The fetish of global competition

Abstract

A number of scholars have criticised the methodological nationalism of the mainstream study of capitalist diversity for ignoring a global convergence trend triggered by global competition. This contribution agrees with this criticism but insists on the need to take the diversities into account in order to understand the dependence of capital on the geographical concreteness of living labour and its social context. At the same time, the paper outlines an analytical framework that sheds light on the process that makes this dependency invisible, hidden behind the convergence trend. This framework further develops Karl Marx’s and Evgeny Pashukanis’s notion of fetishism by drawing on accounts of state theory and economic sociology with a view to outlining the complex interplay of economic and extra-economic processes enabling this disguising. It assigns this process relative autonomy, and thus highlights another type of dependence of capital in its drive towards the realisation of surplus value.

Living Labs: From Niche to Mainstream Innovation Management

“…False positive results such as studies referring to "living laboratory animals" in the context of medical research were excluded (e.g., [83]). By the same token, studies investigating "living labour" were excluded (e.g., [84]). At the end of the process, 97 focal articles were included in the sample representing Database A.…”

Unveiling the Diversity of Scholarly Debate on Living Labs: A Bibliometric Approach

“…Similarly, articles discussing "living labour" were excluded (e.g. Hartmann, 2014). At the end of the process, 411 articles were included in the sample.…”

Universities going global?

“…Internationalization of higher education is seen as a process associated to the broader phenomenon of globalization and as an asymmetrical process that concentrates power with the political coupling of ideology and technique (Halliday 2001;Santos 2017). Globalization entails diffusion of hegemony and promotion of an elite research university model for higher education (Hartmann 2014;Marginson and van der Wende 2007;Ordorika 2007;Robertson 2012). By resorting to critical internationalization studies (Leal, Oregioni, and Moraes 2018;Pashby and Andreotti 2016;Stein 2016Stein , 2017Vavrus and Pekol 2018), I consider how scholars who operate in international interfaces are affected by differential political dynamics.…”