Works Like a Charm: Incentive Rhetoric and the Economization of Everyday Life - Couverture souple

McDonald, Robert O.

Couverture souple

ISBN 10 : 1438494084 ISBN 13 : 9781438494081

Editeur : State University of New York Press, 2024

Synopsis

Breaks the spell of economic thought by interrogating the widespread language and logic of "incentives" in public life from a Lacanian perspective.

Works like a Charm addresses a simple question: Why are "incentives" everywhere now? From inducements to work harder at our jobs to tax rebates for corporations, "incentive" names a general theory of motivation-according to economists, we are incentive-driven creatures. Yet far from being a neutral generalization, this understanding of human behavior smuggles in a quintessentially economic way of seeing the world. Works like a Charm applies Jacques Lacan's psychoanalytic concept of retroactive causality to explain the metastasis of the language and logic of incentives: To discover an incentive is to place in the untouchable past an economic cause for a contextual, historical force. Tracing "incentive" from its roots in antiquity to its uptake by neoclassical and then Chicago-school economists, Robert O. McDonald diagnoses the spread of incentives across the social, cultural, and political field and warns readers of the dangers of handing over causality to the economists.

A propos du livre

À propos de l?auteur

Robert O. McDonald is Assistant Professor of Rhetoric in the Department of Communication Studies at the University of Kansas.

Détails de l'édition

• Éditeur: State University of New York Press
• Date d'édition: 2024
• Langue: anglais
• ISBN 10: 1438494084
• ISBN 13: 9781438494081
• Reliure: Broché
• Nombre de pages: 308
• Coordonnées du fabricant: non disponible
• Personne responsable: non disponible