Predatory Value Extraction

Predatory Value Extraction
Author: William Lazonick
Publisher: Oxford University Press
Total Pages: 325
Release: 2019-12-04
Genre: Political Science
ISBN: 0192585983

Predatory Value Extraction explains how an ideology of corporate resource allocation known as 'maximizing shareholder value' (MSV) that emerged in the 1980s came to dominate strategic thinking in business schools and corporate boardrooms in the United States. Undermining the social foundations of sustainable prosperity, it resulted in employment instability, income inequity, and slow productivity growth. In explaining what happened to sustainable prosperity, William Lazonick and Jang-Sup Shin focus on the growing imbalance between value creation and value extraction in the U.S. economy, and the corporate-governance institutions that determine this balance in the nation's major business corporations. The imbalance has become so extreme that predatory value extraction is now a central economic activity, to the point at which the U.S. economy as a whole can be aptly described as a value-extracting economy. Balancing the contributions of economic actors to value creation with their power to extract value provides the foundation for stable and equitable economic growth. When certain economic actors are able to assert their power to extract far more value than they contribute to the value-creation process, an imbalance occurs which, when extreme, leads to dire economic, political, and social consequences. This book not only explores these consequences, but also sets out an agenda for restoring sustainable prosperity.

Predatory Value Extraction

Predatory Value Extraction
Author: William Lazonick
Publisher:
Total Pages: 252
Release: 2020
Genre: Business & Economics
ISBN: 0198846770

This book explains how an ideology of corporate resource allocation known as 'maximizing shareholder value' (MSV) that emerged in the 1980s undermined the social foundations of sustainable prosperity in the United States, resulting in rising inequality and slow productivity growth, and sets out an agenda for restoring sustainable prosperity.

Race for Profit

Race for Profit
Author: Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor
Publisher: UNC Press Books
Total Pages: 364
Release: 2019-09-03
Genre: History
ISBN: 1469653672

LONGLISTED FOR THE 2019 NATIONAL BOOK AWARD FINALIST, 2020 PULITZER PRIZE IN HISTORY By the late 1960s and early 1970s, reeling from a wave of urban uprisings, politicians finally worked to end the practice of redlining. Reasoning that the turbulence could be calmed by turning Black city-dwellers into homeowners, they passed the Housing and Urban Development Act of 1968, and set about establishing policies to induce mortgage lenders and the real estate industry to treat Black homebuyers equally. The disaster that ensued revealed that racist exclusion had not been eradicated, but rather transmuted into a new phenomenon of predatory inclusion. Race for Profit uncovers how exploitative real estate practices continued well after housing discrimination was banned. The same racist structures and individuals remained intact after redlining's end, and close relationships between regulators and the industry created incentives to ignore improprieties. Meanwhile, new policies meant to encourage low-income homeownership created new methods to exploit Black homeowners. The federal government guaranteed urban mortgages in an attempt to overcome resistance to lending to Black buyers – as if unprofitability, rather than racism, was the cause of housing segregation. Bankers, investors, and real estate agents took advantage of the perverse incentives, targeting the Black women most likely to fail to keep up their home payments and slip into foreclosure, multiplying their profits. As a result, by the end of the 1970s, the nation's first programs to encourage Black homeownership ended with tens of thousands of foreclosures in Black communities across the country. The push to uplift Black homeownership had descended into a goldmine for realtors and mortgage lenders, and a ready-made cudgel for the champions of deregulation to wield against government intervention of any kind. Narrating the story of a sea-change in housing policy and its dire impact on African Americans, Race for Profit reveals how the urban core was transformed into a new frontier of cynical extraction.

