potlatch

PERC Events

In case I haven't already tweeted about it enough, I've been in the process of setting up a new Political Economy Research Centre (PERC) at Goldsmiths over the last few months, together with some great colleagues. PERC sits alongside our new heterodox PPE degree, which is currently in its first year.

You can read about our research ambitions and interests on the website. Hopefully there will be projects and publications to follow. In the meantime, here are two events that are open to all (registration via Eventbrite links is required), both at Goldsmiths:

• 'From REcovery to DIScovery: changing the terms of debate on the economy' - 19th-20th March. Speakers include Andrew Gamble, Ann Pettifor and Steve Keen. Registration here.

• ' What Can Economics Learn from Science Fiction?' - 23rd March, 5.30pm. Lecture by Ha-Joon Chang, followed by drinks reception. Registration here.

Listen to Big Ideas - what is neoliberalism?

The Big Ideas event I spoke at on 'What is neoliberalism?' on Tuesday night turned out to be great fun, with unusually good questions and contributions from the audience. In case anybody would like to listen, here is a recording. It includes my talk, which lasts just over half an hour, and then an hour-long discussion.

Big Ideas discussion - What is Neoliberalism? - 29th July

I'll be speaking at the next Big Ideas event, at the Wheatsheaf pub, 25 Rathbone Place, London, at 8pm on Tuesday 29th July. These events are organised by Andrew McGettigan, and take place on the last Tuesday of every month, for anyone who wants to turn up and discuss ideas.

I'll be speaking on the topic 'What is neoliberalism?', and the blurb is here:

It is often argued that, starting with the Reagan and Thatcher governments in the 1980s, economic policy-making around the world has become dominated by ‘neoliberalism’. This tends to imply something about free markets, but beyond that the term is often used as a catch-all for any undesirable aspect of capitalism.

How might we make better sense of the concept? What can we learn from the long history of neoliberal thinking? And how does that help us understand the current state of politics and capitalism?

'Trials and Tribulations in Economics' - seminar, 26th September

As mentioned here before, I am one of the Co-Investigators on an ESRC Seminar Series, 'Spaces of Evidence', which explores various types of evidence (such as Randomised Controlled Trials) which are at work in policy, management and elite decision-making today.

I'm convening the next seminar at Goldsmiths, London, on the 26th September, which will explore new directions in economic policy evidence, including RCTs and big data. We have quite a nice mix of speakers, including some who will look sceptically at this new empiricist turn, others who are actually practicing it, plus Angus Deaton from Princeton, who has written somewhat critically about the use of RCTs in development.

It's open to all, but please register. All details, including how to register, are available here.

'The New Social-ism' - 11th December

I'm organising a conference, which addresses themes explored in these pieces of mine, regarding the new logic and expertise of the 'social'. If you'd like to attend, please register (for free) at this link.

 

The New Social-ism

What is valuable, visible & knowable in the emerging social economy?

A one-day conference hosted by Centre for Interdisciplinary Methodologies

10am-6pm, 11^th December 2013

Room MS.03, University of Warwick

Appeals to the ‘social’ today are everywhere: ‘social enterprise’, ‘social media’, ‘social neuroscience’, ‘social prescribing’, ‘social marketing’, ‘social analytics’, ‘social innovation’. This is thanks partly to the affordances of new techniques of accounting, network visualization and behavioural analysis, many of which take advantage of the ubiquitous digitization of market and non-market activity. The social world can be seen, quantified and influenced via new forms of expertise and data analytics. Managers, marketers and policy-makers make explicit appeals to the ‘social’, in order to sustain brands, rational decision-making, mental health and public goods.

How do we make sense of this? What is the ontology of the ‘social’ that is being appealed to, and how does it differ from the ‘social’ of 20^th century statistics, society and sociology? What methodologies are at work in rendering this form of sociality visible, measurable and governable? Is social network analysis now performative, as neo-classical economics has been described in the past? What power relations are latent in this new notion of the social, and to what extent is it in fact reducible to the economic after all - or, perhaps, the biological?

