Discomfort about the overarching goal of capitalist economies, and the idea that achieving ever higher levels of consumption of products and services is a vacuous goal, has been with us since the onset of industrialization. This contribution looks at the pheno!11enon and foundations of voluntary simplicity. Its psychological implications and consequences for societies are discussed.

This paper analyses the structural changes in education sector since the introduction of liberalization policy in India. This paper explains how the so-called non-profit trusts and societies appropriated the liberalization policy and enhanced themselves as new capitalist class in higher education sector. Over the decades, the policy witnessed the role of private sector in terms of maintaining m...

This paper draws on the German Socio-economic Panel Study (SOEP) to investigate whether changes in others’ income are perceived differently in post-transition and capitalist societies. We find that the neighbourhood income effect for West Germany is negative and slightly more marked in neighbourhoods where the neighbours interact socially. In contrast, the coefficients on neighbourhood income i...

If social class is defined by relation to the means of production, this still does not tell us how classes are constituted as classes, nor how the complex status hierarchies of capitalist societies are articulated and internalised by individuals or how other systems of status subordination are integrated within a class system of domination. On its own, possession of greater or lesser title to m...

Several concepts are available to indicate the type of society that evolves under the influence of the use of information and communication technology. The most popular concept is the information society. In this book that concept is used in combination with the concept network society to typify contemporary developed and modern societies marked by a high level of information exchange and use o...

If social class is defined by relation to the means of production, this still does not tell us how classes are constituted as classes, nor how the complex status hierarchies of capitalist societies are articulated and internalised by individuals or how other systems of status subordination are integrated within a class system of domination. On its own, possession of greater or lesser title to m...

The goal of this article is to provide a balanced assessment of what has happened to the welfare state in advanced capitalist societies since 1980. What is one to make of recent spending cuts and welfare reforms? Do they represent a fundamental rollback of the welfare activities of the state and thus a belated victory for Thatcherite-Reaganite ideas? Or should these changes rather be seen as in...

What are the underlying drivers of human development? This essay argues that long-term human development, in incomes, social conditions, security and so on, is fundamentally driven by capitalist dynamics and state functioning. The big issue is not state versus market, or growth versus equity, or dynamism versus security. It is the jointly determined functioning of both capitalism and the state....

Historically, cooperatives came into being after capitalist enterprises and began to expand, in various modes and at different paces, in all the advanced economies. In a way, then, cooperatives can be seen as an unexpected fruit of industrial civilization that ripened during the “Belle époque”. Two main interpretations of this historical fact have been suggested. One explains the cooperative mo...