stakes. This philosophical anthropology conditions the form and content of what stakes are offered.

Inequality and Competitiveness

This article suggests a theoretical exploration of possible relationships between several issues normally discussed separately: the long‐standing capital/labour debate, the distinctions between popular capitalism (ie universal or very widespread shareholding) and stakeholding, poverty and inequality and the factors which promote productivity and competitiveness in firms. The author argues that the promotion of competition and its attendant increases in inequality are likely to reduce competitiveness.