potlatch

what's going on with the music formerly known as 'indie'?

Watching Glastonbury on TV made me feel old. But weirdly, not because all the bands were younger than me. I felt old because I didn't understand why thousands of 18 year-olds would get so carried away by Bruce Springsteen. I watched him jumping around the stage with his bandana-wearing chums, and felt embarrassed (subtract the World Economic Forum from Bono then add Al Gore, and what would be the difference? Fiscal policy?). The massed kids seemed to think they were in the presence of something transcendent. What's going on?

I remember Taylor Parkes once writing in Melody Maker that the Jesus and Mary Chain's Psychocandy represented year zero for a trend that would come to dominate British indie music during the 1990s. This trend, admittedly a heavily Scottish one, was for bands to start making music about their record collections. If the J&MC started it, their drummer extended it with Primal Scream, Teenage Fanclub made an art of it - and then there was Oasis. Although the sources were very different, you could even include the Manic Street Preachers and anything punky during the 1990s. Plus Britpop, obviously. True to their national character, this cultural principle has now been elevated to the level of commerce in the US by Interpol and The Killers.

The economic story of indie music was of a punk ethic being applied to startup businesses, beginning with Factory records in 1978, then concluding with the moment the Happy Mondays sat on and broke the company's £30,000 surf-board-style dangly boardroom table in 1992. Appropriately, as it happens: 1992 was also the year of Black Wednesday, when our nation began its transition from being a conflicted, 3rd rate nation of shopkeepers to a sanitised, 2nd rate nation of bankers. Thanks to My Bloody Valentine, Creation was also effectively bust at the time, which was the only honourable condition for any indie label to be in. It's not irrelevant that these businesses were financial disaster zones.

The cultural story would have to include something of the Psychocandy phenomenon. I suspect this is somehow explicable in terms of pop music's flawed aspiration to combine the timeless with the fleeting. You could say the same thing of modernism, but modernism rests on a more sophisticated recognition that the timeless is found in the fleeting. To walk a city in search of something timeless and transcendent requires a particular sensibility regarding the irreducible one-off-ness of events. Not easily done in fact.

Pop music doesn't manage this: it tends to have a 'fleeting' strand and a 'timeless' strand. Did anyone who actually saw the Velvet Underground in 1968 truly understand the significance of what they were seeing? No, of course not. This is why washed-up old hacks (such as I aspire to be) have spent years since extracting the sublime meaning from iconic photos of gigs they never actually attended. It's only a short step before bands themselves join in, pinning their music onto themes, icons and chords that seem timeless, but posing, shouting and playing in a way that is immediate and fleeting. (By persisting with this for over a decade, Oasis missed the point, making it seem like the immediate and fleeting had been going on for bloody ever, thereby turning modernism inside out).

In 2009, a new settlement has arisen. The 'fleeting' and the 'timeless' are now split by a generational division of labour. In the age of myspace, Urban Outfitters, Londonlite, 'illegal'-but-actually-sponsored squat parties, youtube, corporate folk festivals and ipods, the fleeting rush of youth is delivered by a rapid turnover of skinny-jeaned kids. This is the stuff which comes free with a mobile phone upgrade. The fleeting aspect of pop is elevated to new heights, by the fact that the bands themselves are gobbled up in an endless churn. I can tell you which Suede record accompanied my GCSEs and A-Levels; today's teenagers would tell you which band. Within the fleeting wing of indie music, less is permanent than ever before.

Meanwhile, the 'timeless' bit is delegated to anyone whose records we're still listening to years later. Authenticity, timelessness, talent and musical prowess are delivered by an entirely separate bunch, whose age is increasingly irrelevant. This is the stuff which comes free with a £50 ticket and a £10 'discretionary' booking fee. Frankly, the generational and cultural divide between Neil Young and Blur (the other two Glastonbury headliners) is now less culturally important than what they share, which is the ability to endure and to present music as intrinsically worthwhile. This is why the kids need Springsteen. Chris Anderson should write a follow-up to Free called Expensive: why most things being free leads us to over-value what remains.