Twenty-First Century Inequality & Capitalism: Piketty, Marx and Beyond

Twenty-First Century Inequality & Capitalism: Piketty, Marx and Beyond
Author:
Publisher: BRILL
Total Pages: 412
Release: 2018-01-03
Genre: Business & Economics
ISBN: 9004357041

Twenty-First Century Inequality & Capitalism: Piketty, Marx and Beyond is a collection that begins with economist Thomas Piketty’s 2014 book. Most chapters critique Piketty from the perspective of critical theory, global political economy or public sociology, drawing on the work of Karl Marx or the Marxist tradition. The emphasis focuses on elements that are under-theorized or omitted entirely from the economists’ analysis. This includes the importance of considering class and labor dynamics, the recent rise of finance capitalism, insights from feminism, demography, and conflict studies, the Frankfurt School, the world market and the world-system, the rise of a transnational capitalist class, the coming environmental catastrophe, etc. Our goal is to fully understand and suggest action to address today’s capitalist inequality crisis. Contributors are: Robert J. Antonio, J.I. (Hans) Bakker, Roslyn Wallach Bologh, Alessandro Bonanno, Christopher Chase-Dunn, Harry F. Dahms, Eoin Flaherty, Daniel Krier, Basak Kus, Lauren Langman, Dana Marie Louie, Peter Marcuse, Sandor Nagy, Charles Reitz, William I. Robinson, Saskia Sassen, David A. Smith, David N. Smith, Tony Smith, Michael Thompson, Sylvia Walby, Erik Olin Wright.

The Emergence of Corporate Governance

The Emergence of Corporate Governance
Author: Knut Sogner
Publisher: Routledge
Total Pages: 213
Release: 2021-05-31
Genre: Business & Economics
ISBN: 1000395979

Corporate governance is not just about models of best practice organisation or prescriptions following laws or social conventions. Corporate governance is also about persons of power seeking performance, and they do so in ways that transcend structures and pre-conceived notions of the structural set-up of the business. This book emphasises the decision-making dimensions of corporate governance, placing it right in the messy middle of the ever-changing world of capitalism, focussing on the interplay between professional managers and shareholders. This book aims to bring together several fresh perspectives on the development of capitalism seen through the lens of corporate governance. It illustrates the role of intentionality and persons, both as a method with which to understand processes of change, but also as a principle with which to seek a deeper understanding of the corporate governance choices made. It will be of interest to researchers, academics and students in the fields of corporate governance and entrepreneurship, as well as practitioners and other audience interested in the evolution of capitalism and corporate culture.

The Changing C-Suite

The Changing C-Suite
Author: José Luis Alvarez
Publisher: Oxford University Press
Total Pages: 289
Release: 2022
Genre: Executives
ISBN: 0198728425

"This book is about changing corporate power structures. We examine the evolving ways in which power at the apex of complex organizations is structured through roles and relationships in anticipation of and in response to diverse contingencies and interests. Our focus is the changing C-suite, a term denoting the most important senior executives in an organization, characterized by the proliferation of and variation in new Chief X Officer (CXO) roles, where 'X' stands for a specific domain, such as sustainability, communication, digital, human resources, finance, etc. By exploring the emergence and evolution of these CXO roles, we seek to understand these elites' new command posts, sources of expertise and identity, competition and collaboration, and ways of getting things done-what we call their 'style'-thereby extending the political perspective of organizations, which has largely overlooked the changing structure and dynamics underlying executive power and actions. It is in moments of structural transformation, such as the ongoing incorporation of a plethora of new CXO roles on executive committees, that the political model of organizations is better revealed and assessed. The book develops a theoretical account, combined with a rich empirical illustration, of the C-suite's transformation over the last two decades: its magnitude and meaning, its co-construction by different interests, and its potential significance for corporate control. As C-suite incumbents have more leeway to construct their roles than managers at any other organizational layer, special attention is placed on their social and political action styles"--

Carceral Capitalism

Carceral Capitalism
Author: Jackie Wang
Publisher: MIT Press
Total Pages: 361
Release: 2018-02-23
Genre: Political Science
ISBN: 1635900026

