Capitalist Discipline

Capitalist discipline stands for the capacity to create, and reproduce, credible commitments. The focus of this book is the derailment that follows from endogenous coordination deficits that arise from within the political economy itself.The most dramatic derailments occur whenever virtual innovations by the financial superstructure do not correspond with the real interdependences in the economic substructure. Separating the two subsystems is not a simple enterprise.The same holds for the separation of 'private Vs public parts' of the financial and real economy. The interpenetration is too deep; not 'too big' but rather 'too connected to fail' . Analytically speaking, it remains a first order priority to distinguish what acts as a non-decomposable entity, if we want to come at grips with the cyclical causes and consequences of economic order and disorder. For the explanation of the resulting social order and disorder, the principle of bounded rationality is as important as the principle of bounded accountability. As this book extensively documents, organisations differ to the extent in which they can be effectively held accountable for the rational uses of their 'creative destruction' versus 'creative obstruction'. Creative destruction refers to new combinations of resources, relations and markets; creative obstruction to the capacity to frustrate this sort of new combination. Destructive and obstructive powers are the key-components of bargaining power. For a proper understanding of the dynamics of order and disorder we must know how asymmetric the social distribution of negotiating power turns out to be, and what more specifically explains the asymmetry of that distribution and its periodicity over time.