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A review of Nancy MacLean’s Democracy in Chains: The Deep History of the Radical Right’s Stealth Plan for America focuses on the implications of her historiographic method in reading Jim Buchanan’s work and the resulting failure to take seriously the underlying framework of constitutional political economy that informed both Jim Buchanan’s and Frank H. Knight’s work. MacLean’s historiography is that of social movement history, which sublimates the interests and motivations of the individual to that of the movement. The real scholar disappears into simply an agent of the movement’s master plan. Because MacLean is suspicious of the movement she believes Buchanan to be part of, his work is interpreted solely in light of what she assumes to be the master plan. In particular, she ignores Buchanan’s habit of returning to key themes in order to develop new modes of analysis. MacLean focuses solely on his public choice work, ignoring the latter developments of constitutional economics and even moral order.

Two issues in MacLean’s account are the focus on the review. The first is simply a research mistake that she drew unwarranted conclusions from regarding Buchanan’s connection to the “massive resistance” movement against desegregation of Virginia public schools. The second issue reveals MacLean’s unwillingness to consider the changes in Buchanan’s scholarship over his career. Taken together, the issues indicate that she refused to read Buchanan on his own terms in order to understand the progress of his work, even if she disagreed with him at the end.

The purpose of this paper is to explore what an idiosyncratic and dynamic sense of belonging entails for consumption in a lifestyle sport, an ever shifting and progressing world in which individuals engage in community while also seeking to individuate their own sense of belonging.

The authors adopt an ethnographic approach in the context of a regional skateboarding community. Over a year at local skateparks, we interviewed 15 well-established, committed members of the community identified by others (through snowball techniques) to allow us to delve into the phenomenon. These interviews were conducted as part of the primary author's doctoral thesis (See Harris, 2011).

An idiosyncratic and dynamic sense of belonging is prevalent in the lifestyle sport community, even among well-established members. This is reflected in and motivated by a variety of consumption, as well as overconsumption practices.

Understanding the idiosyncratic and dynamic nature of a sense of belonging allows marketers to design offerings to effectively deal with the ambiguities of belonging but also raises the potential for the destructive use of marketing.

The authors demonstrate how approaching belonging through a dynamic and idiosyncratic sense of belonging provides a deeper understanding of belonging and related consumption activities in a lifestyle sport.

Marx is widely regarded today as an “evolutionary” economist. However, what is clear from a close examination of the writings of both Marx and Engels is that they did not actually take Darwin′s theory of natural selection on board. Consequently, if their theory of socio‐economic change is evolutionary, it is not so in a Darwinian sense. Considers the different sense in which the economics of Marx can be regarded as “evolutionary” and the distance between Darwinian and Marxian conceptions of natural or social change.

I am indebted to Anthony Waterman for identifying the largely illegible phrase cuius regio, eius religio, found near the end of Ostrander’s notes. Waterman writes, in explanation, apropos of Martin Luther: Lit. ‘whatever of the king, so of the religion’: it means that L. thought (being the Erastian he was), that the religion of a country should be that of its sovereign prince. Note: (a), the assumption, almost universal at that time, that there can be only ONE church in any Christian nation; and (b) the assumption, standard until the Scottish Enlightenment I should think (though people like Locke begin to chip away at it) that – as Louis XIV put it with admirable economy, ‘l’etat c’est moi’ (Waterman to Samuels, December 12, 2002).

The scope of this undertaking is to categorize that sector of the environment affecting managerial decision making that makes up the “legal environment.” The term legal environment encompasses the federal and state legislative and regulatory powers, plus the common law or court‐developed law that impacts an organization's domain. I have set out to divide the project into three chapters with each chapter emphasizing a major regulatory impact on corporate direction; some predictable, some unpredictable. Moreover, predictability will be dealt with as to controlling the legal environment. Historically, the legal environment crosses over two of the sectors: the government sector, city, state, federal laws and regulations, the court system, and political processes; the sociocultural sector, affirmative action, Title VII of the 1964 Civil Rights Act, values, beliefs, etc. Certain regulatory powers were anticipated by the frames of the Constitution in order to maintain a system of prosperity and strength. However, many of our regulatory agencies have come into being at the behest of the very industries that are regulated, such as antitrust. Furthermore, many of the regulatory laws came about due to the negligence of the business community in not self‐regulating and thereby permitting intolerable conditions for the sociocultural sector.

Limits may be placed on sociability through a sense of social superiority (middle‐class people separating themselves from working‐class on a housing estate), through strength of sociability within the nuclear family limiting outside contacts, or through placing a value on solitude and personal privacy. Inadequate attention has been paid to those who actually “choose” social isolation; in particular, the group formed by those who never marry but choose the single life and its attendant type of social isolation would be worth study, giving consideration to the reasons behind such choices.

After a long hiatus, psychology and economics today are back in conversation with each other: active research programs in behavioral economics, neuro-economics, and the economics of happiness bespeak a thriving cross-disciplinary discussion. Yet for most of the twentieth century, economists distanced themselves from psychology; when they spoke of science, they referred, in the first instance, to the physical sciences, then perhaps to the biological sciences. A hundred years ago, however, American intellectuals viewed psychology as a progressive science and economics as traditionalist – mired in the antiquated notions of laissez-faire and individualism. A social science that assumed individuals knew their preferences, directed their actions toward fulfilling them in a rational manner, and in the process engaged others in dispassionate exchange, was clearly not speaking to the issues of the modern world. The death of progressivism in the wake of WW I only reinforced the rise of psychology: good intentions weren’t enough, motives were suspect, rational individuals went mad in the midst of conflict and turmoil, complex emotions ruled. Careful psychological analysis could, however, enable society to gain some degree of control over the fundamental irrationality of human action.

Comparative studies have confirmed that the current types of cohabitation (defined as living together as a couple without being married) and the meanings attached to them differ across Europe. This variation could reflect differences in the levels of progress or the stages countries have reached in a common developmental process, as suggested by the theory of the Second Demographic Transition and Kiernan’s stage model of cohabitation. However, it may also indicate that countries are on different developmental paths, as suggested by path dependency theories. To examine whether changes in the prevalence of cohabitation follow a common script, this study analyses types of cohabitation within emerging family formation patterns over cohorts and across countries.

For this purpose, sequence methodology is applied to analyze cohort-specific family trajectories in France, western Germany, Norway, and Italy. In particular, using data from the German National Educational Panel Study (NEPS) and the Generation and Gender Survey (GGS), patterns of union status and co-residence with (own) children between ages 15 and 35 among the 1935–1969 birth cohorts (for Germany, among the 1940–1974 birth cohorts) are compared.

Our findings provide some support for the claim that there were common patterns of change. However, also country-specific variations in family trajectory patterns were detected, which suggests that general processes of change were mediated through country-specific institutions (path dependencies). The empirical evidence for convergence as well as for divergence indicates that both theoretical strands add to our understanding of the spread of cohabitation in European countries.