Sukhdev Johal
Biographic Data
| ID | 126574 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Sukhdev Johal |
| GIVEN NAMES | Sukhdev |
| FAMILY NAME | Johal |
| SIGNATURE | JOHAL S |
| AFFILIATIONS | Queen Mary University of London |
| VERIFIED | No |
| TOTAL WORKS | 37 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 654 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 37 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 0 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 1992 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2026 |
| H-INDEX | 14 |
The developing foundational movement
We respond to four critical engagements with our article ‘Geography, the foundational economy, and the fallen-below’. There we sought to differentiate the foundational economy (FE) focus on the socio-spatially uneven crisis of social reproduction from regional studies approaches centred on the uneven crisis of production in European states. The article installed a socio-spatial framework at the heart of foundational analysis. Commentators raised …
Geography, the foundational economy, and the fallen-below
Amid the ongoing cost-of-living crisis in Europe, this article calls for more academic engagement with the concept of foundational liveability. Current conceptualisations of left-behind places and regions focus on uneven development and the legacies of deindustrialisation. With a cost-of-living crisis, however, we need to understand differences between households and new patterns of foundational precarity and discomfort in leading and lagging reg…
The Crisis of Everyday Liveability, Policy and Politics
This article develops a distinctive foundational analysis of what is loosely termed the ‘everyday economy’. The ‘cost of living crisis’ is analysed as an acute crisis of household liveability which overlays a decade‐long chronic crisis. This is caused by the crumbling of all three pillars of liveability: disposable and residual income, essential services and social infrastructure. Mainstream economists and politicians fail to understand or respon…
Diversity in leading and laggard regions: Living standards, residual income and regional policy
This article develops a Foundational Economy contribution to debate about regional inequalities by presenting new calculations of household income after the costs of three essential items (housing, transport and utilities). These residual income measures illustrate the diversity of living standards within and between English and Welsh regions. The analysis shows a mosaic of variation in residual income and wealth accumulation driven by the variab…
The grounded city: From competitivity to the foundational economy
This article develops the concept of the ‘grounded city’ to argue that the development of cities can be analysed through specific accelerators and stabilisers. The city is grounded through its relation with a hinterland, which provides resources and revenues and thus governs city development. In modern cities, property development is an increasingly important accelerator, which shapes what is built and where. At the same time, the foundational ec…
Trade Associations, Narrative and Elite Power
This article introduces and develops the concept of trade narrative to understand how business sectors defend against public disapproval and the threat of increased regulation or removed subsidy. Trade narrative works by accumulating lists of benefits and occluding costs, and is created by consultants for economic interests organized via trade associations. This represents an under-analysed 'policy-based evidence machine', the aim of which is to …
Outsourcing the State: New Sources of Elite Power
This article uses the example of public sector outsourcing to explore how elite power can be fallible. A contract between the state and private companies represents a complex interweaving of different kinds of power with uncertain outcomes: the experience of outsourcing in the UK and elsewhere is that it frequently goes wrong, with fiascos creating political embarrassment for states and financial problems for companies. Drawing on Deleuze and Gua…
Breaking the Constitutional Silence: The Public Services Industry and Government
Analysis of constitutional arrangements has been too narrow in the past, confined to examination of explicitly governmental arrangements. But corporate enterprises perform such important public functions, especially in the age of outsourcing, that they need to be incorporated into the constitution. The article develops this argument and proposes a framework for such incorporation
Brexit: Understanding the socio-economic origins and consequencesThe Fault lines unveiled by BrexitMultiple economies: before and after BrexitAccidental tourists: Brexit and its toxic employment under…
The unprecedented geopolitical shift resulting from Brexit reflects deep socio-economic fault lines within and beyond the UK. In many ways foreshadowing the US presidential election of Donald Trump, Brexit brought to the surface and gave a public voice to socio-economic divisions that were deeply embedded, sometimes illogical, but until now had either been ignored or hushed out of ‘respectable’ public debate. This Discussion Forum emanates from a…