The Jesus & Mary Chain stole the sounds of the Shangri-Las and the Velvet Underground, and dressed it up with swear words, riots and excitement. Today's kids would go and see the Shangri-Las and The Velvet Underground, then the next day go and watch their mate's band doing a poor impersonation of The Jesus & Mary Chain. The former tap into something timeless, albeit crudely and illegitimately; the latter pay homage to it, as a compensation for the lack of it being produced by their own generation.

I'm not making that much of a value judgement. Plundering the past for the present is not greatly more noble than paying homage to it. Out-sourcing the 'classic' dimension of indie music to the horse's mouth (or should that be the 'Boss's mouth'?) is in some ways more honest than pretending to recreate it afresh. But I have one warning for you, kids: Bruce Springsteen will die a long time before you, so at some point you're going to have to start growing your own 'authenticity'. Then again, maybe you have no intention of caring about any of this by my age.

Sir Viv the sociologist

Bourdieu thought sociology was a martial art, where its used only for defence against your enemy. I wondered if Chicago economists were the mafia. Violence everywhere! So how do we deal with the relationship between economics and sociology? The people over at Org Theory are often grappling with this, and I have a new analogy up my sleeve.

One reason I find economic sociology exciting is the sense of operating behind enemy lines, of being out-numbered by people more powerful than you, but potentially defying them. This assumes, following Harrison White and Michel Callon, that sociology can lay claim to the very heartlands of economic discipline, that it is not only concerned with networks, norms and institutions, but has something to say about markets, prices and competition. To not only invade enemy territory, but to set up shop in its head quarters, has a marvellous chutzpah about it.

Counter-vailing raids have been taking place for decades, certainly since Gary Becker began working in the 1950s. These invaders do not just pop up behind enemy lines before being quashed, but seek to colonise, successfully as it happens (I notice Ben Fine has a new book on the topic). I can't see anything noble about 'freakonomics' in a society that already puts a price on everything. It's like Tony Greig promising to make the West Indies 'grovel' in 1976... which brings me to my analogy. Below, I give you my vision of the economic sociologist in action.

I don't know what the academic equivalent of calmly chewing gum and twiddling your bat after hitting a fast bowler for six is, but I'm pretty sure it would be the economic sociologist's crowning achievement.

(Incidentally, I think the shot off Ian Botham at 1.58 has the most chutzpah of all).

why capitalism is about to get burnt

Diverting and constraining the, ahem, 'proven' organisational and technological ability of Germans is the central European project of the 20th century. Anti-trust is a crucial part of this, because it restricts bureaucratic and industrial forces within the liberal, disciplining strictures of the market. This is why Walter Eucken was listened to so carefully by the allies in the late 1940s - along with Hayek, he viewed cartellisation as a contributing factor to Fascism, and helped design an aggressive regime to prevent industial concentration. In this respect neo-liberalism begins in late '40s Germany.

Now what to make of this article:

Twenty blue chip German companies are pooling their resources with the aim of harnessing solar power in the deserts of north Africa and transporting the clean electricity to Europe. The businesses, which include some of the biggest names in European energy, finance and manufacturing, will form a consortium next month. If successful, the highly ambitious plan could see Europe fuelled by solar energy within a decade.

This is a startlingly ambitious engineering project, which quite clearly is not something that is going to be achieved through market competition. Yet market liberals will surely experience a tremor of apprehension when they confront the scale of such environmental challenges and the organisational entities that will be required to confront them. A couple of thoughts or questions.

Firstly, if the next 'phase' of capitalism is oriented around renewable energy, what implications does this have for industrial organisation and monopolisation? Regulationists focus heavily on the shift from Fordist to flexible production that occurred during the crisis of the 1970s, but the problem that this was responding to was largely a cultural one of responding to 1960s individualism. The key philosophical entities that moved to the centre of capitalism were desire, me, identity, self, expression, meaning. By contrast, we now face a comparatively primitive economic problem concerning nature. The next phase of capitalism will be having to deal with entities such as power, exploitation, harnessing, generation, construction. The organisations that serve these purposes will be anything but 'flexible' or 'weightless'.

