For the individual, strident public assertions of one’s unassailable virtue have few consequences beyond sceptical smirks and a possible shortage of dates for Saturday night. For corporations, though, it’s more complicated. In a world where consumer distrust is increasingly the norm, if such self-proclaimed corporate virtue is believed genuine, it can deliver fanatical levels of […]
Business
Posted inBusiness, News/Politics
Working class hero
If one takes a good look at John Lennon’s song Working Class Hero it must dawn on you sooner or later that, just like the song Imagine, it is powerfully revolutionary. In addition to targeting the family, school, college or university (Althusser’s apparatuses where ideology is inculcated in subjects), and the class structure of society, […]
Posted inBusiness, News/Politics
Keith Hart on money, memory and democratising the economy
Keith Hart begins his thought-provoking book The Memory Bank: Money in an Unequal World (Profile Books, London, 2000) with the statement: “Ours is an age of money. Half the world worships money and the other half thinks of it as the root of all evil. In either case, money makes the world go round. If […]
Posted inBusiness, Equality, News/Politics
The madness of capital
Last month the Associated Press reported that the income gap in the United States broke a new record in 2012, with the 1% grabbing a greater share of total household wealth than ever before in history. This news follows on the heels of the fact that the 1% not only captured all of the income […]
Posted inBusiness, Health, Media
How is alcohol good for you?
I recently tweeted my views on the proposed ban on alcohol advertising. The ban, which I fully support, would see to it that alcohol no longer makes its regular appearance across multiple media channels. That means no more beer ads during a sports game. No more of those cider ads featuring hip-looking youth traversing the […]
Posted inBusiness, Equality, News/Politics
The terminal nature of poverty
By Gillian Schutte As academics, journalists, social commentators and activists we have a sense that we know the poor. We are outraged by poverty and inequality and advocate for equity and a life of dignity for all. We look for ways to bring the voices of the poor into the public debate and ask questions […]
Posted inBusiness, Media
Micro-marketing: New opiate of the masses
By Rifqah Luzita Naidoo The trends of consumer culture have most certainly evolved since the late 1940s, where critics considered people as being given superficial morals through the mass media. On the one hand technology has brought things closer; we have the world wide web, online shopping and an application for everything under the sun. […]
Posted inBusiness, Equality
SA remains a bastion of racism, while the rest of Africa moves on
How has the rest of Africa succeeded in putting its traumatic racial discrimination past behind it? Speak to anyone doing business in Africa and they will tell you that “race” is not an issue. They will tell you that doing business is not impeded by requirements to have “black” partners and that the concept of […]
Posted inBusiness, News/Politics
Why commercial law?
Now and I again my friends, who seem never to pay attention to anything I tell them, ask me about my career plans. “So, which area of law will you specialise in?” they ask. When I tell them that I am training to specialise in commercial law, I see their curiosity whirling to awe. I […]
Posted inBusiness, Tech
Academia is Africa’s last hope
“I am studying mathematics because I wanted to study something as difficult as it is useless.” I follow this statement with a polite laugh and wink. This is how I answer a person asking me why I’m studying a subject that most people regard with a terrified shudder (no doubt linked to their bad memories […]
Posted inBusiness, Equality
Rail services still treat us like cattle
Dear Passenger Rail Agency of South Africa, I don’t usually write open letters and have tried to engage you in more direct ways. I was one of the groups kept back by security at your Pretoria Station not too long ago and I am a regular visitor at your customer care booth at Park Station. […]
Posted inBusiness, Health
Capitalism and/as suffering
No one in their right mind would associate capitalism with suffering, would they? Isn’t it about enjoyment of commodities, ostentatious consumption, celebrity life and wealth accumulation? And what is there about all this that could be connected with “suffering”? Of course, one could elaborate, as Hardt and Negri do in Multitude (2005) and elsewhere, about […]