Private Economy

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The following gives an overview of literature on major shifts of the sphere of influence of the private economy that mark the external boundaries of the public sphere–that is, shifts in economic policy and politics that have redrawn the boundaries of public institutions, the public sector and the public good. This includes boundary shifts like the formation of neoliberalism as well as the rise of business and financial news coverage, shifts from seeking government regulation of corporations or via organized labor to directly targeting corporations through public contention, and tendencies to a moralization of markets. See also the section on Public Institutions & the Public Good.

 

Boundary Shifts

Neoliberalism

  • Bockman, Johanna, and Gil Eyal. 2002. “Eastern Europe as a Laboratory for Economic Knowledge: The Transnational Roots of Neoliberalism.” American Journal of Sociology 108:310-352.
  • Brenner, Neil, and Nik Theodore, eds. 2002. Spaces of Neoliberalism: Urban Restructuring in North America and Western Europe. Oxford (UK)/Malden (MA): Blackwell.
  • Calhoun, Craig, and Georgi Derluguian, eds. 2011. Business as Usual: The Roots of the Global Financial Meltdown. New York: New York University Press/SSRC Books.
  • Duménil, Gérard, Dominique Lévy, and Derek Jeffers. 2004. Capital Resurgent: Roots of the Neoliberal Revolution. Cambridge (MA): Harvard University Press.
  • Judt, Tony. 2010. Ill Fares the Land. New York: Penguin.
  • Hall, Stuart. 1988. The Hard Road to Renewal: Thatcherism and the Crisis of the Left. London: Verso.
  • Harvey, David. 2005. A Brief History of Neoliberalism. New York: Oxford University Press.
  • Mirowski, Philip, and Dieter Plehwe, eds. 2009. The Road from Mont Pèlerin: The Making of the Neoliberal Thought Collective. Cambridge (MA): Harvard University Press.
  • Mitchell, Don. 2003. “The End of Public Space? People’s Park, the Public, and the Right to the City.” Pp. 118-160 in The Right to the City: Social Justice and the Fight for Public Space. New York: Guilford.
  • Prasad, Monica. 2006. The Politics of Free Markets: The Rise of Neoliberal Economic Policies in Britain, France, Germany, and the United States. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
  • Sewell Jr., William H. 2009. “From State-Centrism to Neoliberalism: Macro-Historical Contexts of Population Health since World War II.” Pp. 254-288 in Successful Societies: How Institutions and Culture Affect Health, edited by Hall, Peter A., and Michèle Lamont. New York: Cambridge University Press.

Rise of Business News and Financial News Coverage and its Effects

  • Khurana, Rakesh. 2004. Searching for a Corporate Savior: The Irrational Quest for Charismatic CEOs. Princeton (NJ): Princeton University Press.
  • Schiffrin, Anya, ed. 2010. Bad News: How America’s Business Press Missed the Story of the Century. New York: The New Press.
  • Schuster, Thomas. 2006. The Markets and the Media: Business News and Stock Market Movements. Lanham (MD): Rowman & Littlefield Publishers.

Moralization of Markets and Corporations as Direct Targets of Public Contention

  • Carroll, Archie B. 2008. “A History of Corporate Social Responsibility: Concepts and Practices.” Pp. 19-46 in The Oxford Handbook of Corporate Social Responsibility, edited by McWilliams, Abagail, Dirk Matten, Jeremy Moon, and Donald S. Siegel. New York: Oxford University Press.
  • Henning, Christoph, Nico Stehr, and Bernd Weiler, eds. 2006. The Moralization of the Markets. New Brunswick (NJ): Transaction Books.
  • Shamir, Ronen. 2008. “The Age of Responsibilization: On Market-Embedded Morality.” Economy and Society 37:1-19. Suggests that the tendencies to economize public domains and government also dialectically produce tendencies to moralize markets in general and business enterprises in particular.
  • Soule, Sarah A. 2009. Contention and Corporate Social Responsibility. New York: Cambridge University Press. On the shift from seeking government regulation of corporations or via organized labor to direct public anti-corporate activism.

More To Come