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This paper aims to review the undergraduate curricular structure of 36 self‐identified heterodox economic programs in the USA, Australia, UK and Canada.
Abstract
Purpose
This paper aims to review the undergraduate curricular structure of 36 self‐identified heterodox economic programs in the USA, Australia, UK and Canada.
Design/methodology/approach
The author gathers, summarizes, compares and contrasts the structure of 36 undergraduate heterodox departments. Departments are classified into traditional, plausibly pluralistic, and demonstrably heterodox programs. Specific examples illustrate each classification.
Findings
With notable exceptions described here, most heterodox economics programs are structured as traditional mainstream departments with a few pluralist or political economy electives available. However, 20 departments exist that require at least one heterodox course; eight require two or more.
Practical implications
A few programs have created imitable curricular structures that one would expect to significantly influence the depth and breadth of heterodox perspectives presented in the undergraduate economics major.
Originality/value
This is the first published analysis of undergraduate heterodox economics curricula. It highlights the creative structures characterizing some of the English‐speaking world's best programs and demonstrates that the curricula in most programs lack required courses in heterodox economics. The paper also provides examples of intentionally heterodox programs that may serve as models for others to emulate.
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The aim of this paper is to review Fred Lee's book A History of Heterodox Economics.
Abstract
Purpose
The aim of this paper is to review Fred Lee's book A History of Heterodox Economics.
Design/methodology/approach
The paper provides a context for Lee's research within the current debates over the financial crisis, then reviews and evaluates his analysis.
Findings
Lee has provided valuable and almost overwhelmingly meticulous documentation of the struggle to maintain space for heterodox economics within the discipline of economics, beginning before the turn of the twentieth century and continuing into the present. He is most concerned to use this research to formulate strategies to build community among heterodox economists, to provide a strong alternative to mainstream economics.
Originality/value
The author was less than convinced by Lee's suggestion that heterodox economics should emulate a professional model based on publications and citations that bears a striking resemblance to the methods of mainstream economics. That said, the author shares his belief that heterodox economics has important insights to offer economic theory and policy. In all, Lee has provided an important service in his documentation of the rise of heterodox economics as well as the attempts of mainstream economics to marginalize other schools of thought.
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This paper aims to describe cooperation between public and private market players from different legal and religious orders. The author argues that such public–private…
Abstract
Purpose
This paper aims to describe cooperation between public and private market players from different legal and religious orders. The author argues that such public–private partnerships (PPPs) enable the development of a possible convergence between selected areas of mainstream public finance and the Islamic moral economy (IME).
Design/methodology/approach
This paper explores the theory of both mainstream finance and the IME, and using deductive reasoning from axioms, develops the assumptions of a theoretical approach to heterodox PPP. The proposed method affects the ability to find common platforms between mainstream public finance and the IME, through the example of public–private investment projects.
Findings
This endeavour is subject to trade-offs between profit maximisation and social justice values on the basis of long-term PPP contracts. The author shows the assumptions under which this compromise would be beneficial to public entities, multicultural societies and conventional and Islamic investors. It is proposed to distribute profit to the owners up to a predetermined value, above which the PPPs would finance public services for persons otherwise excluded from them.
Originality/value
The success of this approach must depend on a compromise between profit maximisation as the sole investment objective and investment guided by social justice values. Private investors can achieve a capped level of profit on a long-term contract basis, and public partners can obtain long-term contracts for providing public goods. Both would undertake a project with a strong emphasis on corporate social responsibility, with particularly large opportunities in developing Islamic countries.
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E.K. Hunt and Allen M. Sievers
The University of Utah is located in Salt Lake City, the home of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints (LDS or Mormon). This conjunction has led some to believe the…
Abstract
The University of Utah is located in Salt Lake City, the home of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints (LDS or Mormon). This conjunction has led some to believe the University is Church-run, or at least Church dominated. In fact, the University, state-financed from the beginning, has been wholly autonomous since an incident in the early 20th Century. In that incident several faculty members were discharged for their unorthodox religious and political views. This led to an uproar and subsequent protracted controversy, the resolution of which did not reinstate the discharged faculty members but did establish the complete autonomy of the University from the Church.
Eduardo Fayos Solà, Laura Fuentes Moraleda and Ana Isabel Muñoz Mazón
A broad agreement exists that tourism is an effective instrument for social and economic development. However, there is no specific theoretical or practical framework of tourism…
Abstract
A broad agreement exists that tourism is an effective instrument for social and economic development. However, there is no specific theoretical or practical framework of tourism for development to be found. Even the key issues have remained unformulated: concept of development, tourism's contributions to development, and tourism policy and governance for development. This chapter first summarizes the development paradigms held in the last decades (modernization, neoliberalism, dependency, and sustainability) vis-à-vis tourism, and then goes on to consider proposals emanating from New Institutional Economics and the Theory of Social Capital. It concludes with the results of a 2011 enquiry, involving some 60 international experts.
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The purpose of this paper is to present, for the first time, a case for ranking heterodox journals and departments.
Abstract
Purpose
The purpose of this paper is to present, for the first time, a case for ranking heterodox journals and departments.
