Capitalism’s Cultural Turn

By Nigel Thrift

The force of capitalism is acknowledged but it is turned into a necessary but empty foil for cultural turn.

The cultural turn involves acts of respect to importance of capitalism, which at the same time, act as a means of forgetting all about it and getting on to more interesting things. The results, at least, are clear. "Cultural" analysis has become more and more sophisticated but it is mixed in with a level of "economic" analysis which rarely rises above that of anyone who can read a newspaper.

The academic study of business increasingly emphasizes the importance of information and knowledge. And there are numerous examples of this statement. But four will do make the case:

1. growth of an information asymmetries, spillover effects, intangible and non-homogeneous commodities, and the like
2. the growth of interest in learning-by-doing, that is in using the full potential of the knowledge that is incorporated into the bodies of workers, including the potential to innovate
3. the growth of interest in a business history which considers the information infrastructures that typify business organizations
4. the growth of work that is based on investigating and elaborating the conventions that underlie the success or failure of particular urban and regional economies. These conventions are, in effect, particular, culturally specific, information infrastructures, which are seen as the keys to economic success.

Business has become more "intelligent" in a number of ways:

• much of the workforce in many countries, and especially management, has become steadily more qualified
• then it is possible to see the evolution of an independent intelligence community, produced by the business media, by research analysts and press commentators, and by the continually expanding framework of various forms of business education
• business had become more responsive to ideas from outside business, partly as a result of this new educational infrastructure.

There are, then, an increasing number of symmetries between academia and business, of which 4 are particularly remarkable:

1. academia and business share many of the same concerns (for example need to transform information into new knowledge)
2. in both academia and business the increasing commodification of knowledge has only pointed to the value of knowledge which cannot be commodified, and especially to the value of practical knowledge, knowledge that cannot be written down and packaged
3. both academia and business increasingly share many of the same vocabularies, of which the most prevalent is the notion of "culture"
4. the spaces of knowledge have become as critical to business as to academia. In a world, in which more and more information is increasingly able to circulate and circulate rapidly, information skills are still highly concentrated in particular locations, in particular offices, in intra-organizational kinks and in firm networks.

At the period after the Second World War and up to fall of the Berlin Wall the world situation was striated. When Soviet Union and Eastern Europe split asunder there have place certain economic changes

For the managers of business organizations, the consequences are clear:

• almost any business organization become defenseless
• managers are expected to react much more quickly
• large business organizations are, on average, becoming smaller employers, and their attraction is perhaps less than it was in the days of the "company man"

It is an emergent and increasingly powerful "cultural circuit of capital", which has only existed since 1960s.This circuit is responsible for the production and distribution of managerial knowledge to managers. It now has a constant and voracious need for new knowledge. Chief amongst the producers of the managerial discourse which this circuit disseminates are three institutions: 1. business schools, 2. management consultants and 3. management gurus.

The intellectual community has now moved from a position as legislator of the world to simply one of a number of interpretative communities. In the case of relationship between the international intellectual and international business community this tendency has been strengthened by increased traffic between the 2 communities, by the growth of an independed intelligence and analytical capacity within international business, and by the growth of the media as a powerful disseminator of and trader in ideas between the two communities: the cultural turn in the social sciences and humanities now has a direct line into, and indeed is a part of, the cultural turn in capitalism.