Interrogating The New Economy

"This collection challenges outdated notions of a universal worker, offering a glimpse of work organization, management, and worker militancy. It will be of value to academics and activists alike." - Pam Sugiman, Ryerson University

Interrogating the New Economy is a collection of original essays investigating the New Economy and how changes ascribed to it have impacted labour relations, access to work, and, more generally, the social and cultural experiences of work in Canada. Based on years of participatory research, sector-specific studies, and quantitative and qualitative data collection, the work accounts for the ways in which the contemporary workplace has changed but also the extent to which older forms of work organization still remain. The collection begins with an overview of the key social and economic transformations that define the New Economy. It then illustrates these transformations through examples, including essays on wine tourism, the regeneration of mining communities, the place of student workers, and changes in the public service workplace. It also addresses unions and their responses to the restructuring of work, as well as other forms of resistance.

Alternative ways of thinking, analysing and performing economic geographies have become increasingly significant in recent years, partly due to the recent financial crisis, which has had social and political consequences throughout the world. Yet there is a danger that the debate about alternatives may become simply a way of fixing global capitalism in its present crisis-ridden form. Instead, the analysis of alternative economic spaces must continue to offer a critique of the very notion of capitalism as a universal, if variable, set of social relations. This important book brings together critical analyses of alterity from across the social sciences and humanities, refining and advancing what alternative economies and polities are, how they are formed, what difficulties and problems they face, and how they might be sustained. A central theme is the need to examine critically both the material contexts and the conceptual categories deployed in the making of alternative economies.

This book is a key resource on the foundations of Marxist Media, Cultural and Communication Studies. It presents 18 contributions that show how Marx’s analyses of capitalism, the commodity, class, labour, work, exploitation, surplus-value, dialectics, crises, ideology, class struggles, and communism help us to understand media, cultural and communications in 21st century informational capitalism.

Economics is the mother tongue of public policy. It dominates our decision-making for the future, guides multi-billion-dollar investments, and shapes our responses to climate change, inequality, and other environmental and social challenges that define our times. Pity then, or more like disaster, that its fundamental ideas are centuries out of date yet are still taught in college courses worldwide and still used to address critical issues in government and business alike. That’s why it is time, says renegade economist Kate Raworth, to revise our economic thinking for the 21st century. In Doughnut Economics, she sets out seven key ways to fundamentally reframe our understanding of what economics is and does. Along the way, she points out how we can break our addiction to growth; redesign money, finance, and business to be in service to people; and create economies that are regenerative and distributive by design. Named after the now-iconic “doughnut” image that Raworth first drew to depict a sweet spot of human prosperity (an image that appealed to the Occupy Movement, the United Nations, eco-activists, and business leaders alike), Doughnut Economics offers a radically new compass for guiding global development, government policy, and corporate strategy, and sets new standards for what economic success looks like. Raworth handpicks the best emergent ideas—from ecological, behavioral, feminist, and institutional economics to complexity thinking and Earth-systems science—to address this question: How can we turn economies that need to grow, whether or not they make us thrive, into economies that make us thrive, whether or not they grow? Simple, playful, and eloquent, Doughnut Economics offers game-changing analysis and inspiration for a new generation of economic thinkers.

Understanding social media requires us to engage with the individual and collective meanings that diverse stakeholders and participants give to platforms. It also requires us to analyse how social media companies try to make profits, how and which labour creates this profit, who creates social media ideologies, and the conditions under which such ideologies emerge. In short, understanding social media means coming to grips with the relationship between culture and the economy. In this thorough study, Christian Fuchs, one of the leading analysts of the Internet and social media, delves deeply into the subject by applying the approach of cultural materialism to social media, offering readers theoretical concepts, contemporary examples, and proposed opportunities for political intervention. Culture and Economy in the Age of Social Media is the ultimate resource for anyone who wants to understand culture and the economy in an era populated by social media platforms such as Twitter, Facebook, and Google in the West and Weibo, Renren, and Baidu in the East. Updating the analysis of thinkers such as Raymond Williams, Karl Marx, Ferruccio Rossi-Landi, and Dallas W. Smythe for the 21st century, Fuchs presents a version of Marxist cultural theory and cultural materialism that allows us to critically understand social media’s influence on culture and the economy.

“[A] political economist with a gift– due to his not having forgotten his working class background– for bringing complex economic problems down to their real world implications for working people.” - Jeff Noonan Megacity Malaise documents how municipal governance, labour-management relations and public services have been transformed during the postwar period. Carlo Fanelli begins with an analysis of neoliberalism, exposing the underlying social and political causes of urban fiscal crises. Fanelli shows how municipal finances have been eroded to justify the policies of permanent austerity, which has led to a deterioration of public services and demands for concessions from civic workers based on the contention that they are unaffordable. Focusing on the post-amalgamation era at the city of Toronto, Fanelli draws on his experiences as a former city worker and trade unionist to make the case that a new municipal agenda infused with a sense of social and workplace justice is necessary to overcome mounting registers of social inequality. Alternative approaches to public policy must be rooted in a political project that challenges the continued reliance on tax cuts as a cure for nearly all of society’s social ills and municipal governance that rejects the marketization of everyday life.

Social scientists' autobiographies can yield insight into personal commitments to research agendas and the very project of social science itself. But despite the long history of life writing, sociologists have tended to view the practice with skepticism. Canadian Sociologists in the First Person is the first book to survey the Canadian sociological imagination through personal recollections. Exploring the lives and experiences of twenty contributors from across the country, this book connects the unique and shared features of their careers to broad social dynamics while providing a guide to their own research and administrative contributions to their universities, their profession, and their broader society and communities. The contributors teach in different types of institutions, are prominent in the discipline and in their specializations, and represent significant and diverse intellectual currents, political perspectives, and life and career experiences. Aiming to start a broad conversation about what social science and the academic profession look like in Canada from an insider's perspective, Canadian Sociologists in the First Person offers invaluable lessons for younger scholars as they envision a diverse sociological imagination for the twenty-first century.