Jacqueline Bloom Stanfield

Where has love gone? Reciprocity, redistribution, and the Nurturance Gap

Abstract An orderly free society requires the spontaneous cooperation of its citizens. This cooperation has to be continuously instituted in the dynamic social context by caring or nurturing labor. America at present is beset by a Nurturance Gap which is evident in growing social disorder and cultural disintigration and which is observed in the loss of childhood, intimacy, civility and dignity in American society. Careful examination of the place of economy in society is necessary to uncover the roots of this malaise. This examination must be based upon a transactional analysis of the integration of labor, including caring labor, by reciprocity, redistribution and exchange.

Couples coping with dual careers: A description of flexible and rigid coping styles

Abstract This study is a qualitative examination and description of the coping styles of dual career couples. Data from in-depth couple interviews indicate two primary coping styles labeled Flexible and Rigid and discussed with reference to (1) indicators of coping style and (2) role strain. The distinguishing characteristics of this study is that couple, not individual, data are collected and analyzed to describe couple styles of coping reflecting the couples negotiated perception of coping.

The Protective Response and the Evolution of the Capitalist State

In his foreword to the new edition of Polanyi’s The Great Transformation, from which we excerpted the epigraph above, Stiglitz asserts that: economic science and economic history have come to recognize the validity of Polanyi’s key contentions. But public policy — particularly as reflected in the Washington consensus doctrines concerning how the developing world and the economies in transition should make their great transformations — seems all too often not to have done so.

Marc Tool’s Social Value Theory and the Family

The social value theory developed by Marc Tool is a useful perspective to bring to bear upon the manifold issues of family, gender, and nurturing of children at the close of the American Century (J.R. Stanfield 1992). Tool’s theory, developed on the basis of the instrumental value theory tradition of Thorstein Veblen, John Dewey, C.E. Ayres, J.F. Foster, among others, suggests that the principle of institutional adjustment is capable of clarifying the issues posed by this dramatic social change, thereby indicating the way forward to a more effective meshing of institutional practice with current social valuations and individual development.

Political Economy and the Art of Controversy

This chapter examines Galbraith’ s work in the 1950s before the monumentally important The Affluent Society (1958). The books in question are a far cry from the integrated model of mature democratic capitalism that later emerged in the trilogy consisting of that classic plus The New Industrial State (1967a) and Economics and the Public Purpose (1973a), but the mature Galbraithian vision begins to take shape. A substantial portion of the chapter is devoted to Galbraith’ s first effort at constructing a broad picture of the American economy, American Capitalism: The Concept of Countervailing Power (1956), which greatly enhanced Galbraith’ s standing outside the profession. Second, in The Great Crash (1954) Galbraith analyzed the hysterical euphoria that tends to emerge in periods of sustained economic prosperity; this interest in manias and panics was to concern and entertain him for all of his professional life. His now classic treatment of the spectacular collapse of asset values in 1929 has often been reprinted; indeed it has remained continuously in print. One suspects it is probably selling rather well of late given its pertinence to the financial excess and Great Recession of our time. Third, we take our chapter title from Economics and the Art of Controversy (1955), in which Galbraith displayed his keen appreciation of the nature of American political culture and the political context of economics.

Political Economy and the Galbraithian Legacy

These epigraphs suggest the essential legacy of John Kenneth Galbraith and the challenge he has laid before progressive modern liberals: organization, institutional change, emancipation, subordination of making a living to a life worth living, explicit confrontation of the commodity-oriented, growth-is-all culture. Attention must be paid to large organizations, the power they deploy, and its consequences. In an era of ‘ rapid and powerful social and economic transformation… [t]he transforming influence is organization’ (Galbraith, 1982a, p. 5). This will require a self-consciously critical heterodox political economy. But criticism alone is not enough, political organization must be employed to challenge the configuration of power and promote institutional change. Institutions are the pathways of human existence; present institutional tendencies or biases must be understood, criticized, and judiciously redirected.

The Political Economy of the Great Corporation

The publication in June 1967 of The New Industrial State constitutes the maturation of the Galbraithian System. In the ‘ Foreword,’ Galbraith himself compared it to The Affluent Society as a window to the house that contains it, the earlier book providing a ‘ glimpse’ into the total structure depicted in the latter. Years later, he referred to it as his ‘ principal effort in economic argument’ (Anatomy, p. xiii). The New Industrial State is the systematic expression of all of Galbraith’ s preceding works that examine the neglected problem of power and political economic structure. The works that followed it, notably the highly readable Economics and the Public Purpose (1973a), emended, but scarcely enlarged upon the essential 1967 classic. Four decades later it rewards the careful and open-minded student with a model of the concrete political economy that no other scholarly work in the postwar period approaches. Even though the specifics of the analysis must be altered to incorporate continuing change, the analytic structure remains essential reading and will likely remain so for the foreseeable future; it will remain vital until a superior interpretation of the trajectory of mature capitalism is provided.

The Political Economy of Affluence

The Affluent Society (1958a) is one of the most famous books of the twentieth century. Once he focused on American affluence, the paradox that production nonetheless remained the highest national priority came to Galbraith ‘ with the force of a thunderclap’ (Parker, 2005, p. 280). Thus one of the two major themes of the book became the impediment to progress posed by obsolescent thought or cultural or institutional lag. Galbraith’ s term for this was the conventional wisdom, an unforgettable phrase which has become ensconced in the popular idiom and is applied to any habitual interpretation of present circumstances to which its correspondence is dubious. The other major theme was that political economic thought needed to traverse this lag in order to examine the power of the great corporation in modern society and to contemplate the opportunity afforded by affluence to enhance the quality of life. In this regard, Galbraith emphasized the need to address the issue of social balance in the allocation of resources between the pubic and private sectors.

Political Economy and the Public Purpose

Joan Robinson’ s Ely lecture provides a convenient ingress to this chapter, which is primarily concerned with the third volume of Galbraith’ s trilogy, Economics and the Public Purpose. An early dissident from the neoclassical synthesis, Robinson had been very much engaged in the capital controversy between the two Cambridges (England and Massachusetts) and adamantly insisted that the neo-Keynesian interpretation of Keynes was erroneous; her epithet for those who adhered to it was the ‘ bastard Keynesians’ (Robinson, 1974; see also Gibson, 2005). Thus Robinson, literally an original Keynesian economist who was in Cambridge when Keynes was formulating The General Theory, and Galbraith, one of the earliest and staunchest American articulators of Keynes, agreed that the New Economics was critically inadequate.

Political Economy in the Conservative Hour

In this chapter we first review Galbraith’ s analysis of the failure of economic thought and policy that paved the way for the Conservative Hour. Thereafter we turn our attention to The Anatomy of Power (1983a), The Culture of Contentment (1992a), and The Good Society (1996). The first is the most focused discussion of power that Galbraith provided. It offers a taxonomy and analysis of this fundamental force in the social system. The second presents Galbraith’ s view that a new socioeconomic class dynamic has arisen, that between the relatively affluent, who tend to be politically active, and the less advantaged, who are relatively inactive politically. A vanguard of sorts are the socially concerned who seek public policy measures aimed at supporting the disadvantaged, both domestically and transnationally. Galbraith musters some optimism about the force of historical circumstance but nothing like the optimism he earlier had ascribed to the scientific-intellectual estate (The Socially Concerned Today, 1998a, pp. 30–1). The socially concerned are the sizeable minority of the affluent whose political attitudes include looking ‘ beyond personal contentment to a concern for those who do not share the comparative well-being’ (Contentment, p. 17). The Good Society is a concise discussion of Galbraith’ s vision of the guiding principles for the socially concerned.