The University of Texas at Tyler Libraries

Cover -- Half Title -- Title Page -- Copyright Page -- Table of Contents -- Acknowledgements -- 1. Introduction: digital publics and cultural political economy -- Introduction -- Digital publics and mobile communications -- Cultural political economy -- Outline of chapters -- 2. From post-industrial societies to informational societies -- Introduction -- Post-industrial social theory -- Management gurus and post-industrialism: Peter Drucker -- The rise of informational societies -- Informational societies -- Business and management thinking on informational societies -- Conclusion -- 3. Complex, networked digital publics -- Introduction -- Complexity theory -- Complex networks -- Networked digital publics -- Conclusion -- 4. Industrial capitalism versus industrial capital -- Introduction -- Mythic genres -- Utterances of industrial societies -- Empirical industrial factories and workers -- Abstract quantitative units of labour -- Capital beyond industrialisation -- Industrial capital as a body without organs -- Conclusion -- 5. Financialisation and digital publics: beyond discourse and performativity -- Introduction -- Finance and the network society -- Performativity, information and economic networks -- Autonomism and global finance -- Network models of finance and management gurus -- Over-identification of concrete and contingent networks -- Technological determinism -- Beyond purely discursive and performative accounts of global crises -- Conclusion -- 6. Financialisation, neoliberal state projects and the public sphere -- Introduction -- Hegemonic state projects -- Neoliberalism, financialisation and digital media -- Neoliberal state projects and financialised hegemonic strategies -- Household debt and the pursuit of financial hegemony in the public sphere -- Conclusion -- 7. Creative organisational publics -- Introduction.

Digital public spheres in creative workplaces -- Contradictions of creative workplace publics -- The politics of creative workplace publics -- Conclusion -- Note -- 8. Conclusion: contradictions of cultural political economy -- Neoliberalism, finance and knowledge-based economies -- Cultural political economy, contradictions and discourse -- Bibliography -- Index.

Today we often hear academics, commentators, pundits, and politicians telling us that new media has transformed activism, providing an array of networks for ordinary people to become creatively involved in a multitude of social and political practices. But what exactly is the ideology lurking behind these positive claims made about digital publics? By recourse to various critical thinkers, including Marx, Bakhtin, Deleuze and Guattari, and Gramsci, Digital Publics systematically unpacks this ideology. It explains how a number of influential social theorists and management gurus have consistently argued that we now live in new informational times based in global digital systems and new financial networks, which create new sbjectivities and power relations in societies. Digital Publics traces the historical roots of this thinking, demonstrates its flaws and offers up an alternative Marxist-inspired theory of the public sphere, cultural political economy and financialisation. The book will appeal to scholars and students of cultural studies, critical management studies, political science and sociology.

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