1,721,571 research outputs found
New imperialism or new capitalism?
Full text linkOver the past century, the institution of capital and the process of its accumulation have been fundamentally transformed. By contrast, the theories that explain this institution and process have remained largely unchanged. The purpose of this paper is to address this mismatch. Using a broad brush, we outline a new, power theory of capital and accumulation. We use this theory to assess the changing meaning of the corporation and the capitalist state, the new ways in which capital gets accumulated and the specific historical trajectory of twentieth-century capitalism up to the present.arms; accumulation; capital flow; capitalism; conflict; corporation; crisis; distribution; elite; energy; finance; globalization; growth; imperialism; GPE; liberalism; Marxism; Middle East; military; national interest; neoclassical economics; neoliberalism; nomos; oil; OPEC; ownership; peace; power; profit; ruling class; security; stagflation; state; stock market; TNC; United States; US; utility; value; violence; war
Peace Will Bring the Money (השלום יביא את הכסף) Bichler, Shimshon and Nitzan, Jonathan. (1999). The Other Side. January. pp. 23-26. (Article - Magazine; Hebrew).
No full textconflict demographics globalization growth inflation Israel Middle East Palestine peace policy productivity ruling classשרידתה של הכלכלה הישראלית אינה תלויה במשחקי הריבית של פרנקל. שמשון ביכלר ויהונתן ניצן עושים סדר במושגים, וניזכרים בגעגועים בחזון המזרח התיכון החדש
Price and Income Dynamics in the Agri-Food System: A Disaggregate Perspective
Full text linkThis dissertation seeks to illuminate contemporary processes of redistribution in the agri-food sector, with particular reference to the US. It addresses the following questions: How has the rapid rise in food price instability since the turn of the twenty-first century impacted income shifts within the agri-food system? Which groups within agriculture and agribusiness benefit from high and volatile food prices and which groups have suffered amid the tumult? Are all of these groups 'price-takers' that simply respond to price signals? Or are some of them 'priceshapers' that, with varying degrees of success, actively seek to restructure the agri-food system, and the regulatory architecture that governs it, in ways that make certain price developments more likely?
Hitherto, there has been little in the way of sustained analysis of the connections between prices, power and redistribution in the agri-food system. The dissertation addresses three approaches that offer some perspective on the redistributional-power dynamics of agricultural commodity price movements: global value chains analysis, the food regime approach and the emergent international political economy literature on post-crisis commodity derivatives regulations. As the thesis argues, although these approaches offer important qualitative insights, they have yet to offer quantitative means of gauging the power-shifts between different agricultural and agribusiness groups and their connection to price-shifts between different agri-food sub-sectors.
The thesis attempts to enfold the multiple insights of the existing literature into the capital as power approach. I submit that the process of enfoldment results in an analysis that offers a rich and highly differentiated understanding of the redistributional dynamics of high and volatile agricultural commodity prices. The arguments are made in relation to the contestation within agriculture and agribusiness over perhaps the two most controversial developments within the US agri-food sector in the early twenty-first century: the diversion of grain into agrofuels production and the rise of 'excessive speculation' in agricultural derivatives markets.
The importance of these two developments is underlined by the fact that a number of scholars have attributed the sharp food price peaks in 2007-08 and 2010-11 to the influx of speculative investment in futures markets, and the general upward trend in food prices in the 2000s to the agrofuel boom. By analyzing the redistributional effects of high and volatile prices, and by examining the contestation over the course taken by agrofuels policy and commodity derivatives regulation, the dissertation outlines the winners and losers of high and volatile food prices within both agribusiness and agriculture.
[This thesis was nominated for the York University Dissertation Prize.
Going Beyond Counting First Authors in Author Co-citation Analysis
Full text linkThe present study examines one of the fundamental aspects of author co-citation analysis (ACA) - the way co-citation
counts are defined. Co-citation counting provides the data on which all subsequent statistical analyses and mappings
are based, and we compare ACA results based on two different types of co-citation counting - the traditional type that
only counts the first one among a cited work's authors on the one hand and a non-traditional type that takes into
account the first 5 authors of a cited work on the other hand. Results indicate that the picture produced through this non-traditional author co-citation counting contains more coherent author groups and is therefore considerably clearer. However, this picture represents fewer specialties in the research field being studied than that produced through the traditional first-author co-citation counting when the same number of top-ranked authors is selected and analyzed. Reasons for these effects are discussed
What Makes Hollywood Run? Capitalist Power, Risk and the Control of Social Creativity
Full text linkThis dissertation combines an interest in political economy, political theory and cinema to offer an answer about the pace of the Hollywood film business and its general modes of behaviour. More specifically, this dissertation seeks to find out how the largest Hollywood firms attempt to control social creativity such that the art of filmmaking and its related social relations under capitalism do not become financial risks in the pursuit of profit. Controlling the ways people make or watch films, the thesis argues, is an institutional facet of capitalist power. Capitalist powerthe ability to control, modify and, sometimes, limit social creation through the rights of ownershipis the foundation of capital accumulation. For the Hollywood film business, capitalist power is about the ability of business concerns to set the terms that mould the future of cinema.
