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A successful relationship between manufacturer and supplier is vital for the pursuit of mutual benefits, which can be affected by one of the partners’ opportunistic behavior, causing disequilibrium in the existing relationship. The extant research has mainly focused on opportunism as a single phenomenon rather than the detectable strong form and unnoticeable weak form of opportunistic behavior in an exchange relationship that affects the relational outcomes in various ways. This study aims to contribute toward explaining the effect of economic and social forces on a strong and a weak form of opportunism and, in turn, its impact on relational outcomes in manufacturer-supplier relationships.

A sample of 361 manufacturers was drawn randomly using a sampling frame from the western part of India. The authors used covariance-based structural equation modeling to support the proposed model empirically. The authors examined the effect of social capital and transaction cost dimensions on different forms of a supplier’s opportunism.

All three dimensions of social capital have a different impact on both the forms of a supplier’s opportunism in the relationship. The authors found that social capital moderates the relationship between transaction-specific investments on a weak form of opportunism, while social capital is more valuable in curbing opportunism due to the effect of environmental uncertainty and behavioral uncertainty. The authors found that the supplier’s weak form of opportunism than the strong form has a more amplifying effect on governance costs.

This research contributes in three different ways. First, it inquires about the direct effect of transaction cost dimensions and social capital dimensions on a supplier’s multifaceted opportunism (strong form and weak form) in the manufacturer-supplier relationship. Second, it investigates the moderating effect of social capital on the relationship between transaction cost dimensions and forms of supplier opportunism. Third, the weak form of a supplier’s opportunism affects more significantly than the strong form of opportunism on governance costs.

The purpose of this paper is to investigate the extent to which the position of a former insider with multiple levels of knowing and being known, afforded me benefits and challenges in a complex higher education institution in Uganda. A reflexive autoethnographic account of the author’s research experience is employed as methodology. The study observes various benefits and challenges of this position. These include: firsthand knowledge of institutional culture and informants, leading to multiple levels of access; ability to conduct enriching interviews; and good rapport with informants. The challenges include: complexity of the institution; ethical challenges; power dilemmas; and anonymization of data. Access was noted to be a key benefit and it was experienced at five levels: personal relational networks; informant’s knowledge of a family relation; links to institutional and national networks; the role of media; and situational factors. In accordance with Bourdieu’s (1986) concepts of forms of capital, the study established that four levels of knowing were linked to social, cultural, economic or media capital. The study reveals existence of a link between different levels of knowing and being known and their affiliated forms of capital. It shows that possession of any or a combination of these forms of capital leads to what the study defines as “information access capital.” The study suggests that the different levels of knowing and being known determine the breadth and depth of a researcher’s information access capital. The study implies that power imbued relationships can limit access.

The paper applies a reflexive autoethnographic methodology where the author uses their personal research experience to make sense of the benefits and challenges of gaining access as a former insider with multiple identity positions. The paper draws from the author’s personal experience (auto) set in an institutional cultural context (ethno), to analyze the research process (graphy) of gaining access of top and middle management informants. First person (auto) accounts of the author’s organizational cultural (ethno) and research process (graphy) experiences and how they link to the benefits and challenges of researching an organization as insider are used as data.

The study observed various benefits and challenges of the insider position. These include: firsthand knowledge of institutional culture and informants, leading to multiple levels of access; ability to conduct enriching interviews; and good rapport with informants. The challenges include: complexity of the institution; ethical challenges; power dilemmas; and anonymization of data. Access was noted to be a key benefit experienced at five levels: personal networks; informant’s networks; institutional networks; the role of media; and situational factors. The four levels were linked to social, cultural, economic or media capital.

The study is limited to the researcher’s personal experience of the institution. The paper shows the role that social, work, political, media, institutional and national networks and their affiliated forms of capital play in affording insider researchers access. It shows that researchers deficient in these capitals have low-information access capital and face challenges of access. It also shows that although friendship may enable access, if infused with power dynamics, power hinders access. The study shows insider researchers in complex organizations have to continually navigate the insider-outsider continuum and challenges thereof. Practicing relational ethics during and after research is key when conducting organizational insider research.

