Christopher Holmes
|
[c]
Biography Chris is in the final year of his PhD programme, funded by the ESRC '1+3' award. He was awarded a BA in Political Science and MA in Research Methods from the University of Birmingham, passing top of year group both times, before transferring to the University of Warwick in early 2007. He has recently undertaken an institutional placement in the Department of Sociology at the University of California at Davis. During that time he was working with Professor Fred Block, who is Head of Department and one of the leading international figures in Polanyian scholarship. Developing work started on this visit, he won the New Political Economy Graduate Student Paper Prize 2008/09 with an article on hedge funds’ role in the economy. At both Warwick and Birmingham universities, he has undertaken additional work, editing journal articles at review stage and running various websites. Also, he taught the undergraduate module "Introduction to Political Economy" to four seminar groups at the University of Birmingham. Chris’ departmental responsibilities at Warwick have included being the editor of the Politics and International Studies Graduate Working Paper Series, which publishes internally peer-reviewed papers on the PaIS website. Also, he helps run the Political Economy Specialist Group. This is a new research group funded by the Political Studies Association. Publications Holmes, C. (2009) “Hedge fund-based financial ecosystems”, New Political Economy (prize winner, forthcoming) Brassett, J. and Holmes, C. (2009) “Ethics and IPE” (forthcoming) Holmes, C. (2009) “Polanyi and Economic Patriotism: Double Movement and One-Way Logic in Contemporary European Integration”, in Clift, B. and Woll, C. eds., Economic Patriotism: The Limits of the Liberal Market Project (forthcoming) Papers February 2009: "Alpha fund, beta function: Placing hedge funds within the Structure of Financial Markets", delivered at the International Studies Conference, New York, USA March 2007: "Karl Marx, Karl Polanyi and the Nature of Critical Political Economy", delivered at the POLSIS Graduate Colloquium, University of Birmingham September 2007: "The Self-Protecting Market: A Thesis Overview", delivered at the CRIPS seminar series, PaIS, University of Warwick Prizes New Political Economy Graduate Student Paper Prize 2008/09 Joshua Beeby Prize for best graduate dissertation in the Department of Political Science and International Studies, Birmingham Ferns Prize for the graduating student who shows distinctive merit in the Department of Political Science and International Studies, Birmingham Len Tivey Prize for best undergraduate dissertation in the Department of Political Science and International Studies, Birmingham PhD Thesis Title and Summary "Market self-protection: A Polanyian critique of market development in advanced capitalism" My thesis is an attempt to understand and challenge the relationship between liberal conceptions of justice and the economy by examining their meeting point: the market. I argue that Polanyi's concept of double movement offers a unique opportunity to understand this relationship and its reflection in contemporary market development in advanced capitalist economies. However, in empirical application I depart from Polanyi, arguing that, in contemporary capitalism, the type of protection that he saw as a functional necessity of a free market system has evolved in a far more marketised way. I contrast this ‘marketised protection’ with the inner ethical and economic tensions within the competitive market system itself in order to deliver a notion of ‘market self-protection. In order to empirically demonstrate this phenomenon, I employ three conceptual case studies: financialisation, personal welfare provision and environmental sustainability, corresponding to Polanyi's fictitious commodities: money, labour and land respectively. In terms of financialisation I examine hedge funds as a proxy for broader trends in the finance of productive organisation. For personal welfare provision I look at the financialisation of pension and mortgage provision as well as the growing role of consumption based welfare in advanced economies. Finally I demonstrate that, while the need to find coping strategies for environmental degradation is well recognised, almost all of the resultant strategies conceptualise nature solely as resources, which results in a marketised approach to sustainability and the reification of existing patterns of accumulation. Substantively, these cases demonstrate a distinct phase in the relationship between economy and society. Normatively, I seek to make the Polanyian point that transformative change in any of these areas depends upon the assertion of non-commodity identities – a process that, while challenging towards deep traditions of contractual justice in advanced capitalist societies, has never looked so likely. -Supervisor: Matthew Watson -Co-Supervisor: James Brassett Research interests The political economy of everyday economic behaviour in capitalist societies; financialisation of all types; environmental politics and economics; the history of economic and political thought, particularly the invention of autonomy, liberal/contractual theories of justice and the evolution of property rights; critical/post-structural approaches to the economy; global ethics. Contact details Department of Politics and International Studies University of Warwick Coventry CV4 7AL United Kingdom
|
|
