Markets

Markets abound in media - but a media theory of markets is still emerging. Anthropology offers media archaeologies of markets, and the sociology of markets and finance unravels how contemporary financial markets have witnessed a media technological arms race. Building on such work, this volume brings together key thinkers of economic studies with German media theory, describes the central role of the media specificity of markets in new detail and inflects them in three distinct ways. Nik-Khah and Mirowski show how the denigration of human cognition and the concomitant faith in computation prevalent in contemporary market-design practices rely on neoliberal conceptions of information in markets. Schröter confronts the asymmetries and abstractions that characterize money as a medium and explores the absence of money in media. Beverungen situates these inflections and gathers further elements for a politically and historically attuned media theory of markets concerned with contemporary phenomena such as high-frequency trading and cryptocurrencies

From the open road to the high seas? Piracy, damnation and resistance in academic consumption of publishing

Armin Beverungen conducts research on how universities retain their charitable status in a market environment, and on the teaching of ethics in business schools. Steffen Böhm has a particular interest in the economics and management of sustainability. He has also founded an open access journal and an open access press, MayFlyBooks. Christopher Land works on artists and the management of their creativity

Neue Rechte und Universität

Prof. Dr. Jens Schröter, Dr. Pablo Abend und Prof. Dr. Benjamin Beil sind Herausgeber der Reihe. Die Herausgeber*innen der einzelnen Hefte sind renommierte Wissenschaftler*innen aus dem In- und Ausland. AG Siegen Denken: Pablo Abend, Armin Beverungen, Marcus Burkhardt, Timo Kaerlein, Tatjana Seitz, Nadine TahaIn dieser Ausgabe der "Navigationen" sammeln wir Ressourcen gegen die Vereinnahmung der Universität durch die so genannte Neue Rechte. Auslöser für das Themenheft sind die Geschehnisse rund um ein Seminar, das im Wintersemester 2018/19 unter dem Titel „Denken und Denken lassen. Zur Philosophie und Praxis der Meinungsfreiheit“ an der Universität Siegen angeboten wurde.Das Seminar wurde von einer Vorlesungsreihe flankiert, in der „dezidiert konservative oder rechte Denker“ eine Bühne bekamen, u.a. Marc Jongen von der AfD, und der Autor Thilo Sarrazin. Ein zentrales Anliegen dieser Ausgabe ist es, die Siegener Ereignisse zu dokumentieren, wissenschaftlich aufzuarbeiten und in verschiedenen Hinsichten zu kontextualisieren: diskursstrategisch, geographisch, historisch und politisch. Hierzu versammelt das Heft Beiträge diverser Forschungsdisziplinen – explizit auch von Vertreter*innen derjenigen Disziplinen, deren Existenzrecht von Teilen der Siegener Vortragenden in Zweifel gezogen wird. Um die Diversität der betroffenen Zugänge zu repräsentieren, sind über die Medienwissenschaft hinaus Beiträge aus der Islamwissenschaft, den Gender Studies, der Linguistik und der Soziologie im Heft vertreten

Free Labour, Social Media, Management: Challenging Marxist Organization Studies

Abstract In this paper we explore how so-called 'social media' such as Facebook challenge Marxist organization studies. We argue that understanding the role of user activity in web 2.0 business models requires a focus on 'work', understood as value productive activity, that takes place beyond waged labour in the firm. A reading of Marx on the socialization of labour highlights the emerging figure of 'free labour', which is both unpaid and uncoerced. Marxist work on the production of the 'audience commodity' provides one avenue for understanding the production of content and data by users as free labour, but this raises questions concerning the distinction between productive and unproductive labour which is central to Marx's labour theory of value. The Marxist literature on 'the becoming rent of profit' allows for a partial understanding of how the value produced by free labour is captured, thereby developing the understanding of the economic dimension of 'free labour' as unpaid. It overstates, however, the 'uncontrolled' side of 'free labour', and neglects the ways in which this work is managed so as to ensure that it is productive. We therefore call for a return to Marxist labour process analysis, albeit with an expanded focus on labour and a revised understanding of control associated with digital protocols. On this basis, a Marxist organization studies can contribute to an understanding of the political economy of digital capitalism

Editorial introduction: where is business ethics?

