[PDF] Economy And Society Selected Writings eBook

Author : Karl Polanyi
Publisher : John Wiley & Sons
Page : 280 pages
File Size : 14,26 MB
Release : 2018-06-29
Category : Philosophy
ISBN : 1509523340

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Few figures are more crucial to understanding the upheavals of our contemporary era than Karl Polanyi. In a world riven by social and economic crises, from rising inequality to the decay of democratic institutions and profound technological disruption, Polanyi’s path-breaking account of the dynamics of market capitalism and his defence of society and nature against the dangerous tendencies of the market capitalist system are more relevant than ever. This book brings together Polanyi’s most important articles and essays to give a unique selection of his essential shorter writings, mixing classic texts with significant but previously little-known pieces. It highlights the coherence and richness of Polanyi’s theoretical and political approach, making it indispensable for understanding his overarching intellectual contribution. The volume includes his interwar writings, which deal with the world economic crisis and the socialist alternative to conservative and fascist developments; his reflection on political theory and the international situation after the war; and his comparative studies of economic institutions. Polanyi’s political writings are complemented and supported by the critique of economic determinism and what he termed ‘our obsolete market mentality’. This book is an invaluable companion to Polanyi’s masterpiece, The Great Transformation, and an essential resource for students and scholars of political economy, sociology, history and political philosophy.

Author : Talcott Parsons
Publisher : Psychology Press
Page : 348 pages
File Size : 38,91 MB
Release : 1998
Category : Business & Economics
ISBN : 9780415175272

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Annotation. Originally published in 1956.

Author : Marta Russell
Publisher : Haymarket Books
Page : 232 pages
File Size : 14,50 MB
Release : 2019-08-06
Category : Social Science
ISBN : 1608467163

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Spread out over many years and many different publications, the late author and activist Marta Russell wrote a number of groundbreaking and insightful essays on the nature of disability and oppression under capitalism. In this volume, Russell’s various essays are brought together in one place in order to provide a useful and expansive resource to those interested in better understanding the ways in which the modern phenomenon of disability is shaped by capitalist economic and social relations. The essays range in analysis from the theoretical to the topical, including but not limited to: the emergence of disability as a “human category” rooted in the rise of industrial capitalism and the transformation of the conditions of work, family, and society corresponding thereto; a critique of the shortcomings of a purely “civil rights approach” to addressing the persistence of disability oppression in the economic sphere, with a particular focus on the legacy of the Americans with Disabilities Act of 1990; an examination of the changing position of disabled people within the overall system of capitalist production utilizing the Marxist economic concepts of the reserve army of the unemployed, the labor theory of value, and the exploitation of wage-labor; the effects of neoliberal capitalist policies on the living conditions and social position of disabled people as it pertains to welfare, income assistance, health care, and other social security programs; imperialism and war as a factor in the further oppression and immiseration of disabled people within the United States and globally; and the need to build unity against the divisive tendencies which hide the common economic interest shared between disabled people and the often highly-exploited direct care workers who provide services to the former.

Author : Francesco Duina
Publisher : John Wiley & Sons
Page : 276 pages
File Size : 35,25 MB
Release : 2013-08-27
Category : Business & Economics
ISBN : 0745637639

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Institutions are central to economic life. They have a major impact on consumer preferences, the actions and processes of firms, levels of wealth and poverty in countries, the growth of international trade, and much more. Indeed, none of the preconditions for economic activity - such as the existence of buyers and sellers, recognizable goods and services, and the information we need to make choices - would be in place without institutions. Institutions, then, do more than support economic life: they enable and shape it. These insights challenge some of the most basic postulates on modern economic theory and are at the heart of many of the most exciting works in economic sociology. This book examines the role of institutions - defined as the formal and informal rules and practices that surround us as we go about our daily lives - in the economy. Illuminating complex ideas with carefully selected, vivid examples, the investigation focuses on economic activity as it unfolds at the individual, organizational, national, and international levels. This accessible and engaging book will be essential reading for students of economic sociology, and all those interested in the intimate relationship between institutions and the economy.

