Author: Daniel Sidorick
Publisher: Cornell University Press
ISBN: 1501707426
Category : Business & Economics
Languages : en
Pages : 366
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Book Description
Corporations often move factories to areas where production costs, notably labor, taxes, and regulations, are sharply lower than in the original company hometowns. Not every company, however, followed this trend. One of America's most iconic firms, the Campbell Soup Company, was one such exception: it found ways to achieve low-cost production while staying in its original location, Camden, New Jersey, until 1990. The first in-depth history of the Campbell Soup Company and its workers, Condensed Capitalism is also a broader exploration of strategies that companies have used to keep costs down besides relocating to cheap labor havens: lean production, flexible labor sourcing, and uncompromising antiunionism. Daniel Sidorick's study of a classic firm that used these methods for over a century has, therefore, special relevance in current debates about capital mobility and the shifting powers of capital and labor. Sidorick focuses on the engine of the Campbell empire: the soup plants in Camden where millions of cans of food products rolled off the production line daily. It was here that management undertook massive efforts to drive down costs so that the marketing and distribution functions of the company could rely on a limitless supply of products to sell at rock-bottom prices. It was also here that thousands of soup makers struggled to gain some control over their working lives and livelihoods, countering company power with their own strong union local. Campbell's low-cost strategies and the remarkable responses these elicited from its workers tell a story vital to understanding today's global economy. Condensed Capitalism reveals these strategies and their consequences through a narrative that shows the mark of great economic and social forces on the very human stories of the people who spent their lives filling those familiar red-and-white cans.
Author: Arthur Seldon
Publisher:
ISBN: 9780255365987
Category : Capitalism
Languages : en
Pages : 85
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Book Description
In this new condensed version of his masterpiece, Capitalism, Arthur Seldon explains why, despite its apparent imperfections, the market system is infinitely preferable to the alternatives. The market system has, since the eighteenth century, brought enormous gains in living standards, in contradiction to the Marxist theories that predicted capitalism's collapse. The institution of property rights has facilitated trade and investment, whilst the price mechanism has enabled people to benefit from dispersed knowledge about individual preferences. Yet politicians, needing to win votes in the short-term, have largely failed to recognise the benefits of a market system with the minimum of government intervention. The development of the welfare state has been disastrous, almost destroying the voluntary provision of health and education, whilst creating institutions that serve producer interests at the expense of consumers. Seldon's message is clear; if capitalism is to yield its best results the political process must be confined to the minimal duties of the state. This condensed version of Capitalism includes a foreword by the late Milton Friedman, an introduction by John Blundell and Philip Booth, and commentaries by James Bartholomew and D.R. Myddelton.
Author: Andrew Bernstein
Publisher: University Press of America
ISBN: 0761849696
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 146
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Book Description
This book is a concise explanation of capitalism's moral and economic superiority to socialism, including America's current mixed-economy welfare state. This volume offers a focused, essentialized, and condensed argument ideal for the layman who admires capitalism but lacking a succinct, accessible explanation of its moral and economic virtues.
Author: Mats Ingulstad
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1317816102
Category : Business & Economics
Languages : en
Pages : 325
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Book Description
For most of the twentieth century tin was fundamental for both warfare and welfare. The importance of tin is most powerfully represented by the tin can - an invention which created a revolution in food preservation and helped feed both the armies of the great powers and the masses of the new urban society. The trouble with tin was that economically viable deposits of the metal could only be found in a few regions of the world, predominantly in the southern hemisphere, while the main centers of consumption were in the industrialized north. The tin trade was therefore a highly politically charged economy in which states and private enterprise competed and cooperated to assert control over deposits, smelters and markets. Tin provides a particularly telling illustration of how the interactions of business and governments shape the evolution of the global economic trade; the tin industry has experienced extensive state intervention during times of war, encompasses intense competition and cartelization, and has seen industry centers both thrive and fail in the wake of decolonization. The history of the international tin industry reveals the complex interactions and interdependencies between local actors and international networks, decolonization and globalization, as well as government foreign policies and entrepreneurial tactics. By highlighting the global struggles for control and the constantly shifting economic, geographical and political constellations within one specific industry, this collection of essays brings the state back into business history, and the firm into the history of international relations.
Author: Chang Kyung-Sup
Publisher: John Wiley & Sons
ISBN: 1509552901
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 208
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Book Description
Most theories of modernity are based, explicitly or implicitly, on the development of Western societies since the late medieval period, but these theories are of limited value for understanding the development of societies in Asia and other parts of the world, where the process of modernization took place under different circumstances and often in a rapid and highly compressed fashion – not over centuries but in decades. Asian societies have been propelled into modernity too, but theirs is a compressed modernity, which displays very different traits. In this important book, Chang Kyung-Sup provides a systematic account of this compressed modernity and uses it to analyse the extreme social changes, complexities and imbalances found in South Korea and other East Asian societies. While these changes enabled South Korea to modernize very quickly and achieve high levels of economic growth, they also created a society that is haunted by various developmental and civilizational costs, such as endemic generational conflicts, overloaded family responsibilities and exceptionally high suicide rates. As with other societies that have experienced compressed modernity, the South Korean “miracle” is replete with extreme and contradictory social traits. This pioneering work of the nature and consequences of compressed modernity will be of great interest to students and scholars of sociology, politics and development studies, as well as anyone interested in South Korea, Asia and postcolonial societies.