The overall objective of Part I is to outline and rectify some of the methodological problems that obscure our understanding of how capital is accumulated from culture. Marxism stands as the theoretical foil for this argument. Because Marxism defines capital such that only economic activity can create value, it needs to clearly distinguish between economics and politicsyet this is a distinction it is ultimately unable to make. With this backdrop in mind, Part I introduces the capital-as-power approach and uses it as a foundation to an alternative political economic theory of capitalism. The capital-as-power approach views capital not as an economic category, but as a category of power. Consequently, this approach reframes the accumulation of capital as a power process.
Part II focuses on the Hollywood film business. It investigates how and to what extent major filmed entertainment attempts to accumulate capital by lowering its risk. The process of lowering risk has characterized Hollywoods orientation toward the social-historical character of cinema and mass culture. This push to lower risk has been most apparent since the 1980s. In recent decades, major filmed entertainment has used its oligopolistic control of distribution to institute an order of cinema based on several key strategies: saturation booking, blockbuster cinema and high-concept filmmaking
Dominant Capital and the Transformation of Korean Capitalism: From Cold War to Globalization
Full text linkAfter the 1997 financial crisis, the neo-liberal restructuring of the Korean political economy accelerated dramatically. While there is a general consensus that the reform has had negative consequences for Korean society, heated debates continue over the culprits of the 1997 crisis and the changes that followed in its wake. Major opinions have largely coalesced into two opposing camps: one, finding the cause in cronyism and the anachronistic management of the Korean chaebols, advocates market-centred economic reforms; the other, attributing the cause to the ‘unproductive’ nature of foreign financial capital, suggests that the restoration of statist development model, in which the economy is led by the state-chaebol nexus, is a better way for Korean society.
The main reason for the asymmetry between the ‘progressive’ critiques and ‘conservative’ solutions of these two theoretical camps lies in their misunderstanding of the way in which power evolves in capitalist society. Their theories, which are premised on the dichotomy between ‘politics’ and ‘economics,’ are blind to the mutual transformation of capital and the state—to the historical changes in the nature of these institutions through the commodification of power.
The central assumption of this dissertation is that it is necessary to understand the mutual transformation of capital and the state and the evolution of the capitalist ruling class in order to grasp the nature of the post-1997 social restructuring. For this purpose, it adopts Nitzan and Bichler’s perspective of capital as power. From this perspective, situating our understanding of the 1997 crisis and the post-crisis restructuring in the context of the half-century-long evolution of capitalist power in Korea and the transformation of the regimes of differential capital accumulation, this dissertation makes three interrelated arguments.
It argues, first, that the post-1997 restructuring firmly entrenched capitalization as the creorder of Korean society. Second, it argues that globalization has incorporated Korea’s dominant capital into the global structure of absentee owners through the trans-nationalization of ownership and accumulation. Lastly, it argues that the reduction of green-field investment, relative to the pre-1997 period, is to be explained by the shift of the regime of differential accumulation
What’s Love Got to Do with It? Diamonds and the Accumulation of De Beers, 1935-55
Full text linkWhat is accumulation? Visibly, accumulation is a quantitative process, demarcated in financial quantities. However, what is the meaning of those quantities? This question has been the subject of great debate within political economic thought. A new theory of accumulation, capital as power (CasP), argues that the financial quantities of accumulation express the distribution of power among the owners of capital over the qualitatively diverse, complex and mutating social order. With this dissertation, I explore the relationship between the quantities and qualities of accumulation by examining the De Beers diamond cartel, focusing on the period 1935-55. What does it mean to say ‘capital is power’ in the specific setting of the global diamond assemblage? Research and analysis led me to focus on four important relationships that De Beers had to establish, maintain and transform in its struggle for differential accumulation: with diamonds themselves; with potential and actual diamond buyers; with governments; and, with families, especially the Oppenheimer family that controlled De Beers for over 80 years
Variations on the Author
Full text link“Variations on the Author” discusses two of Eduardo Coutinho’s recent films (Um Dia na Vida, from 2010, and Últimas Conversas, posthumously released in 2015) and their contribution to the general question of documentary authorship. The director’s filmography is characterized by a consistent yet self-effacing form of authorial self-inscription: Coutinho often features as an interviewer that rather than express opinions propels discourses; an interviewer that is good at listening. This mode of self-inscription characterizes him as an author who is not expressive but who is nonetheless markedly present on the screen. In Um Dia na Vida, however, Coutinho is completely absent form the image, while Últimas Conversas, on the contrary, includes a confessional prologue that moves the director from the margins to the center of his films. This article examines the ways in which these works stand out in the filmography of a director who offers new insights into the notion of cinematic authorship
Appropriate Similarity Measures for Author Cocitation Analysis
Full text linkWe provide a number of new insights into the methodological discussion about author cocitation analysis. We first argue that the use of the Pearson correlation for measuring the similarity between authors’ cocitation profiles is not very satisfactory. We then discuss what kind of similarity measures may be used as an alternative to the Pearson correlation. We consider three similarity measures in particular. One is the well-known cosine. The other two similarity measures have not been used before in the bibliometric literature. Finally, we show by means of an example that our findings have a high practical relevance.information science;Pearson correlation;cosine;similarity measure;author cocitation analysis
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