Download or read book The Instinct of Workmanship and the Irksomeness of Labor written by Thorstein Veblen and published by Read Books Ltd. This book was released on 2015-02-10 with total page 21 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Originally published in 1899, this is a work by Thorstein Veblen, an American economist and sociologist. It is an article written for the American Journal of Sociology publication outlining some of his theories on work. We are republishing this work with a brand new introductory biography of the author with the aim of placing it in the context of his other writings and achievements. The following passage is an extract from the article: 'It is one of the commonplaces of the received economic theory that work is irksome. Many a discussion proceeds on this axiom that, so far as regards economic matters, men desire above all things to get the goods produced by labor and to avoid the labor by which the goods are produced. In a general way the common-sense opinion is well in accord with current theory on this head. According to the common-sense-ideal, the economic beatitude lies in an unrestrained consumption of goods, without work; whereas the perfect economic affliction is unremunerated labor. Man instinctively revolts at effort that goes to supply the means of life'

Download or read book The Instinct of Workmanship and the Irksomeness of Labor written by and published by . This book was released on 2001 with total page pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:

Download or read book Essays in Our Changing Order written by Thorstein Veblen and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2018-10-08 with total page 549 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Essays in Our Changing Order is the ninth volume in the collected works of America's pre-eminent social scientist. Each volume has a new opening essay, in this case, a comprehensive review of Veblen's works by Scott Bowman that stands by itself as a premier statement. Using an innovative framework, Bowman sees Veblen as concerned with three unifying themes: the dynamic interrelationships between instinct, habits of thought, environment, and social change in human evolution; the essential contradiction between business and industry sustained by the instinctual dominance of pecuniary exploit over workmanlike efficiency; and the role of ideological and animistic thinking in human affairs. This volume of Veblen's most important studies, published posthumously in 1936, illustrates and embellishes the themes Bowman outlines in a variety of ways, and is remarkable for its contemporanity and literary freshness. Veblen's editor, Leon Ardzrooni, divides the work into three major segments: essays on economics, including the history of the field; miscellaneous papers, which nearly all come to rest on matters of religion and philosophy; and what Ardzrooni calls war essays, which again reveal a very worldly and wise observer of current events and critic of national policies. What is so astonishing is the timeliness of these seemingly time bound concerns: whether dealing with the condition of women, the intellectual contributions of Jews, farm labor and unions, or the meaning of the Bolshevik Revolution, Veblen confronts us with insights into still-unfinished business.

Download or read book The Instinct of Workmanship written by Thorstein Veblen and published by . This book was released on 1914 with total page 420 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:

Download or read book The Instinct of Workmanship written by Thorstein Veblen and published by . This book was released on 1914 with total page 386 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:

Download or read book The Theory of the Leisure Class written by Thorstein Veblen and published by Aakar Books. This book was released on 2005-12 with total page 360 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In The Theory Of The Leisure Class, His First And Best-Known Work, Thorstein Veblen Challenges Some Of Man S Most Cherished Standards Of Behavior And With Devastating Wit And Satire Exposes The Hollowness Of Many Of Our Canons Of Taste, Education, Dress And Culture. Veblen Uses The Leisure Class As His Example Because It Is This Class That Sets The Standards Followed By Every Level Of Society.The Sign Of Membership In The Leisure Class Is Exemption From Industrial Toil And The Mark Of Success Is Lavish Expenditure Conspicuous Consumption Is The Famous Term He Invented To Describe Spending Which Satisfies No Real Need But Is A Mark Of Prestige.The Process Veblen Criticized Continues Today The Same Worship Of An Empty Scale Of Values, The Same Urge To Prove Oneself Better Than One S Neighbor By The Conspicuous Accumulation Of Useless Objects And By Time And Money-Wasting Activities.

Download or read book The Institutionalist Tradition in Labor Economics written by Dell P. Champlin and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2018-10-24 with total page 473 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: While there are many economists in schools, government, unions, and non-profit organizations working in the institutionalst tradition, there has been no book that describes this tradition -- until now. Editors Champlin and Knoedler have brought together prominent labor economists, highly respected institutional economists, and newer scholars working on such compelling issues as immigration, wage discrimination, and living wages. Their essays portray the institutionalist tradition in labor as it exists today as well as its historical and theoretical origins. The result is a major contribution to the literature of labor economics, institutionalist economics, and the history of economic thought.

