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David M. Gordon advanced labour economics with his theory of labour market segmentation, in which jobs rather than the marginal productivity of individual workers were the unit of analysis. He advanced economic historiography and macroeconomics by conceptualising social structures of accumulation – a framework built on the foundation of his institutionalist training and enriched by his study of Marxist economics. By appropriating methods from other social science disciplines into econometrics, he augmented empirical analysis in economics. He was a founding member of the Union of Radical Political Economics and its journal, the Review of Radical Political Economics – that advanced and promoted heterodox, radical, and Marxist economists in the United States. His contributions to economics, to organised labour, and to the New School for Social Research, where I studied with him, were stunning.

Part 1 lays out some context about the New School Graduate Faculty where Gordon taught. Part 2 explores what historical forces, including his family, led to his expansive creativity. Part 3 summarises how he expanded labour economics to include the relations as well as the technology of production, linked his understanding of the production process to a historical materialist view of labour in the United States, then extended that to econometric analyses of the US macroeconomy. Part 4 presents a bibliometric analysis to provide some idea of the impact of his work. I end with some concluding remarks.

Education and human capital development are seen by the government of Saudi Arabia as vital to the aim of gaining knowledge economy status. Although financial investment has been evident in education and human capital development in Saudi Arabia for many years, knowledge acquisition, production, and diffusion remain problematic. The strategy that underpins the shift to a knowledge economy is based on the assumption drawn from human capital theory that education can transform individual productivity and therefore promote economic development. However, the links between education and economic growth are not as linear as this framing of education suggests, but depend on complex social processes. Within these processes, individual understandings of knowledge and knowledge creation are crucial. The implications of this for Saudi Arabia are discussed with reference to the work of Knorr Cetina (2007) on knowledge cultures and David and Foray (2002) on knowledge communities. A transition to a knowledge economy is more likely to occur when cultural and social conditions enable the development of knowledge cultures and knowledge communities.

January 27, 2005, was an extraordinary day for Gillette's James Kilts, the show-stopping turnaround expert known as the “Razor Boss of Boston.” Kilts, along with Proctor & Gamble chairman Alan Lafley, had just orchestrated a $57 billion acquisition of Gillette by P&G. The creation of the world's largest consumer products company would end Kilts's four-year tenure as CEO of Gillette and bring to a close Gillette's 104-year history as an independent corporate titan in the Boston area. The deal also capped a series of courtships between Gillette and other companies that had waxed and waned at various points throughout Kilts's stewardship of Gillette. But almost immediately after the transaction was announced, P&G and Gillette drew criticism from the media and the state of Massachusetts concerning the terms of the sale. Would this merger actually benefit shareholders, or was it principally a wealth creation vehicle for Kilts?

To understand the factors that persuaded shareholders of both P&G and Gillette to merge their companies, the valuation metrics involved in determining the merger consideration, compensation packages for key managers, and the politics (internal, local government, and regulatory) that impact major mergers.

The purpose of this paper is to examine the current state of mission and vision statements on corporate web sites and to analyze differentiation strategies through the use of online brand personality attributes in order to find if and how the attributes are effectively used to build up a unique corporate identity.

Content analysis is used to investigate similarities and differences between sectors and industries in Switzerland, based on the brand personality scale of Aaker. Also, the paper focuses on the impact of the communication of brand personality elements, in terms of positioning and differentiation, using correspondence analysis.

The claim that companies do present brand personality by frequently communicating respective attributes through mission and vision statements published on their web site are supported. However, top management does not seem to be geared towards industry norms when phrasing the statements, as a considerable similarity in statement content is found across industries. The results show that companies position themselves using their competitors as a frame of reference.

The results may lack generalizability to small and medium‐sized businesses and other industries.

As most companies in the study position themselves using the same attributes and specifically emphasize “competence,” the results include practical implications for the need to develop uniqueness and differentiation by other means.

This paper discovers a gap between the claim that organizations seek uniqueness in their personality attributes and the reality of their involvement in mutual coorientation when defining their identity, forcing them to adapt to each other.

The purpose of this paper is to investigate the relationship between resting heart rate (RHR) and psychopathy. The literature on heart rate vs criminality (including violence) is quite clear; low RHR is associated with engaging in violent and criminal behavior. However, results are not as consistent for psychopathy.

This paper analyzes heart rate measured at ages 18 and 48, and psychopathy at age 48, in the Cambridge Study in Delinquent Development (CSDD). The CSDD is a prospective longitudinal study that has followed 411 boys from childhood to middle age, and measured social and biological factors of interest to the field of criminal psychology.

