Capital Success Research Articles

Containing spaces for learning through experience: A psychosocial approach to co-operation.

This paper investigates one of the fundamental differences between a co-operative undertaking and a capitalist business: democratic participatory governance as opposed to hierarchical leadership. The latter often comes across as a ‘norm’ to be taken for granted. As such, co-operation is translated into the language of ‘team work’ and ‘staff consultation’, the domains of a successful capitalist company. Participation in co-operative governance, however, is more profound than this and requires an enhanced understanding of the somatic and affective qualities behind democratic decision-making. The paper suggests that a new language might be used to describe this difference, perhaps collective governance should be regarded as a virtue that can be recognised as working beyond values, even co-operative values. A further question arises: if indeed co-operative participatory governance is about relationships among equals, how can this be taught and/or learnt beyond the hard lessons of life experience? What can educational establishments do to teach people how to participate and govern by participating? The paper suggests that possible avenues of exploration in search of an answer to these questions might lie in a psycho-social approach that is able to encourage group learning from experience.

The inclusive entrepreneurial state: collective wealth creation and distribution

Abstract This commentary explores how a new theory of value creation has implications for the distribution of that value. It argues that different theories of value creation lead to different resource allocations and different justifications for them. Thus, to achieve a more equitable distribution of value, a new theory of how that value is created in the first place is needed. This new theory should recognize that value is created collectively, not only by business but also by government and civil society. The state, while predominantly portrayed in traditional economics as a market fixer, has instead often been responsible for actively shaping and creating markets, not just fixing them. Indeed, the most successful capitalist economies have had proactive states that made risky investments, many of which led to technological revolutions. A better understanding of the state's role as a lead risk-taker and innovator (the ‘entrepreneurial state’) can thus also enable a more socially equitable distribution of value.

Stock market development: building a risk society since 1688

ABSTRACT Created by speculators in Amsterdam in 1602, and unstable ever since, stock markets have become central to economies globally, despite being recognised as a significant contributor to today’s risk society. History exposes questionable reasons for the stock market’s rise and reveals reversion to a more productive economic framework to be a way of reducing societal risk. The stock market’s spontaneous development by opportunists in London following the 1688 ‘Glorious Revolution’ spread a non-essential, localised, and speculative market to the international political economy. This precipitated London’s first Big Bang: the privatisation of the Bank of England and stock market deregulation, followed by the South Sea Bubble within thirty years. Economists subsequently embedded the market in economic theory. Keynes’ re-definition of ‘investment’ to include share trading began an ontological drift that made stock markets a hallmark of capitalism. Unlike Knight, Keynes’ concern was share-trading risk, and the uncertainty of the unknown future remains an unresolved challenge for risk analysts, speculators, and regulators, their conflicting goals militating against regulation and stability. Re-building the successful capitalist framework that was abandoned as share markets attracted unjustifiable support, remains a viable alternative to continuing centuries of efforts to manage share-trading risks and the uncertainty of an unknowable future.

“A Slave Obeys”: Capital Violence and Illusory Agency in BioShock

The video game BioShock, developed by 2K Boston, depicts a world in which a laissez-faire capitalist named Andrew Ryan creates an underwater utopia called Rapture that is devoid of institutionalized oversight and entitles all of its citizens to their own production. Despite this exceptional aspiration, the game opens to a metropolis in disrepair; it showcases the broken endgame of the objectivist paradise it critiques (Yeates, 2015). Kevin Roozen suggests, in his paper “Writing is Linked to Identity,” that finding ways to engage students in a way that promotes selfhood is the key to engaging them as a community (2016). The brand of selfhood with which modern students in western capitalistic societies are familiar is often leveraged via excessive competition, and this suggests BioShock has unique insight to offer as a pedagogical locus (Kasser and Lin, 2016). Analyzing the inter-class competition within Rapture that caused the state of dissonance between its utopian ideals and dystopian practice leads to insight into the game’s take on Randian Objectivism and class inequality, an especially salient and relevant context to consider within the context of western economies replete with increasing levels of economic disparity and unrest (“Politics of Poverty”, 2010). In this essay, I approach BioShock with a Marxist perspective, aiming to showcase the game’s depictions of the social consequences for Rapture’s proletariat and bourgeoisie as meaningful insight into real-world class warfare. An important distinction I propose the game makes is in its depictions of agency, violence, and capitalism as intrinsically interconnected—they cannot be separated and are dependent on one another, because the sociological ecosystem established by the game’s narrative insists that each element is required; in so doing, my contention is that the game should be considered not only as a pop culture artifact, but as a legitimate piece of academic criticism in the vein of Marx’s Manifesto. I conclude that, in the game’s philosophical space, to be a successful capitalist, one requires agency without restriction, and the only way to exact that agency is through violence. Through its articulation of these concepts, BioShock functions as a useful vehicle in the search for accessible introductions to various economic, philosophical, and epistemological lessons.

