David Harvie

Harnessing the social: state, crisis and (Big) Society

The article analyses the UK government’s plans to create a social investment market. The Big Society as political economy is understood as a response to three aspects of a multi-faceted, global crisis: a crisis of capital accumulation; a crisis of social reproduction; and, a fiscal crisis of the state. While the neoliberal state is retreating from the sphere of social reproduction, further off-loading the costs of social reproduction onto the unwaged realms of the home and the community, it is simultaneously engaging in efforts to enable this terrain of social reproduction to be harnessed for profit. Key to this process are specific government policies, the creation of new financial institutions and instruments and the introduction of the metric of ‘social value’. Policies ostensibly aimed at resolving the crisis in ways that empower local communities actually foster further financialisation and a deepening of capitalist disciplinary logics into the social fabric.

What are we to do with feral publishers

This article examines the profits and practices of commercial journal publishers and argues for an appropriate response from the academic community.

Speaking out: How organizations value and how value organizes

‘There is no alternative!’, declared British prime minister Margaret Thatcher three decades ago. The bald statement, repeated ad nauseam, became neoliberal mantra. It seeks to universalize and naturalize an ethical framework that privileges market value to the exclusion of other values. This ethical framework—or value system—determines the way in which organizations value human actions and, hence, the way that (market) value organizes human relations—or labour. Value is the form that labour takes within the capitalist mode of production. So claimed Diane Elson in an essay published in the year of Thatcher’s election. ‘The value theory of labour’ (Elson, 1979) was an intervention into a lively Marxist debate on the ‘labour theory of value’ and the ‘law of value’. Elson was criticizing on the one hand, those who suggested that Marx’s theory of value was a proof of exploitation and, on the other, so-called Sraffians or neo-Ricardian Marxists, who sought to explain exchange-value or price magnitudes according to some quantity of (abstract) labour ‘embodied’—or ‘congealed’—within the commodity. Marx’s value theory was not a theory of price, she argued: labour magnitudes do not determine price (and nor do they determine explotation). In contrast, Elson’s approach runs not from labour to value, but from value to labour. Thus we should understand Marx’s theory as a theory of labour, a value theory of labour, a way to help us understand the way that work in capitalist societies tends to be organized and indeed imposed.

Publisher, be damned! From price gouging to the open road

All four authors are members of the Leicester school of critical management and have previously written together on academic publishing. David Harvie lectures in finance and is interested in ethical issues related to this and other matters. He is a member of The Free Association writing collective. Geoff Lightfoot lectures in entrepreneurship and has particular interests in the ideology of markets and critical accounting. Simon Lilley works on information aspects of organisation and is currently head of the School of Management at Leicester University. Kenneth Weir is interested in accounting practices, especially critical and social accounting.

Preferences, power, and the determination of working hours

Document is made available from the Journal of Economic Issues by special permission of the copyright holder, the Association for Evolutionary Economics.

Globalization? No Question! Foreign Direct Investment and Labor Commanded

Skeptics of the globalization thesis argue that most Third World countries are “virtually written off the map” (Hirst and Thompson 1999) in terms of foreign direct investment and trade. The authors reexamine the empirical evidence on international investment, drawing on the concept of labor commanded. Recalculating foreign direct investment flows in terms of labor-commanded hours instead of U.S. dollars, the authors find developing countries to be highly integrated into the global economy.

Learning and assessment in a reading group format

The purpose of this paper is to outline how a traditional learning format the reading group was used to deliver a third-year political economy module (Critique of Political Economy). We begin by outlining the module delivery which is student-centred and where assessment is via presentations. The presenter/discussant format we use mirrors that at many academic conferences. Thereafter, we consider the nature of the reading material we used (Marxs Capital (1976)) before discussing the criteria for a good text. Finally, on the basis of these experiences we consider problems and issues that emerged in the reading group format. In concluding we argue that the reading group format has much to commend it, though we would suggest it as a complement to, rather than a substitute for, the more traditional lecture/seminar approach.

Economic Well-being and British Regions: The Problem with GDP Per Capita

Abstract Economists and policy-makers often present per capita gross domestic product (GDP) as by far the most significant indicator of economic well-being. Such measures are frequently adopted in making international comparisons, constructing time-series for particular countries and in studies of regional inequality. In this paper we challenge this view using a regional analysis of 2001 data focusing upon differences between London and the south-eastern regions, in comparison to the rest of Great Britain (GB). Initially GDP per capita is decomposed into the demographic and labour-market factors which generate it. Thereafter we broaden the notion of work-time used in productivity measures to include other necessary work-related activity, namely commuting. This leads to us to construct a new indicator which we call social productivity. Our conclusion is that our decomposition and notion of social productivity are both relevant in comparisons of regional well-being; in addition such methods may be used fruitfully in international and historical contexts.