Yes what would you and Nathan say about this: "By owning part of the intangible means of production, in the form of speicalist knowledge, ahd having a considerable degree of control over his or her work process, in some respects the employee will resemble a self employed worker. On the other hand, the employing copr wil retian ownership of the goods or services that are produced, of the physical means of production, and some of the crucial mechanisms of knowledge accreditation. For these reasons, the worker does not become fully self employed, in either a defacto or dejure sense. Nevertheless, the possession of highly specialist knowledge and the control of the work process by the employee can develop to the extent that the worker is virtually an autonomous agent. We can find examles of this quasi self employment today, in many public and private universities, and even in some research units in large, knowledge intensive capitalist corporations...Considering all such developments, the meaning of the employment contract is streched to its limit, creating normative and legal tensions tha tmay suggest its radical reformulation into something quite different. In so far as these developments spread, this bodes the end of classical employment relationship, the transformation of the captialist firm, and the demise of capitalism itself." p. 210
It is possible that more labor time is spent in the core countries in such mental operations as design, testing and customization of capital goods (including CAD techniques themselves) and innovation of new consumer goods generally high in informational content or R and D intensity (e.g., new drugs or videos in terms of the contributions of artists, musicians, cameramen, designers and so on). Following Vernon, one could argue that mature commodities in the last stages of the product cycle have been shifted from the metropolis to the periphery. And such a restructuring could explain the renewal of profitability in the 80s--that is, there has been a two sided process: innovations that minimized minimized crude labor time but required high value concrete labor time to produce information intensive production abstract commodities in the core countries and the shifting of production of older commodities to areas where labour power cheaper than in the core for the same level of skill; capitalism has thus been reshaped regionally and in terms of the commodity structure by the double process.
So argues Meghnad Desai in Marxian Economics; A Reappraisal, vol II. ed. Riccardo Bellofiore.
It is possible that such changes call for new kinds of analyses but Hodgson seems to have crossed over into ASAP-like celebrations of the new autonomous worker (though he is not the crass commercialist Lester Thurow or the prodigious researcher Manuel Castells).
He is indeed an interesting example of someone who seems to have begun as a critic of orthodox marxism/falling rate of profit theory; then became a radical economist popularizing Sraffa/Steedman's neo Ricardianism and the critique of Marx which it implied; then at some point decided to take off the static-jacket of linear algebra (as if nobody would notice) to become an evolutionary economist (arguing that Malthus was not really a reactionary and Hayek not truly a social darwininist); and now seems to be writing about the new economy with the same insight as a George Gilder (though he is too burdened by his academic heritage and his youthful socialist leanings to do the genre justice, so Michael Malone probably won't come a calling--no big bucks alas).
yours, rnb