货币演进的历史观与货币创造的政治经济学

一种流行的对现代货币理论的批评认为,现代货币理论忽视了金融市场在货币创造中的主体地位;现代货币理论的错误认识会导致政府对市场的过度干预。这种反对意见不仅误解了现代货币理论,而且建立在错误的历史观上,忽视了政府在市场经济中的重要作用。首先,现代货币理论形成了包括商业银行和政府在内的对货币等级结构的完整认识。其次,在历史上,财政作为货币创造主体的作用并没有让位于商业银行体系,相反,随着布雷顿森林体系的解体,国家财政的作用获得了极大的解放。再次,政府的货币创造具有生产性的一面,它在推动创新和生产力发展上扮演着重要角色;政府创造和回收货币并不是剥削,而是国家的公共目的所使然。最后,货币创造主体的制度设计及其争论的问题本质上是更深层次的政治经济学问题。     

经济法学科学化的法教义学路径

科学化是经济法学科发展的关键。法教义学呈现了法律科学的逻辑性、体系性和可验证性的基本要素,为经济法学的科学化提供了体系化的可能路径。根据法教义学"价值-规范-事实"的研究框架,在价值层面,经济法的社会功能是一种社会对国家经济治理权的想象和期待,旨在以正当、合理的经济介入方式维持和恢复经济系统的良序运行,经济介入的积极形式是培育市场功能条件,消极形式是对经济系统自主运行失序状态的纠正。在规范层面,经济法律规范体系可分解为四组经济法教义学的"理想类型",从而构建起由社会功能、公正优先和法律义务三个要素组成的法律命题体系。在事实层面,经济法应实现立法的体系化与司法的操作化,达成法教义与法治实践的良性互动。     

Decentralization and Economic Growth: Specification,Measurement, and Direction of Causal Relationship

The concept of decentralization has attracted the attention of scholars and policy makers alike for number of decades. Yet, there still remains a significant amount of confusion over its measurement and its contribution to an economy. Current literature on decentralization is characterized by the multitude of conflicting definitions and measurement instruments. Current literature on the relationship of decentralization and economic growth is also mixed. This article builds on the existing literature and develops a decentralization index that includes its most frequently mentioned dimensions. We find that our newly developed index captures decentralization concept better than other tools and that there is no significant relationship between decentralization and economic growth.     

Carpool Karaoke: deconstructing the directly lived experience of hearing oneself singing

The various ways whereby spatial conditions afford to monumentalize culture and to appropriate geographically demarcated places in terms of individual and collective meaning structures has been amply documented in urban cultural studies. However, considerably less attention has been paid to how cultural identity is produced against the background of musical temporality. By way of a phenomenological inquiry into the staged spectacle of James Corden’s (the host of CBS Network’s Late Late Show) Carpool Karaoke, this paper addresses the issues of directly lived experience and authenticity as facets of cultural identity. By critically discussing the assumptions of self-presence and auto-affectivity while singing and listening to one’s sung voice against the background of pre-recorded songs, the notion of directly lived musical experience is put to the test. Furthermore, by examining the dramaturgical scaffolding of Carpool Karaoke, the analysis points to wider implications for post-modern cultural studies in terms of an identified ironic reversal of modernist universal criteria of legitimacy in favor of a celebration of post-modern being-with inauthentically. The analysis of the selected Carpool Karaoke corpus utilizes a resourceful blend of phenomenological method, semiotics and interpretive videography while challenging embedded orthodoxies in the extant literature.     

Is Everything Compatible? A Feminist Critique of Hearn’s Composite Approach to Men and Masculinity

ABSTRACT

Since its emergence in the late 1980s, research on men and masculinity has expanded considerably into an established area at the intersection of sociology, gender studies and related disciplines. There is now a wealth of empirical research but the theoretical debates have largely centred on Connell’s notion of hegemonic masculinity. This article focuses instead on the theoretical contribution of Jeff Hearn, arguably one of the central figures within critical studies on men and masculinities over the last few decades. The article identifies the main tenets of Hearn’s theoretical writing and tracks its development over time, and offers a critical discussion of Hearn’s theoretical position. The critique focuses on ambiguous treatments of central concepts and argues that tensions between perspectives such as materialist analysis, queer theory and intersectionality are not fully acknowledged in Hearn’s work.     

Social semiotics and platform studies: an integrated perspective for the study of social media platforms

ABSTRACT

The development of web 2.0 was powered by web services that are software systems designed to support interoperable machine-to-machine interaction over a network. It was the choice of standards enabling such interactions that favored communication among different systems and their mash ups. Facebook was the first social networking site to launch a service for developers that exposed its web services and the correlated APIs (application programming interfaces). This choice allowed programmers to create tools that could live within Facebook and turned the social networking site into a platform by enacting its programmability. In order to investigate the possibilities and the constraints offered by social media platforms, there seems to arise the necessity to integrate the analysis of frontend texts (such as posts or comments) and of social media communicative properties with the exploration of an underlying layer constituted by the network of relationships created within an application ecosystem and developed by using web services. The aim of the paper is to present a multi-layered approach to the study of social media platforms that combines the emerging subfield of Semiotic Technology with Platform Studies. The model is here applied to the analysis of Facebook Login Service.     

Vladimir Iowa Lenin,Part 2: On Rural Proletarianization and an Alternate Food Future

In the second of our two-part review of Vladimir Lenin’s 1917 study of American agriculture, we extrapolate upon Alexander Chayanov’s neoliberal appropriation, Giovanni Arrighi’s treatment of partial proletarianization, the propagandistic “family farm,” agribusiness’s fluctuating territorial embeddedness, agriculture as an industry, and land and rent as commodities themselves. We finish by deploying Lenin’s alternate history as a Benjaminian détournement in the face of what now appear insurmountable obstacles. An alternate food future is not only possible, it is already underway.