A stakeholder perspective of employee responsibilities and rights

This article offers a perspective that serves as an alternative to dealing with workplace issues within the framework of managerial capitalism. In accomplishing this, the article questions managerial capitalism by drawing from some of the same arguments used to justify it—such as those based on corporate morality, the law, notions of bureaucracy, and social construction of reality. Introducing and applying a strategy of inquiry known as deconstruction helps fulfill the underlying analysis. The result is an articulation of a stakeholder perspective of employee responsibilities and rights. This is an extended version of an Invited/Guest Paper presented to the Study Group on Employee Rights and Industrial Justice of the International Industrial Relations Research Association, at the 43rd IRRA Annual Meeting, Washington, D.C., December 27, 1990.     

Development built on crony capitalism? The case of Dangote Cement

This paper critiques the emergence of Dangote Cement as the dominant player in cement manufacturing in Nigeria. It argues that the changed economic environment General Obasanjo met when he became president of Nigeria for a second time in 1999 made it difficult for him to continue the nationalisation policies and the expansion of government involvement in several spheres of economic activity that he helped to promote in the 1970s. The realisation that this strategy, which created numerous crony capitalists, was unsustainable resulted in Obasanjo allying with Dangote and promulgating the Backward Integration Programme (BIP) for the local cement industry. This made it possible for Dangote to risk aggressive investment in the capital-intensive cement production business. This strategy achieved public good by rapidly making Nigeria, an oil rent- and import-dependent economy with enormous limestone reserves, self-sufficient in cement production.     

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.     

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.     

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。     

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.     

Commentary: New Currents in Science: The Challenge of Quality,examining the discrepancies and incongruities between Japanese techno-scientific policy and the citizens’ science movement in post-3/11 Japan

This commentary is inspired by my participation in the conference on post normal science: New Currents in Science: The Challenges of Quality, 2016, Ispra.First, I will describe Japanese commitment to PNS, which consists of a part of the long history of the Japanese response to European citizens' science/technology movement, in the framework of the introduction of Post-Normal Science in East Asia.Then I will re-examine the relationship between techno-science and democracy after 3/11 Japan, where triple disaster has radically changed the relationship between science/technology and society, and hence the very nature of Japan as a democratic society. Japan had been returning to an authoritarian state and technocratic nation in the aftermath of 3/11. As for the citizens' sphere, since 3/11, Japanese society has been badly divided; in fact, the current division of Japanese society is as bad as that of the Trumpian US.I have applied several conceptual tools to analyze this post-3/11 situation of Japan, that it was created by a combination of 'disaster capitalism' (a concept described by Naomi Klein (2008)), and 'normalcy bias'. The new political climate in post-3/11 Japan results in part from the politics of emergency, and partly from the manipulation and distortion of democracy.From the viewpoint of democracy and science, cases of thyroid cancer in Fukushima and its surroundings are a serious and even pathetically painful issue. One hundred seventy two children in and around Fukushima have already had their thyroids removed in surgical operations. But any suggestion of causality between the Fukushima incident and thyroid cancer is officially rejected. It is announced by the authority's voice that "radioactivity risk is safe, take it, because risk creates chance", like the proclamation given in the novel 1984 by George Orwell. Behind this is another historical psychology, that Japan has overcome Hiroshima and Nagasaki and made a great success in economic development. Post 3/11 Japan is judged as not a good place to discuss science and technology in a deliberate manner supported by a reasonable democracy with mutual understanding and value-free examination of techno-science in action. But, in this time of serious social divide and political populism, can PNS and a citizens' science approach now lead the way to fill in the gap? Are there any lessons from PNS that can be applied to post3/11 Japan? The question is still open.     

A ‘socialist’ economy in a capitalist world

Contending views about the ‘threats’ and ‘opportunities’ relating to China’s economic rise reflect the complex and, for many, confusing role of the state in China’s reform and development process. This in turn relates to a marked difference between China’s official perception of ‘Socialism with Chinese characteristics’ and alternative views regarding the nature of its emerging capitalist system. This glaring gap in perceptions is problematic in an increasingly globalised world, complicating debates about what China should and will do to rebalance its domestic economy how other nations should and will react to the recent surge in Chinese investment overseas. This paper reflects on these debates in the context of China’s multifaceted and ever-evolving economic system.