What a Waste: Outsourcing and How it Goes Wrong
This is the first ever book to analyse outsourcing – contracting out public services to private business interests. It is an unacknowledged revolution in the British economy, and it has happened quietly, but it is creating powerful new corporate interests, transforming the organisation of government at all levels, and is simultaneously enriching a new business elite and creating numerous fiascos in the delivery of public services. What links the …
Power, Politics and the City of London after the Great Financial Crisis
Four faces of power are summarized, based on the established literature in political science and the work of Foucault: they are power over decision, the power of agenda control, hegemonic power and capillary power. The four faces correspond also to four strategies used by City elites in the UK to protect markets from democratic control. Strategies have developed out of conjunctural crises. The most recent strategy, which involved a form of capill…
Unsustainable employment portfolios
This Debates and Controversies contribution introduces the notion of an employment portfolio to explore how economies create combinations of employment. It is not simply the number of jobs but the factor share distributed to labour and the sectoral mix and composition that matter. Three case studies of employment portfolio (Australia, California and the UK) are used to show how previous attempts at structural reform failed to deliver sustainable …
(How) Do Devices Matter in Finance
This article distinguishes between different concepts of device. In traditional English usage, as in the Foucauldian or Deleuzian concept, devices exist in a context of power, opportunism and force. Through argument and evidence about hedge funds and financial innovation, we argue that this kind of non-Callonian device is ubiquitous in finance so that the idea of device can be part of a much more political analysis of the present-day capitalism. …
Accounting for national success and failure: Rethinking the UK case
This article presents some basic political arithmetic on UK economic performance, including empirics on the sources of new job creation and regional differences. These empirics support an argument about the need for new measures and concepts of national success and failure. This is so because, as we show in the UK case, the standard post 1940 economic measures of GDP and unemployment give a seriously misleading picture of national success. This i…
The future has been postponed: The Great Financial Crisis and British politics
Misrule of experts? The financial crisis as elite debacle
This paper is about knowledge limits and the financial crisis. It begins by examining various existing accounts of crisis which disagree about the causes, but share the belief that the crisis represents a problem of socio-technical malfunction which requires some kind of technocratic fix: the three variants on this explanation are the crisis as accident, conspiracy or calculative failure. This paper proposes an alternative explanation which frame…
After the Great ComplacenceFinancial Crisis and the Politics of Reform: Financial Crisis and the Politics of Reform
This book addresses two important questions: first, why did financial innovation lead to the crisis in the banking sector that developed in 2007–8; and, second, why the political reform of finance has apparently proved so difficult across a variety of political jurisdictions? This ambitious book draws on a team of researchers from different disciplines to develop an innovation and distinctive argument in response to these two critical issues. In …
Ownership matters: Private equity and the political division of ownership
This article returns to the issue of how ownership matters. It does so by developing a critique of the ‘advantage-value-return’ framework of assumptions about value creation from the product market, which are recurrent in resource based strategy and many other discourses that highlight what managers can do and the variable governance of management by owners. It then uses a case analysis of private equity and presents empirics which show how the f…
Escaping the Tyranny of Earned Income? The Failure of Finance as Social Innovation
This is an article about the outcomes of the mass marketing of retail financial products in the USA since the early 1980s. Our aim is to change the frame of the debate about the democratisation of finance by evaluating the extension of credit and ownership as a major social innovation led by profit-seeking retail banks. We focus on privately led social innovations of income supplementation through credit and of security through property. Put simp…
Corporate Governance and Impossibilism
