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This paper aims to explore how historical context influences the content and selection of rhetorical legitimation strategies. Using case study method, this paper will focus on how insurance companies and labor tried to defend their legitimacy in the context of enactment of Medicare in the USA. What factors influenced the strategic (rhetorical) decisions made by insurance companies and labor unions in their institutional work?

The study is empirically grounded in archival research, involving an analysis of over 9,000 pages of congressional hearings on Medicare covering the period 1958–1965.

The authors show that rhetorical legitimation strategies depend significantly on the specific historical circumstances in which those strategies are used. The historical context lent credibility to certain arguments and organizations are forced to decide either to challenge widely held assumptions or take advantage of them. The authors show that organizations face strong incentives to pursue the latter option. Here, both the insurance companies and labor unions tried to show that their positions were consistent with classical liberal ideology, because of high respect of classical liberal principles among different stakeholders (policymakers, voters, etc.).

It is uncertain how much the results of the study could be generalized. More information about the organizations whose use of rhetorics the authors studied could have strengthened our conclusions.

The practical relevancy of the revised paper is that the authors should not expect hegemony challenging rhetorics from organizations, which try to influence legislators (and perhaps the larger public). Perhaps (based on the findings), this kind of rhetorics is not even very effective.

The paper helps to understand better how organizations try to advance their interests and gain acceptance among the stakeholders.

In this paper, the authors show how historical context in practice influence rhetorical arguments organizations select in public debates when their goal is to influence the decision-making of their audience. In particular, the authors show how dominant ideology (or ideologies) limit the options organizations face when they are choosing their strategies and arguments. In terms of the selection of rhetorical justification strategies, the most pressing question is not the “real” broad based support of certain ideologies. Insurance company and labor union representatives clearly believed that they must emphasize liberal values (or liberal ideology) if they wanted to gain legitimacy for their positions. In existing literature, it is often assumed that historical context influence the selection of rhetorical strategies but how this in fact happens is not usually specified. The paper shows how interpretations of historical contexts (including the ideological context) in practice influence the rhetorical strategies organizations choose.

Hazel Kyrk, one of the first women economists at the Economic Department of the University of Chicago and author of A Theory of Consumption (1923), conducted groundbreaking research for the Bureau of Home Economics of the US Department of Agriculture and the Bureau of Labor Statistics. Kyrk made a considerable contribution to the development of standards for a “decent living,” the Consumer Price Index, and the conceptualization of what would later turn into the definition of the poverty line. This chapter evaluates Kyrk’s use of eugenic notions of gender and race that were widely used in Kyrk’s day. This chapter shows that eugenic reasoning impacts Kyrk’s theoretical work only superficially but does structure her research on consumption standards through her focus on the white middle-class family as the unit of analysis for consumer behavior. This chapter also makes clear that the American Institutionalist approach to consumer behavior, rather than marginalized and side-tracked due to a lack of theoretical progress, was relegated to the margins of economics science together with the research of women economists into Home Economics departments and policy research at government institutions.

The American agricultural economist Marion Clawson advised the Israeli government during 1953–1955. Clawson, a protégé of John D. Black and Mordecai Ezekiel, criticized the government for ignoring economic considerations, and stated that Israel’s national goals – defense, Negev Desert irrigation, immigrant absorption via new agricultural settlements, and economic independence – were mutually contradictory. His major recommendations were to improve the realism of Israel’s agricultural plan; end expensive Negev irrigation; enlarge irrigated farms eightfold; freeze new settlements until the number of semi-developed settlements falls from 300 to 100; and limit new Negev settlements to 10 over 5–7 years. Thus, Clawson ignored political feasibility and made value judgments. Minister of Finance Levi Eshkol and Minister of Agriculture Peretz Naphtali rejected Clawson’s recommendations because they ignored Israel’s national goals. By September 1954, Clawson shifted towards greater pragmatism: He acknowledged that foreign advisors should not question the national goals or make value judgments, and sought common ground with the Ministry of Agriculture. At his initiative, he wrote Israel Agriculture 1953/54 in collaboration with the Ministry of Agriculture. Israel Agriculture was a consensus document: Clawson eschewed recommendations and accepted that the government might prioritize non-economic goals. In proposing Israel Agriculture, Clawson made a pragmatic decision to relinquish some independence for (potentially) greater influence. Ultimately, Clawson was largely unsuccessful as an advisor. Clawson’s failure was part of a general pattern: Over 1950–1985, the Israeli government always rejected foreign advisors’ recommendations unless it was facing a severe crisis.

The foremost objective of this chapter was to present an overview of the cooperative healthcare sector in Argentina by reviewing its brief history, components and the role these healthcare cooperatives play in the society. The second objective was to look at how these cooperatives have helped women and the local communities in which they operate.

This paper has used chiefly secondary data derived from various academic papers and official and government websites which publish cooperative sector-related information. The intention was to construct a concise yet detailed study that would be of help to other researchers in the field of healthcare cooperatives since the data related to Argentina is highly scattered and frequently found not up to date.