Secondly, part of this primitive problem is very primitive indeed, concerning the original source of all economic value - the sun. The sun, as Bataille points out, is typical of all economic problems, in that its function is to overflow. The sun creates too much energy, the spare energy creates too many plants, the plants feed too many animals... and we're now reaching the end of this chain, so we return to the start all over again (with the help of a little vorsprung durch technik).

For the time being, I think anyone with the ambition to buy up chunks of the Sahara, pave it with solar panels, and lay a multi-billion euro cable under the Mediterranean will probably be thanked. But I wonder if controversy will arise ever. Who owns the sun? The sun is - in the neo-classical vernacular - a market failure, or more specifically a public good problem. In fact its the original public good problem, upon which all subsequent acts of privatisation are based.

But once we return to the sun, late on in our economic history, are we still innocent enough to view it this way? The sun isn't so very different from the Beatles back catalogue - there's a lot of it around, you can't control it, we value it highly, it's a 'public good problem' - but the Beatles are subject to various legal and political protections, most recently retrospective copyright extension. If EMI are allowed to profit from music that they didn't create, might not North Africa have some right to profit from energy that it didn't create? Equally, it sounds risky for a project with billions of euros of sunk costs to be exploiting a resource that is so difficult to privatise (it's not as if there is no 'weather' in Europe). What happens when capital's demand to retain surplus goes head to head with the sun's insistence on distributing it?

So here's how capitalism ends eventually. An economic system condemned to expand through privatising the commons and extracting surpluses finally turns its attention to the ultimate commons, the ultimate surplus, from where all economic questions begin, and seeks to privatise and extract surpluses from it. In an anti-oedipal act, the sun murders this troublesome child. I can't quite work out the details yet, but I'm pretty sure of it. Marx thought capital was a vampire. I reckon it's Icarus.

wedding lists: a socio-economic solution

The Guardian has been having a debate recently about whether wedding lists are a good or a bad thing, started by this piece and followed by this one. What neither article identified is the real genius of wedding lists, namely that they involve a gift economy with maximum fungibility... or nearly maximum fungibility, as I will explain in a moment.

What the authors don't point out is that the bride and groom are not compelled to receive the gifts that are actually selected. If, for example, a wedding list includes 12 plates and one flat-screen TV, but only 10 plates are selected by various attendees, the couple are permitted to shift this 'credit' towards the cost of the flat screen TV. The alternative would be for them to end up with lots of incomplete sets of crockery and cutlery. This solves a fundamental problem of gift economies, which is the difficulty of converting one gift into another, but without resorting to use of money. Both giver and receiver have their choices maximised (giver gets to choose how much to spend; receiver chooses what utility to receive) in a way that is usually only possible in markets.

However, I think I can go one better. Imagine a version of the wedding list in which the giver gets to determine the exact price of their gift, and not simply select the product that corresponds most closely to it. Then imagine that this gave the recipient total freedom over how its used, and not simply a range of finite products with which to make their home more useful or comfortable. Then also imagine that this is still not a gift of money.

That's right, readers: when I get married, each invite will contain details of my Oyster Card, with a request to top it up online. Georg Simmel would be proud...

for a better version of economic freedom

At this point in the economic crisis, it strikes me that the only thing we can be sure of is that our dominant concept of economic freedom will undergo a transformation. Beyond that, who knows? What isn't at all clear is what status markets will have in the future. Assumptions that we need 'less' market freedom are pretty unsophisticated. We certainly need different market freedom, and I think one might plausibly argue that we need more profound market freedom. Take two examples of markets technically working, but offending some innate sense of the freedoms they were once deemed to uphold.

Firstly, we now have a glimpse inside the delirious nonsense of financial innovation and the bonus culture that accompanied it. The fact that a crisis precipitated this moral outcry should not dupe us into thinking that the crisis is the object of the moral outcry. The system was just as offensive when it worked, we just hadn't paid enough attention. Whether or not anyone noticed before, it strikes many of us as implausible that hard-working but only moderately talented individuals can be worth their remuneration packages or finance alone can be worth as much as it once purported to be, as a proportion of national economic value.