This paper presents a mixed methods analysis of corporate governance and develops an argument that governance is impossibilist because it inflates expectations and sets fundamentally unattainable objectives. Disappointment with corporate governance is justified because proceduralisation plus new mechanisms (such as the insistence on more independent non-executive directors) have little ascertainable positive effect on shareholder value and firm p…
Is the Stock Market a Disciplinary Institution? French Giant Firms and the Regime of Accumulation
The authors would like to acknowledge the financial support of the EU under the Framework 6 ESEMK project. Notes 1. John Thornhill & Martin Arnold, ‘Sarkozy and Royal head for poll showdown’, Financial Times, 23 April 2007. 2. Ibid. 3. William Lazonick & Mary O'Sullivan, ‘Maximising Shareholder Value: A New Ideology for Corporate Governance’, Economy and Society, Vol. 29, No. 1 (2000), pp. 13–35. 4. Julie Froud, Sukhdev Johal, Adam Leaver & Karel…
The democratization of finance? Promises, outcomes and conditions
This paper analyses the ‘democratization of finance’ or the promise that all households can make money and/or manage risk by buying appropriate financial services products. It does so by exploring the reasons for discrepancy between what is promised and what can be delivered. Our analysis starts from the economic promises and political pitches for the democratization of finance since the early 1990s and the corollary emphasis on promoting mass fi…
Working for themselves? Capital market intermediaries and present day capitalism
This article uses earlier debates on managerial capitalism to set up and explore questions about the role and possible effects of fee-earning capital market intermediaries in present day capitalism. The question then becomes whether a new group of actors (the capital market intermediaries) have taken a new leading role in the economy, in part by constraining the discretionary power of an old group of actors, the salaried corporate managers. A bro…
Against agency: A Positional Critique
This paper uses the changing historical and theoretical frames within which management pay and investor claims are considered to provide a critique of the functionalist approach of agency and to develop an alternative, positional explanation of rewards. The first part of the paper draws on the contrast between the pre-1940 critique of the rentier and the post-1980 discursive construction of the shareholder to raise important contemporary question…
Financialization and Strategy: Narrative and Numbers
Considering the recent impact of the capital market on corporate strategy, this text analyzes, through argument and supportive case studies, how pressures from the capital bull market of the 1990s and bear market of the early 2000s, have reshaped management action and calculation in large, publicly quoted US and UK corporations. Beginning with the dissatisfaction with classical strategy and its limited engagement with the processes of financializ…
Shareholder value and Financialization: Consultancy Promises, Management Moves
In the pages of the daily financial press, 'shareholder value' is a loose rhetoric. For business consultants who sell financial metrics and implementation, shareholder value is also a product and a promise that purposive management action will be rewarded. This paper begins by considering the consultant's promise and the more guarded academic responses. It then presents empirics on micro performance and the meso limits to shareholder value and ar…
The democratization of finance? Promises, outcomes and conditions
This paper analyses the ‘democratization of finance’ or the promise that all households can make money and/or manage risk by buying appropriate financial services products. It does so by exploring the reasons for discrepancy between what is promised and what can be delivered. Our analysis starts from the economic promises and political pitches for the democratization of finance since the early 1990s and the corollary emphasis on promoting mass fi…
Misrule of experts? The financial crisis as elite debacle
This paper is about knowledge limits and the financial crisis. It begins by examining various existing accounts of crisis which disagree about the causes, but share the belief that the crisis represents a problem of socio-technical malfunction which requires some kind of technocratic fix: the three variants on this explanation are the crisis as accident, conspiracy or calculative failure. This paper proposes an alternative explanation which frame…
Working for themselves? Capital market intermediaries and present day capitalism
This article uses earlier debates on managerial capitalism to set up and explore questions about the role and possible effects of fee-earning capital market intermediaries in present day capitalism. The question then becomes whether a new group of actors (the capital market intermediaries) have taken a new leading role in the economy, in part by constraining the discretionary power of an old group of actors, the salaried corporate managers. A bro…
A new business model? The capital market and the new economy
Original article can be found at : http://www.informaworld.com Copyright Informa / Taylor and Francis Group [Full text of this article is not available in the UHRA
