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The Royal African Company, the Hudson’s Bay Company, and the East India Company used both owned and hired ships in their seventeenth and eighteenth century trading operations. Why such critical assets were sometimes owned and sometimes rented is explored. Contrary to economic reasoning, ship rentals occurred in shipping markets that were uncompetitive. The use of hired ships was correlated instead to market power in the companies’ selling or output markets. The pattern of ship ownership can be attributed to the close social proximity of shipowners to decision-makers in the companies. By modeling the input hiring decision while allowing for variation in the competitiveness of output markets, it is argued that rent-seeking behavior on the part of company insiders may explain the ownership patterns.

Ramp meters in the Twin Cities were turned off for 8 weeks in the Fall of 2000. This paper analyzes traffic data collected in this experiment on travel time variability with and without ramp metering for several representative freeways during the afternoon peak period. Travel time variability is generally reduced with metering. However, it is found that ramp meters are particularly helpful for long trips relative to short trips. The annual benefits from reducing travel time variability with meters are estimated to be $33.1 million, compared to the annual ramp metering costs of $2.6 million in the Twin Cities metro area. Thus, the impact on travel time variability should be captured in future ramp metering benefit/cost analysis.

Strategic change and managerial cognition are closely intertwined. However when data on a specific case of delayed strategic change involving multiple levels of an organization are presented, questions are raised about the application of a managerial cognition framework. This commentary attempts to reconcile some of what is currently known regarding managerial cognition and how a cognitive model is induced from a case study on strategic change in the James Division of Warren Corporation. Alternative interpretations of the data are introduced and directions for future research using the induced theory are suggested.

Mohammad Azharuddin's arrival in professional cricket served, to quote Karl Marx, as a reform of consciousness that awakened the sport ‘from its dream about itself’. His expertise with the bat invoked the wide expanse of human sensorium, provoking reactions of shock and admiration among observers. In this chapter, I examine Azharuddin's life in cricket and public through a dialectical probing of the relationship between shock and aesthetics. Azhar and cricket appear as a productive terrain to carry out the analysis, as it pushes the possibility of what or who can be considered as a valid subject for theoretical scrutiny. Taking cues from Walter Benjamin and CLR James, I theorise the shock effects created by a cricketer most unusual. From his wristy wizardry with the bat to his appointment as captain of the Indian men's cricket team during the rise of Hindu nationalism in the country, Azharuddin's presence and popularity extended beyond the boundaries that are often imposed on a sportsperson. Through his involvement in the match-fixing scandal that was exposed at the turn of the 21st century, Azhar (the name by which he was popularly known) challenged the mores of a game that had emphasised Victorian notions of purity on and off the field. For the purposes of this chapter, I discuss how Azhar constructed a bodily discourse that pushes us to reassess our very notions of art and aesthetics.

Though contemporaries, Adam Smith and Sir James Steuart are commonly portrayed as if they belonged to different eras. Whereas Smith went down in history as both founder of the science of political economy and patron saint of economic liberalism, Steuart became known as the last, outdated advocate for mercantilist policies in Britain. Smith himself was responsible for popularizing the notion of the “system of commerce” as an approach to political economy that dominated the early modern period. As a historiographical concept, the mercantile system became a misguided international trade theory grounded upon the Midas fallacy and the favorable balance of trade doctrine. Smith’s treatment of international trade in the Wealth of Nations, however, was criticized for its inconsistencies and lack of analytical clarity even by some among his own followers. Given Smith’s doubtful credentials as an international trade theorist, the chapter investigates the reasons that led him and Steuart to be placed on opposite sides of the mercantilist divide. The authors analyze the works of both authors in depth, showing that their disagreements had chiefly to do with different views on money and monetary policy. Additionally, the authors explore how early nineteenth-century writers such as Jean-Baptiste Say and J. R. McCulloch helped forge the intellectual profiles of both Steuart and Smith.

In recent decades, it has become clear that the major economic, political, and social problems in the world require contemporary development research to examine intersections of race and class in the global economy. Theorists in the Black Radical Tradition (BRT) were the first to develop and advance a powerful research agenda that integrated race–class analyses of capitalist development. However, over time, progressive waves of research streams in development studies have successively stripped these concepts from their analyses. Post-1950s, class analyses of development overlapped with some important features of the BRT, but removed race. Post-1990s, ethnicity-based analyses of development excised both race and class. In this chapter, I discuss what we learn about capitalist development using the integrated race–class analyses of the BRT, and how jettisoning these concepts weakens our understanding of the political economy of development. To remedy our current knowledge gaps, I call for applying insights of the BRT to our analyses of the development trajectories of nations.

This chapter focuses on spy action as a way to answer the question: where can we find queer female action heroes? The chapter will identify three films – D.E.B.S. (Advocate, 2005), Atomic Blonde (David Leitch, 2017) and The Spy Who Dumped Me (Susanna Fogel, 2018) – worth attention to highlight the potential and problems of the queer female hero in spy action. This chapter examines how each of these spy action films contributes to the ongoing yet uneven development of the female hero as a queer figure in post-millennial action cinema. The chapter will consider to what extent these queer female-led action films may pose a challenge to some of the dominant standards and conventions associated with the action hero, gender roles and the representation of sexuality, but also reinforce others. Some comparisons will be made to James Bond in recognition that the Bond franchise has played an important role in the spy action genre.