This conference brings together scholars working in economic sociology, science and technology studies, social studies of finance, social studies of Big Data and other fields, to address these questions. Confirmed speakers include:

• Profesor Nikolas Rose - Kings College, University of London
• Professor Nigel Thrift, University of Warwick
• Dr. Noortje Marres, Goldsmiths University of London
• Professor Yuval Millo, University of Leicester
• Dr. Liz Moor, Goldsmiths University of London
• Dr. Evelyn Ruppert, Goldsmiths, University of London

The conference is free to attend, but registration is essential. You can register for this conference here. All queries should be sent to Will Davies – [email protected]

The event takes place in Room MS.03, which is in the Mathematics and Statistics building. A campus map is available here (the building is number 38 on the map). Information on how to get to Warwick University is available here.

This conference is sponsored by:

where do neoliberals go after the market?

My colleague, Nate Tkacz and I, have put together a conference at CIM, which tries to think about neoliberalism in terms of rival technologies of information-processing.  In particular, could the market be usurped within the neoliberal imagination by other 'smarter' machinic visions of liberty, such as those promised by 'open data'? Philip Mirowski will give a keynote, drawing on his forthcoming book on the financial crisis. The full ad for the conference is copied below (the original link is here) with registration details at the bottom. Come along!

 

Where Do Neoliberals Go After the Market? - A one day conference, 13th June

University of Warwick

10am-6.30pm

Room S0.21

Neoliberalism is commonly identified as a belief in the self-regulating powers of markets, especially financial markets. Markets, from this perspective, are powerful information-processors, which are uniquely capable of governing complex societies while preserving liberty. In recent decades, financial institutions have added further computational power, which, among other things, has led to the automation of trading and the calculation and simulation of market scenarios to manage risk. The financial crisis has been perceived by some as the outcome of this collision between markets and increasingly ‘performative’ economics.

But where does this leave neoliberalism and its technical ideal of freedom? Does it simply require more markets or greater computational power to prevent future crises? Or are we witnessing the emergence of a different neoliberalism, based on different technologies and ideologies of liberty, in appeals to ‘Big Data’ and ‘openness’? Might software and ‘open data’ usurp the primacy of the price system in the neoliberal imagination, as tools of governance in complex modern societies? To what extent are the political desires of the digital elite – from Hackers to Silicon Valley – amenable to the neoliberal project?

This one-day conference will address these questions from a range of disciplinary perspectives, including software studies, history of economics, political theory, media studies, international political economy and economic sociology.

Speakers

• Prof Philip Mirowski, University of Notre Dame
• Prof Shirin Rai, University of Warwick
• Dr Richard Barbrook, University of Westminster
• Dr Orit Halpern, New School for Social Research
• Dr David Berry, Swansea University
• Dr Johan Soderberg, Université Paris-Est/Écoles des Ponts

 

Conference themes

• Neoliberal responses to financial crisis
• The invention and reinvention of 'competition'
• The philosophy and techniques of 'openness'
• The persistence and reinvention of the market
• The intersections between neoliberalism and cybernetics
• The significance of data and 'Big Data' to the evolution of neoliberalism
• The role of specific devices in visions of freedom
• The political lineages of 'hackers'

 

Attendance

The conference is free to attend, but registration is essential. To register please click here.

Room S0.21 is in the Social Sciences block. A campus map is available here. All details on how to get to Warwick University are available here.

York conference on neoliberalism

Everybody needs to go to this excellent-looking - and free - conference at York in June, Neoliberalism, Crisis and World System. They've assembled some excellent speakers (plus me).

My paper will develop some of the ideas in my neo-communitarianism piece, to reflect on the fact that neoliberalism both began with a critique of the 'social' (in the form of the socialist calculation debate of the 1920s) and is now being arguably reformed or replaced via new logics of 'social' quantification. It strikes me that what facebook et al promise in the form of 'predictive social analytics', for example, isn't that different from what Soviet economists were tasked with doing for a planned economy. So neoliberalism is therefore book-ended by utopian efforts to optimise or rationalise 'the social'. This is the abstract:

