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John E. Elliott has been a professor of economics at the University of Southern California in Los Angeles since 1956 when he graduated from Harvard University with a doctorate in economics. In that position at USC, John has distinguished himself not only as a scholar and prolific writer but also as an outstanding teacher. He has received every teaching honour which USC has within its power to bestow. Moreover, John has distinguished himself for his contribution to the well‐being of the faculty and to the advancement of its efforts to preserve and extend the concept of academic freedom. John E. Elliott was born in the year 1931 and the essays which comprise this Festschriftare written in celebration of his sixtieth birthday. The numerous awards he has received for the high quality of his teaching, for his creativity and innovation in the dissemination of knowledge, his record of books published, articles contributed to scholarly journals and book reviews are to be found in his curriculum vitae printed at the end of this work.

John E. Elliott has been a professor of economics at the University of Southern California in Los Angeles since 1956 when he graduated from Harvard University with a doctorate in economics. In that position at USC, John has distinguished himself not only as a scholar and prolific writer but also as an outstanding teacher. He has received every teaching honour which USC has within its power to bestow. Moreover, John has distinguished himself for his contribution to the wellbeing of the faculty and to the advancement of its efforts to preserve and extend the concept of academic freedom. John E. Elliott was born in the year 1931 and the essays which comprise this Festschrift are written in celebration of his sixtieth birthday. The numerous awards he has received for the high quality of his teaching, for his creativity and innovation in the dissemination of knowledge, his record of books published, articles contributed to scholarly journals, and book reviews, are to be found in his curriculum vitae printed at the end of this work.

Explores Keynes′s long‐term policy proposals as social reform. Using early unpublished philosophical papers of Keynes, the argument is that Keynes′s long‐term policy proposals focused on reconciling “being good” and “doing good”. The socialization of investment was meant to bring about this reconciliation.

The affinities of Smith′s invisible hand notion and Hegel′s cunning of reason are examined through a study of all the key locations in which the invisible hand and cunning of reason are introduced. Despite their differences in orientation and philosophy, both writers reach similar conclusions regarding the play of self‐interest and the emergence of the social good. Specifically, each requires a deus ex machina – Providence or Geist – to generate the necessary telosthat supplements their respective logical arguments concerning the concrete play of interest. At the same time, each view provides little to explain how individualism creates the greater social good, so that recourse in each argument to an extra‐social entity obscures the actual functioning of the social order. The common approaches of the two very different thinkers thus reflects on the general requirements and dilemmas of arguments concerning the social good and individual interest.

The paper examines the dependence of the positivist and welfarist preference satisfaction paradigm of neoclassical economics upon an implicit functionalist philosophy of mind. Functionalism is the doctrine that mental states are strictly materialistic and understandable in cause‐effect terms. An important aspect of functionalism is the multiple realizability thesis, namely, that mental states can be realized in any type of hardware, whether human brain or computer.

The approach used involves investigating the fact‐value distinction after Robbins in terms of the positivist meta‐ethical view known as emotivism, and then explaining emotivism as inherently functionalist. Functionalist thinking itself is explained in terms of contemporary philosophy of mind.

An important finding is that the preference satisfaction paradigm can be shown to be as suitable to artificial intelligence systems as to human beings. A consequence of this is that normative concerns are increasingly difficult to address in connection with the neoclassical thinking about economic agents.

The paper does not investigate more recent research programs in economics (such as behavioural economics) that depart from basic neoclassical assumptions.

A practical implication of the paper is that it shifts attention to previously un‐emphasized aspects of neoclassical thinking.

The paper's value to explain the relation of economics to ethics in neoclassical economics in connection with functionalist philosophy of mind.

The main purpose of our study is to analyze the influence of Artificial Intelligence (AI) on firm performance, notably by building on the business value of AI-based transformation projects. This study was conducted using a four-step sequential approach: (1) analysis of AI and AI concepts/technologies; (2) in-depth exploration of case studies from a great number of industrial sectors; (3) data collection from the databases (websites) of AI-based solution providers; and (4) a review of AI literature to identify their impact on the performance of organizations while highlighting the business value of AI-enabled projects transformation within organizations.