Download or read book The Ploy of Instinct written by Kathleen Frederickson and published by Fordham Univ Press. This book was released on 2014-09-15 with total page 207 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: It is paradoxical that instinct became a central term for late Victorian sexual sciences as they were elaborated in the medicalized spaces of confession and introspection, given that instinct had long been defined in its opposition to self-conscious thought. The Ploy of Instinct ties this paradox to instinct’s deployment in conceptualizing governmentality. Instinct’s domain, Frederickson argues, extended well beyond the women, workers, and “savages” to whom it was so often ascribed. The concept of instinct helped to gloss over contradictions in British liberal ideology made palpable as turn-of-the-century writers grappled with the legacy of Enlightenment humanism. For elite European men, instinct became both an agent of “progress” and a force that, in contrast to desire, offered a plenitude in answer to the alienation of self-consciousness. This shift in instinct’s appeal to privileged European men modified the governmentality of empire, labor, and gender. The book traces these changes through parliamentary papers, pornographic fiction, accounts of Aboriginal Australians, suffragette memoirs, and scientific texts in evolutionary theory, sexology, and early psychoanalysis.

Download or read book Thorstein Veblen written by Murray Murphey and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2018-05-20 with total page 318 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In his latest book, scholar-historian Murray G. Murphey exhaustively explores the life and theory of Thorstein Veblen (1857–1929), whom, many scholars agree, remains one of the leading social theorists of all time, if not also one of the more confounding. Murphey’s account begins with a brief economic history of nineteenth-century America, wherein he examines the conditions that formed Veblen’s ideology. With that understanding, the author studies Veblen’s personal history and brings to the fore his foundational ideas on human psychology, race, his theory of knowledge, and his analysis of social evolution. In the book’s later chapters, Murphey considers Veblen’s writing through the scope of his major volumes – The Theory of the Leisure Class, The Theory of Business Enterprise, and Imperial Germany and the Industrial Revolution, among others. Spanning the latter stages of the nineteenth century into the first several decades of the twentieth century, Murphey traces Veblen’s radical economics and thinking within the broader context of America’s economic theory. In so doing, he upholds Veblen’s influence on the canons of economics and social science, and importantly, he attempts to resolve the lingering mystery behind one of America’s more puzzling and influential theorists.

Download or read book Transforming Higher Education written by Stephen J. Rosow and published by Lexington Books. This book was released on 2012-07-10 with total page 260 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The university is being transformed and can be transformed. This doubleness informs this book. 'Transforming' in 'transforming higher education' can be read as adjective, suggesting that higher education is being transformed by the social and political situation in which it is enmeshed. 'Transforming' can also be read as a gerund, implying the critical activity of changing the university, as signaling a creative and political act of radical possibility. The essays in this book address the transformation of higher education and the transformative possibilities of its current conditions. Only by viewing the university as a historical construction can we assess the dangers and opportunities of the new conditions of higher education, and chart a reasonable course for the future. The essays in this book are critical of recent developments in universities and higher education. Most of us come from public universities, and all remain committed to a democratic higher education that we see threatened by recent developments. There is a danger that the combination of economic crisis, market ideology, and global pressures will continue to structure the debate about higher education in ways that freeze out the transformative and politically critical possibilities of the university. Part I of the book examines the historical transformation of the university as it has changed into its current form. Part II examines both the transformation of the university into a neoliberal institution and makes the case for the more political and radical idea of transforming the university in opposition to how it has been transformed in recent years. Part III offers a number of studies aimed at illuminating possibilities for transforming the university in a more progressive, democratic direction.

Download or read book Thorstein Veblen and the Revival of Free Market Capitalism written by Janet T. Knoedler and published by Edward Elgar Publishing. This book was released on 2007-01-01 with total page 262 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The volume offers many interesting hints on which the reader may have cause to reflect. Tiziana Foresti, History of Economic Ideas With the restoration of laissez faire as the governing principle of contemporary economic ideology and policy making, Thorstein Veblen s insights are once again timely. This book revisits his legacy, featuring original essays by renowned Veblen scholars. The contributors review and comment upon the subjects that concerned Veblen such as: the legal system, finance and capital, the operation of markets, neoclassical economics, private property, cultural and economic change, the place of science, and higher education. They consider how his evolutionary theory of the economy and society can continue to inform our understanding of our modern world. As an astute and highly capable observer, Veblen shed light on our present system through a re-examination of a similar system. Students and scholars of economics will find this provocative book of great interest. It will also be a refreshing discussion for those frustrated by the gap between the rosy scenarios of conventional economics and the problems of inequality, conspicuous consumption, concentrated economic power and unresponsive government.

