2018-2019

This paper examines the meteoric rise of “Choose-Your-Own-Adventure” (CYOA) game books in the 1980s and how this revolutionary cultural genre reflected and reproduced the central role that individual free choice was coming to play in neoliberal notions of selfhood and society. Despite selling over 250 million copies worldwide, making it the fourth best-selling children book series of all time, there have been few efforts to place these books in their larger historical and cultural context. In examining how these game books were written and received, this paper argues that the popularity of CYOA was sparked by the ascent of market choice to the heart of American notions of agency and freedom in the 1970s and 1980s. The book’s unique game format and second person narrative produced the same kind of choice-centric market subjectivity that was emerging in other intellectual and cultural circles such as neoclassical economics, self-help literature and consumer advertising. Similar to what these other cultural frameworks did for adults, CYOA books cultivated within children a highly individualized and “responsibilized” social outlook in which readers are held accountable for their fate since they had been “free to choose” their narrative.  However, as this paper demonstrates, such free-to-choose claims were misleading since the menu of choices available to the CYOA reader were pre-determined and highly limited by the authors and publishers who wrote and designed these books. Much like in the neoliberal marketplace, such “choice architects” belied the freedom to choose as they subtly exerted significant control over young readers by having the power to determine what choices would be made available, thus “funneling” them down certain prescribed narrative paths and ideological lanes. 

This article contributes to an emerging literature on the “neo” or “entrepreneurial”

developmental state that emphasizes the role of innovation policy in promoting the

structural transformation of industry. It finds further evidence that supports this

approach and advances it by making two unique contributions. First, it highlights

an essential yet underappreciated feature of contemporary innovation policy: the

state’s capacity to condition public assistance and discipline private firms that do not

adhere to government guidelines. These capacities are necessary to guarantee that

the benefits of public investment in innovation—the social and economic spillovers—

are not appropriated by private actors but shared more broadly within society.

Second, it highlights that politics—reflected in the relations between innovation

agencies and key social actors—represents an important causal factor in both the

formation and subsequent transformation of these institutional capacities. These

points are illustrated through a historical analysis of a crucial case: the state-led

development of Israel’s thriving high-tech sector.

In this article, we address this lacuna by offering a new normative framework of shared responsibility for remedying the unjust labor conditions in global supply chains and for protecting and promoting the rights of production workers in these chains. In contrast to the traditional legal conception of responsibility based on individual liability, the idea of shared responsibility rests on the assumption that, under certain conditions, more than one actor should bear responsibility to remedy or prevent harmful situations, and that such responsibility is not limited to the actors that caused the event. The term “shared responsibility” has been used in several court decisions on national, international and transnational levels of litigation, particularly in the areas of tort law, environmental law, and human rights law. Similarly, a growing number of political philosophers and legal scholars have begun to develop new conceptions of shared responsibility and discuss questions of responsibility allocation among actors involved in a collective practices. These works, however, have generally tended to refrain from addressing in detail the particular empirical economic conditions of labor or the existing legal rules and regulations that underpin the contemporary global labor market. Given the new conditions of a globalized economy, what role should states, corporations, sub-contractors, consumers, labor rights monitoring firms, international institutions, and workers play in protecting labor rights in global supply chains? If responsibility to promote labor standards should be shared among individuals and institutions involved in global chains of production, how should such responsibility be distributed? This paper presents preliminary steps for addressing these questions.

Tax composition differs not only among countries, but can be altered over time within countries. A growing number of studies argue that changes in countries tax mix and their underlying reforms are paving the way to substantive restructuring of welfare programs.  Similar to this group of studies this paper is about identifying changes in welfare financing and deliberating their restructuring potential for welfare states. Its novelty is in its focus. While current research explored the changing incidence of social insurance contributions (i.e. SI contributions) vis-a-vie other tax methods, this paper explores changes in the contributory tax method itself. More specifically it asks whether countries are preserving the distinguished features of their contributory tax method or transforming it by adopting elements of the income tax method. 

