Ivan Manokha

The gdpr today is commonly seen as a ‘gold standard’ of personal data regulation. While recognizing the importance of the gdpr, especially in affirming that personal data belongs to the individuals rather than commercial or public entities, this paper seeks to demonstrate that such a view is, nevertheless, problematic: first, what the gdpr, along with similar regulations inspired by it elsewhere, effectively does is help organise the functioning of the personal data market in which private user data continues to be commodified and used to generate massive profits by various firms and platforms; second, the gdpr does it in a paradigmatically neoliberal manner – public authorities create a legal framework for a market, and devolve the responsibility for managing negative consequences to the affected populations themselves, presenting it as their ‘empowerment’; third, just as it is often the case with neoliberal governmentality in other sectors, the tool provided by the gdpr to individuals to protect themselves – here the right to reject the terms of service (tos) of different providers – embodies and reproduces an asymmetric power relation between capital and society – here between service providers and users – and effectively ensures that individuals continue to acquiesce to the collection and commodification of their private data: on the one hand, the complexity of different tos, their ‘take-it-or-leave-it’ nature, length, etc., render the evaluation of privacy implications very difficult for individual users; second, in some cases, the rejection of tos is impossible because access to the service in question is indispensable, as in the case of platform workers. Users mechanically click ‘Accept’ which is seen as an instance of ‘informed consent,’ and which in turn makes the collection and monetization of personal data legal.

The lockdowns imposed by most governments during the Covid-19 pandemic have resulted in an unprecedented increase in teleworking. This spike in remote work has generally been greeted with enthusiasm by both academic and non-academic commentators and there is now a widely shared view that employers should be encouraged to retain and enhance the teleworking arrangements in the post-pandemic period. This paper examines the spread and normalization of telework during the pandemic with reference to the growth of the 24/7 work culture and the blurring of boundaries between work and private lives that have been developing in the last two decades or so. It is argued that the rise in remote work during the crisis is contributing to the movement towards 24/7 work and to the collapse of the boundary between professional and private life, particularly as a result of remote employee surveillance that comes with telework. It also results in a new form of alienation-the alienation of workers from their private homes.

Jeremy Bentham's panopticon prison project was based on three central assumptions: the omnipresence of the "watcher"; the universal visibility of objects of surveillance; and the assumption, by the "watched," that they are under constant observation. While the metaphor of the panopticon, following Michel Foucault's work, was often applied to workplace and workplace surveillance to highlight the "disciplining" power of the supervisor's "gaze," this paper argues that it is only with the recent advent of digital employee monitoring technology that the workplace is becoming truly "panoptic." With modern electronic means of surveillance, the supervisor is always "looking"-even when not physically present or not actually watching employees-as all worker actions and movements may now be recorded and analyzed (in real time or at any time in the future). This paper argues that the modern workplace approximates Bentham's panoptic prison much more than the "traditional" workplace ever did and examines the implications of this fundamental historical change in the paradigm of employee monitoring for power relations in the modern workplace.

The objective of this paper is to revisit the metaphor of the Panopticon, borrowed by Michel Foucault from Jeremy Bentham to describe the development of disciplinary institutions in Western societies from the early nineteenth century, and to examine its relevance for the analysis of modern electronic means of surveillance. Widely used in the early stages of the study of new surveillance technologies, the metaphor of the Panopticon, particularly in the field of 'surveillance studies,' is growingly seen as inadequate to understand the impact of the latest surveillance tools and practices. This paper seeks to show that dominant interpretations of Foucault's use of Panopticon as referring to techniques of domination or to 'power over,' while legitimate as regards some of his earlier writings, overlook Foucault's later works on technologies of the self. That is, in Panoptic dispositifs in particular, as well as in settings involving power/knowledge configurations defining 'normality' more generally, individuals may end up exercising power over themselves without any coercion. It is argued here that the development of modern information and communication technologies may be said to produce a setting, the description of which as 'panoptic' is even more pertinent than was the case with respect to Western societies of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Building upon recent empirical works on the 'chilling effect,' particularly in the wake of Edward Snowden's revelations in 2013, the article discusses modern technologies of the self—self-restraint and self-censorship—that new technologies, enabling different forms of surveillance, produce in Western societies. It also outlines the areas in which the notion of the Panopticon may be useful in terms of guiding research into self-discipline and self-restraint in the context of the proliferation of modern techniques of surveillance.

An increasing number of companies are beginning to digitally monitor their employees. While employers have always scrutinised their workers’ performance, the rise of wearable technology to keep tabs has more of a dystopian edge to it. Monitoring has become easier, more intrusive and is not just limited to the workplace – it’s 24/7.

The objective of this paper is to account for an apparent paradox that has in recent years characterized the discipline of Economics, particularly the domain of Macroeconomics: on the one hand, a very strong emphasis on empirical observation and empirical testing of hypotheses as the foundations of scientific method and the criteria for knowledge valida- tion; and a very extensive use of Smith’s notion of “Invisible Hand’ and the manner in which it “works its magic”, on the other. The paper places the construction of Smith by contem- porary economists in the context of the historical development of economic thought, and particularly of the transformation of Political Economy into “pure” Economics, emptied of any reference to non-economic issues, and constructed along the lines of classical (New- tonian) physics. It is argued that such widespread use of the term “Invisible Hand” can be explained by the inability of the discipline, constrained by its definition of what it means to be scientific, to adequately theorize aggregate or structural processes in other than metho- dologically individualist and reductionist terms, denying any legitimate ontological status to non observable phenomena. It is suggested that the “Invisible Hand’ of Smith performs for Macroeconomics the same role as the one played by the deus ex machine of imagined “auctioneer” of Walras for Microeconomics : it is an attempt to back up the claim that free markets will necessarily result in a market-clearing and Pareto-optimal allocation of resources, which the discipline, dealing with social and not natural phenomena, is obviously unable to prove in any “scientific” way.

