The New Spirit of Capitalism

Abstract

International audienceA century after the publication of Max Weber's The Protestant Ethic and the "Spirit" of Capitalism, a major new work examines network-based organization, employee autonomy and post-Fordist horizontal work structures

Italo Calvino and the organizational imagination: Reading social organization through urban metaphors

“…Far more convincing, for us, are the socially critical, subtle and scholarly fashioned images of cities offered by Boltanski and Chiapello (2005); images which cast particular lights and shadows on the complexities of capitalist social organization and which a revelatory of an ethics, politics and new spirit of the projective city.…”

“…In this section of the article, we consider parallels between the richly textured semiotics of Calvino's Invisible Cities and the more prosaic, yet original, sociological narrative analysis of capitalism's evolution offered by Boltanski and Chiapello (2005).…”

“…Another major point of connection between the two works is the principle of 'lightness' which, whilst providing a generally positive value for Calvino (1996) with respect to the art of writing, is rendered more ambivalent and ethically challenging for networked organization and society in the hands of Boltanski and Chiapello (2005) 5 . In order to forge the relationships we see between Bolatanski and Chiapello and Calvino, we offer a brief and exegesis of The New Spirit of Capitalism which focuses on the role of the city metaphor.…”

“…We then explain how Calvino, too, invokes the image of a diamond but, unlike Porter, uses the metaphor to introduce lightness into his cosmos of urban organization. We then proceed to a brief exegesis of Boltanski and Chiapello (2005) focussing on their sociological use of the city in understanding the complexity of justification and governance within modern and postmodern social orders. This is followed by a consideration of Calvino's interpretation of the reticular and virtual -central aspects of lightness within the projective city -which are taken up explicitly by Bauman (2000Bauman ( , 2003 in his conception of 'liquid modernity'.…”

Explaining How Political Culture Changes: Catholic Activism and the Secular Left in Italian Peace Movements

“…This topic began to be examined and discussed even outside the frontiers of left-leaning Christian associations, and in particular within groups close to pacifist groups and, more generally, artistic critique (Boltanski, Chiapello 2005).…”