Activity

Alfred Müller-Armack, adviser to Ludwig Erhard and the thinker of ordoliberalism (which is the intellectual basis of the EU)

[...] The justifications offered for contemporary transformations in employment practices – from longer work hours (‘it allows stores to open on Sundays’) to competition-enhancing deregulation (‘it lowers prices’) – always contrive to catch agents by ‘the joyful affects’ of consumption, appealing o…

[...] As can be expected, agents – both collective and individual – caught up in relations of dependence and placed in situations where they are obliged to defend vital interests – economic survival for enterprises, keeping their jobs for employees – are driven to externalise the bulk of the effort…

the organisations fight in order to not disappear, which says something about the intensity with which they sometimes pursue their goals – the hypostasis of the organisations (‘they’) refers in fact, first of all, to the conatus of upper management.

The reorientation of corporate governance towards maximizing shareholder value – namely, the demand from ‘above’ to extract a rate of return on net capital far beyond the prevailing norms of Fordist capitalism