Tag Archives: capitalism

My inaugural lecture – a year late!

Well, it was a busy 2025, but that’s no excuse. So here it is. On 19 February 2025, I was honoured to take part in an inaugural lecture showcase for the University of St Andrews Business School, alongside my colleagues Professors Alina baluch, Shiona Chillas and Ian Smith. We were introduced by the Principal, Professor Dame Sally Mapstone, while Dean of Arts Professor Catherine O’Leary was our MC. A very special, happy event, followed by a dinner in Upper College Hall.

The lecture has since been published as a commentary piece – and call to action – in the Journal of Cultural Economy, which I edit. It’s open access, available here or as a PDF.

Roscoe 2025 The times they are a-changin markets after neoliberalism and how to study themDownload

For those who prefer, here’s the text and a few pictures:

“The times they are a-changin’: markets after neoliberalism, and how to study them”

You will doubtless know that it is possible, in the run up to Christmas each year, to take a day trip to see Santa Claus in his cottage in Lapland.[i] You and your children hop on an aeroplane and over the next few hours you are transported into a magical world of snowy forests, sleighs, and reindeer – not to mention merchandising opportunities – until, much later that day, you tumble back into Birmingham, Manchester or Gatwick, pockets empty but memories overflowing.

If you believe in Santa, you should probably stop listening now. For this particular market, offering an authentic Santa experience, is an enormously complicated organisational achievement. A network of local operators serves it: the husky tours, snowmobile transport, hotel and gift shop, buses, and the other paraphernalia of tourism. The actors playing Santa are recruited in the UK so that they will be familiar with the latest trends of the toy market and responsive to the vernacular demands of their small visitors. Authenticity is key, lest the visitors complain (again) about ‘a posh English Santa with a false beard.’

The whole is immaculately choreographed. Tourists take a sleigh ride across the frozen lake into the torchlit forest. Elves shepherd them into the cottage for a carefully scripted four-minute encounter with the man himself, out again into the sleigh, and back through the forest, tears in their eyes at the whole magical performance. Some days two flights arrive from different airports. On those days there are two Santas at work, hidden in different locations in the wood, managed by different circuits of elves, the passengers themselves identified by coloured badges on the lapels.

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‘How to Build a Stock Exchange’, a public lecture at The Australian National University (and on ABC National radio!)

In March and April 2025 I was fortunate enough to spend a month in Canberra as a visiting fellow at The Australian National University’s prestigious Research School for Social Sciences. Fine colleagues in the School of Sociology made me welcome and Canberra delighted me, with its lake, trees and hot air balloons. But a highlight was a public lecture I gave on 26 March 2025, recorded by ABC National, and I’m sharing the script here. The radio recording precluded slides, so I’ll add in some images that I might have used. Enjoy!

Update! The lecture was brodcast on ABC National in October. You’ll find it here!

Canberra is famous for its autumn hot air balloon rally!

Good evening, thank you all for coming tonight, and for that generous introduction.  I’d like to thank the Research School for Social Sciences for offering me a fellowship, and the chance to spend a month in Canberra; to the Journal of Cultural Economy for the not inconsiderable contribution of getting me here; and to colleagues in the department of sociology and the department of management for the warm welcome that I have received over the last weeks. Thank you also to ABC Radio National for recording this lecture.   

A generous introduction from Professor Melinda Cooper

I too would like to acknowledge that we are meeting on land belonging to the Ngunnawal (Nunnawal) and Ngambri (nambri) people, to recognise that sovereignty was never ceded, and to pay respect to their Elders past and present.

The acknowledgement of country seems to me, a visitor from the other side of the world, a welcome recognition and acceptance of the difficult history of colonialism. In that same spirit of recognition, I would like to take you from a massacre to a legal trial and a personal connection to the murky history of finance, which can – should you wish – be told as a history of colonial exploitation. Indeed, even if you don’t wish, it still must be.

Continue reading “‘How to Build a Stock Exchange’, a public lecture at The Australian National University (and on ABC National radio!)”

More awfulness from the US labour market

Image result for elizabeth anderson private governmentHot on the heels of my last review – of Ilana Gershon’s Down and Out in the New Economy – here’s a second offering for the THE on the subject of labour relations. This, from the esteemed philosopher Elizabeth Anderson, takes aim at the expansion of market logic into the private realm of firms, and the subsequent ceding of almost all power on the part of employees. In pursuit of a free-market, employers can hire – and fire – at will, and the results are quite shocking. Once again, Brexiteers beware: your much hoped for low-regulation world may have you, quite literally, pissing your pants at work. Here’s a taster:

“Elizabeth Anderson is a philosopher on the warpath. Her Tanner Lectures, published in this volume with comments and a response, take aim at the unelected, arbitrary and dictatorial power that employers, particularly in the US where labour laws are flimsy, hold over their work-forces. She calls it “private government”, in the sense that those governed – that’s us, by the way – are shut out of the governing process.

The book is littered with examples of firms that make employees’ lives a misery. The usual suspects are here and worse: I was shocked to discover that the right to visit the toilet during working hours has been a contentious and ongoing battle of American labour relations for many decades, and that it is not uncommon to be forced to wear nappies on the production line or urinate in one’s clothes…”

Read the rest here

 

 

The promise and paradise of austerity

Out online, my review of Martijn Konings’ The emotional logic of capitalism (Stanford University Press, 2015). Here’s an extract:

‘Certain questions dog progressive thought: why, in view of the manifest failures of financial capitalism, is its hold on our society stronger than ever? Why, despite the empirical evidence of foreclosures, vacant building lots and food banks are people unable to see the catastrophic consequences of current economic arrangements? How has neoliberalism emerged from calamity ever stronger (Mirowski, 2013)? Why, as Crouch (2011) puts it, will neoliberalism simply not die? With this slim book Martijn Konings, a scholar of political economy at the University of Sydney, sketches out an answer: that progressive understandings of capitalism have neglected its emotional logics – its therapeutic, traumatic-redemptive, even theological qualities – and failed to recognise our emotional investment in money, our belief in the social role of credit as an ordering, regulatory mechanism, and our need for the redemptive promise of austere, well-disciplined economy… ‘

You can read the rest here