‘The Leading Journal in the Field’: Destabilizing Authority in the Social Sciences of Management Peter Armstrong & Geoff Lightfoot (eds) ‘I am often told, “Don’t waste your time reading books, you’d be better off reading the leading journals in your field.†Unfortunately, the authors of this book have closely read some of those articles: examining…
Art and Contemporary Critical Practice: Reinventing Institutional Critique Gerald Raunig & Gene Ray (eds) ‘Institutional critique’ is best known through the critical practice that developed in the late 1960s and early 1970s by artists who presented radical challenges to the museum and gallery system. Since then it has been pushed in new directions by new…
Critique of Creativity: Precarity, Subjectivity and Resistance in the ‘Creative Industries’ Gerald Raunig, Gene Ray and Ulf Wuggenig (eds) Creativity is astir: reborn, re-conjured, re-branded, resurgent. The old myths of creation and creators – the hallowed labors and privileged agencies of demiurges and prime movers, of Biblical world-makers and self-fashioning artist-geniuses – are back underway,…
Teppo Eskelinen, Tuuli Hirvilammi and Juhana Venäläinen (eds.) The Nordic welfare states, despite their history of successful welfare generation, have recently experienced a penetration of capitalist market relations to ever new spheres of life. Also their failure to create ecologically sustainable welfare models has been undeniable. Simultaneously, community economies have emerged as a source of…
Ethics and Economy: After Levinas Dag G. Aasland ‘Rather than succumbing to the easy temptation to blame business leaders for anything that went wrong in recent years, Aasland looks for the remnants of good in business as such. This leads him to ask the right questions: one should, for example, not ask why a leader…
Joy Forever: The Political Economy of Social Creativity MichaÅ‚ KozÅ‚owski, Agnieszka Kurant, Jan Sowa, Krystian Szadkowski and Jakub Szreder (eds) The book published by F/SUW in cooperation with MayFly Books gathers papers based on presentations at the conference Labour of the Multitudes? Political Economy of Social Creativity, organized in Warsaw in October 2011. It…
Lacan and Organization Carl Cederström & Casper Hoedemaekers (eds) The work of Jacques Lacan has become an influential source to most disciplines of the social sciences, and is now considered a standard reference in literary theory, cultural studies and political theory. While management and organization studies has traditionally been preoccupied with questions of making corporations…
Negations: Essays in Critical Theory Herbert Marcuse Herbert Marcuse’s Negations is both a radical critique of capitalist modernity and a model of materialist dialectical thinking. In a series of essays, originally written in the period stretching from the 1930s to 1960s, Marcuse takes up the presupposed categories that have, and continue to, ground thought and…
New Lines of Alliance, New Spaces of Liberty Félix Guattari and Antonio Negri “The project: to rescue ‘communism’ from its own disrepute. Once invoked as the liberation of work through mankind’s collective creation, communism has instead stifled humanity. We who see in communism the liberation of both collective and individual possibilities must reverse that regimentation…
Monika Kostera We have been led to believe that the commons met their tragic fate because they were outdated and ineffective as a way of organizing human economic and social activity. However, this story only makes sense if we adopt a severely truncated understanding of being human, shorn of insights from psychology, sociology, or ecology….
Toni Ruuska Capitalism is ecologically irredeemable. It simply cannot be fixed. This is because capitalism is based on endless capital accumulation, entailing growth in material throughput, whereas the planet Earth is finite. From this conclusion of ecological Marxism, this book continues to theorise how capitalism is reproduced in the 21st century. It is argued that…
The Cynical Educator Ansgar Allen Ground down, disenchanted, but committed to education. Unable to quit, yet deploring everything education has become. We suffer a weakened and weakening cynicism. This cynicism exploits the last remaining educational commitments of an otherwise broken workforce, draining that workforce of its final pleasure: Revolt. Our cynicism is reactionary and conditional…
Richard Hall “The Hopeless University is a flag bearer for a collective life that is becoming more efficiently unsustainable.” Faced by the realities and lived experiences of intersecting crises, the University has become hopeless, in two respects. First, it has become a place that has no socially-useful role beyond the reproduction of capital, and has…