- Title
- The new economy, property and personhood
- Creator
- Adkins, Lisa
- Relation
- Culural Theory, Volume 4: Economy, Technology and Knowledge p. 191-209
- Relation
- http://www.sagepub.com/books/Book233837/toc
- Publisher
- Sage
- Resource Type
- book chapter
- Date
- 2010
- Description
- The focus of this article is the new economy, or what some have termed a virtual, reflexive or network economy. While the concept of the new economy is often critiqued for its vagueness - an opaqueness which diverse conceptual and more empirically based definitions have contributed towards - this article aims to identify how in economic arrangements characterized by knowledge and service intensity, relations of property, and especially the relations between people and their labour, are being reworked. In so doing, this article therefore aims to contribute to the project of specifying the dynamics of the new economy (Callon et al., 2002; Castells, 1996; Lury, 2003; Thrift, 1998). Its point of departure is the apparent contradiction, often made visible in studies and analyses of the new economy, that as the economy becomes more and more virtual (Carrier and Miller, 1998), reflexive (Thrift, 1998), networked (Castells, 1996, 2000) or, as it is sometimes put, immaterial (Hardt and Negri, 2000), a greater emphasis is being placed on issues of embodied performance and the significance of human or physical capital appears to be intensifying. In pointing to this contradiction I am certainly not meaning to suggest that the new economy involves a kind of retreat from the material or the physical. Studies of the new economy have done enough to dispel this myth and indeed have shown how material relations are being reworked in this context, for instance, how the replacement of the accumulation capital with the accumulation of information reworks power and property as largely informational (Lash, 2002; Rodowick, 2001). However, while this is so, what studies of the new economy have tended to leave untouched is a consideration of how material relations may be reconstituting vis-a-vis the people who may be working in the new economy. Therefore, while such analyses may show how new technologies of communication, or the shifting characteristics of goods and products reconstitute material relations, for example, how various forms of data copyrighting are reworking the material processes that constitute public and private life (Haraway, 1997), most analyses of the new economy tend to stop short of considering how this reworking of materiality works out in regard to people. This is not to say that analysts of the new economy do not discuss people - for they do. But when they do so, a version of personhood tends to be invoked which side-steps a consideration of how personhood itself may be materially reconstituting in the new economy. Specifically, when people are discussed, they are assumed to be largely in control of and indeed to own their own identities and bodies - a version of personhood which I shall term in this article, following the work of Carol Pateman (1988), a social contract model. One expression of this view of personhood in recent literature on the new economy is found in the emphasis on the aforementioned notions of human, physical or embodied capital. Deriving very loosely from the work of Pierre Bourdieu, such conceptions are widely invoked to get at the ways in which the significance of human capital appears to be intensifying in the new economy. What the concept of human or embodied capital assumes, however, is that people can own or at the very least accumulate forms of capital: that various forms of capital stick to the human subject, a version of personhood which assumes that subjects may own property in the person and may abstract or disentangle that property and trade it as a resource for exchange. What I shall suggest in this article, however, is that in the new economy people cannot unproblematically claim to own and straightforwardly accumulate property in the person, since the relations between property and people are being restructured. More particularly, I will attempt to illuminate how in the new economy qualities previously associated with people are being disentangled, are the object of processes of qualification and re-qualification, and moreover how claims to these qualities are made not through claims towards ownership of these qualities as forms of property in the person (as labour power), but rather through claims which operate external to the domain of personhood.
- Subject
- property; labour; the new economy; material relations
- Identifier
- http://hdl.handle.net/1959.13/1053339
- Identifier
- uon:15565
- Identifier
- ISBN:9781848607057
- Language
- eng
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