Secondly, fly Ryanair. Scrap that. Never, ever, ever fly Ryanair. Here are some reasons why not. I recently got stung by forgetting to check in online, which now costs £40... simply for them to hand you your boarding pass (I tried to check in online for the return flight, but of course it wasn't possible by then, which secured them a second payment). Typically one ends up paying about five times the advertised ticket price. Ryanair offends a fundamental principle of liberal economic morality, that the price and the value should be roughly the same thing. Companies should not be in the business of punishment and coercion. I tried here to explain why the rise of 'free' offends in a similar way.

The founding philosophical lie on which the discipline of economics is founded is that it's possible to split questions of efficiency from those of morality. But it isn't, at least not where people are involved.* Different definitions of efficiency carry different moral presuppositions, impact in different moral ways, carry different moral consequences. Presumably an economist could explain why both of the above two scenarios are efficient, at least pre-crisis in the case of the first, and try to leave it at that. But what each demonstrates is a capitalist psychology and culture which pays scant regard for the integrity of publicly visible prices as politically legitimate carriers of value.

One thing I try to demonstrate in my PhD is that we ended up with a variant of neo-liberalism whose respect for markets (narrowly defined) is actually rather impoverished. The Chicago School paradigm, for example, has maximum respect for price theory (i.e. the economic method) but only half-hearted respect for the price mechanism (i.e. the socio-political device). All manner of organisational forms and practices can then be justified in terms of some abstract concept of efficiency, even when they appear to stray drastically from the ideal of 'fair', transparent market exchange.

This links to the famous distinction between markets and capitalism outlined by Braudel (who recently ended up in a Liam Byrne speech - interesting times when management consultants are quoting French Marxists.) Markets “involve no surprises, in which each party knows in advance the rules and the outcome, and for which the always moderate profits can be roughly calculated beforehand.” They require and sustain transparency.

By contrast, capitalism involves hierarchical power relations that stem from monopolistic positions, "in which competition – the basic law of the so-called market economy – had little place and in which the dealer had two trump cards: he had broken off relations between the producer and the person who eventually received the merchandise…; and he had ready cash which served as his chief ally." This is a simple distinction between horizontal and vertical forms of coordination.

As Chris Dillow points out, bonus culture is in fact only explicable in terms of power. Meanwhile it scarcely needs mentioning that Ryanair make virtually all of their money through exploiting the power an airline has over its customers - price-setting on routes where there is no effective competition, adding charges for nothing whatsoever, trying to dupe customers into buying insurance by mistake, charging monopoly prices for refreshments once in the air etc. Yet neither of these would be captured in the orthodox neo-classical understanding of market power, at least in the eyes of regulators. Deregulation and competition ought 'logically' to benefit the consumer, but in reality unleash new distinctly capitalist freedoms that are exploited in pursuit of political, cultural and psychological domination.

Without wanting to revive my old bugbear, mobile phone companies offer another excellent example. Confronted with OfCom's neo-classically inspired, lightly regulated, perfectly competitive 'market', what do the five networks do? Shave their profits to cut their prices, or enter a power struggle for cultural control of every hoarding, public space, musical event or gross mass gathering they can slap a logo on? Both are undoubtedly examples of competition, but the first is the fantasy taught in economic text books while the latter is the political behaviour that characterises 'actually existing capitalism'. If it weren't for Brussels, we'd probably still be paying 1999 prices for mobile phone calls.

In On Justification, Boltanski & Thevenot offer a persuasive excavation of the moral presuppositions that underpin classical economics. They show how Adam Smith's Theory of Moral Sentiments creates the preconditions of The Wealth of Nations: the valorisation of the spectator perspective, the autonomy of the individual, the capacity to separate people from things. These are all part of a moral framework of value that then enables an empirical framework of valuation, in which the free, price-mediated exchange of things between individuals can be seen, from the economist's spectator perspective, as producing the best outcome. To commit to the price system involves a certain moral vision of freedom in the first place. (For the Brownites out there, this involves questioning the very conditions of your efficiency/equity split, and not simply trying to bring the two into some closer harmony).