Against lean production
Escaping the Tyranny of Earned Income? The Failure of Finance as Social Innovation
This is an article about the outcomes of the mass marketing of retail financial products in the USA since the early 1980s. Our aim is to change the frame of the debate about the democratisation of finance by evaluating the extension of credit and ownership as a major social innovation led by profit-seeking retail banks. We focus on privately led social innovations of income supplementation through credit and of security through property. Put simp…
The grounded city: From competitivity to the foundational economy
This article develops the concept of the ‘grounded city’ to argue that the development of cities can be analysed through specific accelerators and stabilisers. The city is grounded through its relation with a hinterland, which provides resources and revenues and thus governs city development. In modern cities, property development is an increasingly important accelerator, which shapes what is built and where. At the same time, the foundational ec…
(How) Do Devices Matter in Finance
This article distinguishes between different concepts of device. In traditional English usage, as in the Foucauldian or Deleuzian concept, devices exist in a context of power, opportunism and force. Through argument and evidence about hedge funds and financial innovation, we argue that this kind of non-Callonian device is ubiquitous in finance so that the idea of device can be part of a much more political analysis of the present-day capitalism. …
Financialisation and the coupon pool
This article aims to extend our understanding of the role of capital markets in present day capitalism. It starts from a critical examination of established terms, shareholder value, corporate governance and financialisation, before suggesting a new generic term, coupon pool capitalism. The second half aims to demonstrate that, unlike the other terms, the coupon pool concept distinctively emphasises the generation of contradictions and instabilit…
Power, Politics and the City of London after the Great Financial Crisis
Four faces of power are summarized, based on the established literature in political science and the work of Foucault: they are power over decision, the power of agenda control, hegemonic power and capillary power. The four faces correspond also to four strategies used by City elites in the UK to protect markets from democratic control. Strategies have developed out of conjunctural crises. The most recent strategy, which involved a form of capill…
Accumulation under conditions of inequality
TEST 02 - Elsevier's Scopus, the largest abstract and citation database of peer-reviewed literature. Search and access research from the science, technology, medicine, social sciences and arts and humanities fields
Outsourcing the State: New Sources of Elite Power
This article uses the example of public sector outsourcing to explore how elite power can be fallible. A contract between the state and private companies represents a complex interweaving of different kinds of power with uncertain outcomes: the experience of outsourcing in the UK and elsewhere is that it frequently goes wrong, with fiascos creating political embarrassment for states and financial problems for companies. Drawing on Deleuze and Gua…
Brexit: Understanding the socio-economic origins and consequencesThe Fault lines unveiled by BrexitMultiple economies: before and after BrexitAccidental tourists: Brexit and its toxic employment under…
The unprecedented geopolitical shift resulting from Brexit reflects deep socio-economic fault lines within and beyond the UK. In many ways foreshadowing the US presidential election of Donald Trump, Brexit brought to the surface and gave a public voice to socio-economic divisions that were deeply embedded, sometimes illogical, but until now had either been ignored or hushed out of ‘respectable’ public debate. This Discussion Forum emanates from a…
Against agency: A Positional Critique
This paper uses the changing historical and theoretical frames within which management pay and investor claims are considered to provide a critique of the functionalist approach of agency and to develop an alternative, positional explanation of rewards. The first part of the paper draws on the contrast between the pre-1940 critique of the rentier and the post-1980 discursive construction of the shareholder to raise important contemporary question…
Corporate governance and disappointment
This paper raises fundamental questions about the political and economic conditions and consequences of UK and US corporate governance. It does so by locating corporate governance in present day capitalism. Politically, the rise of governance since the early 1990s is part of a more general discursive attempt to combine neoliberalism with social responsibility, which works in the specific case of corporate governance by constructing a plausible bu…
Trade Associations, Narrative and Elite Power