Capitalism, Imperialism and the Food Question

The success and failure of capitalism have been commonly measured by the yardsticks of industrialisation, technical progress and innovations in the financial markets. The emergence of industrial agriculture under successful capitalist transitions is supposed to have taken care of all food and raw material constraints that could have arrested the development of industrial economies and societies in the North. Simultaneously, the problems of underdevelopment and food insecurity in the South is attributed to internal constraints and barriers. The work of Utsa Patnaik challenges these views as she explored multiple aspects of the contribution of colonies to the advance of capital accumulation in the North. She delves into the nineteenth century ‘international division of labour’, the role of tropical food and raw materials exports by commercialised southern agriculture and implication for food security in the colonies. The objective of this article is to engage with the anti-imperial scholarship of Utsa Patnaik with a specific focus on the food question in capitalism. The article traces the evolution of the food question as capitalism evolved and dominated the world economy. JEL Codes: P1, F54, Q18

The Ethics of Yoga and the Spirit of Godmen

Abstract Drawing on Weber's classic study of religion, salvation, and the motivation to be a successful capitalist, this article problematizes the relationship among competition and the embodiment of success in the practice of yoga in modern India. Contemporary postural yoga has been popularized in ways that fetishize the body and the relation between the body and enlightenment. It has become a sign of self-realization in a mode that reflects the possibility of transcendence. So-called godmen in India, who embody this possibility, popularize yoga in different ways. Contrasting Swami Sivananda's brand of twentieth-century yoga in the context of Nehruvian modernity with Baba Ramdev's yoga as an expression of free market religious nationalism, this article examines the work that embodied competition does in different ideological contexts.

Salaried Intellectuals: Fortini, Giudici, Ottieri, Volponi, and Buzzi at the Olivetti Company

With the category of the “salaried intellectual,” this article intends to explore what it meant for twentieth-century Italian poets, novelists, and other artists to take up employment at the Olivetti company’s modern industrial factories. On the one hand, the economic and political resources of a successful capitalist enterprise seemed to offer the intellectual untold creative possibilities. But on the other hand, these resources seemed to place new limits on the exercise of critical thought, particularly for those intellectuals who aimed to challenge the rule of profit. The article theorizes the paradoxical figure of the salaried intellectual in European society, including their relation to previous analyses by Antonio Gramsci and Michel Foucault. It then offers a close reading of the critical theory and literature of five Olivetti employees: Franco Fortini, Giovanni Giudici, Ottiero Ottieri, Paolo Volponi and Giancarlo Buzzi.