I'm sick of current capitalism with its hidden logic, its cultural strategies, its anything-but-market logic. And sick of the economists who would read this and laugh because I don't properly understand price theory. Go and read some Hannah Arendt - politics occurs when things appear publicly. In this respect, your definition of an efficiency that is going on behind people's backs, over people's heads, is fundamentally anti-political. Presuming a model of individual freedom, but never actually defending one, is really no more liberal than the advertisers and HR experts who specialise in manipulating individual freedom. 

Time for a version of freedom rooted in institutions that is publicly visible and comprehensible. Return to the original Smithian notion that price and 'real' value have some correspondence, and remember that this was a moral statement and not simply a technical one. Anything else is just capitalist disdain. Rant over.

* You can have a separate debate about whether the efficiency of machinery can be subject to moral evaluation.

my news...

So, after three years and nine months work, my PhD is written, done, bound, submitted, gone, caput, might never have happened. Submitting is an odd process, involving arguments with photocopiers, lugging boxes around, bus rides up and down the Holloway Road to binders, plastic bags, getting lost in  the Senate House. Reassuring to know that Dr Gordon Brown is on the case from now on. As for the  University of London themselves, they forgot the brass band and bunting on this occasion, but were kind enough to lay on a sweaty portacabin containing some non-plussed staff and eight billion blue bound PhDs. Seriously guys, you shouldn't have. 

Since you ask, its title is 'Competition and Competitiveness: A Cultural Political Economy' (Penguin are rushing out the paper back version in time to hit the beaches this August), it's 89,356 words long (for all you Twitter fans out there, that's 330,617 characters), this is more or less what's in it, and and on the right is what it currently looks like, with the University of London PhD Welcome Committee in the background.

Other news: so long as my examiners don't entirely trash the thing at my viva, I'll be taking up a position in October as Research Fellow in Governance Accountability and Innovation at the Institute for Science Innovation and Society at Said Business School. This is very exciting, particularly given some of the great people I'll be working with.

Time for a drink.

what's politically worthwhile?

How do we judge the worth of a person? Philosophically this is a question almost too vast to address, leading beyond morality into much headier questions about existence, death etc. But sociologically, it can be much easier to take a bite out of. The economic sociology of Luc Boltanski, Laurent Thevenot and David Stark broadens the analysis of worth beyond narrow economic categories of value or efficiency to highlight the fact that such categories are parasitical upon larger, foundational accounts of what is morally valuable. On a technical level, Lucy Kimbell has explored the techniques of human evaluation in various artistic projects. And then there are those such as Kevin Kelly who are looking at this issue of self-auditting. If a philosophical defence of this sociology of moral pluralism is required, it is provided by Michael Walzer's Spheres of Justice.

Times of economic and political upheaval offer an opportunity to move from one evaluative framework to another. Boltanski and Chiapello's New Spirit of Capitalism is an outstanding exposition of how this can occur, focusing mainly on the moral-economic transitions that followed '68. This recent report on 'Prosperity Without Growth' shows a canny understanding of the possibilities to reinvent our economic evaluations, after the present crisis.

In line with some of my recent postings, and this thoughtlet about moral bragging, I keep coming back to this one question: why is it that 'citizens' seize social media to portray an optimal cultural representation of themselves, while avoiding any moral representation, but politicians seize mass media to do the reverse? As the two forms of media begin slowly to merge with one another, the issue starts to become even more striking.

Imagine, for a moment, that the state is just one organisation amongst many, simply with larger, more complex responsibilities for socio-economic coordination and investment (this shouldn't be too hard: it's what the neo-classical 'market failure' brigade and the Shirky-influenced politics2.0 crowd already appear to believe. This excessively economistic worldview is ultimately only able to distinguish between a nuclear warhead and an e-petition in the language of price). Then also imagine that a citizen is already a politician, just with a smaller remit and fewer people to represent. The convergence of broadcast and social media makes this easier to do on both fronts - after all, we're constantly told by Jeff Jarvis et al that a newspaper is just a blog with higher overheads, so why not view the state as a facebook group with prisons?

