Abstract
In this chapter I attempt to show how money—capital—and its transporter—the market—have strayed into social environments in which they are not well suited, with the result that they create considerable havoc both for the economy and for the social environments in which they lodge. Money in this way adulterates social organizations by perverting the grounds of cooperative social life. By infusing organizations with competitive struggle, finance markets undermine the conditions for making social contracts. The underlying premise is not that people are corrupt and greedy, although this may be a consequence of these unprecedentedly novel arrangements. A more certain consequence has been prevailing social unease about jobs and earnings, insurance and savings, and the stability of work organizations.
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Notes
Capital, Vol. 1, p. 193, pp. 537–541. The theory of surplus value has been criticized on various grounds. For example, Rosa Luxemburg (The Accumulation of Capital, 1951) faulted Marx for not clearly specifying the source of growing demand that capitalism requires for accumulation under conditions of constant or declining surplus value. On the other hand, David Harvey (The Limits to Capital. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1982) indicates that growing demand can be traced to the credit system, the state, and mobile capital and labor.
George J. Stiglier, The Theory of Price. New York: Macmillan Company, 1947.
The Council on Economic Priorities publishes an annual listing of companies and products, along with a rating of corporate practices. See Shopping for a Better World. 3rd ed. New York: CEP, 1991.
R. H. Coase’s essay, “The Nature of the Firm” was published in Economica 4 (November 1937) and is reprinted in The Firm, the Market, and the Law. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1988.
Op. cit., p. 7; also see Douglass C. North, Institutions, Institutional Change and Economic Performance. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990.
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Karl Polanyi, op. cit.
Stanford M. Jacoby, Employing Bureaucracy: Managers, Unions, and the Transformation of Work in American Industry, 1900–1945. New York: Columbia University Press, 1985; Michael Useem, The Inner Circle: Large Corporations and the Rise of Business Political Activity in the US. and UK. New York: Oxford University Press, 1984; John McDermott, Corporate Society: Class, Property, and Contemporary Capitalism. Boulder: Westview Press, 1991.
Recognizing the fundamental significance of the organizational form for profit making, Carnegie stated, “You can take away my steel mills, ores, railroad lines, coal, but leave me one thing and I’ll repeat my success. The one thing is organizations.” (Cited in James MacGregor Burns, The Workshop of Democracy. New York: Random House, 1985, p. 103.)
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For recent summaries, see Barry Bluestone, “The Great U-Turn Revisited: Economic Restructuring, Jobs, and the Redistribution of Earnings,” pp. 7–37 in John D. Kasarda (ed.), Jobs, Earnings, and Employment Growth Policies in the United States. Boston: Kluwer Academic Publishers, 1990.
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Analyses show that these declines are not due to cyclical trends (Gary Burtless, Earnings Inequality over the Business Cycle. Washington, DC: The Brookings Institution, 1989), or demographic change (Chris Tilly, Barry Bluestone, and Bennett Harrison, The Reasons for Increasing Wage and Salary Inequality. John W. McCormack Institute of Public Affairs Working Paper. Boston: University of Massachusetts at Boston, 1987).
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Recent accounts are described in Bryan Burrough and John Helyar, Barbarians at the Gate: The Fall of RJR Nabisco. New York: Harper & Row, 1990; and Martin Mayer, The Greatest-Ever Bank Robbery: The Collapse of the Savings and Loan Industry. New York: Charles Scribner’s, 1990.
Douglass North, op. cit.
Robert Jackall, Moral Mazes: The World of Corporate Managers. New York: Oxford University Press, 1988.
Marshall W. Meyer and Lynne G. Zucker, Failing Organizations. Newbury Park: Sage, 1989.
Fligstein, op. cit.
Stewart R. Clegg, Modern Organizations: Organization Studies in the Postmodern World. London: Sage, 1990.
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C. Curson (ed.), Flexible Patterns of Work. London: Institute of Personnel Management, 1986.
See L. Hirschhorn, Beyond Mechanization. Cambridge: MIT Press, 1984; Michael J. Piore and Charles F. Sabel, The Second Industrial Divide: Prospects for Prosperity. New York: Basic Books, 1984; Carolyn C. Perrucci, Robert Perrucci, Dena B. Targ, and Harry R. Targ, Plant Closings: International Contexts and Social Costs. New York: Aldine de Gruyter, 1988. The implications for workplace safety are discussed in Tom Dwyer, Life and Death at Work. New York: Plenum Press, 1992.
Robert B. Reich, The Next American Frontier. New York: Times Books, 1983.
Simon Kuznets, Modern Economic Growth. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1966, p. 188.
David M. Gordon, Richard Edwards, and Michael Reich, Segmented Work, Divided Workers. New York: Cambridge University Press, 1982; Robert Averitt, The Dual Economy: The Dynamics of American Industry Structure. New York: W. W. Norton, 1968; Richard C. Edwards, Contested Terrain. New York: Basic Books, 1979.
McDermott, op. cit., p. pp; Teresa A. Sullivan, “Women and Minority Workers in the New Economy,’ Work and Occupations 16 (1989): 393–415; Michael Wallace, “Brave New Workplace,” Work and Occupations 16 (1989): 363–392.
Piore and Sabel, op. cit.
Robert L. Aronson, Self-Employment: A Labor Market Perspective. Ithaca: Industrial Relations Press, 1991.
Ibid., pp. 112–114.
Jochen Blaschke, Jeremy Boissevain, Hanneke Grotenbreg, Isaac Joseph, Mirjana Morokvasic, and Robin Ward, “European Trends in Ethnic Businesses,” pp. 79–105 in Roger Waldinger, Howard Aldrich, and Robin Ward (eds.), Ethnic Entrepreneurs. Newbury Park: Sage, 1990.
See especially Jaroslav Vanek (ed.), Self-Management. Baltimore: Penguin, 1975.
See Edward Skloot, “Enterprise and Commerce in Nonprofit Organizations,” pp. 380–396 in Walter W Powell (ed.), The Nonprofit Sector. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1987.
For example, see James R. Lincoln and Arne L. Kalleberg, Culture, Control and Commitment. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988.
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(1993). The Firm and Its Contradictions. In: Social Contracts and Economic Markets. Springer, Boston, MA. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-0-585-28187-2_8
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