The term prostitution is often used as a metaphor for qualifying immoral economic conduct. Yet references to this metaphor in the history of economic thought reveal that more than ethics is at stake. Prostitution sometimes designates a unique economy, different from the basic tenets of orthodox economics. It is an economy where money is an obscene object, disrupting the very possibility of equivalence on which orthodox economics is based. This peculiar conceptualization of money is essential for understanding the historical specificity of capitalism. Applying it to the recurring cultural association between finance and prostitution, this essay unearths the gendered aspect of capitalism. In capitalism gender relations are formally excluded from the sphere of exchange. The traditional notion of marriage as a purchase of a wife has become obscene, but its obscenity attests that its exclusion is indeed formal and that it continues to inform economic practices and imagination.

This paper aims to solve a fundamental critique of the research project of the performativity of economics. The critique by philosopher Uskali Mäki strikes the concept of performativity in a weak spot – its utilization of the notion of constitution, drawn from John Austin’s philosophy of language as part of the performativity of speech acts. Accepting Mäki’s critique means a deterioration of performativity research to a marginal field in economic studies, the opposite of the substantial stance it enjoys today. Using Brian Epstein’s unique account of constitution’s role in social ontology, this paper suggests an original solution to the critique, which restores the legitimacy and importance of using constitution as part of performativity research.

In this paper we question the dis/similarities of different Temporary Migrant Workers Programs and their implications on the sectoral labor market; as well as on work standards, workers’ bargaining power and vulnerability to severe forms of labor market exploitation. We further argue that patterns of segmentation (benefits and exploitation) in the sector can be explained by the effects of the different Temporary Migrant Workers Programs, thus highlighting the ways in which migration policies serve as labor policies. Additionally, we reform the line linking limitations on labor market mobility with the development of exploitation and deprivation of rights. This line of analysis further trace the active role migrant workers themselves play in shaping these patterns through their attempts to increase gains by using zones of non-enforcement and institutional weaknesses. Taking the Israeli construction sector, is thus a great opportunity to analyze this intertwinement, as it combines multiple migration policies under unified regulation of the labor market. Through this framework we will question the effects of these different policies and their distinct limitations on workers’ mobility, on the sectoral labor market and its central regulations. In order to do so, we will first describe the effects of labor migration on industrial and employment relations, in general and as it’s manifested in the Israeli construction sector. 

במאמר זה אני טוענת כי אחת הזירות התרבותיות הפופולריות והמשפיעות ביותר במאה ה-20, תעשיית הקולנוע ההוליוודית, לקחה חלק פעיל ומהותי במהפיכת הימין החדש ועזרה לתווך את רעיונותיו לקהלים רחבים. מבחינה זו תפקידו של הקולנוע הפופולרי לא היה פחות ערך מזה של מוסדות אינטלקטואליים כגון האוניברסיטאות ומכוני המחקר השמרניים אך שלא כמוהם, תפקידו של הקולנוע הפופולרי ב"מלחמת הרעיונות" תחת הקפיטליזם של חיי היום יום בשנות ה-70 עדיין לא נחקר לעומקו. 

במאמר זה אבחן את התגבשותו של ה"ליברטריאניזם האנטי מדינתי" של הימין החדש. מה היו מקורות ההשפעה האינטלקטואליים של זרם זה? וכיצד רונלד רייגן, מנהיגו הבלתי מעורער, הצליח להפוך אותם לפופולריים כל כך עד כדי כך שהפכו למקובלים על רוב האמריקנים? בהמשך אראה כיצד רעיונות אלה זלגו אל התרבות הפופולרית והתבטאו ביצירתו של ז'אנר קולנועי חדש, "סרטי לוקחי החוק לידיים" (Vigilante Films) שזכה להצלחה מסחרית עצומה במחצית הראשונה של שנות ה-70.