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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founder of the science of political economy and patron saint of economic liberalism, Steuart became known as the last, outdated advocate for mercantilist policies in Britain.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.

The growing turbulence of the external environment has progressively led to the necessity by organizations of exploiting new opportunities provided by data-driven approaches for supporting the even more complex decision-making processes. The new digital environment has led to the development and adoption of innovative approaches; also in the urban context which has always been characterized by different, interconnected, and dynamic dimensions. Urban governance models have been enhanced by smart technologies, which act as enablers of advanced services and foster connections between citizens, public and private organizations, and decision-makers. In this context, the objective of this chapter is to examine the role of data-driven approaches in the urban context during the chaotic and high variable circumstances related to the diffusion of the Coronavirus disease 2019 (Covid-19). Thanks to the adoption of the co-evolutionary perspective, a cycle in urban governance decision-making approach based on digital technologies is depicted and its contribution for managing the ongoing Covid-19 is traced. The results of the analysis highlight how the data-driven approach supports urban decision-making process and shed light on the co-evolutionary perspective as heuristic device to map the interactions settled in the networks between local governments, data-driven technologies, and citizens. In this sense, this chapter offers interesting insights, potentially capable of generating useful implications for both researchers and professionals in the public sector.

Taxonomies (e.g., classification schemes) are valuable in that they clarify and create conceptual and theoretical frameworks to integrate a large variety of research (Brinkmann, 2002; Crié, 2003). In addition, taxonomies draw attention to the importance of a subject and provide a framework for organizing what we know and what we have yet to explore (Berenbaum, Raghavan, Le, Vernon, & Gomez, 2003). This article develops a taxonomy to explore the ethical considerations of advertising professionals. A netnographic study was conducted and the results are presented. A taxonomy is developed in which advertising practitioner concerns are classified into four categories: (1) societal impact, (2) industry norms and rules, (3) my ethical dilemmas, (4) others’ behavior, and (5) industry responses. This research supports and extends previous academic research into advertising ethics.

This chapter uses the case of American think tanks to develop the idea of a “boundary organization,” or a formal organization that acquires its distinctiveness and efficacy from its intermediate location in the social structure. Traversing, overlapping, and incorporating the logics of multiple institutional spheres – including those of academia, politics, business, and the market – think tanks at first seem to be organizations “divided against themselves.” However, by gathering complex mixtures of otherwise discordant resources, they create novel products, carry out novel practices, and claim for themselves a crucial mediating role in the social structure. This chapter's ultimate aim is to consider the implications of this idea for theories of organizational power. With respect to this aim, I argue that boundary organizations – and organizational boundary-making processes in general – underscore the need to think about power in relational and processional terms.

Can we model politics as exclusively based on self-interest, leaving virtue aside? How much romance is there in the study of politics? We show that James Buchanan, a founder of public choice and constitutional political economy, reintroduces a modicum of romance into politics, despite claiming that his work is the study of “politics without romance”: Buchanan’s model needs an ethical attitude to defend rules against rent-seeking.

We claim that Adam Smith, more than David Hume, should be considered one of the primary intellectual influences on Buchanan’s public choice and constitutional political economy. It is commonly believed that Hume assumes in politics every man ought to be considered a knave, making him an influence on Buchanan’s idea of politics without romance. Yet, it is Smith who, like Buchanan, describes rent-seeking and suggests that public virtues may be the remedy through which good rules maintaining liberty and prosperity can be generated and enforced. Smith, like Buchanan, rejects sole reliance on economic incentives: the study of politics needs some romance.

While it is generally well known that nonviolent collective action was widely deployed in the US southern civil rights movement, there is still much that we do not know about how that came to be. Drawing on primary data that consist of detailed semistructured interviews with members of the Nashville nonviolent movement during the late 1950s and 1960s, we contribute unique insights about how the nonviolent repertoire was diffused into one movement current that became integral to moving the wider southern movement. Innovating with the concept of serially linked movement schools – locations where the deeply intense work took place, the didactic and dialogical labor of analyzing, experimenting, creatively translating, and resocializing human agents in preparation for dangerous performance – we follow the biographical paths of carriers of the nonviolent Gandhian repertoire as it was learned, debated, transformed, and carried from India to the Fellowship of Reconciliation (FOR) and Howard University to Nashville (TN) and then into multiple movement campaigns across the South. Members of the Nashville movement core cadre – products of the Nashville movement workshop schools – were especially important because they served as bridging leaders by serially linking schools and collective action campaigns. In this way, they played critical roles in bridging structural holes (places where the movement had yet to be successfully established) and were central to diffusing the movement throughout the South. Our theoretical and empirical approach contributes to the development of the dialogical perspective on movement diffusion generally and to knowledge about how the nonviolent repertoire became integral to the US civil rights movement in particular.

This chapter examines James Steuart’s explanation of the relationship between banking system and economic development. Unlike other Scottish thinkers of the time, Steuart argues that the origin of commercial nations was not, in his view, a consequence of human nature and a long period of historical evolution. The establishment of the system of trade and commerce that gives rise to a “commercial nation” is conditioned by a series of elements that can render its appearance impossible. This chapter examines how the establishment of the system of trade and commerce that gives rise to a commercial nation is conditioned, according to Steuart, by the development of the banking system. It also broaches Steuart’s explanation of how the banking system functions within a non-commercial nation, which the Scottish author called “the infancy of banking.”

Our study explores friction costs in terms of competition and market structure, considering factors such as market share, industry leverage levels, industry hedging levels, number of peers, and the geographic concentration that influences reinsurance purchase in the Property and Casualty insurance industry in China. Financial factors that influence the hedging level are also included. The data are hand collected from 2008 to 2015 from the Chinese Insurance Yearbook. Using panel data analysis techniques, the results are interesting. The capital structure shows a significant negative relationship with the hedging level. Group has a negative relationship with reinsurance purchases. Assets exhibit a negative relationship with hedging levels. The hedging level has a negative relation with the individual hedging level. Insurers have less incentive to hedge because it provides less resource than leverage. The study also robustly investigates the strategic risk management separately by the financial crises.