Interestingly, it was only heart rate at age 18 that was negatively and significantly related to psychopathy at age 48. No trends or relationships were found between heart rate at age 48 and psychopathy at age 48. The findings do, however, indicate that low heart rate at age 18 predicts psychopathy at age 48, and the strongest negative relationships are found between low heart rate (beats per minute) and impulsive and antisocial psychopathic symptoms.

This is the first ever longitudinal study showing that low RHR predicts later psychopathy. Suggestions for future research are outlined.

Previous research has indicated that low resting heart rate (RHR), measured at age 18, predicts later psychopathy, and that high RHR acts as a protective factor in nullifying the influence of several psychosocial risk factors in predicting later antisocial and criminal outcomes. This paper aims to investigate high RHR as a protective factor against age 8–10 psychosocial risk factors in predicting psychopathy factors at age 48 (measured by the PCL:SV).

Data collected in the Cambridge Study in Delinquent Development are analyzed. This is a prospective longitudinal study of 411 London males from age 8 to age 61.

This paper first reports the age 8–10 psychosocial risk factors that predict the interpersonal/affective Factor 1 and the lifestyle/antisocial Factor 2. Then interaction effects with high RHR are studied. The results indicate that high RHR acts as a protective factor against a convicted father and a depressed mother in predicting both psychopathy factors. It also protected against harsh discipline, large family size, low verbal IQ, high hyperactivity, poor parental supervision and a high delinquency-rate school in predicting one of these psychopathy factors, and against a convicted mother in a sensitivity analysis.

This is the first ever longitudinal study showing that high RHR acts as a protective factor in the prediction of psychopathy. The replicated results with different antisocial outcomes show that more research is warranted on the protective effects of high RHR.

This chapter investigates the nature of the transformation of macroeconomics by focusing on the impact of the Great Depression on economic doctrines. There is no doubt that the Great Depression exerted an enormous influence on economic thought, but the exact nature of its impact should be examined more carefully. In this chapter, I examine the transformation from a perspective which emphasizes the interaction between economic ideas and economic events, and the interaction between theory and policy rather than the development of economic theory. More specifically, I examine the evolution of what became known as macroeconomics after the Depression in terms of an ongoing debate among the “stabilizers” and their critics. I further suggest using four perspectives, or schools of thought, as measures to locate the evolution and transformation; the gold standard mentality, liquidationism, the Treasury view, and the real-bills doctrine. By highlighting these four economic ideas, I argue that what happened during the Great Depression was the retreat of the gold standard mentality, the complete demise of liquidationism and the Treasury view, and the strange survival of the real-bills doctrine. Each of those transformations happened not in response to internal debates in the discipline, but in response to government policies and real-world events.

The purpose of this study is to investigate how concentrated owners add value to Asian firms. While prior research suggests that relational owners (i.e., business groups, top management team, board, government, banks, families, and corporation) may help firms fill institutional voids, this study proposes that it is transactional owners (i.e., foreign and institutional investors) lacking this ability who contribute most to firm performance. As these owners frequently hail from contexts with well-developed corporate governance traditions, they tend to have experience with the design and implementation of such governance practices.

This study involves a meta-analysis covering 276 studies from 17 Asian countries.

This study shows that transactional owners impose effective governance practices such as separating the chief executive officer (CEO) and Chair roles and assuring board independence. These practices promote decisions benefiting all shareholders, such as preventing diversification and financial over-leveraging.

This study contributes to the comparative corporate governance literature by showing that implementing internal governance practices helps improve firm performance in Asia. It also contributes to the owner identity literature by opening the black box of how transactional and relational owners differentially affect firms’ strategic behavior. Overall, this study yields a more nuanced understanding of what transactional owners contribute to Asian firms.

Freddie Mercury rose to fame as the lead singer of the UK pop group Queen. The group started working on tracks for their fourteenth studio album, Innuendo, in early 1989, and the album was finally released in February 1991. Progress on recording was slow as Mercury, who had been diagnosed with AIDS, was unable to work for more than a few days at a time. Innuendo became the final Queen album to be released during Mercury’s lifetime, and ‘The Show Must Go On’ is its final track. Its placing is arguably significant, given that both Mercury and the remaining band members must have assumed that this would be the last album that they would record together. In this chapter, I present an analysis of the song’s music and lyrics, along with the music video that accompanied the single release, with reference to Mercury’s illness and his wish to contribute vocals for as long as he possibly could, knowing the seriousness of his condition meant that this would be one of his last recordings.