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Like the quixotic character that never knew that he was speaking all through his life in pure and simple prose, Gandhi never realized that what he was preaching and practicing throughout his life was in fact the basic principles and theories that could be subsumed under the contemporary discipline of political economy (PE). Gandhian political economy (GPE) is replete with many of the characteristics of classical and Marxian political economy and these are mentioned at relevant places throughout this work. It also assimilates some of the major features of contemporary heterodox political economy, in particular, the class analysis of Neo‐Marxism; gender, ethnicity and class analysis of Feminist political economy; the analysis of justice, ethics and institutional trust of social political economy; the analysis of the significance of institutions and institutional change of the institutional‐evolutionary political economy; and the importance of the interdisciplinary focus on contemporary issues like development and international political economy.

The purpose of this paper is to take conceptual and methodological steps towards the elaboration of the critical grounded theory (CGT) method.

Starting from conceptual issues with mapping everyday discourses and practices in their broader societal context in organisational ethnography, cultural political economy (CPE) is proposed as a suitable theoretical framework for integrating the cultural dimension of discourses and imaginaries into political-economic analyses of organisation and management. The CGT method is introduced for empirical operationalisation.

Grounded theory tools for working with ethnographic data can be employed within critical approaches such as CPE although they originate from positivist social science. The need to combine ethnographic fieldwork with substantial theoretical work and/or critical discourse analysis may be met by CGT, which affords the ethnographic strengths of grounded theory without, however, bracketing the critical-theoretical insights of CPE.

The usefulness of CGT has been tentatively tested, but requires thorough meta-theoretical and methodological development, which is what is undertaken here.

CGT expects and takes account of the social implications of its employment in the field.

First steps towards a new critical method for organisation and management studies are taken. Although originating from concern with CPE, the CGT method may appeal to a wider audience of critical scholars across the social sciences.

Declining growth rates and rising unemployment as well as socio-economic inequalities signalled the crisis of globalisation. Dissent around socio-economic inequalities and austerity measures was articulated by far-right political parties and populist leaders coupled with the rise of anti-immigrant and xenophobic political parties. Within this historical context, this chapter has two concerns. First, how do mainstream and critical approaches within the discipline of International Political Economy explicate double crises of liberalism (economic liberalism and political liberalism) and rise of populism and far-right politics. It then aims to uncover what these approaches anticipate for future prospects of globalisation and which kind of strategies they put forward to overcome the crises. Second, the chapter then aspires to study to what extent there is retreat from globalisation and a rising trend of isolationism through debating continuity and change in terms of foreign direct investment and international trade after 2007–2008 crisis. Is it possible to observe change in the flow of foreign direct investment and internationalisation/transnationalisation of production? Are economies moving towards protectionism? What happens to multilateral and bilateral trade agreements after the failure of Doha talks? In a nutshell, is there a retreat from globalisation or is it simply populism and/or post-truth society that the world is going through under the current context?

This paper uses Leon Trotsky’s theory of Uneven and Combined Development (UCD) in order to transcend both globalising and methodologically nationalist theories of the global political economy. While uneven development theorists working in economic geography have demonstrated the logical corollary of capitalist development and the completion of the world market in the persistence of geographic unevenness, they fail to specify or problematise the role of states in this process. This leads to an ambiguity about why the states system has persisted under conditions of deep economic integration across states. State theorists, meanwhile, tend to exclude the world market and system of states as conditioning factors in state (trans)formation. For this reason, much state theory offers only a contingent account of the relationship between patterns of capital accumulation and states’ institutional forms. Geopolitical economy, with its focus on the competitive interrelations between states as constitutive of capitalist value relations, is well placed to transcend the pitfalls of these twin perspectives by closely engaging with the theory of UCD. UCD provides a nonreductionist means of integrating global processes of capital accumulation with their distinctive and peculiar national mediations. A research programme is developed to operationalise UCD for purposes of concrete research – something lacking from recent development in the field.

