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In this article I examine Bourdieu's conception of symbolic domination as based on misrecognition and compare it with Gramsci's notion of hegemony based on consent. Drawing on ethnographic research in workplaces in the USA and Hungary I show how both theories are flawed. Gramsci does not appreciate the importance of mystification as a foundation for stable hegemony in advanced capitalism while Bourdieu's notion of misrecognition, based on the notion of habitus, is too deep to comprehend the fragility of state socialist regimes. Comparative analysis, I argue, calls for a concept of domination that is more contingent than Bourdieu's symbolic domination, yet deeper than Gramsci's hegemony.

We embed the distributional bargaining concept in Sir Arthur Lewis’s labor surplus economy setting. In the petroleum-abundant labor surplus economies, distributional bargaining comes into its own, mainly over the subsidization of the large swaths of the population working in the sectors with substantial amounts of disguised unemployment. These are primarily the subsistence agriculture and the public sector. Based on the open-loop noncooperative differential game model, we derive three feasible bargaining equilibria, whereby only the antagonistic and the allocation modes are compatible with the setting of inferior institutional quality that dominates most natural-resource-dependent countries. We scrutinize both modes in the framework of the dual economy model and show that political bargaining in the allocation mode unambiguously protracts the process of economic modernization. The outcome of the antagonistic mode for the process of structural change depends on the magnitude of the labor cost increase in this phase. To assess the bargaining–modernization nexus empirically, we employ mostly pooled mean group (PMG) estimators for panel datasets spanning the years 1990–2016 for 21 oil-producing countries. For the system generalized method of moments (GMM) panel estimations, we employ a panel with 82 countries. We find that the revenues generated from exports of natural resources have a positive long-run impact on the economic modernization. Consistent with our theoretical model, the interaction of the authoritarian regime type with the natural resource wealth has a robust negative impact on the indicators of economic modernization.

The reform of China's state-owned enterprises (SOEs) has been characterized by a gradual and selective approach. In fact there was not privatization at all until the mid-1990s, some 15 years after Chian started its economic reform. Despite years of economic reform, state ownership remains significant in the economy. In this paper a theory of China's SOE reform in China is offered, and predictions regarding the types of SOEs to be chosen for privatization and the results of privatization are made. Then empirical evidence is presented supporting the basic premise of the theory and its theoretical predictions.

This article examines unpaid work within urban agriculture sites. It focuses on the extra work-the surplus labor-that is performed to sustain these sites and how this work relates to subject formation. Land access and subjectivities are widely discussed in the urban agriculture literature, particularly in the Global North, but recent research has also identified the continual supply of labor as a crucial issue as well. However, work dynamics of urban agriculture have seldom been the object of analysis, and little is known about the relationship between unpaid urban agriculture work and subjectivity. I argue that surplus labor is useful for analysis because of the surplus value that is produced through urban agriculture. I draw on the theoretical framework of diverse economies to examine surplus labor through an antiessentialist form of class analysis. A case study from New Jersey, USA, is based on two years of participant observation and forty-eight interviews in twenty cities. The case study reveals how surplus labor is performed, the techniques used to appropriate and distribute surplus labor, the subject formation that occurs through this surplus labor, and models of surplus food distribution that emerge from the juncture of surplus and subjectivity. Conclusions point to contested work practices and the embodied experience of surplus production as keys to subject formation. More broadly, it sheds light on the processes through which surplus labor is performed in unpaid informal forms of enterprise and the role that subject formation plays in that labor.

We present a field experiment to assess the effect of own and peer wage variations on actual work effort of employees with hourly wages. Work effort neither reacts to an increase of the own wage, nor to a positive or negative peer comparison. This result seems at odds with numerous laboratory experiments that show a clear own wage sensitivity on effort. In an additional real-effort laboratory experiment we show that explicit cost and surplus information that enables an exact calculation of an employer's surplus from the work contract is a crucial prerequisite for a positive wage—effort relation. This demonstrates that an employee's reciprocity requires a clear assessment of the surplus at stake.

This study uses data from the National Basketball Association to explore organizational mechanisms that affect the division of firm surplus in human-capital-intensive activity. It builds on the idea that reciprocal interdependence among team members creates the potential for complementarity. Complementarity, in turn, translates into higher firm surplus. The division of this surplus is subject to bargaining between the firm owner and labor. We argue that when complementarity increases, the firm owner's share of surplus will grow if interdependence among team members is symmetric. Furthermore, we identify three levers that make complementarity amenable to managerial design: the nature of interaction among team members, the relative dominance of team members, and the composition of a team. We find that greater interaction among team members and higher recruitment of team-oriented individuals are associated with increased complementarity, whereas dominant team members are associated with reduced complementarity. The study contributes to the literature on organization design by extending its implications to the division of surplus in human-capital-intensive activity.

The analysis of deindustrialisation has been led by heterodox economists, especially those in the structuralist and Kaldorian traditions, based on a conception of sectoral specificity and the role of manufacturing in growth. Sectors are not the units of Marxian economic analysis, but thinking through the meaning of sectors in Marxian terms allows for an analysis of the meaning and implications of a change in sectoral structure. Deindustrialisation is the sectoral shift that has been most prominent in recent decades and which is likely to have significant implications for the future of capitalism. This article develops an original Marxian theorisation of deindustrialisation. This conceptualisation includes a distinction between two forms of deindustrialisation. As well as taking into account changes in sectoral structure, the proposed typology considers whether such changes are associated with a shift between those activities that produce surplus value and those that do not or only a shift in the composition of surplus-value-producing activities. The distinction between different forms of deindustrialisation allows for an arguably richer analysis of this phenomenon than in more narrowly sector-based approaches.

Postel-Vinay and Robin's (2002) sequential auction model is extended to allow for aggregate productivity shocks. Workers exhibit permanent differences in ability while firms are identical. Negative aggregate productivity shocks induce job destruction by driving the surplus of matches with low ability workers to negative values. Endogenous job destruction coupled with worker heterogeneity thus provides a mechanism for amplifying productivity shocks that offers an original solution to the unemployment volatility puzzle (Shimer (2005)). Moreover, positive or negative shocks may lead employers and employees to renegotiate low wages up and high wages down when agents' individual surpluses become negative. The model delivers rich business cycle dynamics of wage distributions and explains why both low wages and high wages are more procyclical than wages in the middle of the distribution.

This paper provides an endogenous growth model to illuminate the role of entrepreneurial start-up firms in structural economic transformation. We follow the Lewis-model distinction between a traditional and modern sector and underpin this distinction with micro-foundations. We specify mature and start-up entrepreneurs and make a distinction between survivalist self-employment activities in the traditional sector and opportunity-driven entrepreneurship in the modern. The model shows how opportunity-driven entrepreneurship can drive structural transformation in both the modern and traditional sectors through innovation and the provision of intermediate inputs and services (which permits greater specialization in manufacturing) and by increasing employment and productivity.

Situated in the context of the land and ocean grabs in Ghana post-2007–2008 global economic crises, this article argues that the country is experiencing “primitive accumulation” without capitalist industrialization. I draw on the insights of agrarian political economy to argue that this has created cheap laborers without industrial capital to exploit. The corollary of this is the creation of additional “relative surplus population”, worsening the country's (un)employment crisis. However, this “relative surplus population” is not marginal to global capitalist accumulation and exploitation; on the contrary, it is important to them. The article draws on ethnographic fieldwork in Ghanaian communities to document the voices of the dispossessed and semi-proletarianized about their experiences with the crisis of (re)production inflicted on them by global capitalism.