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Michael Brown argues that what unites the human and social sciences is their evolving character, made explicit in the concepts of “reflexivity,” “course of activity,” and “theorizing.” Once the social sciences are taken as a whole, the notion of “sociality” will allow to grasp society as ever changing, as a becoming. I shall examine the notion of sociality in the literary criticism of Lukács, Goldmann, and Adorno, three authors who consider the essay as the adequate open form of critique in times of rapid social change. Originally adopted by the young Lukács, the essay tended to be abandoned by him when elaborating the concept of critical or socialist realism as a repository of timeless cultural values. In his studies in the European realist or the soviet novel, for example, on Balzac, Stendhal, Thomas Mann, or Solzhenitsyn, the dialectical concept of social totality becomes a sum of orientations, presenting the individual writer with the moral task to choose “progress” and discard “negativity.” The social is thus narrowed to individual choice. Different from Lukács, Goldmann's literary theory defines cultural production as a matter of the social group, the transindividual subject. Goldmann was deeply marked by Lukács's early writings from which he gained notably the notion of tragedy and the concept of maximum possible consciousness—the world vision of a social group which structures the work of a writer. Cultural creation is resistance to capitalist society, as evident in the literature of absence, Malraux's novels, and the nouveau roman. In the writings of Adorno the social is lodged within the avant-garde, provided that one takes its means and procedures literally, e.g., the writings of Kafka. By formal innovation—among others the adoption of the essay, the small form, the fragment—art exercises criticism of the ongoing rationalization process and preserves the possibility of change (p. 319).

The main purpose of the research is to determine if the relationship between trading volume and price changes is connected to market effectiveness and to use the volume-price relationship to compare the efficiency levels of foreign markets. The degree of the relationship is determined in this study, and the efficiency levels of different countries' capital markets are compared.

In this study, 1,024 observations are used as a data set, which includes daily closing prices and trading volume in the stock market indices of 25 countries between the dates of 01.12.2016 and 31.12.2020. In the first step of the analysis, descriptive statistics of price and volume series are examined. The stationarity of the series is then controlled using the ADF unit root test. Simple linear regression models with the dependent variable of trading volume are generated for all stock market indices after each series has reached stationarity, and the ARCH heteroscedasticity test is used to determine whether these models contain the ARCH effect. Because all models have the ARCH effect, autoregressive models are chosen, and EGARCH models are conducted for all indices to see whether there is an asymmetry in the price-volume relationship.

The study concludes that the stock market in the United States is the most effective, since it has the strongest relationship between trading volume and price changes. However, because of the financial distress caused by the COVID-19 pandemic, the relationship between price and trading volume is lower in Eurozone countries. The price-volume relationship could not be observed in some shallow markets. Furthermore, whereas the majority of countries have a negative relationship between price changes and transaction volume, China, the United Arab Emirates and Qatar have a positive relationship. When prices rise in these countries, investors buy with the sense of hope provided by the optimistic atmosphere, and when prices fall, they sell with the fear of losing money.

The study's most significant limitation is that it is difficult to ascertain a definitive conclusion about the subject under investigation. In reality, if the same research is done using data from different countries and time periods, the results are quite likely to vary.

As a result of the study, investors can decide which market to enter by comparing and analyzing the price-volume relationship of several markets. According to the study's findings, investors are advised to examine the price-volume relationship in a market before beginning to trade in that market. In this way, investors can understand the market's efficiency and whether it is overpriced.

The relationship between price movements and trade volume gives crucial information about a capital market's internal structure. Some concerns can be answered by assessing this relationship, such as whether the market has a speculative pricing problem, how information flows to the market, and whether investment decisions are rational and homogenous. Empirical studies on modeling this relationship, on the other hand, have not reached a definite outcome. The main reason for this is that the price-to-volume relationship fluctuates depending on the market structure. The purpose of this study is to fill a gap in the literature by presenting the reasons why this critical issue in the literature cannot be answered, as well as empirical findings.

The significance and originality of this research are that it examines the price-volume relationship to evaluate the efficiency levels of various markets. This relationship is being investigated in a number of multinational studies. These researches, on the other hand, were conducted to see if there is a relationship between trading volume and market volatility, and if so, how that interaction is formed. The size of the price and volume relationship is emphasized in this study, unlike previous studies in the literature.

This paper aims at examining the co-movement dependent regime and causality relationships between conventional and Islamic returns for emerging, frontier and developed markets from November 2008 to August 2020.

First, the authors used the Markov-switching autoregression (MS–AR) model to capture the regime-switching behavior in the stock market returns. Second, the authors applied the Markov-switching regression and vector autoregression (MS-VAR) models in order to study, respectively, the co-movement and causality relationship between returns of conventional and Islamic indexes across market states.

Results show the presence of two different regimes for the three studied markets, namely, stability and crisis periods. Also, the authors found evidence of a co-movement relationship between the conventional and Islamic indexes for the three studied markets whatever the regime. For the Granger causality, it is proved only for emerging and developed markets and only during the stability regime. Finally, the authors conclude that Islamic indexes can act as diversifiers, or safe-haven assets are not strongly supported.

This paper is the first study that examines the co-movement and the causal relationship between conventional and Islamic indexes not only across different financial markets' regimes but also during the COVID-19 period. The findings may help investors in making educated decisions about whether or not to add Islamic indexes to their portfolios especially during the recent outbreak.