Author : Max Weber
Publisher : Univ of California Press
Page : 1660 pages
File Size : 24,39 MB
Release : 1978
Category : Business & Economics
ISBN : 9780520035003

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Max Weber's Economy and Society is the greatest sociological treatise written in this century. Published posthumously in Germany in the early 1920's, it has become a constitutive part of the modern sociological imagination. Economy and Society was the first strictly empirical comparison of social structures and normative orders in world-historical depth, containing the famous chapters on social action, religion, law, bureaucracy, charisma, the city, and the political community with its dimensions of class, status and power. Economy and Status is Weber's only major treatise for an educated general public. It was meant to be a broad introduction, but in its own way it is the most demanding textbook yet written by a sociologist. The precision of its definitions, the complexity of its typologies and the wealth of its historical content make the work a continuos challenge at several levels of comprehension: for the advanced undergraduate who gropes for his sense of society, for the graduate student who must develop his own analytical skills, and for the scholar who must match wits with Weber. When the long-awaited first complete English edition of Economy and Society was published in 1968, Arthur Stinchcombe wrote in the American Journal of Sociology: "My answer to the question of whether people should still start their sociological intellectual biographies with Economy and Society is yes." Reinhard Bendix noted in the American Sociological Review that the "publication of a compete English edition of Weber's most systematic work [represents] the culmination of a cultural transmission to the American setting...It will be a study-guide and compendium for years to come for all those interested in historical sociology and comparative study." In a lengthy introduction, Guenther Roth traces the intellectual prehistory of Economy and Society, the gradual emergence of its dominant themes and the nature of its internal logic. Mr. Roth is a Professor of Sociology at Columbia University. Mr. Wittich heads an economic research group at the United Nations.

Author : Pierre Bourdieu
Publisher : John Wiley & Sons
Page : 456 pages
File Size : 21,60 MB
Release : 2014-03-10
Category : Social Science
ISBN : 0745681654

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Much orthodox economic theory is based on assumptions which are treated as self-evident: supply and demand are regarded as independent entities, the individual is assumed to be a rational agent who knows his interests and how to make decisions corresponding to them, and so on. But one has only to examine an economic transaction closely, as Pierre Bourdieu does here for the buying and selling of houses, to see that these abstract assumptions cannot explain what happens in reality. As Bourdieu shows, the market is constructed by the state, which can decide, for example, whether to promote private housing or collective provision. And the individuals involved in the transaction are immersed in symbolic constructions which constitute, in a strong sense, the value of houses, neighbourhoods and towns. The abstract and illusory nature of the assumptions of orthodox economic theory has been criticised by some economists, but Bourdieu argues that we must go further. Supply, demand, the market and even the buyer and seller are products of a process of social construction, and so-called ‘economic' processes can be adequately described only by calling on sociological methods. Instead of seeing the two disciplines in antagonistic terms, it is time to recognize that sociology and economics are in fact part of a single discipline, the object of which is the analysis of social facts, of which economic transactions are in the end merely one aspect. This brilliant study by the most original sociologist of post-war France will be essential reading for students and scholars of sociology, economics, anthropology and related disciplines.

Author : Sean Patrick Adams
Publisher : Johns Hopkins University Press+ORM
Page : 449 pages
File Size : 32,24 MB
Release : 2009-12-01
Category : History
ISBN : 1421400510

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A look at the role of state policies in North-South economic divergence and in American industrial development leading up to the Civil War. In 1796, famed engineer and architect Benjamin Henry Latrobe toured the coal fields outside Richmond, Virginia, declaring enthusiastically, “Such a mine of Wealth exists, I believe, nowhere else!” With its abundant and accessible deposits, growing industries, and network of rivers and ports, Virginia stood poised to serve as the center of the young nation’s coal trade. By the middle of the nineteenth century, however, Virginia’s leadership in the American coal industry had completely unraveled while Pennsylvania, at first slow to exploit its vast reserves of anthracite and bituminous coal, had become the country’s leading producer. Sean Patrick Adams compares the political economies of coal in Virginia and Pennsylvania from the late eighteenth century through the Civil War, examining the divergent paths these two states took in developing their ample coal reserves during a critical period of American industrialization. In both cases, Adams finds, state economic policies played a major role. Virginia’s failure to exploit the rich coal fields in the western part of the state can be traced to the legislature’s overriding concern to protect and promote the interests of the agrarian, slaveholding elite of eastern Virginia. Pennsylvania’s more factious legislature enthusiastically embraced a policy of economic growth that resulted in the construction of an extensive transportation network, a statewide geological survey, and support for private investment in its coal fields. Using coal as a barometer of economic change, Old Dominion, Industrial Commonwealth addresses longstanding questions about North-South economic divergence and the role of state government in American industrial development.

