Routledge Concepts of Capital: The Commodification of Social Life

Borrowing terminology from the economic discipline―specifically the concept of "capital"―has led to an abundance of new terms in the social sciences: human capital, social capital, and cultural capital, to name the most prominent representatives on an ever-growing list. In this interdisciplinary transaction, the concept is borrowed and the original meaning extended until the new concepts often have nothing left in common with their initial referents. Here Jacek Tittenbrun offers a critical analysis of human, social, and cultural capital on the basis of their uses and misuses across a wide range of social sciences, simultaneously revealing the source of conceptual diffusion in the real world. He presents a two-pronged analysis of an intellectual fashion popular in the social sciences and offers a critical analysis of a range of concepts constructed around the common core of "capital." The analysis is innovative, as it is underpinned by a theoretical framework rooted in economic sociology and the concept of ownership in particular. The approach is one of the sociology of knowledge coupled with a substantive critique-application of the given concepts. The volume reveals a range of processes in the real world that account for the conceptual diffusion. The general reader will be drawn to the discussion in the second half of the book, a study of a variety of relatable real life situations that illuminate privatization and commodification in our lives. Review -The author's argument that the concepts of human capital, social capital, and cultural capital have come to bear too much conceptual weight is a reasonable one and deserves wide attention. . . . Tittenbrun clearly reads widely in both economics and sociology.- --J. Li, Choice -This is a tour de force. Professor Tittenbrun has produced a scholarly and stimulating book that brings together conceptions of capital, commodification, and privatization in a unique way. This makes a significant contribution to critical literature in economics and sociology.- --Jane Hardy, professor, University of Hertfordshire -... Jacek Tittenbrun examines the gullible acceptance of economic dogma in the social sciences. 'Why is it, ' he asks, 'that our academic colleagues who call themselves economists, sociologists, or social psychologists are building fortresses on shifting sands of such concepts as social, cultural, or human capital?' What he does is remarkable: first, he demonstrates clearly that the concept of social, cultural, or human capital does not hold water, even if it is defended by a Nobel prize winner. Second, he examines these flawed concepts from the point of the Marxian and Simmelian analysis of the commodification of interactions. Third, he demonstrates venues of contemporary expansion of the capitalist markets. Fourth, he shows the consequences. We can believe that we are not tools, but somebody has to pay for the accumulation of financial capital--and this somebody's dispossession is mediated by a variety of 'enclosures.' Readers of Tittenbrun will have second thoughts before defining shopping malls as public spaces and gated communities as paradises of true happiness. My guess is that the concepts of social, cultural, and human capital will go down the drain as did the concepts of ether or phlogiston. I also think that the rational choice theory and the over-individualized, undersocialized theories of interacting and communicating in market societies will decline, because they have nothing to tell us either about us or about the social world around us. Recycling Marx makes sense, so does reinventing democracy. After all, even Harvard professors begin to suspect that not everything is for sale.- --Slawomir Magala, professor, Erasmus University Rotterdam -The values which serve as the basis for management and economy are being expanded to all spheres and dimensions of contemporary life. Everything is for sale and shaped according to pre-es