From this perspective, might we say the following: that in the age of a decentralised, network society, where people demand autonomy - primarily as consumers, but that could change - the problem politicians face is how to be more like 'us' and the problem 'we' face is how to be more like politicians. Matthew Taylor writes regularly on this latter issue of how to enable people to take active, collective responsibility for the world around them. 

Might this issue about aesthetic vs moral reputation be part of the problem, and hence part of the solution? Gordon Brown's central problem is that he conveys endless moralism, duty and calling, while failing entirely to communicate who he is. The civic deficit, on the other hand, is that people aspire to optimal identities, tastes and fashions, but only rarely gauge themselves in terms of 'the good life'. The politician measures worth in ethical terms while the citizen does so in aesthetic terms. Now that we all have equal access to the means of media production and can organise without organisations (still disregarding the substantive distinction between a nuclear warhead and an e-petition), politics has become a pro-am pursuit, but where the 'pros' are trading in social capital and the 'ams' in cultural capital. 

When politicians do start trading in cultural accounts of worth, we need to remain vigilent. At best it involves Tony Blair inviting Noel Gallagher to Downing Street, and at worst it involves something much more troubling, as we saw in the European election results. I wonder if we'll miss Gordon Brown's rather dreary, 1950s promises to 'do his duty'. In some ways it is rather comforting to be governed by politicians who are 'out of touch' as it relieves the citizenry of responsibility for the state of things. But anyone who is committed to the 'radical' devolution of power, to autonomy, to organising without organisations, grass-roots democracy and so on might seriously want to consider what a new moral economy might look like. How will ugliness, blandness, tastelessness be trumped in the future by virtue and participation? Or is the challenge simply to make ethics 'cool'? So how then is that different from the marketing strategies and 'reputation management' of ethically dubious companies? There must be a limit to how neatly ethics can be collapsed into aesthetics.

In the realm of consumption, optimists argue that ethical accounts of worth are beginning to fight back against aesthetic ones. In time, this may occur with use of media and mySociety-type initiatives may become a dominant force. But until then, the risk is that social media makes us spin doctors of our own lives, tweaking our cultural identities, where democracy in fact requires the opposite. As uncomfortable as it makes the British (not the Americans), perhaps virtue needs audiences and platforms for celebration.

One of Lucy Kimbell's evaluation projects, 'Pindices', looked at this issue of how to evaluate an individual's democratic worth. On the face of it, the project is absurd, beyond the realms of how we imagine ourselves living, but that poses the question 'why?'. I've noticed that people 'donate' their facebook statuses to a given cause, but 'moral bragging' is still taboo in comparison to 'cultural bragging'. I have no deep desire to see this reversed, but suspect that it signifies something about the challenges involved in creating the type of decentralised society that most of us purport to want.

the future of 'change'

Much ink has been spilled reflecting on the authority of economists after the financial crisis and why so few predicted it. After all, if Milton Friedman is right, the fact that a given economic method rests on surreal and abstract presuppositions is irrelevant in comparison to its capacity to predict the future, but on this account economics failed. But what of those other economic analysts, whose claims operate outside of Popperian falsification, as quasi-existentialist statements about the way things just are? I speak, of course, of the business guru.

I have just been reading a publication from 1997, declaring that networked organisations are the future, stable employment relations are a thing of the past, hollowed-out or 'virtual' organisations are emerging to defeat bureaucratic ones. This, after all, was the era of change - change in organisational forms, markets, public sector; change that was getting ever faster; change that was destroying and consuming every poor mite that refused to bow down to it. My Work Foundation colleagues and I used to take great pleasure in a delightfully silly book that used to knock around the office called The Change Monster. If anyone had taken much 1990s business rhetoric literally, they would have viewed it as a small miracle that their spouse was still with them from one day to the next. Tony Blair captured this zeitgeist effectively in his war on the 'forces of conservatism', which seemed to be waged against everything from the unions, to the Conservative party, to bureaucratic structures, to, well, Iraq (remember the kaleidoscope that was shaken? It was the change monster I tells ya!).

