Category Archives: Community members posts

Why is Northern Europe so Indebted? The Impact of Welfare on Household Debt

Posted on May 29, 2021 by Oleg Komlik

by Martino Comelli* You might think the U.S. would be world champion of household debt, yet the highest private indebtment has always been in the Nordic countries. Debt, however, takes different forms. In Scandinavia, inclusive welfare systems make debt into … Continue reading →

Posted in Community members posts, Papers | Tagged consumption, credit, debt, European Union, financialization, varieties of capitalism, welfare | Leave a comment

Race, Class and Identity Politics

Posted on April 26, 2021 by Oleg Komlik

by Kaveh Yazdani* Of late, numerous liberal, right-wing and even some leftist journalists, academics and politicians have readily embraced the prism of “leftist identity politics”. More often than not, they have done so under the cloak of liberal universalism by … Continue reading →

Posted in Community members posts | Tagged class, identity, labor, Political economy, politics, race | Leave a comment

The Paradigm Shift in Political Economy and the Failure of the Mont Pelerin ideas

Posted on March 26, 2021 by Oleg Komlik

by Vadym Syrota* The current period of socio-economic development across the globe is featured by the paradigm shift in dominant economic theory similar to the one that took place in 1970-80s. The appearance of Friedrich Hayek’s The Road to Serfdom (1944) … Continue reading →

Posted in Community members posts | Tagged institutional change, neoliberalism, policy | 2 Comments

How Capitalism Survives: Social Theory and Structural Change

Posted on February 26, 2021 by Oleg Komlik

by Francesco Boldizzoni* For as long as neoliberalism – the face that capitalism has assumed since the 1980s – has been showing signs of aging, there has been a tendency to view every crisis as a harbinger of impending epochal … Continue reading →

Posted in Books, Community members posts | Tagged capitalism, economic history, ideology, institutional change, intellectual history, Political economy, theory | 1 Comment

Trump as Messiah

Posted on January 14, 2021 by Oleg Komlik

by Ivan Light* How can they still back him? During the Trump presidency, this question arose again and again when, despite a relentless succession of failures, lies, outrages, and scandals, his voters loyally backed Trump. The question remains unanswered because, … Continue reading →

Posted in Community members posts | Tagged ‪culture, Donald Trump, entrepreneurship, politics, religion, United States | 1 Comment

Finance under state capitalism: Re-conceptualising capital markets through China’s financial transformation

Posted on December 15, 2020 by Oleg Komlik

by Johannes Petry* When one thinks of China, burgeoning capital markets – the epitomisation of free market capitalism – are certainly not the first thing that spring to mind. By 1989, capital markets did not even exist in China. But … Continue reading →

Posted in Community members posts, Papers | Tagged China, Economic Sociology, financial system, financialization, institutions, markets, Political economy, state, varieties of capitalism | 1 Comment

Towards a New Political Economy of India: the Formation of Rural Middle Classes

Posted on November 23, 2020 by Oleg Komlik

by Maryam Aslany* For observers of the developing world, the ‘middle class’ has become a key category of economic analysis and forecasting. The discussion suffers, however, from a major oversight, since it assumes that the middle class is exclusively urban. … Continue reading →

Posted in Books, Community members posts | Tagged agriculture, cultural capital, India, labor, liberalization, Middle class, stratification | Leave a comment

Human Need vs. Capitalist Greed: a Gastronomic Rebuttal of Mainstream Economics

Posted on November 10, 2020 by Oleg Komlik

by Michael Symons* “A tap of my magic wand… and all you see is money!” With this, the conjurer distracts attention from healthy bodies, happy households, wise governments, and nature. Even the actual market of bread, apples and beer disappears … Continue reading →

Posted in Books, Community members posts | Tagged ‪culture, capitalism, economics, food, history of economic thought, money, philosophy | 3 Comments

Polanyi’s Prescience: Covid-19, Market Utopianism, and the Reality of Society

Posted on October 16, 2020 by Oleg Komlik

by Margaret Somers and Fred Block * One of Karl Polanyi’s fundamental concepts is ‘the reality of society’, a term he uses in The Great Transformation (TGT) (Polanyi 1944/2001) to contest the idealised model of the autonomous self-regulating market. Modern … Continue reading →

Posted in Community members posts | Tagged ‎market‬ ‪‎fundamentalism, COVID-19, healthcare, Karl Polanyi, neoliberalism, state, United States | 2 Comments

Political Economy After Neoliberalism: A Manifesto for New Thinking

Posted on October 8, 2020 by Oleg Komlik

by Neil Fligstein and Steven Vogel* If anything could have dislodged the neoliberal doctrine of freeing the market from the government, you might have expected the coronavirus pandemic to do the trick. Of course, the same was said about the global financial … Continue reading →

Posted in Community members posts | Tagged comparative political economy, corporate governance, COVID-19, Economic Sociology, embeddedness, markets, neoliberalism, Political economy, power, shareholder value, state, varieties of capitalism | 5 Comments

Forms of Capital and Moral Legitimation of Capitalism

Posted on September 27, 2020 by Oleg Komlik

by Ivan Light* The class system routinely provides people with resources they need to enact their inherited status. These resources are Pierre Bourdieu’s four forms of capital: financial, human, cultural, and social. A coal miner’s son will not need and … Continue reading →

Posted in Books, Community members posts | Tagged capitalism, cultural capital, economic history, entrepreneurship, knowledge, morality, social capital, social networks | 1 Comment

Rethinking Central Bank Independence

Posted on August 24, 2020 by Oleg Komlik

by Vadym Syrota* Nowadays global economy faces a slightly controversial type of crisis: despite looming economic recession, states, business and households find themselves in the environment of, what The Economist called, “free money”. Central banks are to be credited for … Continue reading →

Posted in Community members posts | Tagged central banking, crisis, globalization, Political economy | 1 Comment

The Long Divorce Between the Economy and Financial Markets

Posted on July 14, 2020 by Oleg Komlik

by Ken-Hou Lin and Megan Tobias Neely* As the coronavirus spread around the world, the global economy entered a recession unprecedented in scale. The World Bank predicts a 5.2 percent economic contraction by the end of this year—the largest downturn … Continue reading →

Posted in Books, Community members posts | Tagged financial crisis, financialization, inequality, neoliberalism, United States | 4 Comments

How Did Corporations Spread CSR from the US to the Rest of the World?

Posted on May 29, 2020 by Oleg Komlik

by Rami Kaplan & Daniel Kinderman* Why do firms adopt Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR) practices? How does CSR spread across the globe? Our paper “The Business-Led Globalization of CSR” provides surprising answers to these most fundamental questions, based on the … Continue reading →

Posted in Community members posts, Papers | Tagged corporate social responsibility, corporations, diffusion, globalization, neoliberalism, United Kingdom, Venezuela | Leave a comment

“Herd Immunity” is Epidemiological Neoliberalism

Posted on April 24, 2020 by Oleg Komlik

by Isabel Frey* While most European countries are imposing lockdowns to stop the spread of the coronavirus, a few countries are opting for a different strategy: herd immunity. Instead of testing as many people as possible and implementing measures to … Continue reading →