Concepts of Capital: The Commodification of Social Life

ISBN-13: 9781412853026 / Angielski / Twarda / 2014 / 272 str.

Jacek Tittenbrun

Opis

Borrowing terminology from the economic discipline-specifically the concept of "capital"-has led to an abundance of new terms in the social sciences: human capital, social capital, and cultural capital, to name the most prominent representatives on an ever-growing list. In this interdisciplinary transaction, the concept is borrowed and the original meaning extended until the new concepts often have nothing left in common with their initial referents. Here Jacek Tittenbrun offers a critical analysis of human, social, and cultural capital on the basis of their uses and misuses across a wide range of social sciences, simultaneously revealing the source of conceptual diffusion in the real world. He presents a two-pronged analysis of an intellectual fashion popular in the social sciences and offers a critical analysis of a range of concepts constructed around the common core of "capital." The analysis is innovative, insofar as it is underpinned by a theoretical framework rooted in economic sociology and the concept of ownership in particular. The approach is one of the sociology of knowledge coupled with a substantive critique-application of the given concepts. The volume reveals a range of processes in the real world that account for the conceptual diffusion. The general reader will be drawn to the discussion in the second half of the book, a study of a variety of relatable real life situations that illuminate privatization and commodification in our lives.

Spis treści

Introduction

1 Ownership
2 Human Capital and Its Pioneering Labors
3 Social Capital
4 Cultural Capital in the Sociology of Education
5 Cultural Capital in the Sociology of Religion
6 Economists on Human and Social Capital
7 Economic Imperialism
8 The Economic Base of the Ideological Superstructure
9 Classic Accounts of the Nexus between Property, Capital, and Commodities
10 Modern Capital Accumulation; or, The New Enclosures
11 The Privatization of Local and National Government
12 The Privatization of Public Space
13 The Commodification and Privatization of Higher Education
14 The Commodification of Culture
15 The Commodification and Privatization of Nature
16 The Commodification and Privatization of Knowledge and Biological Life
17 The Commodification of Third-World Poverty
18 The Commodification of Morality
19 The Commodification of Emotions
20 The Commodification of Death
21 The Commodification of the Human Body
22 The Commodification of Health Care
23 The Commodification of Sports
24 The Commodification of Capital
25 The Privatization of the Cosmos
26 The Economy and Society
27 Memetics

References

Index

O autorze

Jacek Tittenbrun