The Power of Normal: Exploring the Notion of Story Structure

PHOTO: THREE-SHOTS/PIXABAY The Power of Normal Exploring the Notion of Story Structure by Nii Ayikwei Parkes As readers, we all carry prejudices, but acknowledging a wider range of normals makes the difference between “I don’t understand your normal” and “I refuse to recognize your normal.” essays A s another year gathers speed it strikes me that I have been teaching creative writing in some form or other for over a decade. In that time, I have encountered numerous theories on story structure and narrative conventions; from Gustav Freytag’s Pyramid, to Three-Act structure, to the Hollywoodadored The Writer’s Journey, by Christopher Vogler, which was itself derived from Joseph Campbell’s The Hero with a Thousand Faces, to Christopher Booker’s The Seven Basic Plots. In my own practice, I avoid teaching these analyses as guide models. Each time I refer to one of them, I make it a point to stress to my students they are not universally true and should always be challenged. My discomfort with these 3–5–7 models (as I like to call them) is not just from the absurdity of trying to distill the complexity of the world’s eternally evolving heritage of stories into single models, which invariably are littered with caveats and exceptions. No. My bigger concern is that the 3–5–7 models have largely also become foundations for exclusion of certain stories— and the focus on models is somewhat akin to the way in which global economists spend years arguing about which capitalist models work better, without giving any attention to the fact that all successful capitalist nations were built on inhumane exploitation of serfs, women, occupied lands, slaves, children—and in more recent success stories like Singapore and South Korea, WORLDLIT.ORG 35 PHOTO: FRANCESCO GATTONI essay the power of normal underpaid labor and suppression of civil liberties. Just as it is within the world of fiction, focusing on the economic models and not the historic biases and nuances is misleading. What the 3–5–7s share is the notion of the normal; the starting point and, often, the conclusion of stories are deemed as normal—what happens in-between is upheaval, the drama. Strangely, nobody seems to question the normal, but writers and storytellers from the margins will have been affected by it without the word ever being mentioned. They will have been told that their stories aren’t relatable, compelling, structured, of high enough quality, etc. And while these things may be true sometimes, often what gatekeepers, fully schooled in the 3–5–7s but not the prejudices underlying them, are saying is, “I don’t recognize your normal,” or, more authoritatively, “I refuse to recognize your normal.” So, essentially, what much of the world does is to learn the dominant normal and judge stories by that capitalized Normal. That way the focus shifts to Vogler versus Booker, or the relevance of newer perspectives from the likes of John Yorke, a former producer for the cult British soap EastEnders, whose book, Into the Woods, purports to answer the why of storytelling, and Dan Harmon’s story embryo, on which his successful TV series Community is based, that argues for eight stages: (1) a normal world, (2) a desired object, (3) entry into a new world to acquire the desired object, (4) adaptation to the new world, (5) reaching the desired object, (6) paying the price for it, and (7) returning to the normal world having (8) changed. These are all useful perspectives, but the question of What is Normal? remains unasked. It lurks in the background like any other kind of institutionalized prejudice. We all carry prejudices, but acknowledging a wider range of normals makes the difference between I don’t understand your normal and I refuse to recognize your normal. If I count my work from school magazines in Ghana, I have worked as an editor for thirty years, but in every week of those years I have encountered new variations of normal. Particularly memorable was an incident when I was working in-residence at California State University, Los Angeles. I was reading a collection of stories by a Chinese writer, Mu...

Ernesto (Che) Guevara: The Last “Heroic” Guerrilla

ABSTRACTWe take the opportunity presented by the fiftieth anniversary of the death of Che Guevara to reexamine his life and revolutionary program and the legacy he left behind. Attention is given to the formative influences that led to his introduction to Fidel Castro and his involvement in the Cuban revolution. We take a close look at the stylized theory of revolution that emerged from this experience, his reflective writings on the subject, and his subsequent attempts to generalize and apply his revolutionary model in the Congo and Bolivia. This model is critically interpreted and evaluated through the lense of his eleven month Bolivian campaign. We conclude by examining the ‘paradox’ of Che Guevara. He was a failed guerrilla who remains an iconic symbol of the revolutionary Left. He was an authentic true believer who dreamed that it might be possible to one day forge a utopian society of ‘new men’ and yet, fifty years after his death, his revolutionary project is farther away from being realized than ever. His heroic image, in the meantime, has evolved to become one of the most successful capitalist brands in history.

Современный российский капитализм: историко-генетический и мирохозяйственный аспекты

