Geoff Lightfoot

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.

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.

Placing the ‘post-social’ market: Identity and spatiality in the xeno-economy

Following Knorr Cetina and Bruegger (2002), an understanding of financial markets as ‘post-social’ environments has gained sway. This claim is premised on the idea that new technologies, in particular screen displays of complex real-time financial information, have displaced ‘the market’ from the social and economic relations in which it might otherwise be assumed to be embedded. We argue that recent historical transformations in trading and markets are better characterized as ‘re-spatializations’ involving shifts in the placing and mediation of market spatiality. Material from the City Lives project and other sources is analysed to explore the transformation of the London International Financial Futures Exchange (LIFFE) from the early 1980s onwards. Using the notion of ‘xeno-economy’ (cf. Rotman’s (1987) ‘xeno-money’) it is argued that the spatial redistributions of the market did not so much efface sociality as set up new kinds of relations between local traders and institutions, notably mediated through geographical displaced ‘trading arcades’. The immanence of modes of sociality to markets as intrinsically and necessarily social objects is thereby emphasized.

The embodiment of neoliberalism: exploring the roots and limits of the calculation of arbitrage in the entrepreneurial function

How has neoliberalism achieved its sway? We address this question by tracing an alternative history of the economic theorization of ‘entrepreneurship’ that reveals the extent to which sociological transformation is attendant upon the construction, dissemination and change of the concepts of economy. Surveying the theoretical works of luminaries such as Kirzner, Mises and Simmel and reading them alongside ethnographies of the practices that instantiate a neo-liberal world we see the ways in which entrepreneurship is fashioned, realized and ramified and, in so doing, reveal new fault lines for exploitation by those who would rather seek to escape its pernicious embrace. For it is the notion of entrepreneurship that enables both the functioning of an apparently objective market to best deploy societal resources and the continuing capture of the benefits of such by a privileged elite who seemingly bear its mark in the most vivid of terms. By unpacking entrepreneurship we unpack the market, which is a vital first step in any attempt to trammel its seemingly inevitable and unstoppable march through an otherwise undefended social.

The man in the black hat

A century after the American Frontier was closed, the cowboy remains an iconic figure. A sturdy individualism, a steely disregard for convention and the bravery to do what’s gotta be done: these are powerful tropes that seemingly define a particular type of heroism. One that seems ageless despite the disappearance of the border environment in which the fictive cowboy operated. Our aim in this paper is to explore the mythology of the cowboy as depicted in western films and fiction, demonstrating how it draws upon and develops particular kinds of individualism, sociality and morality that were first explicitly explored in the late eighteenth century. And, as theoretically‐laden icon, we examine how the cowboy continues to shape writing and thinking about individuals and organizations, specifically focussing on the works of Ayn Rand and notions of entrepreneurship.

Finance past, Finance future: A brief exploration of the evolution of financial practices

As we work our way through the latest financial crisis, politicians seem both powerless to act convincingly and unable to craft from the welter of diverse and antagonistic narratives a coherent and convincing vision of the future. In this article, we argue that a temporal lens brings clarity to such confusion, and that thinking in terms of time and reflecting on privileged temporal structures helps to highlight underlying assumptions and distinguish different narratives from one another. We begin by articulating our understanding of temporality, and we proceed to apply this to the evolution of financial practice during different historical epochs as recently delineated by Gordon (2012). We argue that the principles of finance were effectively in place by the eighteenth century and that consequent developments are best conceptualized as phases in which one particular aspect is intensified. We find that in different historical periods, the temporal intensification associated with specific models of finance shifts, over history, from the past to the present to the future. We argue that a quite idiosyncratic understanding of the future has been intensified in the present phase, what we refer to as proximal future, and we explain how this has come to be. We then consider the ethical consequences of privileging an intensification of proximal future before mapping an alternative model centred on intensifying distal future, highlighting early signs of its potential emergence in the shadows of our present.

As condições no cotidiano organizando rotinas em negócios familiares

Este artigo se baseia em uma abordagem etnografica para capturar as complexidades que envolvem o trabalho em empresas familiares. Tal abordagem nos permite concentrar na forma pela qual os gestores-proprietarios sao habilitados a construir as narrativas de suas vidas diarias, referindo-se a eventos mundanos; como eles tecem os relatos em que figuram imagens das rotinas cotidianas, como a refeicao familia, o tempo de abertura e fechamento, o trajeto da escola ou mesmo fazer livros.

Organising Destruction: A Derivative Logic?

In this article, we attempt to better understand war’s preponderance by exploring its relation to something we commonly see as ever present: the economy and the institutions of finance through which it is enacted. We delineate histories of warfare and finance, rendering our present as one of ‘war amongst the people’, in Rupert Smith’s words, in which finance is exemplified by the logic of the derivative. Through detailed examination of an infamous comment by Donald Rumsfeld, the then US Secretary of Defense, and the US Defense Department’s short-lived Policy Analysis Market, we explore the management of knowledge enabled by the derivative as emblematic of our times in both military and financial circles and draw upon the work of Randy Martin to suggest that this logic is increasingly imperial in its reach and ubiquitous in its effects, becoming in the process the key organisational technology of our times. At the core of the functioning of the derivative, we contend, in all of the domains in which we witness it at work, is an essential indifference to the underlying circumstances from which it purportedly derives, leaving us in a world in which we endlessly manage risks to our future security but at the cost of the loss of genuinely open futures worthy of our interest.

Comparative Study of the Non-Profit Sectors of Pakistan and India

This is a theoretical paper that has analysed more than 55 publications to draw comparison between Pakistan and India non-profit sectors. The two countries share their history under British rule before 1947 partition. Before the partition the non-profit sector saw a rise under different religious umbrellas, however after the partition the sectors saw a rise in nonreligious, non-political organizations in both countries. The paper draws the similarities and differences among the types of organizations, funding sources, giving, and legal framework. The paper debates the reasons for different evolutions of the sectors in post-independence era and its reasons. The findings show that both sectors evolved different due to differences in religious influence, political instability, and check and balance systems. The paper aims to contribute in depth analysis of the both sectors in the literature.

The ideology of markets and the practice of policy: objectivity, control and the objectionable

Purpose – The purpose of this paper is to briefly explore some recent curious interlocking of the ideology of markets and the practice of policy.Design/methodology/approach – This particular discursive combine has most visibly been apparent in the concatenated birth and death of the US Defense Departments so‐called “Policy Analysis Market” (PAM). Yet PAM is but the most notorious example of a more sustained and pervasive attempt to use the technologies and disciplines of markets to render policy both better informed and more amenable to control through robust and seemingly incontestable systems of accountability. Given its prominence, our way in is through a brief description of PAMs origins and demise.Findings – It is found that PAM and its similar brethren of markets for use in policy formation and judgement are less concerned with the capture of reality and more with the disciplining power of a curious “objectivity”.Originality/value – Projects such as PAM are thus not easily challengeable on grounds...