Mutuality talk in a family-owned multinational: anthropological categories & critical analyses of corporate ethicizing

This article draws on work carried out as part of a collaboration between an elite business school and a family-owned multinational corporation, concerned with promoting ‘mutuality in business’ as a new frontier of responsible capitalism. While the business school partners treated mutuality as a new principle central to an emergent ethical capitalism, the corporation claimed mutuality as a long-established value unique to their company. Both interpretations foreground a central problem in recent writing on the anthropology of business/corporations: the tension between the claim that economic life is always embedded within a moral calculus, and the shift towards increasingly ethical behaviour among many corporations. Further, recent work in the anthropology of business rejects normative evaluations of corporate ethicizing. When corporations lay claim to ethical renewal, but maintain a commitment to competition and growth, then anthropologists must balance a sympathetic engagement with corporate ethicizing, and critical engagement with growth-based strategie

Dynamic Factor Analysis for Measuring Money

Technological innovations in the financial industry pose major problems for the measurement of monetary aggregates. The authors describe work on a new measure of money that has a more satisfactory means of identifying and removing the effects of financial innovations. The new method distinguishes between the measured data (currency and deposit balances) and the underlying phenomena of interest (the intended use of money for transactions and savings). Although the classification scheme used for monetary aggregates was originally designed to provide a proxy for the phenomena of interest, it is breaking down. The authors feel it is beneficial to move to an explicit attempt to measure an index of intended use. The distinction is only a preliminary step. It provides a mechanism that allows for financial innovations to affect measured data without fundamentally altering the underlying phenomena being measured, but it does not automatically accommodate financial innovations. To achieve that step will require further work. At least intuitively, however, the focus on an explicit measurement model provides a better framework for identifying when financial innovations change the measured data. Although the work is preliminary, and there are many outstanding problems, if the approach proves successful it will result in the most fundamental reformulation in the way money is measured since the introduction of monetary aggregates half a century ago. The authors review previous methodologies and describe a dynamic factor approach that makes an explicit distinction between the measured data and the underlying phenomena. They present some preliminary estimates using simulated and real data.Econometric and statistical methods; Monetary aggregates; Monetary and financial indicators

Money and Credit Factors

The authors introduce new measures of important underlying macroeconomic phenomena that affect the financial side of the economy. These measures are calculated using the time-series factor analysis (TSFA) methodology introduced in Gilbert and Meijer (2005). The measures appear to be both more interesting and more robust to the effects of financial innovations than traditional aggregates. The general ideas set out in Gilbert and Pichette (2003) are pursued, but the improved estimation methods of TSFA are used. Furthermore, four credit aggregates are added to the components of the monetary aggregates, resulting in the possibility of extracting more common factors.Credit and credit aggregates; Monetary aggregates; Econometric and statistical methods

Book review: offshoring by John Urry

Offshoring introduces John Urry’s panoptic vision of a world in which democracy is all at sea. While the super-rich secret themselves away on extravagant treasure islands, the rest of the world is hard at work fuelling their indulgence. For Urry, the offshore world is dancing to the tune of Mont Pelerin’s neoliberal thought collective, and the 2007-08 financial crisis can be decoded as an outcome of offshore entanglements – a perfect storm in which offshore finance, unregulated energy markets, excessive consumption, and the waste it generates converged. The book’s closing chapter offers a template for ‘reshoring’, a broad project of democratic reform to be led by a ‘low carbon civil society,’ writes Paul Gilbert

Book review: the colonel who would not repent: the bangladesh war and its unquiet legacy by Salil Tripathi

In The Colonel Who Would Not Repent: The Bangladesh War and its Unquiet Legacy, journalist Salil Tripathi revisits Bangladesh’s liberation war. As a young journalist, Tripathi encountered Farooq Rahman, the unrepentant colonel who played a pivotal role in the assassination of Bangladesh’s revered independence leader Sheikh Mujibur Rahman, but who was granted indemnity in the immediate aftermath. Farooq Rahman lived freely in Dhaka, even running for president, before his eventual execution by a war crimes tribunal in 2010. How, asks Tripathi, could Bangladesh’s independence leader be revered while his killers walked free? Why did it take so long to establish a war crimes tribunal? And how might Bangladesh ‘put its blood-soaked past behind without condoning the guilty’? Review by Paul Gilbert

Book review: the radical imagination: social movement research in the age of austerity by Max Haiven and Alex Khasnabish

What is to be done in the face of crisis, when the very trope of crisis curtails our ability to imagine what might be possible, beyond a narrow horizon of diminished expectations? Max Haiven and Alex Khasnabish confront a ‘crisis of social reproduction’ shaped by the crash of 2008 and the war on terror. They find the imagination hobbled, tethered to individualized dreams of enrichment or escape from precarity. What seems to be missing from North Atlantic social movements – and society at large – is The Radical Imagination, a process of collectively envisioning alternative futures based on analyses of the root causes of social problems. Committed social researchers are tasked with ‘opening the time for the imagination’ in the landscape of perseverance that is populated by social movements caught between success and failure, writes Paul Gilbert