‘Marx’s economy and beyond’ is a paper jointly written by Mark Harvey and Norman Geras. Mark says
Our paper is entitled ‘Marx’s economy and beyond’. It is the result of nearly two years of discussion between us, and common work, on the strengths and weaknesses of Marx’s political economy – including the labour theory of value – and the general directions that need to be taken to move forward from it.
Click here to download the paper.
Professor Mark Harvey has been awarded an ESRC Professorial Fellowship for a research project entitled: The food-energy-climate change trilemma: developing a neo-Polanyian analysis
The world is facing three historically unprecedented problems:
These three problems are deeply interconnected, combining together in ‘the food-energy-climate change trilemma’.
Understanding how this trilemma is developing in different parts of the world is critical to finding possible solutions, but it presents a challenge to social science. Mark Harvey’s fellowship project will be comparing how the different politico-socio-economies of the USA, Europe, China and Brazil are responding to the trilemma. His research team will include a senior research officer, and an ESRC doctoral student. The project begins in October this year and runs until 2016.
Dr Ben Anderson, along with colleagues Prof. Riccardo Russo (Psychology) and Prof. Kun Yang (Electronics and Computer Science) and partners at London South Bank University have secured over £750,000 to analyse household energy habits and to develop and test an experimental energy use monitoring/reduction system.
The four year DANCER (Digital Agent Networking for Customer Energy Reduction) project, which is funded by the EPSRC’s Transforming Energy Demand in Buildings through Digital Innovation (BuildTEDDI) Programme will employ novel sensing and communication mechanisms to build patterns of users’ movements within the home and their linked energy use of a range of appliances. These and other data will be fed into a decision making agent that will support the users in the management of their energy use. The system will be tested in a case-control experimental trial.
DANCER adopts a multidisciplinary approach where knowledge from psychology, social and economic research, wireless communication and computer science unite to develop and test a solution that could have substantial benefits for all stakeholders in the energy supply-consumer chain.
Twenty years after the Earth Summit in Rio, the United Nations Conference on Sustainable Development (UNCSD) is taking place in Brazil on 20-22 June 2012.
The ESRC is marking Rio week by highlighting how social sciences are contributing to environmental research across a range of areas – such as societal change and policy uptake, consumer habits, employment, poverty, resource management, security, global development, low-income economies and risk mitigation.
In this video Professor Mark Harvey discusses his research on the development of drinking water infrastructures in the UK, India, Mexico and Taiwan.
Pre-industrial configurations of water and sewage in the UK (c) 2012 University of Essex
This paper, Drinking-Water and drinking water: Trajectories of Provision and Consumption in the UK, Taiwan and Delhiby Mark Harvey considers the economic sociology and political economy of drinking water infrastructures in the UK, Delhi and Taiwan to show how the emergence of all-purpose (including drinking) water was the outcome of long and varied historical processes, involving major changes in both systems of provision and patterns of consumption. Read the rest of this entry »
Resilience Model (c) University of Essex 2012
This paper, “Economic Analysis of Resilience: A Framework for Local Policy Response Based on New Case Studies“, written by Pierre Régibeau (Imperial College, London and CRA International) and Katharine Rockett (University of Essex) takes a recent set of case studies on resilience of ecocultures to form the basis for a critical review of the resilience literature and the development of a proposal for a novel resilience index.
The paper notes the diversity of definitions of resilience and the confusion this creates in implementing resilience studies and develop a synthesis view that establishes a framework for defining resilience in an implementable way. This framework emphasises the importance of defining the source of and magnitude of shocks as part of the definition.
Professor Mark Harvey, Director, CRESI, University of Essex
15th March 2012
At 16:00 in Room 6.345 and afterwards in the Sociology Common Room.
This presentation will develop an argument for a renewal of historical materialism by examining Marx’s conception of economy, as enshrined in the Labour Theory of Value. Developing a neo-Polanyian framework, which problematises what we mean by economy, the paper will argue that we need a much more radically historical and spatial understanding than is permitted by the closed circuit, commodity-capital, vision of the economy as presented in Capital. It will do so by playing a neo-Polanyian conception of ‘economies of labour’ against the Labour Theory of Value, and hence suggesting an alternative view of economy as open, multi-modal, and an outcome of complex causal interactions between economic, political, cultural and environmental dynamics. In so doing it retains, and indeed expands, a concern to understand the generation of systemic inequality in society to include rights over public as well as private, commodity, resources.
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