Essential agriculture,sacrificial labor,and the COVID-19 pandemic in the US South

As farmworkers were reframed as “essential” workers during the COVID-19 pandemic, US growers demanded unfettered access to foreign farm labor. After initially announcing a freeze on all immigration processing, the Trump administration bowed to farmers' demands, granting a single exception for agricultural guestworkers under the H-2A visa program. Through a focus on H-2A farmworkers in Georgia, this paper highlights how the pandemic exacerbated farm labor conditions in the US South. The author interrogates these conditions through the lens of racial capitalism, exposing the legacies of plantation political economies and a longstanding agricultural labor system premised on devaluing racialized labor. These histories are obscured by the myth of agricultural exceptionalism—the idea that agriculture is too different and important to be subject to the same rules and regulations as other industries. Agricultural exceptionalism naturalizes the racial capitalist system and informs state responses that privilege agricultural production through the exploitation of farmworkers, remaking “essential” farmworkers as sacrificial labor.     

Cacao Capitalism and Extended Urbanization: On the Contradictory Origins of Bounded Urbanism in Nineteenth‐century Coastal Ecuador

This article challenges both contemporary and classic urban theory by analyzing the historical case of coastal Ecuador. Working from primary and secondary sources, I track the urbanization of coastal Ecuador during the long nineteenth century, when cacao exports determined not only the economic wellbeing of the city of Guayaquil, but of the entire tropical lowland region. I argue that this extended urban geography was both experienced and practiced as an unbounded economic and cultural region. As the value of cacao exports skyrocketed, capitalists in the city invested in infrastructural projects and financial instruments, divorcing money‐making from cacao production. After the Gran Incendio (great fire) of 1896, the city was rebuilt according to the ideals of modern liberal planning that further separated the city from the country symbolically, despite their continued material interconnection. This work suggests that long histories of capitalist urbanization provide material and theoretical support for critiquing bounded urban theory both past and present, by moving beyond the city and highlighting the processes undergirding spatial production under capitalist social relations. Likewise, this historical case study argues that city‐centrism, rather than being constituted epistemologically, was tied to liberal notions of the urban based on nineteenth‐century ideologies of modernization and progress.     

Cross-national differences in stakeholder management: Applying institutional theory and comparative capitalism framework

Drawing upon the research in institutional theory and comparative capitalism, the present study investigates how cross-national differences in the political, business, and economic institutional contexts of the United States, Italy, and Japan are associated with the ways in which companies in each of these countries prioritize and engage in their stakeholder engagement activities (SEAs). Using Porter and Kramer's framework, which classifies corporate social responsibility (CSR) activities as falling into four categories (good citizenship, mitigating harm from value chain, transforming value chain activities, and strategic philanthropy), we investigate how companies in the United States, Japan, and Italy prioritize and engage in these four SEAs. An analysis of data collected from 340 companies across these countries reveals that while companies in each of these three countries undertake the four types of SEAs, the prioritization and prevalence of the four types of SEAs vary from one country to the other, in ways that align with the prevailing institutional contexts of each country. The results contribute to a more nuanced understanding of why and how companies' approaches to CSR differ across countries. From a practitioner's perspective, the findings highlight the cultural specificity of CSR, implying that despite the global nature of CSR, the implementation of CSR needs to be tailored to a country's context.     

大数据与监视型资本主义

本文首先介绍了监视型资本主义的概念,描述信息时代的资本是如何通过收集个人数据,无视私隐,筛选用户,在不受法律监控的情况下进行帝国式扩展的。进而,本文提出数据的附身性和数码资本错位这两个特征,用以分析技术如何在数据收集和应用上激活数据的私人财产属性,以及资本如何利用价值错位和技术优势去诱使用户参与这一资本增值的进程。数据的附身性揭示了个体如何被卷入大数据时代的生产关系,数码资本错位揭示了资本具体实现监视型资本主义的技术。这两个概念将完善监视型资本主义这一理论体系,进一步展现这个时代隐蔽的不平等状况。     