This article introduces and develops the concept of trade narrative to understand how business sectors defend against public disapproval and the threat of increased regulation or removed subsidy. Trade narrative works by accumulating lists of benefits and occluding costs, and is created by consultants for economic interests organized via trade associations. This represents an under-analysed 'policy-based evidence machine', the aim of which is to …
Is the Stock Market a Disciplinary Institution? French Giant Firms and the Regime of Accumulation
The authors would like to acknowledge the financial support of the EU under the Framework 6 ESEMK project. Notes 1. John Thornhill & Martin Arnold, ‘Sarkozy and Royal head for poll showdown’, Financial Times, 23 April 2007. 2. Ibid. 3. William Lazonick & Mary O'Sullivan, ‘Maximising Shareholder Value: A New Ideology for Corporate Governance’, Economy and Society, Vol. 29, No. 1 (2000), pp. 13–35. 4. Julie Froud, Sukhdev Johal, Adam Leaver & Karel…
From social settlement to household lottery
This article proposes a new appoach to the problems of late capitalism, focused on circuits of production and consumption. It presents empirics on the growth of services in four advanced economies and examines the distributive implications in the UK. The argument is that, for the UK case, the changing composition of employment and the composition of demand feed into a vicious circle whereby the pattern of demand reinforces employment-generated in…
The Myth of the Line: Ford's Production of the Model T at Highland Park, 1909–16
This article questions the myth that the moving assembly line was Ford's key productive innovation before 1918. It begins by analysing Hounshell and Lewchuk's recent historiographic accounts of Ford. The article then refutes the myth of the line by demonstrating that the myth cannot be reconciled with Ford Archive evidence on the chronology of productivity growth and the composition of costs. A concluding section sets the moving assembly line in …
Diversity in leading and laggard regions: Living standards, residual income and regional policy
This article develops a Foundational Economy contribution to debate about regional inequalities by presenting new calculations of household income after the costs of three essential items (housing, transport and utilities). These residual income measures illustrate the diversity of living standards within and between English and Welsh regions. The analysis shows a mosaic of variation in residual income and wealth accumulation driven by the variab…
Geography, the foundational economy, and the fallen-below
Amid the ongoing cost-of-living crisis in Europe, this article calls for more academic engagement with the concept of foundational liveability. Current conceptualisations of left-behind places and regions focus on uneven development and the legacies of deindustrialisation. With a cost-of-living crisis, however, we need to understand differences between households and new patterns of foundational precarity and discomfort in leading and lagging reg…
Stakeholder Economy? From utility privatisation to New Labour
The Crisis of Everyday Liveability, Policy and Politics
This article develops a distinctive foundational analysis of what is loosely termed the ‘everyday economy’. The ‘cost of living crisis’ is analysed as an acute crisis of household liveability which overlays a decade‐long chronic crisis. This is caused by the crumbling of all three pillars of liveability: disposable and residual income, essential services and social infrastructure. Mainstream economists and politicians fail to understand or respon…
Unsustainable employment portfolios
This Debates and Controversies contribution introduces the notion of an employment portfolio to explore how economies create combinations of employment. It is not simply the number of jobs but the factor share distributed to labour and the sectoral mix and composition that matter. Three case studies of employment portfolio (Australia, California and the UK) are used to show how previous attempts at structural reform failed to deliver sustainable …
Against lean production
The Myth of the Line: Ford's Production of the Model T at Highland Park, 1909–16
This article questions the myth that the moving assembly line was Ford's key productive innovation before 1918. It begins by analysing Hounshell and Lewchuk's recent historiographic accounts of Ford. The article then refutes the myth of the line by demonstrating that the myth cannot be reconciled with Ford Archive evidence on the chronology of productivity growth and the composition of costs. A concluding section sets the moving assembly line in …
Stakeholder Economy? From utility privatisation to New Labour
From social settlement to household lottery
This article proposes a new appoach to the problems of late capitalism, focused on circuits of production and consumption. It presents empirics on the growth of services in four advanced economies and examines the distributive implications in the UK. The argument is that, for the UK case, the changing composition of employment and the composition of demand feed into a vicious circle whereby the pattern of demand reinforces employment-generated in…