<p>Статья посвящена феномену современного российского капитализма и продолжает тему, которую автор уже поднимал в журнале «Знание. Понимание. Умение» (2016. № 4). В данной статье рассматриваются историко-генетический и мирохозяйственный аспекты современного российского капитализма.</p><p>Автор обращается к истокам явления начиная с периода экспериментов с комсомольской экономикой и номенклатурной приватизации конца 1980-х годов. Именно в этот период, как считают ряд исследователей, происходит становление основных крупных состояний современной России. Дальнейшие пути становления капитализма в России включали в себя этапы ваучерной приватизации и залоговых аукционов, в результате которых, не без помощи государства, возникли крупнейшие финансово-промышленные группы. Все эти явления (а также сегодняшний этап приватизации крупнейших государственных активов) рассматриваются в статье в контексте единой логики передельного, непроизводительного капитализма, свойственного России в большей мере, чем странам с успешной капиталистической системой (Запад, а сегодня и многие страны Восточной и Юго-Восточной Азии).</p><p>Особое внимание автор уделяет соотношению российского капитализма с мировой капиталистической системой. В статье показано, что существенной чертой российского капитализма является его периферийный характер (несамостоятельный, зависимый, эксплуатируемый). Раскрывается основной механизм эксплуатации в рамках периферийного капитализма, а также способы насаждения отсталости, к которым прибегают страны капиталистического центра. Вместе с тем в статье намечаются пути выхода российской экономики из такого зависимого положения, прежде всего через диверсификацию экономики и создание промышленного производства на новой (современной) технологической основе. Отмечается также необходимость модернизации российского общества как важной предпосылки для нормального развития бизнеса. </p>

The Time-Value of Money and the Money-Value of Time: Duration, Roundaboutness, Productivity and Time-Preference in Finance and Economics

The colloquial understanding of capital as financial-capital is after-all close to the mark, at least closer than thinking of capital as a collection of physical things. The latter is perhaps responsible for more confusion and controversy than clarity. A consideration of the role of time in production and investment decisions, as explored in this paper, brings one to the realization that capital is the result of a process of evaluation. Capital is the result of ‘capital-accounting’. It is the ability to use capital accounting that is in large part responsible for the phenomenal success of capitalism. Productive physical resources, whether natural or produced, are either never capital in this sense or else are all capital. They are never capital in their pure physical nature. But they are all different types of capital, human or non-human, when considered as a stock of potential value over time. What is the best way to think about capital? Yeager (1976) suggests that it makes sense to think of capital as a stock of ‘waiting’ whose price is the interest-rate. Some combination of D (duration) and NPV, an amalgam D-NPV may capture this idea and the subtle way in which time and value interact in economic life. Is capital (as opposed to a capital-good) a factor of production? Yes, if you consider it necessary for production to occur. Physical inputs have to be financed, in the broadest sense of that term, because they have to be deployed over time, and can be so deployed in various configurations. That is the function of capital, a valuable function, for which there is a scarcity-price, the rate-of-interest. But it is not physically measurable. As explained above, it is the result of the interplay between the time-value of money and the money-value of time so nicely captured in the concept of duration.

Institutions, innovation and industrialization: essays in economic history and development

This book brings together a group of leading economic historians to examine how institutions, innovation, and industrialization have determined the development of nations. Presented in honor of Joel Mokyr—arguably the preeminent economic historian of his generation—these wide-ranging essays address a host of core economic questions. What are the origins of markets? How do governments shape our economic fortunes? What role has entrepreneurship played in the rise and success of capitalism? Tackling these and other issues, the book looks at coercion and exchange in the markets of twelfth-century China, sovereign debt in the age of Philip II of Spain, the regulation of child labor in nineteenth-century Europe, meat provisioning in pre–Civil War New York, aircraft manufacturing before World War I, and more. The book also features an essay that surveys Mokyr’s important contributions to the field of economic history, and an essay by Mokyr himself on the origins of the Industrial Revolution. In addition to the editors, the contributors are Gergely Baics, Hoyt Bleakley, Fabio Braggion, Joyce Burnette, Louis Cain, Mauricio Drelichman, Narly Dwarkasing, Joseph Ferrie, Noel Johnson, Eric Jones, Mark Koyama, Ralf Meisenzahl, Peter Meyer, Joel Mokyr, Lyndon Moore, Cormac O Grada, Rick Szostak, Carolyn Tuttle, Karine van der Beek, Hans-Joachim Voth, and Simone Wegge.

European Venture Capital Market: Scaling Beyond Current Boundaries

This study systematically documents the perceptions of LPs, venture capitalists and entrepreneurs and their views of the trends and challenges facing the European venture capital market. The interest from LPs in European venture capital funds was found to be neutral to marginally negative because of historical returns. However, buoyancy in the supply of high quality opportunities at reasonable valuations has the potential to improve this outlook. The findings suggest that European venture capitalists still face structural barriers in the form of heterogeneous consumer preferences, improving but weak exit and fundraising environments, and the scarcity of LPs of significant size. The study revealed that successful venture capitalists tended to build scaleable businesses, either global or European which improve the potential for returns. In addition to having an aspiration to build global companies, venture capitalists with entrepreneurial, industry and investment experience with access to a rich professional network were top performers.