The paper shows the role that social, work, political, media, institutional and national networks and their affiliated forms of capital play in affording insider researchers access. It shows that researchers deficient in these forms of capital have low-information access capital and face challenges of access. It also shows that although friendship may enable access, if infused with power dynamics, power serves as hindrance to access. The study also shows insider researchers in complex organizations may have to continually navigate the insider-outsider continuum and challenges thereof. Practicing relational ethics during and after research is a key consideration of insider researchers.

The paper reveals the challenges of accessing top and middle management in complex, bureaucratic and guarded higher education organizations. It shows that although higher education institutions, by virtue of their research orientated missions, should ideally set the right example for easy access to information at all levels and ranks of the organization. However, the reality of access for an insider research may be far from the ideal due to factors of complexity and previously formed power imbued relationships.

The paper contributes to understanding factors at play when gaining and maintaining research access to top and middle management in a higher education context. In accordance with (Bourdieu’s, 1986) concepts of forms of capital, the paper contributes to understanding the relationship between multiple levels of knowing and their affiliated forms of capital and how these capital forms may facilitate information access. It shows that possession of any capital form increases a researcher’s information access capital. The paper expands Weinreb’s (2006) definition of stranger and insider interviews, by showing multiple ways of “knowing or being known” before and during the study.

This chapter offers the first full translation from Russian to English of the Balance of the National Economy of the USSR, 1924–26’s first chapter. Involving 12 authors and composed of 21 chapters, the Balance is a collective work published in June 1926 in Moscow by the Soviet Central Statistical Administration under the scientific supervision of its former director, Pavel Illich Popov (1872–1950). In this first chapter, titled ‘Studying the Balance of the National Economy: An Introduction’, Popov set the theoretical foundations of what might be considered as the first modern national accounting system and paved the way to multisector macroeconometric modelling.

This chapter explores the domestication of Marx's critique of political economy within Marxist-oriented environmental sociology, and treadmill of production (ToP) theory, in particular. The aim is to explicate the theoretical resources for a rigorous critique of capital-induced planetary degradation. Shortcomings of ToP theory pertaining to the conceptualization of capital and value are identified. The reasons for these shortcomings, including how they might be addressed, are elaborated by reconsidering key aspects of Marx's critical theory of modern capitalist society. The chapter contributes to current discussions in both critical theory and environmental sociology by demonstrating the continued relevance of Marx's critical theory for understanding the political-economic, social, and ideational dimensions of planetary degradation. In contrast to ToP theory, which critically examines the production of wealth by counterposing finitude and limits against the expansionary tendencies of economic growth, the critical theory approach advanced in this chapter conceptualizes the acceleration of environmental degradation following World War II in terms of a ToP of value, whereby the necessity of the value form is continuously established in the present. The chapter discusses how Marxian critical theory facilitates a critical examination of the widespread growth of environmentalism as concomitant with the spread of neoliberal capitalism.

In the new development stage of comprehensively building a socialist modern state, it is imperative to adhere to the guidance of Xi Jinping Thought on Socialism with Chinese Characteristics for a New Era, comprehensively summarize China's practical experiences in economic development, strengthen research on capital issues, construct theories of socialist political economy with Chinese characteristics regarding capital and provide scientific theoretical guidance for further promoting the positive role of various types of capital while preventing and overcoming their negative effects, which is a major theoretical issue and a glorious task for the theoretical and economic circles in China.

From the perspective of Marx's theory on capital and historical development, modern capital represents the organizational mode of socialized mass production and market economy. It serves as both the economic foundation of bourgeois society and a tool for socialist economic development.

The market economy represents an inevitable historical stage and form of socialist economic development, necessitating the adoption of capital as an organizational form within socialist economies.

The utilization of capital to advance a socialist economy is a remarkable achievement by the CPC and Chinese people, representing a significant innovation in both theory and practice. The role of capital is inherently dual under any social condition. In the context of a socialist system, capital can play a positive role effectively, and its behavior can be guided and regulated correctly to curb its negative or even destructive impact.

