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This chapter aims to gain a deeper understanding of the phenomenon of an ultraconservative group’s crisis communication. It delves into the communication strategies and narratives of the Taliban as they interact with the international media, particularly in relation to the women residing in Afghanistan. A qualitative content analysis of the Taliban’s initial press conference, subsequent interviews and statements on the women in Afghanistan after the Kabul takeover in August 2021 was conducted to understand how the group constructed its narrative on women. The findings suggest that the Taliban adopt a coherent communication strategy. Overall, the group seems to construct a positive image of free women in Afghanistan under their governance by representing image repair strategies of denying disadvantages and positioning themselves as supportive of women’s rights, embedded in hero narratives. Through an analysis of the data employed in this research, it transpired that the Taliban lay a special emphasis on a promising future for their home country through the implementation of the principles of human rights, with a special focus on their commitment to women’s rights and the respect they accord to women. With regard to the imposition of restrictions on Afghan women, the group can be seen to adopt an image repair strategy, employed by evading responsibility, coupled with a narrative of blaming foreign forces.

Computer corpus linguistics (CCL) is a scientific innovation that has facilitated the creation and analysis of large corpora in a systematic way by means of computer technology since the 1950s. This article provides an account of the CCL pioneers in general but particularly of those in Germany, the Netherlands, Sweden, and Switzerland. It is found that Germany and Sweden, due to more advantageous financing and weaker communities of generativists, had a faster adoption of CCL than the other two countries. A particular late adopter among the four was Switzerland, which did not take up CCL until foreign professors had been recruited.

Retailers increasingly experiment with a wide variety of store elements; this chapter focuses on in-store marketing tactics and reports the results of 12 in-store experiments conducted in cooperation with different retail chains. Experiments 1–3 address in-store signage (digital, floor) and reveal that digital screens and signage can draw customers toward merchandise and deeper into shopping aisles. Experiments 4–6 explore the impact of the organization of a display (vertical, horizontal, diagonal, waterfall) and generally demonstrate the superiority of vertical organizations of merchandise. In Experiments 7–9, results pertaining to the location of a product in a store highlight the importance of placing merchandise at eye level. With Experiments 10 and 11, the authors reinforce the importance of retail atmospherics (scent, lighting). Finally, Experiment 12 explores product placement and other factors that can enhance the effectiveness of in-store merchandise demonstrations.

This chapter analyzes markets with an “infinite variety” of goods, such as large parts of the service economy and creative industries such as the book, film, and music market. I argue that the infinite variety of supply that characterizes such markets does not lead to discoordination, because of the emergence of cognitive institutions in the form of market categories, reference points such as exemplary goods, and instruments of interpretation which facilitate the (quality) coordination process. These cognitive institutions function as an extended mind of market participants and enable what is termed interpretative rationality, as distinct from calculative rationality. This interpretative rationality consists of the ability to recognize relevant differences and similarities between goods. These cognitive institutions, like the price system, are an emergent order which can be analyzed through the lens of Austrian economics. This chapter further demonstrates the potential convergence between particular strands of economic sociology and Austrian economics.

This chapter discusses the “seigniorage argument” in favor of public money issuance, according to which public finances could be improved if the state more fully exercised the privilege of money creation, which is, today, largely shared with private banks. This point was made in the 1930s by several proponents of the “100% money” reform scheme, such as Henry Simons of the University of Chicago, Lauchlin Currie of Harvard and Irving Fisher of Yale, who called for a full-reserve requirement in lawful money behind checking deposits. One of their claims was that, by returning all seigniorage profit to the state, such reform would allow a significant reduction of the national debt. In academic debates, however, following a criticism first made by Albert G. Hart of the University of Chicago in 1935, this argument has generally been discarded as wholly illusory. Hart argued that, because the state, under a 100% system, would be likely to pay the banks a subsidy for managing checking accounts, no substantial debt reduction could possibly be expected to follow. The 100% money proponents never answered Hart’s criticism, whose conclusion has often been considered as definitive in the literature. However, a detailed study of the subject reveals that Hart’s analysis itself appears to be questionable on at least two grounds: the first pertains to the sources of the seigniorage benefit, the other to its distribution. This chapter concludes that the “seigniorage argument” of the 100% money authors may not have been entirely unfounded.

Our chapter discusses the myriad ways in which Frank H. Knight’s Risk, Uncertainty, and Profit (RUP) has been incorporated by different streams of scholarship dedicated to institutional analysis since 1990, when bibliometric evidence indicates a revival of interest in his classic work. Using citation analysis, the authors identify clusters of scholarship that build on Knight’s contributions, assessing which of his insights were absorbed by different subfields and how these have been connected to recent topics and concerns. The authors then qualitatively explore these results to throw new light on the recent history of institutional economics, using Knight’s RUP as a window into the evolution of (and inter-relations between) different research traditions that currently populate the field, including new economic sociology, comparative politics, evolutionary economics, entrepreneurial studies, environmental social sciences, international political economy, and the anthropology of finance. The authors conclude that Knight’s legacy remains unsettled, with different groups selectively absorbing a subset of his ideas and developing them in relative isolation from research conducted elsewhere. Nevertheless, boundary work connecting these separate areas reveals possible spaces for collaboration among scholars who study institutions building explicitly on Knightian insights.