This article carries out a Foucauldian analysis of the global discourse of human rights. In the spirit of Foucault’s genealogy it identifies a historical discontinuity in the development of human rights between the Cold War period, when human rights were a heavily contested concept, and the late modern world in which human rights are becoming a form of global standard whose validity is less and less questioned. Using Foucault’s understanding of the way power is exercised within discursive structures and knowledge/power configurations, the article argues that in the late modern world human rights constitute a global norm with reference to which agents are evaluated and increasingly evaluate themselves. Power may be exercised over those forms of agency that do not conform to this norm by other agents, and at the same time, we witness more and more situations in which there is no such coercion and yet agents find it necessary to alter their behaviour and declare their adherence to human rights. The article also seeks to extend Foucault’s framework in order to explain the emergence of the global human rights discourse. It thereby complements a Foucauldian analysis with a political economy approach which, it is argued, helps us enhance the Foucauldian framework which suffers from the separation of discourses and politics from the economy.

This article examines the relationship between global poverty and terrorism. The approach is built around a concept of ‘social bandit’ developed by Eric Hobsbawm. By social bandits, Hobsbawm refers to those outlaws in pre-capitalist societies who robbed the rich, and gave (at least some of their loot) to the poor. What was common to social bandits is a myth that surrounded their activity, and a strong popular sympathy and support. This article uses Hobsbawm’s notion of social bandit to deal with the fact that in today’s international setting, particularly in the context of huge international inequality and widespread poverty in the non-western world, violence against western states, particularly the United States, enjoys significant sympathy elsewhere. This is not only an outcome of inequality and has to do with other factors, particularly certain political or military actions of the USA and other western states, but what is important to note here is that violence perpetrated by terrorists is directed at those who are seen as beneficiaries of the existing order, of international inequalities and injustices. In short, the operation of the international order, its asymmetries and inequalities, riches and wealth in developed countries and poverty and misery elsewhere, seems to play a role in the creation of such social bandits, and in providing them with support and legitimacy which they otherwise would not have had.

This article carries out a critical analysis of the discourse/practice of Business Ethics that has developed to an unprecedented extent in the last decade or so. It argues that in the late-modern global political economy (GPE) there develops a form of a Gramscian hegemony of transnational capital and the discourse/practice of Business Ethics can be seen as a form of moral leadership in the context of the emerging hegemonic order.

The latest financial crisis has put the state and the international system to the test. In this context one would expect an explosion in literature from the discipline that claims academic monopoly over the international sphere: International Relations. However, as our research shows, surprisingly few IR scholars have made any attempt to analyse the crisis. This article seeks to explain this paucity of engagement, and the failings of those few works that did attempt to engage with the crisis, by exposing the limits of the discipline’s orthodoxy. It argues that the discipline of IR has been predominantly concerned with the analysis of political interactions of sovereign states, their external behaviour towards each other in an anarchic international system, with each of these territorial units seen as pursuing their national interests, usually vaguely defined in terms of power or resources. With such privileging of the political over the economic, of the external over the domestic, of state actors over non-state actors, and of the study of conflict over the analysis of other types of interactions, the discipline of IR has inherently and structurally been unable to engage with, and render intelligible, the latest financial crisis and its consequences. The article then sketches out an alternative approach which seeks to overcome the dichotomies that characterize the orthodoxy and provides a more holistic explanation of the crisis.

The subject of this article is the increasing commitment declared by business enterprises to ethical business practices and corporate social responsibility. It is approached using Jean Baudrillard’s analysis of the way ‘signifiers’ are attached to products in advanced capitalist society. In such societies signifiers are split off from signifieds and their referents (commodities). The main linguistic form is not the symbol, as in previous social settings, but the signal. Since the linguistic elements are fragmented, signifiers are able to ‘float’ in the social space and be combined with the signifieds and referents at will. Thus, the producers often emphasise not the use value of the commodities in their advertisement but instead randomly attach various qualities to commodities irrespective of their functionality or material utility. In this article the development of corporate social responsibility is seen as such a signifier and the implications thereof for the late-modern Global Political Economy are discussed.

This Chapter demonstrates that religious humanitarianism of the Middle Ages advanced a view of justice which was an integral part of the feudal order, characterised by surplus extraction based on relations of personal/juridical dependence and carried out by means of political/military coercion.With the development of capitalism a totally different social setting emerges and with it the nature of Just War Theory is gradually fundamentally transformed.

This chapter seeks to demonstrate that poverty plays a role in the development of anti-Western terrorist activity. It suggests that in the arguments of both the proponents and the opponents of a causal relationship between poverty and terrorism there are some important shortcomings.

Fair Trade can be said to positively impact upon alleviation and/or prevention of forced labour for it renders the socio- economic environment less conducive to it, as we will see when we discuss some specific examples of Fair Trade initiatives. However, this chapter argues that despite a few encouraging experiences, Fair Trade does not deal with the underlying causes of poverty and underdevelop- ment perpetuated by the structure of world production and distribution, nor with the fact that the economies of numerous developing states depend virtually exclusively on exports of agricultural and primary products such as coffee, tea, cocoa or minerals.