Essays on the contemporary continuum of incarceration: the biopolitics of juvenile delinquency, predatory policing, the political economy of fees and fines, and algorithmic policing. What we see happening in Ferguson and other cities around the country is not the creation of livable spaces, but the creation of living hells. When people are trapped in a cycle of debt it also can affect their subjectivity and how they temporally inhabit the world by making it difficult for them to imagine and plan for the future. What psychic toll does this have on residents? How does it feel to be routinely dehumanized and exploited by the police? —from Carceral Capitalism In this collection of essays in Semiotext(e)'s Intervention series, Jackie Wang examines the contemporary incarceration techniques that have emerged since the 1990s. The essays illustrate various aspects of the carceral continuum, including the biopolitics of juvenile delinquency, predatory policing, the political economy of fees and fines, cybernetic governance, and algorithmic policing. Included in this volume is Wang's influential critique of liberal anti-racist politics, “Against Innocence,” as well as essays on RoboCop, techno-policing, and the aesthetic problem of making invisible forms of power legible. Wang shows that the new racial capitalism begins with parasitic governance and predatory lending that extends credit only to dispossess later. Predatory lending has a decidedly spatial character and exists in many forms, including subprime mortgage loans, student loans for sham for-profit colleges, car loans, rent-to-own scams, payday loans, and bail bond loans. Parasitic governance, Wang argues, operates through five primary techniques: financial states of exception, automation, extraction and looting, confinement, and gratuitous violence. While these techniques of governance often involve physical confinement and the state-sanctioned execution of black Americans, new carceral modes have blurred the distinction between the inside and outside of prison. As technologies of control are perfected, carcerality tends to bleed into society.

Expulsions

Expulsions
Author: Saskia Sassen
Publisher: Harvard University Press
Total Pages: 305
Release: 2014-05-05
Genre: Business & Economics
ISBN: 0674599225

Soaring income inequality and unemployment, expanding populations of the displaced and imprisoned, accelerating destruction of land and water bodies: today’s socioeconomic and environmental dislocations cannot be fully understood in the usual terms of poverty and injustice, according to Saskia Sassen. They are more accurately understood as a type of expulsion—from professional livelihood, from living space, even from the very biosphere that makes life possible. This hard-headed critique updates our understanding of economics for the twenty-first century, exposing a system with devastating consequences even for those who think they are not vulnerable. From finance to mining, the complex types of knowledge and technology we have come to admire are used too often in ways that produce elementary brutalities. These have evolved into predatory formations—assemblages of knowledge, interests, and outcomes that go beyond a firm’s or an individual’s or a government’s project. Sassen draws surprising connections to illuminate the systemic logic of these expulsions. The sophisticated knowledge that created today’s financial “instruments” is paralleled by the engineering expertise that enables exploitation of the environment, and by the legal expertise that allows the world’s have-nations to acquire vast stretches of territory from the have-nots. Expulsions lays bare the extent to which the sheer complexity of the global economy makes it hard to trace lines of responsibility for the displacements, evictions, and eradications it produces—and equally hard for those who benefit from the system to feel responsible for its depredations.

Planetary Mine

Planetary Mine
Author: Martin Arboleda
Publisher: Verso Books
Total Pages: 289
Release: 2020-01-14
Genre: Social Science
ISBN: 1788732960

A clarion call to rethink natural resource extraction beyond the extractive industries Planetary Mine rethinks the politics and territoriality of resource extraction, especially as the mining industry becomes reorganized in the form of logistical networks, and East Asian economies emerge as the new pivot of the capitalist world-system. Through an exploration of the ways in which mines in the Atacama Desert of Chile—the driest in the world—have become intermingled with an expanding constellation of megacities, ports, banks, and factories across East Asia, the book rethinks uneven geographical development in the era of supply chain capitalism. Arguing that extraction entails much more than the mere spatiality of mine shafts and pits, Planetary Mine points towards the expanding webs of infrastructure, of labor, of finance, and of struggle, that drive resource-based industries in the twenty-first century.