Kesan Pengantaraan Pengalaman Psikologi bagi Hubungan Pelbagai Kemahiran dalam Tugas Pengajaran dengan Motivasi Kerja

Tujuan – Kajian ini bertujuan meneliti hubungan langsung faktor pelbagai kemahiran dengan motivasi kerja guru. Selain itu, kajian ini juga meneliti kesan pengantaraan pengalaman-pengalaman psikologi sebagai pemboleh ubah pengantara. Metodologi – Kajian ini menggunakan reka bentuk korelasi yang melibatkan pengujian permodelan persamaan berstruktur dengan pendekatan kuantitatif, manakala kaedah tinjauan keratan rentas digunakan untuk pungutan data kajian. Responden kajian ini berjumlah 458 orang terdiri daripada kalangan guru sekolah menengah kebangsaan harian biasa di negeri Kedah. Teknik pensampelan rawak berkelompok telah digunakan untuk memilih responden kajian. Data kajian telah dianalisis dengan menggunakan Pemodelan Persamaan Berstruktur dan analisis lanjutan IBM SPSS melibatkan kaedah bootstrapping bagi kesan pengantaraan. Dapatan – Hasil kajian menunjukkan pelbagai kemahiran tidak mempunyai hubungan langsung yang signifi kan dengan motivasi kerja guru. Namun begitu, faktor pelbagai kemahiran didapati mempunyai hubungan langsung yang signifi kan dengan pengalaman kerja yang bermakna, pengalaman bertanggungjawab terhadap hasil kerja dan pengetahuan sebenar hasil kerja. Analisis selang keyakinan 95% bias diperbetulkan bagi pengalaman kerja yang bermakna, pengalaman bertanggungjawab terhadap hasil kerja dan pengetahuan sebenar hasil kerja tidak mengandungi nilai sifar menunjukkan ketiga-tiga pengalaman psikologi memberi kesan pengantaraan yang signifikan. Signifikan – Kajian ini memberi manfaat kepada penguruspengurus di sekolah dan kepimpinan pendidikan dalam merancang reka bentuk kerja guru dengan memberi tumpuan kepada pembinaan motivasi kerja melalui proses merangsang pengalaman-pengalaman psikologi guru. Dalam hal ini, pengalaman-pengalaman psikologi merupakan keberhasilan modal psikologi positif melalui penglibatan guru dalam melaksanakan tugas pengajaran. Kajian ini memberi manfaat secara langsung kepada guru dalam memahami kepentingan menggunakan pelbagai kemahiran dalam melaksanakan tugas pengajaran di sekolah.

Regional Cooperation for Whom? A Study of ASEAN–India FTA in the Context of Plantation/Tropical Products

On account of multilateral and regional integration global governance is taking over hitherto unreached spaces of policy making including internal/domestic policies of nation-states. This is undertaken with the overriding objective of facilitating global accumulation of capital. Because of the competition to woo capital, the nation-states are under pressure to favour monopoly capital even at the expense of other interests such as those of labour, environment, local capital, gender, etc. But the success of capital is fast eroding its social constituency. The spread of peoples’ movements for democracy is a sign of this growing incongruence in the system. Nation-states will be constrained by popular opinion to take positions that are not necessarily friendly to monopoly capital. But they cannot do that in isolation. They will need to build up global collective action in favour of an alternative governance system that allow democracy to recapture its meaning, and help sustain national economic habitats and the economic diversity they conserve, against the forces of devastating economic homogenization abetted by unregulated competition. The article supports the above propositions drawing evidence from the case of tropical products. It builds the case for regional cooperation for governing trade and competition as opposed to the mainstream model of unbridled competition and unregulated markets.