[Extract] Where is business ethics today? And with this, where are business ethics today? Where do we find them? Are there enough? These questions strike us today, and present us with our starting points. First of all in considering how business ethics has evolved, and what state it is in. But also, in asking where business and ethics are today and how and where they might be in the future. Starting out with these seemingly innocent questions, we face a set of somewhat more troubling questions about the location of business ethics. For some, business ethics is quite easy to locate. When seen as a business function, an academic discipline or a part of business school education, business ethics is often taken as something that obviously has a location. If business ethics is readily locatable, then it can be disciplined, generalised, taught and instituted as part of best practice and corporate strategy. But are business ethics so easily locatable? Are they a 'something' characterised by a 'thingliness' that might allow them to be taken in hand and put to use? If business ethics are not open to such reification, then we might find that ethics in business involves a basic dislocation relating to phenomenal experiences arising when things are out of place. Business ethics would then take place when, as was sensed by Hamlet, things are 'out of joint'. The experience of whistleblowers and the victims of corporate malfeasance is certainly one of deeply felt dislocation. If we find business ethics in these practices, might ethics also be found in other spaces of dislocation

Whither Marx in the Business School?

In this thesis I read critical studies of management reading Marx. I explore the inheritance of Marx in the business school through a symptomatic reading of labour process theory and critical management studies. In Part I I explore the conditions of this thesis. The university-based business school is introduced as the context in which this thesis is written, and as an institution concerned with management as object of theory and its relation to capital. I outline a symptomatic reading which explores how particular theories or problematics focus on particular objects, such as management or capital. In Part II I read works in labour process theory to demonstrate how Marx is inherited in these discourses and how labour process theory seeks to constitute a study of management within a Marxist problematic, before abandoning the Marxist problematic and establishing a new problematic of management. In Part III I read works in critical management studies to demonstrate the ways in which Marx and a problematic of management is established. Here a variety of both theoretical and political positions emerge, from a Marxism to anti-Marxism in theory, and a for and against management in politics. The symptomatic reading demonstrates that overall a particular reading of Marx leads critical studies of management away from a clear position within a Marxist problematic, to moments in which Marx is no longer read and in which capital emerges as a symptom that is not accounted for theoretically. This is followed by a return to a reading of Marx in the business school, which seeks to account once again for capital. This thesis contributes to the work of inheritance in the business school, and the conclusion points to current moments in this work, which leave the question "whither Marx in the business school?" contested

FCJ-212 Introduction to Issue 29: Computing the City

This themed issue on 'Computing the City', which emerges from a workshop with the same title held at the Centre for Digital Cultures at Leuphana University Lüneburg in 2014, focuses specifically on the development of urban ubiquitous computing, its status as media infrastructure, its complicity with logistics, as well as its contingent histories and virtual futures. The approach to computing the city taken here questions the accustomed self-description of a mediated society as a completely new infrastructure of living and dwelling. This is not yet another themed issue on the 'smart city' - as we will see below; a consideration of computing the city far exceeds the ways in which the smart city as discourse and project seeks to capture our imaginaries of future technological cities

Value Struggles in the Creative City: A ‘People’s Republic of Stokes Croft’?

In this paper we explore the case of Stokes Croft, Bristol, UK, as a neighbourhood in a city which has appropriated the discourse of the creative industries from the bottom up in order to foster its regeneration against capital’s art of rent. We show how Stokes Croft’s self-branding as a cultural quarter has led to struggles over the creative and cultural commons thus produced, which we conceptualise as value struggles where localised value practices clash with capital’s imposition of value. Our case study including two vignettes points both to the productivity of such value struggles in producing new value practices understood as commoning, as well as the limits of reproducing a common life in the face of existing financial and property regimes. Stokes Croft therefore serves as a case in point of the tragedy of the urban commons and points to potential ways of overcoming it

Whither Marx in the business school?

In this thesis I read critical studies of management reading Marx. I explore the inheritance of Marx in the business school through a symptomatic reading of labour process theory and critical management studies. In Part I I explore the conditions of this thesis. The university-based business school is introduced as the context in which this thesis is written, and as an institution concerned with management as object of theory and its relation to capital. I outline a symptomatic reading which explores how particular theories or problematics focus on particular objects, such as management or capital. In Part II I read works in labour process theory to demonstrate how Marx is inherited in these discourses and how labour process theory seeks to constitute a study of management within a Marxist problematic, before abandoning the Marxist problematic and establishing a new problematic of management. In Part III I read works in critical management studies to demonstrate the ways in which Marx and a problematic of management is established. Here a variety of both theoretical and political positions emerge, from a Marxism to anti-Marxism in theory, and a for and against management in politics. The symptomatic reading demonstrates that overall a particular reading of Marx leads critical studies of management away from a clear position within a Marxist problematic, to moments in which Marx is no longer read and in which capital emerges as a symptom that is not accounted for theoretically. This is followed by a return to a reading of Marx in the business school, which seeks to account once again for capital. This thesis contributes to the work of inheritance in the business school, and the conclusion points to current moments in this work, which leave the question "whither Marx in the business school?" contested.EThOS - Electronic Theses Online ServiceGBUnited Kingdo