The only sensible interpretation of all of this is that the era was characterised by a idiosyncratic, somewhat dysfunctional relationship to Joseph Schumpeter. Schumpeter identified that capitalism is characterised by waves of 'creative destruction', in which new business practices exploit new technologies (or techniques) to destroy previous ones. Real, radical productivity leaps do not occur within industries or within existing markets, but through the destruction of them.

The preacher's - and profiteers - of 'change' take Schumpeter's material-economic analysis and transform it into a discursive-cultural one. The gospel they sell their clients implores them to delay or out-source real 'creative destruction', and replace it with rhetorical, managed, normal 'change'. As Bob Jessop notes, the 1980s and 90s saw a pronounced attempt to internalise and normalise Schumpeterian principles in Western economies - a paradoxical venture, given the external, abnormal nature of the Schumpeterian entrerpreneur. But if change can be normalised and instated as the founding constitutional principle of an organisation, then, it is hoped, that organisation can avoid being destroyed by the very forces it claims to believe in. A weird bargain is struck: as long as change is worshipped, witnessed and celebrated everywhere, things can remain largely the same. Bosses, financial markets, charismatic Prime Ministers and other forms of hierarchy can all sleep soundly, as long as they constantly doff their cap to 'change'.  Attack 'the forces of conservatism', and Britain's 19th century power structures might make it through unscathed.

I am not so close to the 'new economy' literature as I was, so I don't know quite how the change fetishists are responding to the eruption of crisis. I note Michael Porter uses it as an opportunity to ramp up the urgency of an agenda he's been trumpetting for 25 years.

But even if this is all going strong, one wonders whether the appetite for such literature can survive this moment of real creative destruction. Things are evidently not the same as they were in 1997; but this isn't because of some vaporous change that engulfs us culturally. It's a material and political crisis that will be pored over, written about and taught by economic historians in 200 years time. The same could not be said of 'the New Economy'. Some sort of dialectic is at work, in which change rhetoric sustains institutions over time, while actual economic upheaval leaves - as Larkin observed of death - 'nothing to be said'. London's geniuses of financial innovation, praised to the rafters for their dynamism during the good years, have surely now excelled themselves when it comes to 'change'  - nationalisation, bankruptcy, riots, fiscal crisis - but for some reason nobody quite views it like that any more.

This is partly an issue about how we perceive the ingredients of crises, as I discuss here. Of course, new organisational structures, technologies, social forms and values will shape and characterise the next wave of industrial capitalism. And of course, most of those factors are already waiting in the wings, ready to be used to construct a new model. But viewed in the context of crisis, they appear plausible, realistic and with long-term utility; they do not appear like the ecstatic work of the change monster.

Take one example. When David Cameron declared the need for a new constitutional settlement recently, quite a bit of this was based on the capabilities of new technologies such as youtube and text messaging. Leaving aside the overall quality of his vision, I was struck by how credible and necessary this exploitation of digital technology suddenly appeared. Prior to this constitutional crisis, the e-democracy movement had preached e-this, e-that, cyber-parliament, the Big Conversation, a civic commons - none of which ever acquired any political plausibility. It operated in a rhetorical realm in which 'participation' and 'interactivity' could be celebrated to the heavens, without ever imperilling a decrepit parliamentary system. Now that the constitutional crisis has 'gone real' (a wonderfully Hegelian phrase I learnt from a derivatives broker whose colleague had accidentally found himself in possession of 1,000 tonnes of Russian sugar), we no longer have to speak participation, speak interactivity, but set about wondering what practices and procedures are needed to realise them.

So who's to say that the 'virtual organisation' and the 'networked employee' won't exist in the future. They will do, although without the adjectives to glamorise them. The prophets of change may turn out to be right after all. But that's precisely why we won't need them any longer.

open-sourcing my research on the firm

As I mentioned in a previous post, I'm working on a project for Demos at the moment, provisionally entitled 'reinventing the firm'. Its scope is potentially huge, so the challenge has been partly about narrowing it. On the other hand, there are exciting philosophical and sociological questions involved, regarding the nature of ownership, the future of economic institutions post-crisis, the Will Hutton-ish agenda (mourned by him at the weekend) of how to privilege production over finance. There will be a strong focus on employee-owned models.