British Pharmaceuticals: A Cautionary Tale
British pharmaccuticals is generally represented as a successful sector which illustrates the potential of knowledge-intensive, high-valve-added activities. This article presents a revisionist account based on evidence and argument. Pharmaceuticals is a small sector which combines high-value-added and average wages to benefit capital not labour. The knowledge base in the laboratory creates imitative product with marketing then applied to capture …
The Third Way and the Jammed Economy
LIKE PLANNING IN THE 1930s or New Liberalism in the 1910s, 'The Third Way' is now being offered as a new political problematic with the potential to reconstruct problems and define new solutions which previously eluded Labour and old social democracy. In response, this polemic questions the Third Way's analysis and policy prescriptions in the area of the economy. The first section presents an analysis of how the economy is represented and concept…
Shareholder value and Financialization: Consultancy Promises, Management Moves
In the pages of the daily financial press, 'shareholder value' is a loose rhetoric. For business consultants who sell financial metrics and implementation, shareholder value is also a product and a promise that purposive management action will be rewarded. This paper begins by considering the consultant's promise and the more guarded academic responses. It then presents empirics on micro performance and the meso limits to shareholder value and ar…
Accumulation under conditions of inequality
TEST 02 - Elsevier's Scopus, the largest abstract and citation database of peer-reviewed literature. Search and access research from the science, technology, medicine, social sciences and arts and humanities fields
A new business model? The capital market and the new economy
Original article can be found at : http://www.informaworld.com Copyright Informa / Taylor and Francis Group [Full text of this article is not available in the UHRA
Financialisation and the coupon pool
This article aims to extend our understanding of the role of capital markets in present day capitalism. It starts from a critical examination of established terms, shareholder value, corporate governance and financialisation, before suggesting a new generic term, coupon pool capitalism. The second half aims to demonstrate that, unlike the other terms, the coupon pool concept distinctively emphasises the generation of contradictions and instabilit…
Corporate governance and disappointment
This paper raises fundamental questions about the political and economic conditions and consequences of UK and US corporate governance. It does so by locating corporate governance in present day capitalism. Politically, the rise of governance since the early 1990s is part of a more general discursive attempt to combine neoliberalism with social responsibility, which works in the specific case of corporate governance by constructing a plausible bu…
Different Worlds of Motoring: Choice, Constraint and Risk in Household Consumption
The article shows how the old economic variable of income can be related to spatial location and used to reinforce recent revisionism in sociology which questions the automatic link between consumption and identity. The diversity of motoring experience is demonstrated through a case study of motoring in inner and outer London which draws on a variety of resources, including interviews from two London boroughs, survey evidence on household expendi…
Financialization and Strategy: Narrative and Numbers
Considering the recent impact of the capital market on corporate strategy, this text analyzes, through argument and supportive case studies, how pressures from the capital bull market of the 1990s and bear market of the early 2000s, have reshaped management action and calculation in large, publicly quoted US and UK corporations. Beginning with the dissatisfaction with classical strategy and its limited engagement with the processes of financializ…
Is the Stock Market a Disciplinary Institution? French Giant Firms and the Regime of Accumulation
The authors would like to acknowledge the financial support of the EU under the Framework 6 ESEMK project. Notes 1. John Thornhill & Martin Arnold, ‘Sarkozy and Royal head for poll showdown’, Financial Times, 23 April 2007. 2. Ibid. 3. William Lazonick & Mary O'Sullivan, ‘Maximising Shareholder Value: A New Ideology for Corporate Governance’, Economy and Society, Vol. 29, No. 1 (2000), pp. 13–35. 4. Julie Froud, Sukhdev Johal, Adam Leaver & Karel…
The democratization of finance? Promises, outcomes and conditions
This paper analyses the ‘democratization of finance’ or the promise that all households can make money and/or manage risk by buying appropriate financial services products. It does so by exploring the reasons for discrepancy between what is promised and what can be delivered. Our analysis starts from the economic promises and political pitches for the democratization of finance since the early 1990s and the corollary emphasis on promoting mass fi…