Author: Viktor Mayer-Schönberger
Publisher: Basic Books
ISBN: 0465093698
Category : Business & Economics
Languages : en
Pages : 288
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Book Description
From the New York Times bestselling author of Big Data, a prediction for how data will revolutionize the market economy and make cash, banks, and big companies obsolete In modern history, the story of capitalism has been a story of firms and financiers. That's all going to change thanks to the Big Data revolution. As Viktor Mayer-Schönberger, bestselling author of Big Data, and Thomas Ramge, who writes for The Economist, show, data is replacing money as the driver of market behavior. Big finance and big companies will be replaced by small groups and individual actors who make markets instead of making things: think Uber instead of Ford, or Airbnb instead of Hyatt. This is the dawn of the era of data capitalism. Will it be an age of prosperity or of calamity? This book provides the indispensable roadmap for securing a better future.
Author: Shoshana Zuboff
Publisher: PublicAffairs
ISBN: 1610395700
Category : Business & Economics
Languages : en
Pages : 658
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Book Description
The challenges to humanity posed by the digital future, the first detailed examination of the unprecedented form of power called "surveillance capitalism," and the quest by powerful corporations to predict and control our behavior. In this masterwork of original thinking and research, Shoshana Zuboff provides startling insights into the phenomenon that she has named surveillance capitalism. The stakes could not be higher: a global architecture of behavior modification threatens human nature in the twenty-first century just as industrial capitalism disfigured the natural world in the twentieth. Zuboff vividly brings to life the consequences as surveillance capitalism advances from Silicon Valley into every economic sector. Vast wealth and power are accumulated in ominous new "behavioral futures markets," where predictions about our behavior are bought and sold, and the production of goods and services is subordinated to a new "means of behavioral modification." The threat has shifted from a totalitarian Big Brother state to a ubiquitous digital architecture: a "Big Other" operating in the interests of surveillance capital. Here is the crucible of an unprecedented form of power marked by extreme concentrations of knowledge and free from democratic oversight. Zuboff's comprehensive and moving analysis lays bare the threats to twenty-first century society: a controlled "hive" of total connection that seduces with promises of total certainty for maximum profit -- at the expense of democracy, freedom, and our human future. With little resistance from law or society, surveillance capitalism is on the verge of dominating the social order and shaping the digital future -- if we let it.
Author: Victor D. Lippit
Publisher: Psychology Press
ISBN: 9780415273947
Category : Business & Economics
Languages : en
Pages : 216
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Book Description
This imaginative and ambitious book rethinks the nature of capitalism. Lippit, a leading heterodox economist in the USA, here delivers a comparative study of different forms of capitalism. He first critically examines the three main capitalist prototypes: * the Anglo-American, market-driven version * the welfare-state capitalism of continental Europe * the state-led capitalism of East Asia. After investigating their various intricacies, he then goes on to analyze the common weaknesses of each different strand. A provocative and stimulating read, this book will be welcomed by postgraduates and professionals in the fields of economics and political economy.
Author: Dennis C. Mueller
Publisher: OUP USA
ISBN: 0195391179
Category : Business & Economics
Languages : en
Pages : 574
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Book Description
The financial crisis that began in 2008 and its lingering aftermath have caused many intellectuals and politicians to question the virtues of capitalist systems. The 19 original essays in this handbook, written by leading scholars from Asia, North America, and Europe, analyze both the strengths and weaknesses of capitalist systems. The volume opens with essays on the historical and legal origins of capitalism. These are followed by chapters describing the nature, institutions, and advantages of capitalism: entrepreneurship, innovation, property rights, contracts, capital markets, and the modern corporation. The next set of chapters discusses the problems that can arise in capitalist systems including monopoly, principal agent problems, financial bubbles, excessive managerial compensation, and empire building through wealth-destroying mergers. Two subsequent essays examine in detail the properties of the "Asian model" of capitalism as exemplified by Japan and South Korea, and capitalist systems where ownership and control are largely separated as in the United States and United Kingdom. The handbook concludes with an essay on capitalism in the 21st century by Nobel Prize winner Edmund Phelps.
Author: Robert W. McChesney
Publisher: New Press, The
ISBN: 1595588914
Category : Computers
Languages : en
Pages : 319
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Book Description
Celebrants and skeptics alike have produced valuable analyses of the Internet's effect on us and our world, oscillating between utopian bliss and dystopian hell. But according to Robert W. McChesney, arguments on both sides fail to address the relationship between economic power and the digital world. McChesney's award-winning Rich Media, Poor Democracy skewered the assumption that a society drenched in commercial information is a democratic one. In Digital Disconnect McChesney returns to this provocative thesis in light of the advances of the digital age, incorporating capitalism into the heart of his analysis. He argues that the sharp decline in the enforcement of antitrust violations, the increase in patents on digital technology and proprietary systems, and other policies and massive indirect subsidies have made the Internet a place of numbing commercialism. A small handful of monopolies now dominate the political economy, from Google, which garners an astonishing 97 percent share of the mobile search market, to Microsoft, whose operating system is used by over 90 percent of the world's computers. This capitalistic colonization of the Internet has spurred the collapse of credible journalism, and made the Internet an unparalleled apparatus for government and corporate surveillance, and a disturbingly anti-democratic force. In Digital Disconnect Robert McChesney offers a groundbreaking analysis and critique of the Internet, urging us to reclaim the democratizing potential of the digital revolution while we still can.
