Bruce Pietrykowski

You Are What You Eat: The Social Economy of the Slow Food Movement

Recent work by Schor revives concerns raised by Veblen and Hirsch over the destructive consequences of competitive consumption. In contrast, Twitchell argues that increased access to commodities as symbols of luxury signals a democratization of class and social status. Rather than playing the role of dupes, consumers are active co-conspirators in the creation and maintenance of luxury goods markets. While flawed, each of these perspectives has something important to offer to social economists interested in understanding consumption. A key question for social economists is whether material pleasure and the symbolic expression of identity through consumer goods is compatible with a more politicized, socially conscious consumption ethos. Food consumption offers a fruitful starting point for pursuing this issue. I begin by examining food and its symbolic role in identity formation. I then consider the Slow Food movement and explore the ways in which it maintains a central role for material pleasure while promoting a socially and environmentally conscious stance toward consumption.

Rebuilding the American State: Evidence from the 1940s

From the vantage point of a critical moment in the history of statebuilding in the United States, we wish to take a fresh look at questions about the resources and wherewithal of the national state. Within modern American political science, a focus on state capacity is at least as old as the landmark essay by Woodrow Wilson on “The Study of Administration” and as current as the important scholarly impulse that has revived interest in the state at a time of struggle about the size and span of the federal government. The dominant motif of these various accounts of American statebuilding has been a concern with organizational assets, which usually are assayed by their placement on a linear scale of strength and weakness.

Objectivism, Relativism and the Importance of Rhetoric for Marxist Economics

The revolution in social thought which has taken place in anthropology, sociology, history, literature and even law has been squelched in economics by both neoclassicals and Marxists. It is the purpose of this essay to show that aspects of contemporary poststructuralist and feminist theory are considerably more compatible with Marxian and neo-Marxian theory than with neoclassical thought. More important, we argue that these poststructuralist and feminist approaches, and especially their implicit theory of the relation between the individual and society, can significantly enhance Marxian economic analysis of the production process and consumer behavior by creating a richer theory of individual behavior and by expanding the Marxian conception of institutions and thus of accumulation and reproduction.

Information Technology and Commercialization of Knowledge: Corporate Universities and Class Dynamics in an Era of Technological Restructuring

It is one of the unwritten, and commonly unspoken, commonplaces lying at the root of modern academic policy that the various universities are competitors for the traffic in merchantable instruction, in much the same fashion as rival establishments in the retail trade compete for custom. Indeed, the modern department store offers afelicitous analogy, that has already been found serviceable in illustration of the American university sposition in this respect...

Beyond the Fordist/Post-Fordist Dichotomy: Working Through The Second Industrial Divide

The publication of The Second Industrial Dividehelped to initiate a sustained inquiry into the transformation of work under industrial capitalism in the late twentieth century. The argument that the breakdown of Fordist mass production ushered in a new production paradigm in the shape of flexible systems of work organization is reexamined. The dominant role of high-volume mass production and its craft-based counterpart can continue to coexist well into the future. Nevertheless, current income and employment trends appear to disadvantage the traditional blue-collar Fordist worker and industrial unions. The cause of these trends may not, however, be directly linked to skills associated with computer technology. Finally, the type of flexibility most closely associated with the work of Piore and Sabel—flexible specialization—is discussed. It is argued that flexible specialization within industrial districts that (a) foster the development of socially informed economic action and (b) constrain competitive behavior may form the basis for the creation of different employment opportunities that challenge the dominant logic of capitalist development through which flexible employment strategies are used in tandem with corporate downsizing and increased managerial control.

Exploring New Directions for Research in the Radical Political Economy of Consumption

The sphere of consumption and the behavior of consumers has been a neglected area of investigation by radical political economists. The production/consumption duality is examined with special reference to Marx. Postmodern Marxism is offered as an alternative with which to examine consumer activities. Furthermore, insights and methods of analysis from the social construction of technology (SCOT) and feminist theory are investigated. These approaches can help to reclaim the terrain of consumer behavior for heterodox economics.

FORDISM AT FORD: SPATIAL DECENTRALIZATION AND LABOR SEGMENTATION AT THE FORD MOTOR COMPANY, 1920-1950.

AbstractThe identification of a system of flexible production, with its own spatial logic, in contrast to an older system of Fordist mass production has generated much interest among economic geographers and political economists. This distinction rests on a widely accepted and rarely questioned understanding of the constituents of Fordist mass production. The leading examples of Fordist production are the Ford Motor Companys Highland Park and River Rouge plants. Contrary to this standard narrative, I suggest that the spatial logic of production at Ford included both industrial concentration and spatial decentralization of some tasks formerly centralized at both Highland Park and the Rouge. Beginning in the early 1920s, tasks were moved out of Highland Park and the Rouge and into separate Ford-owned plants known as the village industry plants. I examine neoclassical location theory through the transaction cost theory of industrial location advanced by Scott and suggest that this approach does not adequate...

Beyond Contested Exchange: The Importance of Consumption and Communication in Market Exchange

Current research on efficiency wages and transaction costs utilizes models of economic behavior that require a theory of market institutions. Yet the institutional structure of market exchange appears at odds with the neoclassical theory of markets under perfect competition. Both Samuel Bowles/Herbert Gintis and David Levine recognize this as a problem for traditional economic theory. Bowles and Gintis suggest that market power is a prerequisite for the effective utilization of resources within the capitalist enterprise. Levine identifies market exchange with the need for individuals to define for themselves a distinct way of life in order to secure the recognition of others and preserve the integrity of the self. The middle ground between a theory of market power and individual personality formation lies in the inherent social relations governing market exchange. By exploring this middle ground, market exchange can be presented as a set of communicative practices through which individual needs are shaped...

On Categories and Configurations: Further Remarks on Rebuilding the American state

“Rebuilding the American State” was written in the manner of a bozzetto : it is a sketch drawn to reshape interlocking analytical and historiographical conversations and to suggest pathways joining the era of Roosevelt to the qualities and conundrums of postwar Democratic party liberalism. We underscored the key role of what might be called the long 1940s, stretching from the economic and political crisis faced by the New Deal in 1937–38 to the election in 1952 of the first Republican president since Hoover. We claimed that institutional and policy decisions taken across a number of domains in this period coherently recast the state and, in so doing, the contours and possibilities of American politics. We argued as well that old and new institutionalist approaches to state capacity have shared an unfortunate propensity to inventory organizational resources without regard to the normative and practical policy visions that define the content of what it is the state actually is meant to accomplish. In this light, simple dichotomous distinctions between weak and strong states appear as too blunt to sharply etch our understanding of the past half-century of American political development.

Revaluing Low-Wage Work Service-Sector Skills and the Fight for 15

Labor and community activists have organized around raising wages for low-wage workers, notably through the “Fight for 15” campaign among fast food workers. This study uses skills data together with manager survey data to estimate occupational wages. Quantile regression was used to estimate a skills-based wage. The analysis provides empirical support for a US