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Purpose – This chapter engages critically with the ideas of corporate social responsibility (CSR) and irresponsibility (CSI) in order to examine their utility for the purposes of realizing more socially just and environmentally sustainable social and economic practices.

Methodology/approach – The chapter develops Marx's understanding of the twin pressures of class struggle and inter-capitalist competition in setting the limits of agency for corporate actors. It is thus theoretical and discursive in nature.

Findings – The findings of the chapter suggest that the scope for corporate agency in relation to responsibility/irresponsibility is severely limited by inter-capitalist competition and capitalist social relations. It therefore argues that those interested in social justice and environmental sustainability should focus on these structural pressures rather than theorizing corporate agency.

Social implications – The research suggests that the focus of academic and government attention should be on resolving the contradictions and exploitative social relations inherent in capitalism. Without this emphasis activism, corporate agency and government action will not eradicate the types of problem that advocates of CSR/CSI are concerned about.

Originality/value of paper – The value of the paper is that it contests and engages critically with the utility of the notion of CSR and the emergent concept of CSI. It asks proponents of these concepts to think seriously about the structural pressures and constraints within which business and policy makers act.

In this work, I deal – based on my memories and reflections on Lachmann’s teaching and the ideas that I discussed with him as my dissertation supervisor and member of his weekly departmental seminar – with the following two topics: first, what Lachmann understood by his subjectivist approach to economics and some of its consequences, including the use of the concept of equilibrium in economics; and second, my understanding of Lachmann’s intellectual relationship with Schumpeter. The work also raises questions about the absence in Lachmann’s work of an examination of the role of innovation in the economic process that he analyzed.

The 15 years spanning from the end of the nineteenth century till the outbreak of the First World War formed, perhaps, the richest period in the history of Marxian economics. The main development between the time of Marx's writing and that of the German-Russian debates was the change in the competitive nature of the capitalist system. In the early stages of capitalism, the forces of competition created an imperative for capitalist firms to invest all their profits, or lose out in the competitive struggle to other firms which did. However, as large firms and oligopolistic structures emerged, the nature of competition changed, with price competition no longer the only form, leading to an erosion of this imperative, and an increase in capitalist consumption. Kalecki showed that, in this case, total profits were determined by capitalist's consumption and investment expenditures. The result, according to Kalecki, was a chronic tendency towards stagnation in capitalist economies. The long boom could be explained as ‘exports’ to a market external to the private sector, namely armaments and military expenditures.

In this introductory chapter, we briefly outline the history of the political economy of raw materials, focusing particularly on the relationship between raw materials and economic development. We then introduce the chapters of this volume, and we conclude by discussing future directions for research in this area.

The chapter provides a practical guide to identify and define different funding sources for entrepreneurial and innovation endeavors, including a methodology to describe return on investment expectations from funding sources. Also, the authors provide recommended key performance indicators and valuation methods when pitching to potential investors.