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This paper explores the relevance of Adam Smith’s invisible hand and the remainder of his legacy for public management. The paper’s central claim is that, by approaching Adam Smith and his legacy, public managers can assist themselves to do what they should do - examine their latent assumptions. The first of three challenges in approaching Adam Smith’s ideas is to get Smith right, because he has been widely misunderstood. The second is to question Smith’s account of conceptual space; it is desirable to go beyond him. The third challenge is to explore in specific terms the potential for public management of an understanding of Smith and his legacy

Adam Smith is revered as the father of modern economics. Analysis of his writings, however, reveals a profoundly medieval outlook. Smith is preoccupied with the need to preserve order in society. His scientific methodology emphasises reconciliation with the world we live in rather than investigation of it. He invokes a version of natural law in which the universe is a harmonious machine administered by a providential deity. Nobody is uncared for and, in real happiness, we are all substantially equal. No action is without its appropriate reward – in this life or the next. The social desirability of individual self-seeking activity is ensured by the “invisible hand,” that is, the hand of a god who has moulded us so to behave, that the quantity of happiness in the world is always maximised.

This paper encourages an examination of the conceptual space which Adam Smith’s work and legacy present and which conditions thinking about governmental and societal organization and management. The paper, situating Smith in his eighteenth‐century context, distinguishes between the historical Smith and his legacy. It analyzes the invisible hand doctrine, showing that the doctrine should be understood in the context of Smith’s other writings and arguing that Smith himself would reject the version which many suppose to constitute the Smithian legacy. It emphasizes the importance of the Smithian legacy, and it argues that Smith’s readers should go beyond Smith by recognizing the socially constituted character of the conceptual space which Smith’s writings and legacy have provided to contemporary society. A central implication is that, by exploring Adam Smith and his legacy, governmental and other thinkers and managers can do what they should do ‐ examine their latent assumptions.

The paper aims to apply the ideas found in the paper of Adam Smith, the pre‐eminent eighteenth century economist, to the field of management.

The paper provides a brief biography of Smith, summarizes his main contributions, and then applies them to contemporary management practices.

Adam Smith was the first person to identify specialization and the division of labor as the main drivers of productivity. He also conceptualized the “invisible hand principle” which explains how, under the proper set of incentives, self‐interested individuals are directed to pursue activities that benefit the whole of society. Both ideas are of utmost importance in the field of management. Specifically, successful managers are those who are able to create good “rules of the game” which align the incentives of labor with the goals of the firm.

Smith's contributions provide a foundation for the division of labor and demonstrate the importance of establishing the right “institutions” within a firm.

The paper arrives at practical implications for managers from the paper of an eighteenth century economist.

In recent decades many emerging markets (EMFs) have undertaken entrepreneurial transformations to adapt to institutional transition and industrial change. Corporate entrepreneurship (CE) provided EMFs viable ways to revitalize, reconfigure, and transform successfully with the dynamic environment. Although previous research examined government roles on EMFs' CE activities, little is known about the mechanisms of how government exerts influence on CE activities. To fully understand CE of EMFs, we propose a stage model to explore specific roles governments play that affect CE activities over time. In particular, we investigate how governments' grabbing hand, helping hand, and invisible hand roles affected Chinese auto firms' CE activities at different stages from 1980 to 2016. Government involvement is summarized and the advantages and disadvantages of these roles are analyzed.

This chapter explores the challenges presented to public organizations by neoliberal thinking and the acceptance of the neoliberal capitalist agenda. Demonstrably, severe economic, political, and social dislocations are the result. Nevertheless, neoliberal influence remains and intensifies. We argue that this counterintuitive result is not grounded in either instrumental or theoretical merit but in the creation and dissemination of certain identifiable memes. The chapter proceeds with a critical examination of current neoliberal memes, an appraisal of their impact on government, society and economics, and the derivation of alternative memes from a Smithian perspective on political economy. Based on this critique and the derived memes, the chapter offers suggestions for a pragmatic cultural and administrative praxis that promise not only to moderate the influence of neoliberal memes and to mitigate tendencies for the propagation of new disadvantageous memeplexes, but also to avert the problems associated with the traditional distrust of government agencies and their top-down, disengaged, technical, and expert-driven solutions.