Design/methodology/approach
The first section of the article briefly delineates the intellectual and social organization of heterodox economics as a social system of scientific activity. This background is then used to argue the case for ranking heterodox journals (section two) and heterodox departments (section three). An example of ranking journals that promote the development of heterodox theory, is not a zero‐sum game, and does not invite invidious comparisons is delineated in the fourth section. The final section summarizes the case for rankings.
Findings
There are two central issues facing heterodox economics: one is the development of a coherent, integrated economic theory that explains the social provisioning process; and the second is the making of economic departments that contribute to the development of heterodox theory and policy, and the training of heterodox economists. A case can be made for ranking journals and departments that deal with the two issues.
Originality/value
An example of ranking journals that promote the development of heterodox theory, is not a zero‐sum game, and does not invite invidious comparisons is delineated.
Frederic S. Lee and Wolfram Elsner
The purpose of the “Introduction” is to provide the motivation and context for the articles of this special issue and an overview and summary of the contributions that follow.
Abstract
Purpose
The purpose of the “Introduction” is to provide the motivation and context for the articles of this special issue and an overview and summary of the contributions that follow.
Design/methodology/approach
The paper provides an overview and summary of the contributions in the special issue.
Findings
It is argued that heterodoxies had gained a considerable and growing influence on research orientations, methodologies, and critical reflections, also on the mainstream publishing practices, even in the mainstream. This has been widely acknowledged as “hip heterodoxy” recently. Thus, many heterodox economists have developed optimistic expectations for the future of the profession. However, that influence has left the main mechanisms of reproduction of the mainstream untouched. These are mass teaching, public advising, journal policies, and faculty recruitment. Above that, the last decade has seen something like a “counterattack” to safeguard these mainstream reproduction mechanisms. The means used for this seem to be journal (and publisher) rankings based on purely quantitative citation measures and “impact factors”. These have an obvious cumulative “economies‐of‐scale” effect which triggers a tendency towards reinforcement and collective monopolization of the dominating orientation. Department rankings and individual faculty evaluations are then based on journals rankings. As a result, there are observable tendencies towards the cleansing of economics departments in a number of countries.
Originality/value
The paper also discusses potential reasons and methods for alternative approaches to measure citation interrelations, networks, cooperation, and rankings among heterodoxies (journals and departments), and for alternatives of publishing and the future of heterodoxies in general. Finally, it draws the picture of the present situation and the foreseeable future of heterodoxies as it emerges from the 11 contributions of the special issue.
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Jeremy C. Wells and Lucas Lixinski
Existing regulatory frameworks for identifying and treating historic buildings and places reflect deference to expert rule, which privilege the values of a small number of…
Abstract
Purpose
Existing regulatory frameworks for identifying and treating historic buildings and places reflect deference to expert rule, which privilege the values of a small number of heritage experts over the values of the majority of people who visit, work, and reside in historic environments. To address this problem, the purpose of this paper is to explore a fundamental shift in how US federal and local preservation laws address built heritage by suggesting a dynamic, adaptive regulatory framework that incorporates heterodox approaches to heritage and therefore is capable of accommodating contemporary sociocultural values.
Design/methodology/approach
The overall approach the authors use is a comparative literature review from the fields of heterodox/orthodox heritage, heterodox/orthodox law, adaptive management, and participatory methods to inform the creation of a dynamic, adaptive regulatory framework.
Findings
Heterodox heritage emphasizes the need for a bottom-up, stakeholder-driven process, where everyday people’s values have the opportunity to be considered as being as valid as those of conventional experts. Orthodox law cannot accommodate this pluralistic approach, so heterodox law is required because, like heterodox heritage, it deconstructs power, values participation, and community involvement.
Practical implications
Orthodox heritage conservation practice disempowers most stakeholders and empowers conventional experts; this power differential is maintained by orthodox law.
Originality/value
To date, there have been few, if any, attempts to address critical heritage studies theory in the context of the regulatory environment. This paper appears to be the first such investigation in the literature.
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The emergence and maturation of the social sciences is an important component of the expansion of institutions of higher learning in the 20th century. The discipline of Political…
Abstract
The emergence and maturation of the social sciences is an important component of the expansion of institutions of higher learning in the 20th century. The discipline of Political Economy, increasingly institutionalized in various Canadian universities in the early decades of the century, secured a Chair at the University of Manitoba in 1909. After 1914, its title became “Political Economy and Political Science” and the department subsequently served “as the great mother department to which were attached newer social science disciplines until it was deemed appropriate to let them launch out on their own” (Pentland, 1977, p. 3). Political Science became independent in 1948, Geography in 1951, and Sociology and Anthropology in 1962 (p. 4). Agricultural Economics, which was taught in the Manitoba Agricultural College, became its own department when the college joined the university in 1924. In the 1930s, Agricultural Economics was absorbed into Department of Political Economy. However, according to Pentland (pp. 4–5) it was not until the late 1940s that agricultural economics became a significant “sub-department.” It subsequently separated itself from Political Economy and, in 1954, became an independent department in the Faculty of Agriculture (p. 5). The result of these disciplinary developments was that the faculty of the Department of Political Economy had, from time to time, members whose expertise lay outside the increasingly well-defined terrain of economics. Despite this, however, they did not seem to have any long-lasting direct impact on shaping and defining the curricula in Economics. Since these other disciplines left and became independent when they had reached a certain size or degree of influence, Economics was left to define and pursue its own agenda unencumbered by the needs of these former associates.