The research has found that health cooperatives in Argentina have aided in overcoming problems in the sector such as sectoral fragmentation, negligence and frequently inadequate standards of care management as well as operational and implementation failures that the private and government healthcare players have been accused of being fraught with. Furthermore, the cooperatives have frequently played a complementary or supplementary role rather than a competitive one with the private and government players.

Through the examples presented in this chapter, it is evident that health cooperatives in Argentina are making large impacts in the healthcare domain along with positively impacting women, marginalised and vulnerable sections of the society and the community. It only remains to be seen now how far this sector will grow in the future and how many more lives will be benefitted.

Prior to the passage of the 20th amendment to the US Constitution in 1920, several states had extended the suffrage to women. Helen Laura Sumner (later Woodbury), a student of John R. Commons at Wisconsin, undertook a statistical study of the political, economic, and social impacts of the granting of voting rights to women in the state of Colorado, and subsequently defended the results against numerous attacks. In this paper, we present a brief account of the struggle for women’s equality in the extension of the suffrage and examine Sumner’s critical analysis of the evidence as to its effects, as well as the counterarguments to which she responded.

A new round of technological revolution is impacting various aspects of society. However, the importance of technology adoption in fostering firm innovation is underexplored. Therefore, this study aims to investigate whether robot adoption affects technological innovation and how human capital plays a role in this relationship in the era of circular economy.

Based on the robot adoption data from the International Federation of Robotics (IFR) and panel data of China's listed manufacturing firms from 2011 to 2020, this study uses regression models to test the impact of industrial robots on firm innovation and the mediating role of human capital.

The results demonstrate that the adoption of industrial robots can significantly promote high-quality innovation. Specifically, a one-unit increase in the number of robots per 100 employees is associated with a 13.52% increase in the number of invention patent applications in the following year. The mechanism tests show that industrial robots drive firm innovation by accumulating more highly educated workers and allocating more workers to R&D jobs. The findings are more significant for firms in industries with low market concentration, in labor-intensive industries and in regions with a shortage of high-end talent.

Due to data limitations, the sample of this study is limited to listed manufacturing firms, so the impact of industrial robots on promoting innovation may be underestimated. In addition, this study cannot observe the dynamic process of human capital management by firms after adopting robots.

The Chinese government should continue to promote the intelligent upgrading of the manufacturing industry and facilitate the promotion of robots in innovation. This implication can also be applied to developing countries that hope to learn from China's experience. In addition, this study emphasizes the role of human capital in the innovation-promoting process of robots. This highlights the importance of firms to strengthen employee education and training.

The adoption of industrial robots has profoundly influenced the production and lifestyle of human society. This study finds that the adoption of robots contributes to firm innovation, which helps people gain a deeper understanding of the positive impacts brought about by industrial intelligence.

By exploring the impact of industrial robots on firm innovation, this study offers crucial evidence at the firm level to comprehend the economic implications of robot adoption based on circular economy and human perspectives. Moreover, this study reveals that human capital is an important factor in how industrial robots affect firm innovation, providing an important complement to previous studies.

Economists usually shy away from talking about power. They assume an economy comprised of many small and medium-sized firms, each competing for consumer dollars. This circumvents the problem of economic power. John Kenneth Galbraith, however, refused to ignore power. It stood at the center of his economics, and he saw it as a key reason the US economy thrived in the years following World War II (WWII). This chapter examines Galbraith’s changing views regarding economic power. American Capitalism explains how countervailing power, or power on the other side of the market, solves the problem of economic power. In The New Industrial State, scientists and educated managers within the firm (the technostructure) mitigate the negative consequences of economic power wielded by large firms. The Affluent Society and Economics and the Public Purpose look to the government as the main check on corporate power. It does this through labor legislation or programs such as the New Deal and Fair Deal. This chapter then evaluates the different solutions Galbraith proffered to the problem of economic power. It contends that Galbraith got three things right when analyzing economic power. First, we no longer live in a world of scarcity due to oligopolistic firms. Second, capitalism was different in the post-WWII era because the US economy thrived and gains were shared widely. Third, Galbraith understood that power was unequally distributed – both between the public and private sectors and within the private sector itself. On the other hand, Galbraith was overly optimistic in believing the market economy or the public sector could counter corporate power.

The burnout, stress, and work-life balance challenges faced by teachers have received renewed interest due to the myriad disruptions and changes to K-12 schooling brought about by the COVID-19 pandemic. Even prior to the pandemic, relatively little was known about teachers' time use outside of the classroom, the blurring of work and home boundaries, and how teachers compare to similar professionals in these regards. We use daily time-diary data from the American Time Use Survey (ATUS) for 3,168 teachers and 1,886 professionals in similarly prosocial occupations from 2003 to 2019 to examine occupational differences in time use. Compared to observationally similar non-teachers, teachers spend significantly more time volunteering at their workplace and completing work outside the workplace during the school year. On average, teachers spend 19 more minutes working outside of the workplace on weekdays than observably similar non-teachers and 38 more minutes on weekends. The weekend disparity is particularly large among secondary school teachers. This suggests that before the widespread switch to online and hybrid learning necessitated by the COVID-19 pandemic, teachers were already navigating blurrier work-life boundaries than their counterparts in similar professions. This has important implications for teacher turnover and for the effectiveness and wellness of teachers who remain in the profession.