Download or read book Veblen s Century written by Irving Horowitz and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2017-07-28 with total page 447 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Thorstein Veblen has a place of honor reserved for truly important figures. Economist, iconoclast, social critic, and moral judge of the American way of life, he has continued to attract the attention of students and scholars alike. People from every spectrum of political thought and every branch of the social sciences have been drawn to his work-sometimes in praise, other times in criticism, but always with a sense of measuring what Veblen said and often how he said it.Veblen was, in the final analysis, an anthropologist of America as an advanced culture, as much a figure of the young twentieth century of America triumphant, as Tocqueville was a figure of the young nineteenth century of America ascending. We share with Veblen a sense of the observer peering at the complex foundation of behavior, whether such behavior is defined in terms of attitudes toward work and leisure, wealth and poverty, and finally, global war and peace.An examination of the contributors to the Veblen literature in this masterful volume serves to make clear just how vital Veblen was and remains to our cultural landscape. Whether the reader selects from or reads all of the statements by David Riesman, Douglas Dowd, Max Lerner, E. Digby Baltzell, Wesley Clair Mitchell, C. Wright Mills, Daniel Bell, and the other outstanding participants in Veblen's Century, the pulsating vitality of Veblen himself is well captured. Indeed, a little bit of Veblen is encapsulated in and by his commentators.Veblen's Century originated as a project initiated in 1974 by Professor Horowitz to reissue the entire corpus of Veblen's writings in new editions with introductions written expressly with this larger purpose of bringing the master of economic theory to the attention of a new generation. That the project took more than a quarter century to complete is indicative of the care with which each new essay is crafted. In addition, with Transaction being identified as the home of Veblen, books on him were offered to

Download or read book Thorstein Veblen written by David Riesman and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2018-04-24 with total page 325 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This is a brilliant and unconventional study of one of the most challenging figures in modern social and economic thought. David Riesman has chosen a deliberately personal method of exposition and evaluation, and he is by no means a disciple. He says of Veblen: 'I find him more often interesting than attractive, more often pungent than wise.' By approaching Veblen subjectively and in a critical spirit, Riesman has arrived at an estimate of the man that is objective and balanced.Veblen's ideas and attitudes are carefully examined, with particular attention to his conviction that 'the instinct of workmanship' was the constructive element in life, and to his fundamental principle of 'idle curiosity.' Veblen is seen as a man with a passionate moral sense whose method was irony coupled with research. Riesman makes the interesting point that the author of The Theory of the Leisure Class was episodically a passionate, even revolutionary reformer, in contrast to a career primarily as an intellectual skeptic.Riesman looks behind the ideas, searching for their origins in Veblen's life, with the result that one finishes the book with a genuine sense of the strange man who is its subject. Riesman concludes that Thorstein Veblen is important not so much for his specific contribution to economic thought as for his stance toward the economy and his fellow economists. For us today, Riesman adds, Veblen's great value inheres in his way of seeing. The new introduction by Mestrovic provides an appreciation of Riesman, no less than Veblen.David Riesman is the Henry Ford II Professor Emeritus of Social Sciences at Harvard University. He has also taught at the University of Chicago, and Johns Hopkins University. Among his most important books are The Lonely Crowd; Faces in the Crowd; Individualism Reconsidered; and Constraint and Variety in American Education. His collection, Abundance for What?, confirms his place as the foremost sociologist of education in the modern era.Stjepan G. Mestrovic is a senior social theorist in his own right. He is currently located at Texas A&M University, where he is a professor of sociology.

