Theme 1 Key Questions
We focus on a of linked questions which allow us to question taken for granted assumptions about private sector management and markets and to explore what it means to run a cultural economy:
1. The limits of management
If private sector management has been empowered by structural reform and the packaging of transferable management practice by consultancy, what are the consequences for the capacity of the corporate sector to generate "shareholder value" and/or pay top management much more?
2. New public management?
What are the implications of the new styles of public management for the democratic political process and for the values of transparency and accountability? More specifically, what has been lost through the attack on traditional public service and gained through new forms of public private partnership?
3. Markets and the formatting of economic subjects
To what extent does the quasi- marketisation of everything through purchaser/provider splits, futures markets etc format knowledge so that subjects can and do behave appropriately. This open question applies to experts in the financial markets as much as to ordinary households choosing between complex financial products.
4. New economy?
More than 5 years after the stock market bubble burst in spring 2000, it is time to review the 19900s in retrospect. So we can now ask what was ephemeral about the new economy madness of the later 1990s and whether fundamentals like the corporate form and labour process have been permanently changed by diogital technologies?
5. New elites
How have new business and cultural elites been created and empowered by public and private economic restructuring?. How have the relations between wealth, power, visibility and position at the top of major organisations changed in the past generation. And what does this imply about social cohesion?
The result is a cultural economy view of present day capitalism which recognises diversity because all the changes in access to capital, assets and resources over the past 25 years do not have one simple logic for work, ownership and citizenship as various social groups move along different trajectories. But, cultural economy also highlights macro process issues around financialisation and the growing influence of the capital market on firms and households over the past 30 years. Many of our inquiries explore this theme of capital market influence in different ways both in terms of the consequences for corporate behaviour and calculation in the space created by the rhetoric of value and the consequences for household behaviour and calculation in the absence of functional financial literacy. All this plays against a background of increasingly uneven distribution of income and wealth.
Theme organisation
The work of the theme will be developed via three projects, each of which will comprise a number of inquiries, with an integrative fourth project examining common concerns arising from the other projects. Follow the links to the left to view a summary of each project.