Geographies of Algorithmic Violence: Redlining the Smart City

City governments are embracing data-driven and algorithmic planning to tackle urban problems. Data-driven analytics have an unprecedented capacity to call urban futures into being. At the same time, they can depoliticize planning decisions. I argue that this shift calls urban studies scholars to investigate geographies of algorithmic violence—a repetitive and standardized form of violence that contributes to the racialization of space and spatialization of poverty. This article examines this broader phenomenon through the case of a proprietary market value assessment that is being used to guide development in cities across the United States. The assessment employs an algorithm that helps city officials make critical decisions about which neighborhoods to target for investment, disinvestment and public service upgrades or disconnections. I argue that the racial, infrastructural, and epistemological violence associated with this evaluation can potentially lead to a new kind of municipal redlining. The article brings insights from critical race theory into conversation with critical scholarship on algorithms by analyzing how algorithmic violence works through data-driven planning technologies to depoliticize and leverage power while further entrenching racism and inequality.     

State Capitalism Revisited: A Review of Emergent Forms and Developments

Even when the neoliberal ideology of the free market was more dominant than it now is, the state was involved in economic activities that could be undertaken by private firms. State capitalism takes increasingly diverse forms, including beyond direct, partial or even indirect ownership. This paper briefly reviews some of these forms without claiming to be exhaustive as the shape state capitalism takes differs widely across the institutionalized contexts of countries. We assess state capitalism using Polanyi’s double movement framework and argue that this framework needs adaptation to novel forms of state capitalism that include, e.g., state-owned multinationals and sovereign wealth funds.     

Promotion and Coevolutionary Dynamics in Contemporary Capitalism

We characterize the dynamics of contemporary capitalist societies as emerging from the coevolution of five different subsystems: the intimate realm of individuals, the market, the state, civil society, and nature. We highlight a specific coevolution mechanism between some of these subsystems, which we call promotion. The insights from this coevolution approach are twofold. On one hand, from the ontological and heuristic perspectives, we argue that our proposal opens the possibility for constructing a general, interpretative framework in evolutionary economics. On the other hand, from a theoretical-explanatory perspective, we detect certain coevolution paths that may engender global pathologies in capitalist societies. We also suggest that future research may explore some normative implications of this approach, as well as alternative methodological strategies to develop it.     

Institutionalism,Critical Theory,and the Administered Society

Paul Krugman recently suggested that John Maynard Keynes helped economists study and resolve mass unemployment at a time when few of them could understand the problem and institutionalists seemed unable to articulate a clear policy strategy. This article responds by outlining John R. Commons' case for full employment with liberty and his three-part strategy (addressing money, people and politics) for curing joblessness while saving capitalism. Commons' argument and recommendations offer insights that extend beyond Keynesian economics in important ways, and his contributions have special relevance today in light of the recent global financial crisis and still ongoing Great Recession.     

Toward ‘Wisely Managed’ Capitalism: Post-Keynesian Institutionalism and the Creative State

Post-Keynesian Institutionalism (PKI), a synthesis of post Keynesian and institutional economics, emerged in the USA as a strand of evolutionary economics in the early 1980s and has attracted increasing attention in recent years. This article examines milestones in the development of PKI, devoting particular attention to the tradition’s conception of the role of the state. The first section identifies antecedents to PKI in the writings of John R. Commons and John Maynard Keynes. The second describes how PKI emerged against the backdrop of increasing dissatisfaction with neoclassical Keynesianism in the era of stagflation. The third summarizes the subsequent contributions of Hyman P. Minsky, whose work was a model of PKI in the 1980s and 1990s. The final two sections outline PKI’s contemporary characteristics and identify elements of an agenda for future research. PKI has always been about achieving a more humane form of capitalism, which requires the state to play a creative role in shaping economic life.