Financialised Capitalism
Financialised Capitalism
To answer an exam question on this, look at it alongside the lecture about Fordism and look at the diagram. Need a basis of comparison if we are going to say if job quality has improved and control has changed – changing from what? There used to be claims that Fordism was being replaced by post-Fordism – a system of work and employment relations which was different and better in job quality than Fordism. Most people say that Fordism declined in 1970’s and by the mid-80’s, something different was emerging. But that was 25 years ago now so these claims about post-Fordism (can also be called the new economy) are old so we have 2 decades of change to evaluate.
Financialised capitalism – Since the global financial crash of 2008 we have had to adjust to the fact that we are living in a different economic system which wasn’t envisaged in the 80’s when things looked a lot more optimistic. Some of us began to argue in the last decade that it wasn’t post-Fordism that had emerged but instead, financialised capitalism. There are 2 papers about this on Myplace summarising trends; the slides we have are a summary of that paper.
Themes’ evaluating the trajectories of change – if you want to interrogate how much change has taken place then you go back to the 4 C’s (continuity, context, content, cohesiveness) with emphasis on cohesiveness. If we are going to evaluate the emergence of a new system of working employment relations then the emphasis is on the word system; system implies interconnected parts that work together to produce something that works. For someone to claim that post-Fordism has emerged as a successor to another system, they have to show it is systemic and that the various parts hang together because otherwise it wouldn’t be a system and because for a system to be effective it must generate mutual gains (more than one economic actor can benefit from a change). Systems can’t work effectively unless people feel they have a
To answer an exam question on this, look at it alongside the lecture about Fordism and look at the diagram. Need a basis of comparison if we are going to say if job quality has improved and control has changed – changing from what? There used to be claims that Fordism was being replaced by post-Fordism – a system of work and employment relations which was different and better in job quality than Fordism. Most people say that Fordism declined in 1970’s and by the mid-80’s, something different was emerging. But that was 25 years ago now so these claims about post-Fordism (can also be called the new economy) are old so we have 2 decades of change to evaluate.
Financialised capitalism – Since the global financial crash of 2008 we have had to adjust to the fact that we are living in a different economic system which wasn’t envisaged in the 80’s when things looked a lot more optimistic. Some of us began to argue in the last decade that it wasn’t post-Fordism that had emerged but instead, financialised capitalism. There are 2 papers about this on Myplace summarising trends; the slides we have are a summary of that paper.
Themes’ evaluating the trajectories of change – if you want to interrogate how much change has taken place then you go back to the 4 C’s (continuity, context, content, cohesiveness) with emphasis on cohesiveness. If we are going to evaluate the emergence of a new system of working employment relations then the emphasis is on the word system; system implies interconnected parts that work together to produce something that works. For someone to claim that post-Fordism has emerged as a successor to another system, they have to show it is systemic and that the various parts hang together because otherwise it wouldn’t be a system and because for a system to be effective it must generate mutual gains (more than one economic actor can benefit from a change). Systems can’t work effectively unless people feel they have a