This paper aims to explain the causal complexity between ecosystems of doing business and living standards based on the theoretical model of the ecosystem of doing business proposed by Li (2019) and Du et al. (2020). By integrating ecological theory, transaction cost theory and institutional logics theory, this study explored effective ecosystems of doing business that achieve high living standards and explained the interpretive mechanisms behind different ecosystems of doing business. Moreover, this study also analyzed whether there were any necessary elements that lead to high living standards and discussed how the interactions between these elements influence carrying capacity and transaction costs from government logic and market logic, thus affecting living standards.

In this study, fuzzy set qualitative comparative analysis (fsQCA) and necessary condition analysis (NCA) were combined to analyze the data from the 2020 China City Statistical Yearbook, covering the main socioeconomic statistical data of cities at all levels in 2019.

This study found that no individual factor of the ecosystems of doing business was necessary to achieve high living standards, but the high level of human capital, innovation capacity, financial access and market demand play a significant role in achieving high living standards. Furthermore, two effective types of ecosystems of doing business lead to high living standards, namely, market dominance (government’s “invisible hand” or “nudging hand”) and government–market logic mutualism/symbiosis (government’s “helping hand”).

First, this work found that individual elements were not a necessary condition for high living standards, not only in kind but also in degree, complementing fsQCA with NCA, which indicates that environmental elements can be substituted by others. Second, this study considered the complex effects and explained the mechanisms behind different ecosystems of doing business, drawing on ecological theory, transaction cost theory and institutional logics theory from a configurational perspective. This study deepened the theories’ applications in the field of living standards and further discussed the elements interactions. Third, this study introduced configurational perspective and QCA into living standards research and adopted a mixed method that combines fsQCA and NCA to analyze the causal complexity between ecosystems of doing business and people’s living standards.

The purpose of this paper is to review the evolution of policies and practices of innovation in China for the past 40 years.

This is a review paper. It adopts a different multi-dimensional, qualitative methodology to examine China’s trajectory of innovation from the economic reform since 1978, highlighting “China” experiences in the developing innovation-driven economy, also pointing the challenges that China faces in this transition process and future prospects. The analysis of China’s innovation performance was based mostly on secondary data from sources and institutions that use statistical data to build country rankings, such as the global innovation index and global competitiveness index.

It is found that the institutional foundations of the national innovation system in China are already being laid, and so far, China has made extraordinary progress regarding innovation performance from country to region and from business to individual. However, some critical challenges in its innovation-driven development still need urgent attention and effective efforts to reinforce them.

This paper aims to fill the gap in the literature by providing an overview of the evolution of the policies and practices of innovation development in China since the 1978 economic reforms and explores the Chinese experiences in transforming into an innovation-driven economy.

Using Kristeva's theory of abjection, this article analyzes the psychosocial reality of the coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) pandemic, advancing the understanding of exclusion and stigmatization as forms of social abjection.

The article applies abjection to understand how severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2 (SARS-CoV-2) is both a medical emergency but also a cultural challenge. The analysis is structured in three dimensions: (1) the transgressive potential of the virus, (2) forms of cultural coping with its threat and (3) the moral order of abjection.

The virus is an existential challenge to cultural boundaries and subjectivity. Strategies to prevent its further spread (e.g. handwashing, “social distancing” and closing national borders) are thus culturally significant. The virus triggers the processes of abjection, (re-)establishing challenged boundaries and exclusionary social hierarchies. Collateral consequences of protective measures vary across regions and social groups, creating and exacerbating social inequalities.

Practices of abjecting the virus go far beyond handwashing, masking, etc. The virus, an invisible enemy to be expunged, is also a hybrid of threatening pathogen and human body; it is not the virus but people who experience exclusion, discrimination and disrespect. Thus, cultural sociology must address the moral economy of abjection.

As Kristeva insists, the abject threatens both the subject and the symbolic order. Overcoming social abjection means recognizing and strengthening individual and community agency and requires understanding vulnerability as an anthropological condition, enacting caring relationships and acting in solidarity.

This article demonstrates that abjection is a suitable theoretical tool for analyzing the social dynamics of the COVID-19 crisis.