Robust political economy (RPE) is a research program that combines insights from Austrian economics and public choice to evaluate the performance of institutions in cases of limited knowledge and limited altruism, or “worst-case scenarios.” Many critics of RPE argue that it is too narrowly focused on the bad motivations and inadequacies of social actors while smuggling in classical liberal normative commitments as part of a purported solution to these problems. This chapter takes a different tack by highlighting the ways that RPE as currently understood may not be robust against particularly bad conduct. It suggests that depending on the parameters of what constitutes a worst-case scenario, classical liberal institutions, especially a minimal state, may turn out to be less robust than some conservative or social democratic alternatives.

The purpose of this paper is to focus on the enterprise lending and control process in closely held banks, with special reference to Sri Lanka. It explores how those processes are being influenced by the distinctive cultural and political processes at organizational and societal levels.

The study relies on three cases built upon the life experiences of several employees in a closely held bank, articulating multiple sources of evidence: interviews, observations, documents, archival records, open-ended questionnaires, internet conversations and exchange of e-mails. The data analysis adopts cultural political economy theory.

The study’s findings reveal how cultural and political factors, such as egoistic motives and politics, gifts/rewards and a manipulative culture, along with exploitative and discriminatory politics at organizational and societal levels, articulate into the enterprise lending and control process (“five Cs”) in closely held banks. “Rational” enterprise lending and control processes in this context merely become a “ceremonial” practice, serving the petty interest of powerful capitalist business owners. Whereas previous studies emphasize that the criteria (five Cs) discriminate against ordinary people, as distinct from the élite, the findings of this study implicate that over and above that the criteria are set aside when it suits in order to favor or accommodate the élite.

The paper provides a “qualitative inquiry” on how cultural politics at organizational and societal-level effect on enterprise lending and control process within closely held banks in less developed countries (LDCs). The previous studies on bank lending and control used either large-scale surveys or alternatively devoted their interest toward the role and impact of accounting in World Bank and IMF-led lending schemes and policies, particularly in LDCs.

This article argues that critical realism (CR) offers an ontological position suited to understanding the dynamic relations between multinational companies (MNCs) and the complex political spaces within which they operate. After outlining the core assumptions of CR, the key arguments are elaborated through two case studies which focus on issues of staffing and expatriation. The first case concerns recent developments in the Middle East, highlighting the shifting reality of nationality-based definitions of staffing the MNC, and the second examines the internationalisation of Chinese firms, exploring the way MNCs restructure space to retain access to home-country advantages.

There are a lot of discussions about privacy in relation to contemporary communication systems (such as Facebook and other “social media” platforms), but discussions about privacy on the internet in most cases misses a profound understanding of the notion of privacy and where this notion is coming from. The purpose of this paper is to challenge the liberal notion of privacy and explore foundations of an alternative privacy conception.

A typology of privacy definitions is elaborated based on Giddens' theory of structuration. The concept of privacy fetishism that is based on critical political economy is introduced. Limits of the liberal concept of privacy are discussed. This discussion is connected to the theories of Marx, Arendt and Habermas. Some foundations of an alternative privacy concept are outlined.

The notion of privacy fetishism is introduced for criticizing naturalistic accounts of privacy. Marx and Engels have advanced four elements of the critique of the liberal privacy concept that were partly taken up by Arendt and Habermas: privacy as atomism that advances; possessive individualism that harms the public good; legitimizes and reproduces the capitalist class structure; and capitalist patriarchy.

Given the criticisms advanced in this paper, the need for an alternative, socialist privacy concept is ascertained and it is argued that privacy rights should be differentiated according to the position individuals occupy in the power structure, so that surveillance makes transparent wealth and income gaps and company's profits and privacy protects workers and consumers from capitalist domination.

The paper contributes to the establishment of a concept of privacy that is grounded in critical political economy. Owing to the liberal bias of the privacy concept, the theorization of privacy has thus far been largely ignored in critical political economy. The paper contributes to illuminating this blind spot.