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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 policies in creative and cultural industries (CCIs) are often based on an implicit assumption that work in the cultural and creative sectors is ‘good work’ and dominant discourses tend to over-celebrate entrepreneurship. The authors argue that enough attention has been paid to the real work in CCIs. The stake is to better address the symptoms observed for a sustainable and inclusive economy in the CCIs. Through the entrepreneurship-as-practice perspective, the authors document the professionalisation difficulties in music sector, with a qualitative study in a French city, with a particular focus on the marginalisation experienced by the young artists. With the identification of their work specificities and the tendencies for the twenty-first century, the authors point out the diversity of the tasks, the multi-activity and collective practices and the need for some innovative support organisational forms to develop training and skilling (both artistic and entrepreneurial).

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.