Farm Subsidies and Technical Change: State-Mediated Accumulation in U.S. Agriculture

What role did farm subsidies play in producing the current industrial agricultural system in the United States? This paper examines that question by using a model of the hunt for superprofits mediated by state intervention as applied to the origins of farm programs during the 1930s. The essay argues that farm programs intensified the industrialization of farm production begun in the 1920s. In doing so, state intervention—ostensibly on behalf of the family farm—increased volatility, crises, and disparity within the farm sector and encouraged the rise of capitalist agribusiness at taxpayers’ expense, situating farmers as little more than conduits for cash payments from the government. Farm subsidies created an ever more expensive and entrenched system of entitlements, along with a far-flung configuration of industries with a vested interest in their continuation, and helped secure conditions for successful industrial capitalist development in the broader economy.

Discipline and indulgence: college football, media, and the American way of life during the Cold War

The early Cold War (1947 - 1964) was a time of optimism in America. Flushed with confidence by the Second World War, many heralded the American Century and saw postwar affluence as proof that capitalism would solve want and poverty. Yet this period also filled people with anxiety. Beyond the specter of nuclear annihilation, the consumerism and affluence of capitalism's success were seen as turning the sons of pioneers into couch potatoes. In Discipline and Indulgence, Jeffrey Montez de Oca demonstrates how popular culture, especially college football, addressed capitalism's contradictions by integrating men into the economy of the Cold War as workers, warriors, and consumers. In the dawning television age, college football provided a ritual and spectacle of the American way of life that anyone could participate in from the comfort of his own home. College football formed an ethical space of patriotic pageantry where men could produce themselves as citizens of the Cold War state. Based on a theoretically sophisticated analysis of Cold War media, Discipline and Indulgence assesses the period's institutional linkage of sport, higher education, media, and militarism and finds the connections of contemporary sport media to today's War on Terror.

A grand theory of human nature and happiness

PurposeThe purpose of this paper is to offer a new theory of human nature to explain the happiness paradox of capitalism.Design/methodology/approachIt is argued that happiness crisis in capitalism stems from the lack of full understanding of human nature which is like a black box from which key assumptions in capitalist market system are derived. The author attempts to unlock this black box in order to understand the failure of capitalism in bringing happiness.FindingsAs the success of capitalism comes from its partial understanding of human nature, its failure comes from its partial misunderstanding or exploitation of human nature. This leads to ignoring the needs and desires of certain elements of human nature for the sake of serving only the animal spirit and self‐centric ego. The proposed new theory offers a new understanding of happiness and its determinants. Comparing the human body to a luxury recreational vehicle (RV) and the elements of human nature to the companions on this vehicle, the theory suggests that an individual cannot be truly happy if he or she listens only to one of his/her residents while disregarding the others. The new theory offers better explanation for the 2008 financial crisis and the happiness paradox in wealthy nations. It also provides an underlining framework for the existing happiness theories.Research limitations/implicationsThe new theory needs to be tested through empirical studies.Social implicationsThe paper theoretically argues that that authentic happiness is possible if individuals listen to the voices of all elements of human nature and try to fulfil their needs and desires in a balanced manner.Originality/valueThe paper offers a new comprehensive theory on human nature.

Capitalism, for and against: a feminist debate

Acknowledgements Part I. For Capitalism as a Feminist Ideal and Reality Ann Cudd: 1. Introduction 2. The empirical case for capitalism as an actually existing system 3. The theoretical explanation of capitalism's success 4. Feminist critiques of capitalism 5. Fetishism 6. Enlightened capitalism: a feminist capitalist manifesto Part II. Against Capitalism as Theory and as Reality Nancy Holmstrom: 7. Introduction 8. Capitalism in theory: ideals and limits 9. Capitalism in reality 10. Human interests are women's interests 11. Conclusion. What is the alternative and what should feminists do now? Part III. Responses: 12. Ann Cudd's reply to Nancy Holmstrom 13. Nancy Holmstrom's reply to Ann Cudd.

Vested interests: how American and Chinese venture capitalists view essential management skills

This paper used semi-structured interviews with 11 highly successful venture capitalists from both the United States and China to examine perceptions of the essential nature of management skills for successful technology-based small-to-medium sized venture exits. Findings suggest American VCs appear to maintain a more global management perspective, whereas Chinese VCs appear to maintain a perspective that is more China-centric, or market specific, in nature. This divergence in perceptions of essential managerial skills offers an opportunity for the convergence of understanding of universal best practices. Implications for theory and research are discussed. Such an understanding may provide critical implications for successful exits from cross border ventures.