The idea of a preanalytic vision as explaining scientific change was originally proposed by Joseph Schumpeter in his posthumously published History of Economic Analysis. Schumpeter’s proposal is put into a broader perspective by comparison with the theories of Neurath and Kuhn and issues in the sociology of science that they all raise. The chapter then turns to clarifying the meaning and role of ideology and the differences that have occurred over time and between different authors – Marx, Engels, Schumpeter and Gramsci. It turns to the critical realist approach termed ‘explanatory critique’, and the implications this has for social ecological economics and the role of researchers in the transformation of society. The chapter shows how calls for change in economic thought have appealed to concepts of a preanalytic vision and paradigm shift as invoking a revolutionary change and substantive transformation.

Chapter 2 describes the historical background of digital capitalism. It starts by drawing a broader picture of the post-Second World War political economy, where the 1970s saw the OECD world stumbling into the current situation of long-term stagnation. Digital technology emerged as an outlier, securing consistent growth through successive capitalist crises. The chapter describes the emergence and growth of the digital technologies as an effect of multiple strategies for capitalist rejuvenation: automation intensified from the 1970s onwards, boosting demand for digital equipment. Globalisation and financialisation of production caused demand for digital information and communication technologies to surge, spurring growth for the leading digital companies of the time. On the more political side, military Keynesianism and the deregulation of telecommunications paved the way for the rise of big tech. The chapter pays particular attention to the different national trajectories of privatisation in the 1990s. These help explain why today’s big tech companies appeared in the United States rather than Europe or Japan, which were also leading technology regions at that time.

Chapter 5 examines the consequences of proprietary markets for labour. Two points in particular are stressed: first, market-owning companies use their power to extract value from the economy and especially from the supply side of proprietary markets. Producers within these systems come to depend more and more on the market-like meta-platforms, which can then increase the proportion they extract. As a consequence, the share taken by the meta-platforms for market participation is missing on the external provider’s revenue income side and cannot be distributed in wages. Digital capitalism’s accumulation model is thus a driver of social inequality. Second, the chapter uses material case studies and the broader literature to demonstrate how algorithmic management methods are applied to expand control and exploitation in the digital labour process. The digital tracking, performance rating, scoring technologies and information asymmetries employed for labour control are captured as filiations of the control strategies developed for proprietary markets. The chapter elaborates their dissemination through new business models and in particular the ‘gig economy’, through corporate software and through wearable technologies in manufacturing. While the bottom line is that the new means of control are again drivers of social inequality, day-to-day resistance strategies and the limitations of digital control are also discussed.

If growth in scale is success, then ecological economics appears to have been successful. Three main positions on research are described as constituting ecological economics: new environmental pragmatism, new resource economics and social ecological economics. Four crossover positions, between the three main ones, capture a fuller picture of argumentation about direction and meaning and are explored. The chapter then considers the implications of these seven categories for unity and division within ecological economics. Social ecological economics takes a research position that is distinct from the existing economic orthodoxy, but is also critical of the pragmatic willingness to adopt whatever is assumed to achieve a given end. Several authors have advocated the idea of a potential union between ecological economics and neoclassical resource and environmental economics.

In this chapter, ecological economics is identified as arising from late-twentieth-century environmentalism and the failure of environmental economics to create an academic community prepared to challenge mainstream economic thinking, and more specifically economic growth and price-making markets. Ecological economics engages with a range of topics which recur across time and space and have been debated in Western philosophy since the ancient Greeks. Environmental economics arose, along with the growth in public awareness, as a direct response to pollution problems. Neoclassical theorists gave resource and environmental economics a technocentric optimism and ideological faith in self-regulating, price-making markets that circumvented recognising any need for fundamental change in human behaviour or major government intervention to directly regulate corporations or control market players. Economists voicing strong environmental critiques proved too revolutionary for the orthodox mainstream of the profession.

This chapter describes the rise of leading digital corporations as an attempt to cope with long-term economic stagnation and the surfeit of surplus capital emerging in the aftermath of the financial crisis of 2008/09. After a brief introduction to the topic of the book and its main arguments, Schumpeter’s classic theory of capitalist monopolies (Capitalism, Socialism and Democracy) is established as a central point of reference. This contextualises digital capitalism in the historical perspective of concentration of economic power and the emergence of monopolies. The chapter also briefly introduces one of the concluding arguments: in digital capitalism, we are dealing with a post-neoliberal practice in the sense of the market itself being privatised – which is unthinkable in neoliberal economic theory. The chapter concludes with a brief introduction to the following six chapters.

Instead of ecological economics offering an integrative approach, it was founded on vague and unstructured appeals to transdisciplinarity, interdisciplinarity, holism, pluralism and eclecticism. In this chapter, the approaches to integration critically reviewed by Kapp are discussed and brought into a current social ecological economic perspective with specific focus on dialectics (from Hegel to Engels and Marx to Georgescu-Roegen), analogy and metaphor (which are distinguished), unity of science and finally multi-/trans-/inter-disciplinarity. The argument is made that interdisciplinarity is key but requires insight into a process as to how it might proceed. The role of conceptualisation is highlighted and Kapp's proposal for ‘common-denominator’ concepts is explained and explored. The potential for and barriers to integration are reflected upon throughout and summarised in the conclusions.

Adopting an orthodox mainstream paradigmatic perspective, in part or whole, has serious implications for the conduct and relevance of economic science. This chapter aims to clarify the divisions in economics between orthodoxy and heterodoxy, and to show how this has impacted understanding of the environmental crisis. The concept of orthodox - as opposed to radical - dissent is introduced, and the meaning of paradigmatic conformity is outlined. The chapter argues that the fight for a paradigm shift in economics is undercut by such conformity and pragmatism. What constitutes heterodox thought on the environment is critically reviewed in terms four economic schools: Marxist/socialist, institutionalist, feminist and Post Keynesian. The chapter reveals the paradigmatic and ideological struggle in which heterodoxy in general is engaged and how this plays out with respect to ecological economics in particular.

Chapter 4 digs deeper into the strategies and practices of the leading digital corporations of the present age, focussing on Alphabet/Google, Apple, Meta, Amazon, Alibaba and Tencent. Their function as ‘proprietary markets’ is identified as the heart of digital capitalism. The chapter begins with a more analytical perspective on the post-Second World War political economy, drawing on regulation theory and Wolfgang Streeck’s theory of democratic capitalism. The term ‘proprietary markets’ captures what sets the new digital accumulation regime apart from the Fordist and post-Fordist models that preceded it. While Fordism was about selling uniform mass products to unsaturated markets and post-Fordism shifted the focus to individualised products in more competitive markets, digital capitalism’s leading corporations have basically exited the competition game altogether by becoming the markets themselves. The chapter introduces a distinction between platforms per se and meta-platforms like Android or Amazon, which operate as markets for an ever-growing range of products and services. The latter’s strategies have ensured that it is almost impossible to access important markets without them. The chapter outlines how their expansion to date has relied on strategies such as ecosystem-building through mergers and acquisitions, and suggests that control of infrastructure will represent their main future growth strategy. This analysis is embedded in a theory of rent extraction: maintaining the digital infrastructures in question is often very cheap compared to the profits these companies extract from their position as owners of markets.