You may have to Search all our reviewed books and magazines, click the sign up button below to create a free account.
How the asset—anything that can be controlled, traded, and capitalized as a revenue stream—has become the primary basis of technoscientific capitalism. In this book, scholars from a range of disciplines argue that the asset—meaning anything that can be controlled, traded, and capitalized as a revenue stream—has become the primary basis of technoscientific capitalism. An asset can be an object or an experience, a sum of money or a life form, a patent or a bodily function. A process of assetization prevails, imposing investment and return as the key rationale, and overtaking commodification and its speculative logic. Although assets can be bought and sold, the point is to get a durable...
Do things such as performance indicators, valuation formulas, consumer tests, stock prices or financial contracts represent an external reality? Or do they rather constitute, in a performative fashion, what they refer to? The Provoked Economy tackles this question from a pragmatist angle, considering economic reality as a ceaselessly provoked reality. It takes the reader through a series of diverse empirical sites – from public administrations to stock exchanges, from investment banks to marketing facilities and business schools – in order to explore what can be seen from such a demanding standpoint. It demonstrates that descriptions of economic objects do actually produce economic objec...
What does it mean to turn something into capital? What does considering things as assets entail? What does the prevalence of an investor’s viewpoint require? What is this culture of valuation that asks that we capitalize on everything? How can we make sense of the traits, necessities and upshots of this pervasive cultural condition?This book takes the reader to an ethnographic stroll down the trail of capitalization. Start-up companies, research centers, consulting firms, state enterprises, investment banks, public administrations: the territory can certainly prove strange and disorienting at first sight, with its blurred boundaries between private appropriation and public interest, econom...
The Financial Image: Finance, Philosophy, and Contemporary Film draws on a broad range of narrative feature films, documentaries, and moving image installations in the US, Europe, and Asia. Using frameworks from contemporary philosophy and critical finance studies, the book explores how contemporary cinema has registered recent financial and economic issues. The book focuses on how filmmakers have found formal means to explore, celebrate, and critique the increasingly important role that the financial sector plays in shaping global economic, political, ethical, and social life.
This book draws on the tools of science and technology studies and economic sociology to reconceptualize the intersection of economy and technology, suggesting materiality - the idea that social existence involves not only actors and social relations but also objects - as the theoretical point of convergence.
Publisher description
An increasing number of activities in everyday life are being evaluated and experienced in terms of performance metrics. This book examines this assemblage of networks of observation -- in which all are performing and keeping score -- and their attendant emotional pathologies across various industries and occupations.
øWhen political, social, technological and economic interests, values, and perspectives interact, market order and performance become contentious issues of debate. Such Šhot� situations are becoming increasingly common and make for rich sites of resear
'Market Devices' addresses the crucial role of technical instruments in the construction of markets and explores how market devices are set to configure economic calculative capacities while observing the part they play in the marketability of goods and services.
What is the correct concept behind measures of inflation? Does money cause business activity or is it the other way around? Shall we stimulate growth by raising aggregate demand or rather by lowering taxes and thereby providing incentives to produce? Policy-relevant questions such as these are of immediate and obvious importance to the welfare of societies. The standard approach in dealing with them is to build a model, based on economic theory, answer the question for the model world and then apply the results to economic phenomena outside. Data come in, if at all, only in testing a limited number of the model's consequences. Despite some critical voices, economic methodology too has by and...