The paper argues that the classical Marxist theory of capitalist accumulation is inadequate to understand new forms of capitalism and their accumulation processes determined by “platforms” and “big data”. Big data platforms are shaping the processes of production, labour, the price of products and market conditions. “Digital platforms” and “big data” have become an integral part of the processes of production, distribution and exchange relations. These twin pillars are central to the capitalist accumulation processes. The article argues that the classical Marxist theory of capitalist accumulation is inadequate to understand new forms of capitalism and their accumulation processes determined by “platforms” and “big data”.

As a conceptual paper, this paper follows critical methodological lineages and traditions based on non-linear historical narratives around the conceptualisation, construction and transition of the “Marxist theory of capital accumulation” in the age of platform economy. This paper follows a discourse analysis (Fairclough, 2003) to locate the way in which an artificial intelligence (AI)-led platform economy helps identify and conceptualise new forms of capitalist accumulation. It engages with Jørgensen and Phillips' (2002) contextual and empirical discursive traditions to undertake a qualitative comparative analysis by exploring a broad range of complex factors with case studies and examples from leading firms within the platform economy. Finally, it adopts two steps of “Theory Synthesis and Theory Adaptation” as outlined by Jaakkola (2020) to synthesise, adopt and expand the Marxist theory of capital accumulation under platform capitalism.

This article identifies new trends and forms of data driven capitalist accumulation processes within the platform capitalism. The findings suggest that an AI led platform economy creates new forms of capitalist accumulation. The article helps to develop theoretical understanding and conceptual frameworks to understand and explain these new forms of capital accumulation.

This study builds upon the limited theorisation on the AI and new capitalist accumulation processes. This article identifies new trends and forms of data driven capitalist accumulation processes within platform capitalism. The article helps to understand digital and platform capitalisms in the lens of digital labour and expands the theory of capitalist accumulation and its new forms in the age of datafication. While critiquing the Marxist theory of capitalist accumulation, the article offers alternative approaches for the future.

The purpose of this chapter is to characterize fictitious capital and fictitious profits as extreme expressions of the fetishism of capital. Considering the incessant search for valorization and allowing for fictitious forms of capital, the subject of this study is at the center of the dynamics of recent capitalist accumulation, especially when we take into account the capitalist crises over the last four or five decades. Its mechanism of fictitious valorization (M – M′), a decisive dimension of contemporary capitalism, is contradictory, based on the growing obstacles to the extraction of surplus value on an expanded scale, and therefore the real valorization of capital. At the same time, we support the idea that this mass of overaccumulated capital produces profits unrelated to surplus value, that is fictitious profits, further intensifying the fetishistic and contradictory nature of capitalism.

Development of intellectual capital, in conjunction with collaborative capabilities, is particularly important to continuously generating innovation. In the literature to date, the link between collaborative and intellectual capital, although key assets in knowledge-intensive industries, has rarely been investigated. This chapter introduces a model illustrating the interaction between human, intellectual, and structural capital, and their interplay. Several propositions are also derived in view of the need for companies to harness these three types of capital which are integral to implicit knowledge generation and leveraging the dynamic capabilities of the organization. As a consequence, team-based organizational forms are considered to be the most appropriate collaborative pattern for knowledge-intensive industries. This suggests that companies must increasingly focus on building valuable collaborative capital using flexible forms of organization in order to perpetuate successful product innovations.

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.

The purpose of this paper is to explore the nature of social capital in its applications for enterprise (and entrepreneurship) in order to facilitate its incorporation into the relevant education and training programmes.

Based on examples from the literature and his own experience the author highlights a variety of different uses for social capital in an enterprise context.

This exploration not only confirms social capital's relevance for enterprise but also illustrates and categorises some of the different forms it can take – for instance forms which provide access to relevant information; forms which facilitate trust, mutual obligations and/or credibility; and forms which promote shared norms of behaviour and commitment.

Because these different forms can all be crucial but cannot be substituted one for another, they act in the enterprise mix rather like vitamins in a diet. Understanding the variety and uses of social capital is thus important for enterprise and communicating this should form a key part of entrepreneurship education.

While some attention is being paid to the relevance of social capital for enterprise, it receives less recognition as a component of the enterprise mix than factors such as financial and human capital – and is rarely included in enterprise education and training programmes. To help educators to correct this omission the paper supplements the theory by suggesting practical examples of the reality of social capital's varied forms and uses.