Knowing Capitalism′This is an ambitious, original, and complex treatment of key aspects of contemporary capitalism. It makes a major contribution because it profoundly destabilizes the scholarship on globalization, the so-called new economy, information technology, distinct contemporary business cultures and practices′ - Saskia Sassen, author of Globalization and its Discontents ′Nigel Thrift offers us the sort of cultural analysis of global capitalism that has long been needed - one that emphasizes the innovative energy of global capitalism. The book avoids stale denouncements and offers instead a view of capitalism as a form of practice′ Capitalism is well known for producing a form of existence where `everything solid melts into air′. But what happens when capitalism develops theories about itself? Are we moving into a condition in which capitalism can be said to possess a brain? These questions are pursued in this sparkling and thought-provoking book. Thrift looks at what he calls ′the cultural circuit of capitalism′, the mechanism for generating new theories of capitalism. The book traces the rise of this circuit back to the 1960s when a series of institutions locked together to interrogate capitalism, to the present day, when these institutions are moving out to the Pacific basin and beyond. What have these theories produced? How have they been implicated in the speculative bubbles that characterized the late twentieth century? What part have they played in developing our understanding of human relations? Building on an inter-disciplinary approach which embraces the core social sciences, Thrift outlines an exciting new theory for understanding capitalism. His book is of interest to readers in geography, social theory, anthropology and cultural economics. |
From inside the book
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... tothe power of creativity and intuition. For – asI will attempt to show –while these may be watchwords of contemporary capitalism, they are also the qualities that mustbe fostered in ordertoovercome manyof contemporary capitalism's ...
... tothe increasingly active role thatthe consumeris often expected totake. Consumers are expectedtomake more andmore extravagant investments in theactof consumption itself, through collecting, subscribing, experiencing and,in general ...
... tothe new logisticalsoftware which is ableto represent and track all the movements and communications within afirm (Amin and Cohendet, 2003). Then, there isthe appearance of new spaces of production, machines for living like ...
... to the rest of the economy, and indeed tothe worldat large.15 But perhaps the new economy's lasting legacy willprove to be theboostit gave to theunfolding ofa digital environment that has increasingly begun to constitute a kind.
... tothe ideaof capitalism as a continual struggleto releasenew formsof representation that can capture how the world is,new formsof subject that can populate the world, new forms of commodity that can hold the world in their.
Contents
The Globalization of Reflexive Business | |
Reengineering the SoulofCapitalism | |
Coauthor Kris Olds Part II The New Economy | |
The Automatic Production of Space | |
Closer to the Machine? Intelligent Environments New Forms | |
New ModelsofEveryday | |
Remembering the Technological Unconscious by Foregrounding | |
Index | |