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analysis of changing forms of competition in the historical development 74 Mark Harvey of UK food supermarkets. The conclusion drawn from this analysis is that competitive processes are a result of processes of transformation wider than intra-market dynamics. Empirico-normative views of competition Leaving aside neo-classical views of ‘perfect competition’, this much acclaimed market force has attracted surprisingly few empirical ‘competition studies’ to complement those in the field of innovation. There is a wide range of conceptions of what constitutes competition
Introduction This chapter builds on the basic arguments of the two previous chapters. Money is an inherently imperfect and shifting measure of value. It is endogenous to capitalism but this is not equivalent to seeing it as ‘non-state’, because the state itself needs to be conceived as within, not without, the capitalist system as a whole. Institutional forms change how money works, and the actions of these institutions, particularly of states, matter in the sense of making a real difference not only to monetary forms but to accumulation. The next section
6 Between markets, firms and networks: constituting the cultural economy Fran Tonkiss Introduction Cultural and creative sectors have come to represent key areas of growth within a number of regional and national economies, and figure prominently within arguments regarding the increasingly ‘cultural’ character of economic processes and the restructuring of market forms. An emergent cultural economy is also of critical interest for institutional analysis, and for a number of reasons. Firstly, such an analysis addresses very clearly the need to take culture
, stabilise and decline, and it is the dynamics of these processes that are 2 Stan Metcalfe and Alan Warde central to our conception of the operation of modern capitalism. Consider the market arrangements for the food industry in the UK. In the last half century they have been transformed irrevocably as the supermarket form has displaced almost entirely a system based on centralised wholesale markets and small retail stores (Harvey et al., 2001). In the process the social, temporal and spatial nature of the activity of procuring food has also been transformed with major
the week before the June election, parties might have been expected to offer some specific proposals regarding how they aimed to lift Greece out of the crisis. Then, on 18 June, whichever parties were to form a government would have something verging on a plan to take to the Troika, regarding what the immediate and medium-term domestic policy matrix for Athens would entail. Above all else, measures to ensure economic stability and the promotion of growth were absolutely paramount, to rebuild confidence in Greece’s ability to bring about its own economic recovery
for professional football in Britain – and subsequently increasingly of the market for the broadcasting rights for professional football, including for pay-TV in the form of both subscription channels and pay-per-view on an individual match basis – have thus been purposively constructed. Over time, it has also been deliberately changed, significantly, under the influence of internal and external pressures on the game. This has taken the form of the richer clubs breaking away from the existing league structure to create their own ‘Premier’ league. It has seen media
innocuous. (There are a few exceptions, such as the theory of speculative bubbles.) Consequently it is not accidental that few economists pay specific attention to organisational forms, because in equilibrium models any organisational structure must be transparent to the basic data; and it is notable that orthodox and quasi-orthodox economists who have tried to explain why firms, as organisations, exist have taken care to isolate their explanations from the theory of production, which continues to be directly based on the supposedly fundamental data of the economy. As
governments kept privatizing, deregulating and lowering taxes. But up until 2010 neither substantially reduced their spending nor stopped trying to stimulate economic activity. They instead found alternative revenue sources and attempted to achieve economic stimuli through other more covert means. In effect, pseudo-forms of Keynesian-style demand management continued behind the scenes. Tory and Labour configurations of pseudo-Keynesianism took different forms. They emerged out of compromises between Treasury restrictions and party
: Actually we are, in the end, all of us, in show business. And let's not pretend otherwise … in the end we're there to sell copies of this magazine and therefore it has to be, if nothing else, entertaining, so it has to be made fun; if it's dull no one will buy it. These quotes illustrate clear examples of themes that ran through the conversations I had at Money Matters . The presentation of economic knowledge in an entertaining and simplified form, along with the pressure to provoke
One hundred years ago the idea of ‘the economy’ didn’t exist. Now, improving ‘the economy’ has come to be seen as one of the most important tasks facing modern societies. Politics and policymaking are increasingly conducted in the language of economics and economic logic increasingly frames how political problems are defined and addressed. The result is that crucial societal functions are outsourced to economic experts. The econocracy is about how this particular way of thinking about economies and economics has come to dominate many modern societies and its damaging consequences. We have put experts in charge but those experts are not fit for purpose.
A growing movement is arguing that we should redefine the relationship between society and economics. Across the world, students, the economists of the future, are rebelling against their education. From three members of this movement comes a book that tries to open up the black box of economic decision making to public scrutiny. We show how a particular form of economics has come to dominate in universities across the UK and has thus shaped our understanding of the economy. We document the weaknesses of this form of economics and how it has failed to address many important issues such as financial stability, environmental sustainability and inequality; and we set out a vision for how we can bring economic discussion and decision making back into the public sphere to ensure the societies of the future can flourish.