Download or read book Veblens America written by Sidney Plotkin and published by Anthem Press. This book was released on 2018-12-28 with total page 364 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Donald Trump’s astonishing rise to the US presidency challenges conventional understandings of American politics, yet he is distinctively American. His biography and family lineage reflect American traditions such as real estate hucksterism and buccaneering salesmanship. But Trump’s pugnacity also reflects the shadow of other darker American traditions of misogyny, racism and xenophobia, patterns that formed what Thorstein Veblen called a “sclerosis of the American soul.” Using Veblen’s theory of American development to explore the nation’s curious fusion of barbarism and liberal democracy, Veblen’s America taps the rich vein of the sociologist’s early twentieth-century insights to shed light on the Trump phenomenon that has overwhelmed and threatened early twenty-first-century American democracy.

Download or read book Work Time Regulation as Sustainable Full Employment Strategy written by Robert LaJeunesse and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2009-03-25 with total page 540 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Robert LaJeunesse looks beyond the 20th century arguments for shortening the work week. He writes a careful, convincing critique of traditional full employment policies in advocacy of an alternative macroeconomic paradigm. With an emphasis on greater socioeconomic participation, the author proposes a policy of work time regulation that is not only appropriate for a 21st century post-industrial economy, but speaks to concerns about balancing work and family, environmental sustainability, stabilizing incomes and prices, and social and economic well being. Through its unique conceptualization of employment relations as a social effort bargain, this book proposes that governments can achieve egalitarian and sustainable macroeconomic objectives by regulating work hours. Equally important to achieving sustainable full employment and price stability, work time regulation offers the capability for citizens living in an age of abundance to define themselves as something other than paid employees. Work time reform represents a first step in a process of enlightenment in which workers will create an identity through the whole of their relationships at work, home, community, and at play. There is certainly a role for government in fostering the pursuit of "loftier ideals" subsequent to a redistribution of work time, but the first precondition for enhanced human development is greater socioeconomic participation, which means more paid work for some and less for others. In addition to students and researchers in economics, sociology, and political science, this book will be of interest to policy makers, policy analysts, labour unionists, environmentalists, and other social reformers.

Download or read book Veblen written by Charles Camic and published by Harvard University Press. This book was released on 2020-11-30 with total page 505 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A bold new biography of the thinker who demolished accepted economic theories in order to expose how people of economic and social privilege plunder their wealth from society’s productive men and women. Thorstein Veblen was one of America’s most penetrating analysts of modern capitalist society. But he was not, as is widely assumed, an outsider to the social world he acidly described. Veblen overturns the long-accepted view that Veblen’s ideas, including his insights about conspicuous consumption and the leisure class, derived from his position as a social outsider. In the hinterlands of America’s Midwest, Veblen’s schooling coincided with the late nineteenth-century revolution in higher education that occurred under the patronage of the titans of the new industrial age. The resulting educational opportunities carried Veblen from local Carleton College to centers of scholarship at Johns Hopkins, Yale, Cornell, and the University of Chicago, where he studied with leading philosophers, historians, and economists. Afterward, he joined the nation’s academic elite as a professional economist, producing his seminal books The Theory of the Leisure Class and The Theory of Business Enterprise. Until late in his career, Veblen was, Charles Camic argues, the consummate academic insider, engaged in debates about wealth distribution raging in the field of economics. Veblen demonstrates how Veblen’s education and subsequent involvement in those debates gave rise to his original ideas about the social institutions that enable wealthy Americans—a swarm of economically unproductive “parasites”—to amass vast fortunes on the backs of productive men and women. Today, when great wealth inequalities again command national attention, Camic helps us understand the historical roots and continuing reach of Veblen’s searing analysis of this “sclerosis of the American soul.”

Download or read book The Complete Works of Thorstein Veblen written by Thorstein Veblen and published by Good Press. This book was released on 2024-01-10 with total page 2586 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Complete Works of Thorstein Veblen is a comprehensive collection of the iconic American economist's writings. Veblen's literary style is characterized by his sharp wit, biting satire, and insightful social commentary, making his works both thought-provoking and entertaining. This collection includes his seminal work 'The Theory of the Leisure Class,' which critiques capitalist society and the concept of conspicuous consumption. Veblen's work remains influential in the fields of economics, sociology, and political theory. Veblen's unique perspective on society and economics is sure to captivate readers and leave them pondering the intricacies of modern capitalism. As a pioneer of institutional economics, Veblen's ideas continue to shape contemporary debates on inequality and capitalism. The Complete Works of Thorstein Veblen is a must-read for anyone interested in the intersection of economics and culture, offering valuable insights into the nature of modern society.