Author : Albert O. Hirschman
Publisher :
Page : 0 pages
File Size : 24,58 MB
Release : 2001
Category : Democracy
ISBN : 9781890951054

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Gathered here for the first time in one volume are recent writings of interdisciplinary range, erudite sophistication, and limitless curiosity. During the last half century, Albert O. Hirschman has single-handedly redefined the scope and limits of political economy, in theory and in practice. His contributions as both a scholar and an economic advisor have definitively shaped an innovative program for social change and economic development. Gathered here for the first time in one volume are recent writings of interdisciplinary range, erudite sophistication, and limitless curiosity.In two essays on commensality and the "invention" of democracy in classical Greece, and on the workings and making of the Marshall Plan, Hirschman shows how his personal and political experience allow him to forge new connections between the past and the present, between intellectual life and lived experience. The third piece, "Trespassing," is an interview Hirschman gave in Italian in 1993, which he has translated and edited for this volume. Although in the past Hirschman has resisted autobiographical meditation, here he recounts--with frankness, humor, and insight--some of the most compelling and formative moments of his life divided between the "European" and the "American" years. Not only does he discuss how his personal experiences have shaped and influenced his thinking about economic and social development, democracy and capitalism, he also reveals the "key terms" of his scholarship--concepts he is constantly rethinking, subverting, and reinventing.

Author : Sudhir Alladi Venkatesh
Publisher : Harvard University Press
Page : 460 pages
File Size : 11,16 MB
Release : 2009-06-30
Category : Social Science
ISBN : 9780674044647

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In this revelatory book, Sudhir Venkatesh takes us into Maquis Park, a poor black neighborhood on Chicago's Southside, to explore the desperate and remarkable ways in which a community survives. The result is a dramatic narrative of individuals at work, and a rich portrait of a community. But while excavating the efforts of men and women to generate a basic livelihood for themselves and their families, Off the Books offers a devastating critique of the entrenched poverty that we so often ignore in America, and reveals how the underground economy is an inevitable response to the ghetto's appalling isolation from the rest of the country.

Author : Gareth Dale
Publisher : Polity
Page : 320 pages
File Size : 11,89 MB
Release : 2010-06-21
Category : Business & Economics
ISBN : 0745640710

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Karl Polanyi’s The Great Transformation is generally acclaimed as being among the most influential works of economic history in the twentieth century, and remains as vital in the current historical conjuncture as it was in his own. In its critique of nineteenth-century ‘market fundamentalism’ it reads as a warning to our own neoliberal age, and is widely touted as a prophetic guidebook for those who aspire to understand the causes and dynamics of global economic turbulence at the end of the 2000s. Karl Polanyi: The Limits of the Market is the first comprehensive introduction to Polanyi’s ideas and legacy. It assesses not only the texts for which he is famous – prepared during his spells in American academia – but also his journalistic articles written in his first exile in Vienna, and lectures and pamphlets from his second exile, in Britain. It provides a detailed critical analysis of The Great Transformation, but also surveys Polanyi’s seminal writings in economic anthropology, the economic history of ancient and archaic societies, and political and economic theory. Its primary source base includes interviews with Polanyi’s daughter, Kari Polanyi-Levitt, as well as the entire compass of his own published and unpublished writings in English and German. This engaging and accessible introduction to Polanyi’s thinking will appeal to students and scholars across the social sciences, providing a refreshing perspective on the roots of our current economic crisis.