This study has called on the theory of IT capabilities to seize the influence of AI business value on firm performance (at the organizational and process levels). The research process (responding to the research question, making discussions, interpretations and comparisons, and formulating recommendations) was based on a review of 500 case studies from IBM, AWS, Cloudera, Nvidia, Conversica, Universal Robots websites, etc. Studying the influence of AI on the performance of organizations, and more specifically, of the business value of such organizations’ AI-enabled transformation projects, required us to make an archival data analysis following the three steps, namely the conceptual phase, the refinement and development phase, and the assessment phase.

AI covers a wide range of technologies, including machine translation, chatbots and self-learning algorithms, all of which can allow individuals to better understand their environment and act accordingly. Organizations have been adopting AI technological innovations with a view to adapting to or disrupting their ecosystem while developing and optimizing their strategic and competitive advantages. AI fully expresses its potential through its ability to optimize existing processes and improve automation, information and transformation effects, but also to detect, predict and interact with humans. Thus, the results of our study have highlighted such AI benefits in organizations, and more specifically, its ability to improve on performance at both the organizational (financial, marketing and administrative) and process levels. By building on these AI attributes, organizations can, therefore, enhance the business value of their transformed projects. The same results also showed that organizations achieve performance through AI capabilities only when they use their features/technologies to reconfigure their processes.

AI obviously influences the way businesses are done today. Therefore, practitioners and researchers need to consider AI as a valuable support or even a pilot for a new business model. For the purpose of our study, we adopted a research framework geared toward a more inclusive and comprehensive approach so as to better account for the intangible benefits of AI within organizations. In terms of interest, this study nurtures a scientific interest, which aims at proposing a model for analyzing the influence of AI on the performance of organizations, and at the same time, filling the associated gap in the literature. As for the managerial interest, our study aims to provide managers with elements to be reconfigured or added in order to take advantage of the full benefits of AI, and therefore improve organizations’ performance, the profitability of their investments in AI transformation projects, and some competitive advantage. This study also allows managers to consider AI not as a single technology but as a set/combination of several different configurations of IT in the various company’s business areas because multiple key elements must be brought together to ensure the success of AI: data, talent mix, domain knowledge, key decisions, external partnerships and scalable infrastructure.

This article analyses case studies on the reuse of secondary data from AI deployment reports in organizations. The transformation of projects based on the use of AI focuses mainly on business process innovations and indirectly on those occurring at the organizational level. Thus, 500 case studies are being examined to provide significant and tangible evidence about the business value of AI-based projects and the impact of AI on firm performance. More specifically, this article, through these case studies, exposes the influence of AI at both the organizational and process performance levels, while considering it not as a single technology but as a set/combination of the several different configurations of IT in various industries.

This issue is a selected bibliography covering the subject of leadership.

Communications regarding this column should be addressed to Mrs. Cheney, Peabody Library School, Nashville, Tenn. 37203. Mrs. Cheney does not sell the books listed here. They are available through normal trade sources. Mrs. Cheney, being a member of the editorial board of Pierian Press, will not review Pierian Press reference books in this column. Descriptions of Pierian Press reference books will be included elsewhere in this publication.

This study examines the value relevance of recognised and disclosed revaluations of land and buildings for a large sample of Australian firms from 1993 through 1997. In contrast to prior research, we control for risk and cyclical effects and find no difference between recognised and disclosed revaluations, using yearly‐cross‐sectional and pooled regressions and using both market and non‐market dependent variables. We also find only weak evidence that revaluations of recognised and disclosed land and buildings are value relevant.

Blues music is in the midst of its second revival in popularity in roughly thirty years. The year 1960 can be identified, with some qualification, as a reference point for the first rise in international awareness and appreciation of the blues. This first period of wide‐spread white interest in the blues continued until the early seventies, while the current revival began in the middle 1980s. During both periods a sizeable literature on the blues has appeared. This article provides a thumbnail sketch of the popularity of the blues, followed by a description of scholarly and critical literature devoted to the music. Documentary and instructional materials in audio and video formats are also discussed. Recommendations are made for library collections and a list of selected sources is included at the end of the article.