Working for themselves? Capital market intermediaries and present day capitalism
This article uses earlier debates on managerial capitalism to set up and explore questions about the role and possible effects of fee-earning capital market intermediaries in present day capitalism. The question then becomes whether a new group of actors (the capital market intermediaries) have taken a new leading role in the economy, in part by constraining the discretionary power of an old group of actors, the salaried corporate managers. A bro…
Against agency: A Positional Critique
This paper uses the changing historical and theoretical frames within which management pay and investor claims are considered to provide a critique of the functionalist approach of agency and to develop an alternative, positional explanation of rewards. The first part of the paper draws on the contrast between the pre-1940 critique of the rentier and the post-1980 discursive construction of the shareholder to raise important contemporary question…
Corporate Governance and Impossibilism
This paper presents a mixed methods analysis of corporate governance and develops an argument that governance is impossibilist because it inflates expectations and sets fundamentally unattainable objectives. Disappointment with corporate governance is justified because proceduralisation plus new mechanisms (such as the insistence on more independent non-executive directors) have little ascertainable positive effect on shareholder value and firm p…
Ownership matters: Private equity and the political division of ownership
This article returns to the issue of how ownership matters. It does so by developing a critique of the ‘advantage-value-return’ framework of assumptions about value creation from the product market, which are recurrent in resource based strategy and many other discourses that highlight what managers can do and the variable governance of management by owners. It then uses a case analysis of private equity and presents empirics which show how the f…
Escaping the Tyranny of Earned Income? The Failure of Finance as Social Innovation
This is an article about the outcomes of the mass marketing of retail financial products in the USA since the early 1980s. Our aim is to change the frame of the debate about the democratisation of finance by evaluating the extension of credit and ownership as a major social innovation led by profit-seeking retail banks. We focus on privately led social innovations of income supplementation through credit and of security through property. Put simp…
After the Great ComplacenceFinancial Crisis and the Politics of Reform: Financial Crisis and the Politics of Reform
This book addresses two important questions: first, why did financial innovation lead to the crisis in the banking sector that developed in 2007–8; and, second, why the political reform of finance has apparently proved so difficult across a variety of political jurisdictions? This ambitious book draws on a team of researchers from different disciplines to develop an innovation and distinctive argument in response to these two critical issues. In …
Accounting for national success and failure: Rethinking the UK case
This article presents some basic political arithmetic on UK economic performance, including empirics on the sources of new job creation and regional differences. These empirics support an argument about the need for new measures and concepts of national success and failure. This is so because, as we show in the UK case, the standard post 1940 economic measures of GDP and unemployment give a seriously misleading picture of national success. This i…
The future has been postponed: The Great Financial Crisis and British politics
Misrule of experts? The financial crisis as elite debacle
This paper is about knowledge limits and the financial crisis. It begins by examining various existing accounts of crisis which disagree about the causes, but share the belief that the crisis represents a problem of socio-technical malfunction which requires some kind of technocratic fix: the three variants on this explanation are the crisis as accident, conspiracy or calculative failure. This paper proposes an alternative explanation which frame…
Unsustainable employment portfolios
This Debates and Controversies contribution introduces the notion of an employment portfolio to explore how economies create combinations of employment. It is not simply the number of jobs but the factor share distributed to labour and the sectoral mix and composition that matter. Three case studies of employment portfolio (Australia, California and the UK) are used to show how previous attempts at structural reform failed to deliver sustainable …
Economics (33 works) · Housing, Finance, and Neoliberalism (23 works) · Political science (23 works) · Business (20 works) · Law (16 works) · Politics (16 works) · Law (14 works) · Finance (12 works) · Market economy (11 works) · Political economy (11 works)