Christoph Hermann - Böcker

In recent years activists around the globe have challenged the commodification of water, education, health care, and other essential goods, while academics have warned from unintended effects when everything can be bought and sold. But what is commodification? And what is the problem with commodification? In The Critique of Commodification, Christoph Hermann argues that commodification entails production for profit rather than social needs, and that production for profit has a number of harmful effects, including the exclusion of those who cannot pay, the marginalization of those whose collective purchasing power is not large enough, and the focus on highly profitable forms of production over more socially beneficial and ecologically sustainable alternatives. Drawing upon and extending the work of Marx, Polyani, and Luxemburg, Hermann goes beyond the standard moral critiques of markets and adopts a materialist approach to emphasize the dispossession of public resources and to highlight how goods and services are altered when sold on markets for profit. Tracing the intellectual history of the term commodification, this book not only criticizes commodification, but also proposes a new model for production that focuses on needs rather than profits.

In recent years activists around the globe have challenged the commodification of water, education, health care, and other essential goods, while academics have warned from unintended effects when everything can be bought and sold. But what is commodification? And what is the problem with commodification? In The Critique of Commodification, Christoph Hermann argues that commodification entails production for profit rather than social needs, and that production for profit has a number of harmful effects, including the exclusion of those who cannot pay, the marginalization of those whose collective purchasing power is not large enough, and the focus on highly profitable forms of production over more socially beneficial and ecologically sustainable alternatives. Drawing upon and extending the work of Marx, Polyani, and Luxemburg, Hermann goes beyond the standard moral critiques of markets and adopts a materialist approach to emphasize the dispossession of public resources and to highlight how goods and services are altered when sold on markets for profit. Tracing the intellectual history of the term commodification, this book not only criticizes commodification, but also proposes a new model for production that focuses on needs rather than profits.

This book addresses the EU as powerful driver of the wave of privatizations in the network industries and public services since the early 1990s. Based on theoretical arguments and empirical studies it examines the impact of these policies on what is regarded as the normative pillars of the European Social Model.

John Maynard Keynes expected that around the year 2030 people would only work 15 hours a week. In the mid-1960s, Jean Fourastié still anticipated the introduction of the 30-hour week in the year 2000, when productivity would continue to grow at an established pace. Productivity growth slowed down somewhat in the 1970s and 1980s, but rebounded in the 1990s with the spread of new information and communication technologies. The knowledge economy, however, did not bring about a jobless future or a world without work, as some scholars had predicted. With few exceptions, work hours of full-time employees have hardly fallen in the advanced capitalist countries in the last three decades, while in a number of countries they have actually increased since the 1980s. This book takes the persistence of long work hours as starting point to investigate the relationship between capitalism and work time. It does so by discussing major theoretical schools and their explanations for the length and distribution of work hours, as well as tracing major changes in production and reproduction systems, and analyzing their consequences for work hours. Furthermore, this volume explores the struggle for shorter work hours, starting from the introduction of the ten-hour work day in the nineteenth century to the introduction of the 35-hour week in France and Germany at the end of the twentieth century. However, the book also shows how neoliberalism has eroded collective work time regulations and resulted in an increase and polarization of work hours since the 1980s. Finally, the book argues that shorter work hours not only means more free time for workers, but also reduces inequality and improves human and ecological sustainability.

Public services throughout Europe have undergone dramatic restructuring processes in recent years in connection with liberalization and privatization. While evaluations of the successes of public services have focused on prices and efficiency, much less attention has been paid to the impacts of liberalization and privatization on employment, labor relations, and working conditions. This book addresses this gap by illustrating the ways in which liberalization has contributed to increasing private and foreign ownership of public services, the decentralization of labor relations has amplified pressure on wages, and decreasing employment numbers and increasing workloads have improved productivity partly at the cost of service quality. Examining diverse public-service sectors including network industries, public transportation, and hospitals, and using international case studies, Privatization of Public Services covers a wide range of aspects of service provision, with particular emphasis on companies and workers. The result is a unique picture of the changes created by the liberalization processes in Europe.

John Maynard Keynes expected that around the year 2030 people would only work 15 hours a week. In the mid-1960s, Jean Fourastié still anticipated the introduction of the 30-hour week in the year 2000, when productivity would continue to grow at an established pace. Productivity growth slowed down somewhat in the 1970s and 1980s, but rebounded in the 1990s with the spread of new information and communication technologies. The knowledge economy, however, did not bring about a jobless future or a world without work, as some scholars had predicted. With few exceptions, work hours of full-time employees have hardly fallen in the advanced capitalist countries in the last three decades, while in a number of countries they have actually increased since the 1980s. This book takes the persistence of long work hours as starting point to investigate the relationship between capitalism and work time. It does so by discussing major theoretical schools and their explanations for the length and distribution of work hours, as well as tracing major changes in production and reproduction systems, and analyzing their consequences for work hours. Furthermore, this volume explores the struggle for shorter work hours, starting from the introduction of the ten-hour work day in the nineteenth century to the introduction of the 35-hour week in France and Germany at the end of the twentieth century. However, the book also shows how neoliberalism has eroded collective work time regulations and resulted in an increase and polarization of work hours since the 1980s. Finally, the book argues that shorter work hours not only means more free time for workers, but also reduces inequality and improves human and ecological sustainability.

Some of the central problems to be solved by the brain, such as figure-ground coding and object recognition, concern the binding of separately coded feature elements into coherent object representations. The binding problem has recently been approached by a variety of disciplines, notably psychophysics, and experimental psychology, electrophysiology, neurophysiology and computational modelling. This special issue brings together a collection of papers principally from psychology and computational modelling. These papers address issues in Gestalt formation, the relation of grouping and binding processes to visual attention, the role of temporal factors for grouping and binding, the neuronal correlates of binding mechanisms, the development of binding operations in infants and the breakdown of these processes following brain injury.

Public services throughout Europe have undergone dramatic restructuring processes in recent years in connection with liberalization and privatization. While evaluations of the successes of public services have focused on prices and efficiency, much less attention has been paid to the impacts of liberalization and privatization on employment, labor relations, and working conditions. This book addresses this gap by illustrating the ways in which liberalization has contributed to increasing private and foreign ownership of public services, the decentralization of labor relations has amplified pressure on wages, and decreasing employment numbers and increasing workloads have improved productivity partly at the cost of service quality. Examining diverse public-service sectors including network industries, public transportation, and hospitals, and using international case studies, Privatization of Public Services covers a wide range of aspects of service provision, with particular emphasis on companies and workers. The result is a unique picture of the changes created by the liberalization processes in Europe.