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To resolve the wide and growing disparity of incomes within the USA and between highly and poorly developed countries, self‐empowerment of the poor – while devoutly to be encouraged and wished for – will not suffice without continued and enhanced global commitments of assistance from private, public domestic and international governments and institutions in the tasks of educating and training of the poor for better jobs, improved health practices and viable democracies. The effort will require the transfer of billions of dollars to development from the estimated $1.5 trillion currently spent on military arms worldwide and more equitable land distribution without political and social upheaval. Human nature must be pressed to eschew selfish materialism, indifference and political opportunism, for the common good of current and future generations.

We argue that the United States has experienced a decline of economic, political, and military power since the 1970s, and that this decline can be attributed in part to the fragmentation of the American corporate elite. In the mid-twentieth century, this elite – constrained by a highly legitimate state, a relatively powerful labor movement, and an active financial community – adopted a moderate and pragmatic strategy for dealing with the political issues of the day. The “enlightened self-interest” of corporate leaders contributed to a strong economy with a relatively low level of inequality and an expanding middle class. This arrangement broke down in the 1970s, however, as increasing foreign competition and two energy crises led to spiraling inflation and lower profits. In response, the corporate elite waged an aggressive (and ultimately successful) assault on government regulation and organized labor. This success had the paradoxical effect of undermining the elite’s own sources of cohesion, however. Having won the war against government and labor, the group no longer needed to be organized. The marginalization of the commercial banks and the acquisition wave of the 1980s exacerbated the fragmentation of the corporate elite. No longer able to act collectively by the 1990s, the corporate elite was now incapable of addressing issues of business and societal-wide concern. Although increasingly able to gain individual favors from the state, the elite’s collective weakness has contributed to the political gridlock and social decay that plague American society in the twenty-first century.

The purpose of this paper is to develop the theoretical linkage between culture and economic growth and empirically test the relationship by measuring culture and how it affects labor productivity.

This study uses a cross-section study of developing countries and regresses economic productivity growth on a set of control variables and cultural factors.

It is found that three cultural factors, economic attitudes, political attitudes, and attitudes towards the family, affect economic productivity growth.

Many economists ignore culture as a factor in economic growth, either because they discount the value of culture or because they have no simple way to quantify culture, resulting in the role of culture being under-researched. The study is the first to extensively examine the role of culture in productivity growth using large-scale data sources. The authors show that culture plays an important role in productivity gains across countries, contributing to the study of the effects of culture on economic development, and that culture can be empirically measured and linked to an activity that directly affects the economic growth – labor productivity.

This article looks at the attitudes and perceptions that young offenders have of dental health and services prior to and during their time at a Young Offenders’ Institution in the North East of England. The recent incorporation of prison health services into National Health Service (NHS) structures and funding arrangements brings with it statutory responsibilities concerning the amount and equivalence of health care in and out of prison settings. It also requires evaluation of services in comparable ways. Prison health in general and prison dental health in particular have previously been isolated from mainstream NHS health care in terms of both practice and research. The results from this study highlight the need for those responsible for dental health services at all penal institutions to examine the levels of provision they provide and how the perspectives of this marginalized and vulnerable group can be taken into account in the planning and improvement of services.

Past decades have witnessed significant contributions to theories of the firm, innovation and economic growth from two closely related paradigms, namely, the Capabilities School and National Innovation Systems Approach. Unlike the neoclassical models of the firm and growth, these two paradigms place emphasis on the knowledge and learning process in understanding economic development. Despite being closer to reality in their treatment of economic issues than their neoclassical school counterpart, the two paradigms have not put human agency in the forefront of their analysis. This paper constructs a theory of national capabilities in the subjectivist perspective, which is then extended to understand firm and national capabilities and competitiveness. While this paper recognizes the influence of institutions on firms' decision making, unlike contemporary evolutionary literatures, the subjectivist perspective highlights the fact that all institutions are the coordinating effort of human actions which attempt to interpret external events or make sense out of social or economic interactions.

A great deal of policy thinking in the last ten to 15 years has been driven by the insights gained from the so‐called “new growth theory”. The theory emphasizes that investments in knowledge and human capital generate economic growth through spillover of knowledge, and the policy implication is that investments in knowledge and human capital are the best way to stimulate growth. However, there is a couple of missing links in the “spillover argument” in that the theory seems to disregard the role of the entrepreneur. The paper aims to answer the question: Why haven't entrepreneurship researchers become a strong voice regarding the understanding of the development of the knowledge economy?

The author argues that a dynamic and innovative research field is characterized by a balance between the pursuit of new issues and knowledge in research, for example, by being sensitive for changes in society, and the development of existing knowledge, by integrating and validating the knowledge base already existing within the field.

The paper shows that one important reason for the lack of visibility of entrepreneurship research can be found in an internal scientific development of the research field – entrepreneurship research has become more and more theory‐driven and shows less sensitivity and openness for changes in society.

The article gives a critical reflection on the development of entrepreneurship as a research field. In this sense the article provides an increased understanding of the knowledge that is within the field, and gives also suggestions for the future development of the research field.

Continued exponential and asymmetrical growth in both population and individual economic productivity would propel world society along a path that is environmentally unsustainable, economically inequitable, and hence socially unstable. Terrorist activity in September 2001 may be vivid evidence of that instability. Revolutionary developments in communications technologies can, however, enable partnerships among scholarly disciplines and among societal institutions to harness rapidly expanding human knowledge (broadly construed) to pursue goals in both population and individual economic productivity that would lead to a sustainable, equitable, and stable world society. Such a knowledge‐based strategy could enable us to pursue the vision of a global society in which all of the basic human needs and an equitable share of human wants can be met by successive generations while maintaining a healthy, physically attractive, and biologically productive environment. Several scenarios are presented to illustrate the promise of cooperative efforts to pursue this vision, and to highlight some obstacles to that pursuit.

This article presents a South African's perspective on the possible role of social capital in achieving long‐term sustainable human and economic development in the world. Social capital is defined as the presence of effective human networks and social cohesion, which are manifested in effective institutions and processes where people can co‐operate for mutual advantage. This article postulates that social capital can help societies to achieve internal evolution towards sustainable development in a manner that can resolve the problem of the commons. It proposes that three “tipping points” drive socio‐economic development: open society; economic growth; and creative minorities – including an entrepreneurial class. Social capital provides a supportive environment for these tipping points and, in this case, more is better. Ways to create more social capital are discussed with reference to the sources of social capital. These include the freedom to form networks, anti‐corruption measures, sanctions against transgressors, using the budget as well as the potential contribution of social transformation policies.

Sustained modern economic growth is less than 300 years old. Most of the human experience has been a Malthusian one – brief periods of relative plenty for some, followed by collapse due to famine, drought, or other exogenous factors, or due to internal factors such as war or excessive population growth that outstripped the resource base. In all cases, general productivity growth was short term and minimal and each society's well-being was tied inexorably to the condition and stock of natural resources.

This piece is a republished autobiography of Alfred D. Chandler, Jr.

Chandler reflects on his life and career as a management historian.

Chandler reflects on his life and career, in particular how he came to write Strategy and Structure and its impact on him as a historian. He also discusses his life at Harvard Business School, the editing of the Roosevelt letters, and the writing of The Visible Hand.

This is excellent background material for the other papers in the issue, as well as a valuable personal insight into Chandler's own thinking.