Friedrich Hayek referred to the term ‘social’ as “that weasel word”, arguing that it was meaningless and always disguised the true intentions of its user. The origins of neoliberalism can be traced to the ‘socialist calculation’ debates of the 1920s and ‘30s, in which Austrian economists and leftwing neo-classical economists argued over whether efficiency was possible in a planned economy. Neoliberal government has been analysed in terms of the ‘death of the social’ (Rose, 1996) while economists have been accused of ‘colonising’ the social, with economistic theories such as ‘social capital’ (Fine, 2008, 2011). But today, the ‘social’ seems everywhere, in the form of social enterprise, valuation, prescribing, media and so on. This paper reflects on neoliberalism as a failed attempt to cleanse modernity of Rousseauian social theory, arguing that the crisis of the last five years has seen the ‘revenge of the social’, which experts and economists strive to cope with, by reducing it to the psychological.

Speaking at UEL, 6th February

I'm speaking at University of East London on 6th February, at a seminar entitled Security, Community & Democracy. My talk will be developing some of the ideas from my recent piece on neo-communitarianism:

‘Experiments in Community: Relational Government and Audit After Neoliberalism’.

The neoliberal era is – or was – characterised by the extension of economic modes of evaluation into new corners of social, cultural and political life. Various critical scholars noted that it either eradicated the ‘social’ realm as a distinct terrain of action, or else re-imagined it in ways that was supportive of the ‘economic’. But in the wake of various crises of neoliberalism, the ‘social’ has reappeared with its own logic, as ‘social media’, ‘social prescribing’, ‘social enterprise’ and so on. Policy-makers have re-discovered the social, not simply as an economic ‘externality’, but as a psychological or neurological resource, which facilitates wellbeing and behavioural rationality. But what sorts of evidence, audit and evaluation will be required to realise new forms of ‘relational government’? What does it mean for a policy to ‘succeed’, if not in a purely economistic sense? The paper will suggest that audited field experiments in community and behavioural policy, accompanied by data analytics, represent a key methodological basis for governance in the emerging era.

Hope to see you there!

CRESC conference on 'promises' and crises

The CRESC Annual Conference looks excellent this year:

Weds September 5 - Friday September 7, 2012, Manchester University

Keynote Speakers

• Barbara Adam (Social Sciences, Cardiff University)
• Robert Boyer (ENS, Paris)
• Aditya Chakrabortty (The Guardian) 
• Will Hutton (Hertford College, Oxford University)
• Paul Mason (BBC Newsnight)
• Elizabeth A. Povinelli (Anthropology, Columbia University)

Promises: Crises and Socio-Cultural Change

In the midst of global financial crisis and radical transformations in states, institutions and social relations, it has become urgent to explore the role promises play in effecting socio-cultural change. As particular plans, projects, policies, initiatives, dreams and visions, promises both open and close the possibility of different kinds of socio-cultural futures (and pasts). What promises are contained in the current political and socio-cultural moment?

Hopefully see you there!

Erik Olin Wright lecture on Worker-owned Cooperatives - 23rd May - Oxford

I'm organising and chairing this event with Erik Olin Wright in Oxford on 23rd May. All welcome!

 

Worker-owned Cooperatives: A niche in capitalism or a pathway beyond?

A lecture by Professor Erik Olin Wright, University of Wisconsin

5pm-6.30pm, Wednesday 23rd May, 2012

Lecture Theature, Department of Politics and International Relations, Manor Road Building, Manor Road, Oxford

Worker-owned Cooperatives have an ambiguous relationship to capitalism as an economic system. On the one hand, worker coops constitute a distinctive organizational form that occupies a small niche compatible with a well-functioning capitalist economy. On the other hand, worker-owned and managed firms violate in fundamental ways the class character of capitalism by being organized on democratic egalitarian principles. This contradictory relationship between cooperatives and capitalism poses an important question for critics of capitalism: To what extent could worker cooperatives ever constitute a significant component of an alternative to capitalism?

This lecture, hosted jointly by Oxford University's Centre for Mutual and Employee-owned Business, Public Policy Unit and Centre for the Study of Social Justice, will explore worker-owned cooperatives, as a case of what Wright terms 'real utopias'. It will feature a response by Prof Stuart White (Politics) and be chaired by Dr. Will Davies (Centre for Mutual and Employee-owned Business).

No registration is required. Please email [email protected] for any further details about this event.