While looking for connections between culture, entrepreneurship, and economics, I stumbled upon Culture and Enterprise, by Don Lavoie and Emily Chamlee-Wright. The book starts by sating that markets and business life are not so much things that need to be measured, as meanings that need to be narrated and interpreted. The following are some learnings from this book:
- Economists take markets seriously but see culture as irrelevant to economic performance, while the others take culture seriously but see markets as uninteresting or evil.
- Note to self: Read more about Jurgen Habermas
- The left today is anything but a unified collective of political correctness police.
- Modernist thinking is seen as static, as oriented toward centralized control, as focussed on forcing things into universal categories and smoothing over differences, as preoccupied with average phenomena and insufficiently attentive to the margins.
- “We now tend to view culture as a context rather than a force; a “tool kit” of habits, skills, and styles from which people construct strategies of action in everyday life, rather than a set of ultimate values; a space of contestation and change rather than a cybernetic mechanism of equilibrium-seeking and pattern maintenance” — Mark Jacobs
- Cultural studies makes an important move as it challenges the myth of a single national culture.
- “The ethical life of a people –in contrast to what Hegel called “morality” — is inseparable from its institutions, its collective interpretations of the world, its ways of self-understanding, its customs, traditions, and values. — Albrecht Wellmer
- Culture is a framework of meaning, an aspect of virtually any causal factor one might identify, not a separate casual factor on its own. It is the background that provides the linguistic framework with which we understand the world around us.
- Of all the social sciences, economics is the one that most desperately needs to pay more attention to the cultural aspects of what it studies. The images and symbolic messages we receive and send through culture profoundly shape the way we think about such issues as the proper role of government, the rule of law, contractual obligations, professional ethics, private property rights, and the monetary order.
- Institutions critical to social progress, including economic prosperity, depend upon the interpretive framework culture provides.
- The process of interpretation is “polysemic”, one that is, in which a variety of radically diverse readings are possible. When the alternative voices of this dialogue are able to come to an understanding of one another, this can be the source of a creative process for the production of new meaning.
- Formalism can be defined as getting so caught up in the pyrotechnical difficulties of one’s theory that one loses sight altogether of the practical problems it was invented to solve. (In economics, formalism takes the form of an infatuation with mathematical technique). Formalism is an excessive construction of theoretical jargon and overcomplicated conceptual apparati.
- Many economists are stuck on the idea of measuring mechanistic causation.
- It appears that economics and cultural studies aim at opposite ideas. Find universal laws, or identify local differences. Individualism or communalism. Economics tend to assert that science is value free, while scholars in cultural studies are keen on undermining and subverting the whole idea of value-free objectivity.
- When Jacques Derrida asserts that written culture has a profound effect on spoken culture, and that we should beware of a kind of “phonocentrism” that privileges the intellectual significance of verbal modes of discourse over written ones, he is not just talking about French literature, but about all human societies which have embraced any form of writing.
- Cultural studies theory operates at a highly general philosophical level, examining the underlying character of all linguistically constituted human thought, communication, and action.
- Are individual responses based on cultural influences or incentives?
- Culture is the underlying meaning of the specific content of any rational choice.
- Rational decision making is a product of language, which is necessarily a social process that precedes the individual language speaker.
- Art of the elite critics, the art that is promoted by the official Art Institutions that have been the primary concern of government policies, has little impact on the public’s values, but the arts that do have a major impact are those that are called popular, those that are products of the spontaneous market.
- The authors claim that one of the most important elements in economic development is something that sounds thoroughly subjective: the culture.
- Historically the most influential avenue for the shaping of values has been through “popular culture”, the stories, poetry, theatre, and so forth by which fundamental values are imparted.
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