Since the global economic crisis of 2007–2008, ‘capitalism’ has been the topic of widespread general discussion in both mainstream and social media. In this book, Christian W. Chun examines the discourses of capitalism taken up by people in their responses to a street art installation created by Steve Lambert, entitled Capitalism Works for Me! In doing so, he considers several key questions, including: How do everyday people view and make sense of capitalism and its role in their work and personal lives? What are the discourses they use in their common-sense understandings of the economy to defend or reject capitalism as a system? Chun looks at how dominant discourses in social circulation operate to co-construct and support capitalism, and the accompanying counter-discourses that critique it. This is key reading for advanced students of discourse analysis, language and globalization/politics, media/communication studies, and related areas. A video lecture by the author can be accessed via the Routledge website (www.routledge.com/9781138807105) and the Routledge Language and Communication Portal (www.routledgetextbooks.com/textbooks/languageandcommunication).

In this book, Christian W. Chun examines the ways in which identities, discourses, and topographies of both capitalist and anti-capitalist imaginaries and realities are embodied in the everyday practices of people. A World without Capitalism? is a sociolinguistic ethnography that explores the heretofore limited research in applied linguistics and sociolinguistics on the discursive and materialized representations and enactments of capitalism. Engaging across disciplinary fields, including applied linguistics, ethnography, political economy, philosophy, and cultural studies, Chun investigates in ethnographic detail how capitalism does and does not pervade people’s everyday experiences. This book aims to further contribute to a much-needed understanding of how discourses operate in the co-constructions of capitalist and anti-capitalist imaginaries and instantiated realities and practices as narrated, lived, and embodied by people and material artifacts. This book is vital reading for students and researchers working in the fields of applied linguistics, discourse analysis, and cultural studies, as well as those interested in understanding capitalism and questioning how to live beyond it.

The capitalist market, progressives bemoan, is a cold monster: it disrupts social bonds, erodes emotional attachments, and imposes an abstract utilitarian rationality. But what if such hallowed critiques are completely misleading? This book argues that the production of new sources of faith and enchantment is crucial to the dynamics of the capitalist economy. Distinctively secular patterns of attraction and attachment give modern institutions a binding force that was not available to more traditional forms of rule. Elaborating his alternative approach through an engagement with the semiotics of money and the genealogy of economy, Martijn Konings uncovers capitalism's emotional and theological content in order to understand the paradoxical sources of cohesion and legitimacy that it commands. In developing this perspective, he draws on pragmatist thought to rework and revitalize the Marxist critique of capitalism.

This book adds a crucial focus on morality to the growing literature on the history of capitalism by exploring social and cultural perspectives on the economic order that has dominated the modern world. Taking the study beyond narrow economic confines, it traces the entanglement between moral sentiments and capitalism, examining both moral critiques and moral justifications. Company bankruptcies, systems of taxation, wealth, and the running of stock exchanges were attacked on moral grounds, while ideas of economic justice and the humanization of capitalism loomed large over moral critiques. Many movements, from antislavery to labour campaigns, were inspired by aspirations to improve capitalism and halt the moral decay that was felt to have affected large sections of society. This book questions how moral sentiments are defined and have changed over time, and how these relate to both capitalism and anti-capitalism. Covering a range of different social movements and ethical issues, the 13 chapters present a moral history of capitalism, understood not simply as an economic system but as an order that encompasses all areas of modern life.

This book examines the ways in which our ideas about language and identity which used to be framed in national and political terms as a matter of rights and citizenship are increasingly recast in economic terms as a matter of added value. It argues that this discursive shift is connected to specific characteristics of the globalized new economy in what can be thought of as "late capitalism". Through ten ethnographic case studies, it demonstrates the complex ways in which older nationalist ideologies which invest language with value as a source of pride get bound up with newer neoliberal ideologies which invest language with value as a source of profit. The complex interaction between these modes of mobilizing linguistic resources challenges some of our ideas about globalization, hinting that we are in a period of intensification of modernity, in which the limits of the nation-State are stretched, but not (yet) undone. At the same time, this book argues, this intensification also calls into question modernist ways of looking at language and identity, requiring a more serious engagement with capitalism and how it constitutes symbolic (including linguistic) as well as material markets.

Capitalism and the Commons focuses on the political and social perspectives that commons offer, how they are appropriated or suppressed by capital and state, and how social initiatives and movements contest these dynamics or build their struggles on commoning. The volume comprises theoretical and empirical approaches that engage with three main themes: conceptualizing the commons, analyzing practices of commoning, and exploring commons politics. In their contributions, the authors focus on the development of anti-capitalist commons and explore the issue of practice and politics through case studies from Colombia, the Democratic Republic of Congo, South Africa, and Africa more broadly, Austria, Germany and South Korea, ranging from peri-urban and rural agriculture to urban commons and how they manifest in the Global South as well as in the Global North. The book engages with different discourses on the commons in regard to their relevance for social change and thereby reinvigorates the political meaning of the commons. It provides an original and important approach to the topic in terms of conceptualization, detailing diverse empirical realities, and analyzing potential perspectives. In so doing, the book transcends narrow disciplinary boundaries and expands the focus to the global. Providing a fresh perspective on the commons as a decisive component of alternatives, this title will be relevant to scholars and students of resource management, social movements, and sustainable development more broadly.

“A clever, even witty examination of the manipulation of language in these days of neoliberal or late stage capitalism” (Counterpunch). From Silicon Valley to the White House, from kindergarten to college, and from the factory floor to the church pulpit, we are all called to be innovators and entrepreneurs, to be curators of an ever-expanding roster of competencies, and to become resilient and flexible in the face of the insults and injuries we confront at work. In the midst of increasing inequality, these keywords teach us to thrive by applying the lessons of a competitive marketplace to every sphere of life. What’s more, by celebrating the values of grit, creativity, and passion at school and at work, they assure us that economic success is nothing less than a moral virtue. Organized alphabetically as a lexicon, Keywords explores the history and common usage of major terms in the everyday language of capitalism. Because these words have infiltrated everyday life, their meanings may seem self-evident, even benign. Who could be against empowerment, after all? Keywords uncovers the histories of words like innovation, which was once synonymous with “false prophecy” before it became the prevailing faith of Silicon Valley. Other words, like best practices and human capital, are relatively new coinages that subtly shape our way of thinking. As this book makes clear, the new language of capitalism burnishes hierarchy, competition, and exploitation as leadership, collaboration, and sharing, modeling for us the habits of the economically successful person: be visionary, be self-reliant—and never, ever stop working.