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Knowing Capitalism
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Knowing Capitalism



January 2005 | 264 pages | SAGE Publications Ltd
'This is an ambitious, original, and complex treatment of key aspects of contemporary capitalism. It makes a major contribution because it profoundly destabilizes the scholarship on globalization, the so-called new economy, information technology, distinct contemporary business cultures and practices'
- Saskia Sassen, author of Globalization and its Discontents

'Nigel Thrift offers us the sort of cultural analysis of global capitalism that has long been needed - one that emphasizes the innovative energy of global capitalism. The book avoids stale denouncements and offers instead a view of capitalism as a form of practice'
- Karin Knorr Cetina, Professor of Sociology, University of Konstanz, Germany

Capitalism is well known for producing a form of existence where `everything solid melts into air'. But what happens when capitalism develops theories about itself? Are we moving into a condition in which capitalism can be said to possess a brain?

These questions are pursued in this sparkling and thought-provoking book. Thrift looks at what he calls 'the cultural circuit of capitalism', the mechanism for generating new theories of capitalism. The book traces the rise of this circuit back to the 1960s when a series of institutions locked together to interrogate capitalism, to the present day, when these institutions are moving out to the Pacific basin and beyond. What have these theories produced? How have they been implicated in the speculative bubbles that characterized the late twentieth century? What part have they played in developing our understanding of human relations?

Building on an inter-disciplinary approach which embraces the core social sciences, Thrift outlines an exciting new theory for understanding capitalism. His book is of interest to readers in geography, social theory, anthropology and cultural economics.

 
Adventures of Capitalism
The Cultural Circuit of Capitalism

 
 
PART ONE: THE CULTURAL CIRCUIT OF CAPITALISM
 
The Rise of Soft Capitalism
 
The Place of Complexity
 
Virtual Capitalism
The Globalization of Reflexive Business Knowledge

 
with Kris Olds
Cultures on the Brink
Re-Engineering the Soul of Capitalism on a Global Scale

 
 
PART TWO: THE NEW ECONOMY
 
'It's the Romance, Not the Finance, that Makes the Business Worth Pursuing'
Disclosing a New Market Culture

 
 
Performing Cultures in the New Economy
with Shaun French
The Automatic Production of Space
 
Closer to the Machine? Intelligent Environments, New Forms of Possession and the Rise of the Supertoy
 
Electric Animals
New Models of Everyday Life?

 
 
Remembering the Technological Unconscious by Foregrounding Knowledges of Postition

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