There'll be case studies in the final publication (due for September) but I wondered if anyone had any tips for novel examples of new organisational, governance and ownership models. My delicious bookmarks give a sense of some of my interests here. Of course the Mondragon Case Study, err, I mean Mondragon Cooperative Corporation is the innovative example par excellence, but has been around for 50 years now. But I wonder if anything else is bubbling up, in the way that, say, Zopa is offering a new means of organising credit. If anyone would like to contribute ideas or examples (or simply know more about the project) please comment below or email me. All intellectual gifts are gratefully repaid via the currency of acknowledgements.

political imaginations of technology

I argue in my PhD that one of the defining features of the neo-liberal state is (or was) that it maintains an arms-length relationship with technological expertise. This is most vigorously argued by Hayek, whose chief enemy was the economic planner. Why, you wonks out there might ask, has the Treasury spent the last 30 years sniggering at BERR? The neo-liberal economist finds it amusing that a government department might want to have a policy on how to manufacture a given product, when quite evidently this is none of the state's business. (I once spotted a poster in a BERR corridor listing the four 'market failures', an apparent bid to remind its staff not to think too substantively about the production process itself). Foucault's observation, which inspired this paper of mine, that "the economic critique the neo-liberals try to apply to governmental policy is also a filtering of every action by the public authorities in terms of contradiction, lack of consistency and nonsense" might well apply to HMT views of BERR, pre-2008.

Two questions follow. Firstly, how does (or did) the neo-liberal state then go about representing the substantive technological dimension of capitalism? It's no good pretending away the technological differences between the era of Adam Smith and that of Margaret Thatcher, despite the latter's popularity amongst rural idiots. I suggest that this is the crucial function performed by the 'competitiveness' discourse, developed by Michael Porter, The World Economic Forum and IMD. Its vagueness, which has enfuriated orthodox economists, is entirely the point: it provides a way of loosely referring to the productive capacity of a nation, without getting bogged down in Soviet-style questions of how many tractors are needed.

In this context, the cultural economist in me finds this slide show rather interesting. The IMD have just published their 2009 competitiveness rankings, which (predictably) puts the US in number 1, lots of tiny countries in the top 10 and a few wilting giants in the top 20. The images are rather nice. While Business Week would be the last people to recommend industrial policies, they have some rather attractive images to conjure up warm fuzzy feelings about where wealth actually probably comes from. Britain's, apparently, emerges from Bank tube station, which puts us in 21st spot.

The IMD rankings are also interesting for being the first ones produced since the beginning of the financial crisis (the World Economic Forum produced their last ones only a few days after the collapse of Lehmann Bros). Britain has slipped significantly, but largely the rankings seem unaffected. Cause for Western optimism, or a sign that this is a methodological paradigm invented for the purposes of a now-defunct neo-liberal era?

If it's the latter, the second question is how technology will be represented and evaluated for policy-makers during the next political-economic epoch. Early indications, what with politicians becoming embroiled in discussions of car exhaust pipes, are of a return to the 1970s. Everything in history happens twice, someone said, the first time as tragedy and the second time as farce. The European Commission is desparately trying to keep a lid on faintly Gallic state aid strategies all over the place. Tractor quotas seem imminent. Industrial policy is no longer a taboo in quite the same way, not that it ever went away - look at copyright - but it is no longer the policy love that dare not speak its name.

This I Love 1976 nostalgia show can only last so long, however. Sorry to indulge in more evolutionary mysticism (as implied in this comment), but I reckon something new will emerge that is neither Bennite industrial policy nor Porter-esque competitiveness policy. It will have traces of both, naturally, but we're currently waiting for a new paradigm.

Could, for example, the division between substantive economic knowledge ('100 tractors please') and abstract formalism ('is this a market failure or not?') be bridged in some way? There are some who imply that this is happening elsewhere in the economy, thanks to the vast data sets that are being made available by ubiquitous surveillance. In the age of the 'constant audit', consumer research is moving to collapse the distinction between qualitative and quantitative data. What might this mean for how governments relate to the technological means of production? Not socialism, by a long way, but not neo-liberalism either. BERR might be about to have the next laugh.