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Instead, they examine in detail the devices, relations, and practices that underpin these market-based interventions. Drawing on recent work in science and technology studies (STS), each chapter focuses on a different intervention and critically explores the market sensibility around which it is organized. Trade and exchange, competition, property and ownership, and investment and return all become the focus of a thorough exploration of what it means to intervene in public problems, how problems are composed, and how solutions are continually reworked.  Can Markets Solve Problems? offers the first book-length STS enquiry into markets and public problems. Weaving together rich empirical descriptions and conceptual discussions, the book provides in-depth insights into the workings of these markets, their continuous evolution, and the consequences. The result is a new avenue of critical inquiry that moves between the details of specific policies and the always-emerging, collective features of this landscape of intervention.","brand":"WoB","offers":[{"title":"GB \/ VERY_GOOD \/ INTERNAL","offer_id":49604073488657,"sku":"GOR013499873","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":false}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0784\/4072\/6801\/files\/1912685159.jpg?v=1751347240"},{"product_id":"futilitarianism-book-neil-vallelly-9781912685905","title":"Futilitarianism","description":"\u003cb\u003eA proposal for countering the futility of neoliberal existence to build an egalitarian, sustainable, and hopeful future.\u003c\/b\u003e\u003cbr\u003e \u003cbr\u003e If maximizing utility leads to the greatest happiness of the greatest number of people, as utilitarianism has always proposed, then why is it that as many of us currently maximize our utility--by working endlessly, undertaking further education and training, relentlessly marketing and selling ourselves--we are met with the steady worsening of collective social and economic conditions? In \u003ci\u003eFutilitarianism\u003c\/i\u003e, social and political theorist Neil Vallelly eloquently tells the story of how neoliberalism transformed the relationship between utility maximization and the common good.\u003cbr\u003e \u003cbr\u003e Drawing on a vast array of contemporary examples, from self-help literature and marketing jargon to political speeches and governmental responses to the COVID-19 pandemic, Vallelly coins several terms--including \"the futilitarian condition,\" \"homo futilitus,\" and \"semio-futility\"--to demonstrate that in the neoliberal decades, the practice of utility maximization traps us in useless and repetitive behaviors that foreclose the possibility of collective happiness.\u003cbr\u003e \u003cbr\u003e This urgent and provocative book chimes with the mood of the time by at once mapping the historical relationship between utilitarianism and capitalism, developing an original framework for understanding neoliberalism, and recounting the lived experience of uselessness in the early twenty-first century. 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The dawn of the COVID-19 pandemic represented an exceptional interruption in the routines of work, financial markets, movement across borders and education. The policies introduced in response were said to be unprecedented—but the distribution of risks and rewards was anything but. While asset-owners, outsourcers, platforms and those in spacious homes prospered, others faced new hardships and dangers.     Unprecedented? explores the events of 2020-21, as they afflicted the UK economy, as a means to grasp the underlying dynamics of contemporary capitalism, which are too often obscured from view. It traces the political and cultural contours of a \"rentier nationalism,\" that was lurking prior to the pandemic, but was accelerated and illuminated by COVID-19. But it also pinpoints the contradictions and weaknesses of this capitalist model, and the new sources of opposition that it meets.     An empirical, accessible and critical analysis of the COVID economy, Unprecedented? is essential reading for anyone seeking to understand the political and economic turbulence of the pandemic’s first eighteen months.","brand":"WoB","offers":[{"title":"GB \/ NEW \/ GARDNERS","offer_id":49743418556689,"sku":"NGR9781913380120","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0784\/4072\/6801\/files\/1913380122.jpg?v=1751347535"},{"product_id":"marketizers-book-jacob-jensen-9781913380526","title":"The Marketizers","description":"A history of the pervasive idea that politics is a marketplace.  An original interpretation of the neoliberal order’s origins, The Marketizers is essential reading for anyone seeking to understand the marketization of politics since the 1980s. The book traces the origins of the neoliberal order to public choice theory and argues that the reinvention of government on the model of the market would have been unimaginable without the emergence of this body of thought. The separation of provision and production in public services, the introduction of competition between service providers, the treatment of citizens as customers, and the use of performance incentives all have origins in the writings of public choice theorists.  From the 1940s through the 1980s, these marketizers gradually eroded the differences between politics and the market as they applied the tools of economics to problems usually considered the purview of political scientists and political philosophers. 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Contributors AUDINT, Khairani Barokka, Carina Brand, Ha-Joon Chang, Miriam Cherry, William Davies, Mark Fisher, Dan Gavshon-Brady and James Pockson, Owen Hatherley, Laura Horn, Tim Jackson, Mark Johnson, Bastien Kerspern, Nora O Murchú, Tobias Revell et al., Judy Thorne, Sherryl Vint, Joseph Walton, Brian Willems","brand":"WoB","offers":[{"title":"US \/ WELL_READ \/ SBYB","offer_id":50120712782097,"sku":"CIN1912685078A","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":false},{"title":"GB \/ VERY_GOOD \/ INTERNAL","offer_id":53112448516369,"sku":"GOR011611455","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0784\/4072\/6801\/files\/1912685078.jpg?v=1751380479"},{"product_id":"politics-of-feeling-book-ben-anderson-9781915983299","title":"The Politics of Feeling","description":"How today’s dominant political forms—right-wing populism, progressivism, and liberalism—offer differentiated responses to shared conditions of uncertainty.  The Politics of Feeling argues that politics has become a matter of political feelings in an age of uncertainty. The uncertainties of the post-2008 period have transformed the political arena and made the question of how people feel central to the formation of political affiliations and divisions. The book identifies three competing political forms in the US and the UK today: right-wing populism, progressivism, and contemporary liberalism. It argues that rather than naming coherent programs of political thought, these popular political forms are operating as arrangements or modes of attachment and political intensity. Each one suggests a different way of remembering the past, imagining the future, and making the present politically meaningful. Each one elevates some affective orientations over others and thereby etches differences of race, class, and gender within its structure. 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