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This chapter is about the modern, Western education system as an economic system of production on behalf of the capitalist mode of production (CMP) and globalization towards a single, global social space around market capitalism, liberal democracy and individualism.

The schooling process is above all an economic process, within which educational labour is performed, and through which the education system operates in an integrated fashion with the (external) economic system.

It is mainly through children’s compulsory educational labour that modern schooling plays a part in the production of labour power, supplies productive (paid) employment within the CMP, meets ‘corporate economic imperatives’, supports ‘the expansion of global corporate power’ and facilitates globalization.

What children receive in exchange for their appropriated and consumed labour power within the education system are not payments of the kind enjoyed by adults in the external economy, but instead merely a promise – the promise enshrined in the Western education industry paradigm.

In modern societies, young people, like chattel slaves, are compulsorily prevented from freely exchanging their labour power on the labour market while being compulsorily required to perform educational labour through a process in which their labour power is consumed and reproduced, and only at the end of which as adults they can freely (like freed slaves) enter the labour market to exchange their labour power.

This compulsory dispossession, exploitation and consumption of labour power reflects and reinforces the power distribution between children and adults in modern societies, doing so in a way resembling that between chattel slaves and their owners.

The purpose of this second part of this special issue is to contribute to a better understanding of the nature of Soviet society. It is not possible to analyse such a society in all its complexities within the space of one study. There are, however, some economic relations which determine society's major features. We believe that commodity‐production relations in the Soviet Union are of this type.

Doctors' labour and medicines are special necessities for human survival and evolution. Since China launched the healthcare reform, the theoretical circles' discussions have not yet clarified the respective special properties of doctors' labour and medicines as goods and the internal relations between doctors' labour and medicines at the level of the theoretical basis.

Health is a prerequisite for people's all-round development, a precondition for economic and social development and the people's common aspiration. The all-round moderately prosperous society could not be achieved without people's all-round health.

The authors believe the socialist relation between doctors' labour and medicines with Chinese characteristics should be one that is people-oriented, and the corporatization of hospitals or the capitalization of doctors' labour should be avoided.

In this paper, the authors explore the particularity of doctors' labour, particularity of medicine production, circulation, consumption and the internal relations between doctors' labour and medicines by using the analytical approach of Marxist political economy while considering the special roles of doctor's labour and medicines in the reproduction of labour power and put forward the theoretical basis for the segregation of doctor's labour and medicines.

This chapter pulls together the main strands of Child Labour in Global Society, and addresses their implications for the sociological study of children’s lives, schooling and slavery.

In popular and scholarly discourses there is a tendency to emphasize the differences between the social lives of children and those of adults rather than the similarities and continuities; to misrepresent children’s social activities in comparison with those of adults; to rationalize the differential way in which children’s social activities and participation are assessed and rewarded relative to those of adults; and to fortify children’s actual and/or assumed marginal situation in modern society.

There are sociological gains to be had from emphasizing the comparable features and structural links between ‘childhood’ and ‘adulthood’ due especially to the common participation of children and adults in productive labour.

The way in which children’s social activities are differentially assessed and rewarded is reflected in how children are denied full citizenship rights, and so are non-citizens.

In particular, children are denied the right to freely exchange their labour power on the labour market.

While viewing educational labour as forced labour does not sit well with ideas about children and childhood in modern society, doing so is consistent with the element of compulsion in for instance the Convention on the Rights of the Child (CRC).

Being compulsorily required to perform educational labour is indicative of how in modern societies children are owned and in slavery, not just of the de facto kind, but also of the de jure kind.

This paper aims to examine how Chief Executive Officer (CEO) power affects firm-level labor productivity.

The authors rely on regression analysis to examine the relation between CEO power and labor productivity.

Following prior research (i.e. the sequential rank order tournament theory), the authors predict that powerful CEOs lead to high labor productivity. They find a significant and positive relationship between CEO power and labor productivity. They further decompose labor productivity into labor efficiency and labor cost components and find a positive (negative) relationship between CEO power and labor efficiency (cost) component, suggesting that more powerful CEOs better manage labor efficiency and control labor cost. The results are also robust to various additional tests.

This study contributes to two streams of research: the CEO power literature in finance and the labor productivity and cost literature in accounting. To the best of the authors’ knowledge, it is the first study that performs a direct empirical test on the relation between CEO power and labor productivity.

Drawing upon Alfred Sohn-Rethel's work, we argue that, just as capitalism produces abstract labor, it coproduces both abstract mind and abstract life. Abstract mind is the split between mind and nature and between subject/observer and observed object that characterizes scientific epistemology. Abstract mind reflects an abstracted objectified world of nature as a means to be exploited. Biological life is rendered as abstract life by capitalist exploitation and by the reification and technologization of organisms by contemporary technoscience. What Alberto Toscano has called “the culture of abstraction” imposes market rationality onto nature and the living world, disrupting biotic communities and transforming organisms into what Finn Bowring calls “functional bio-machines.”

Nobody concerned with political economy can neglect the history of economic doctrines. Structural changes in the economy and society influence economic thinking and, conversely, innovative thought structures and attitudes have almost always forced economic institutions and modes of behaviour to adjust. We learn from the history of economic doctrines how a particular theory emerged and whether, and in which environment, it could take root. We can see how a school evolves out of a common methodological perception and similar techniques of analysis, and how it has to establish itself. The interaction between unresolved problems on the one hand, and the search for better solutions or explanations on the other, leads to a change in paradigma and to the formation of new lines of reasoning. As long as the real world is subject to progress and change scientific search for explanation must out of necessity continue.

Aim of the present monograph is the economic analysis of the role of MNEs regarding globalisation and digital economy and in parallel there is a reference and examination of some legal aspects concerning MNEs, cyberspace and e‐commerce as the means of expression of the digital economy. The whole effort of the author is focused on the examination of various aspects of MNEs and their impact upon globalisation and vice versa and how and if we are moving towards a global digital economy.

Meetings are a necessary part of work. The purpose of this paper is to focus on how power distance in meetings affects emotional labor, including whether leader-member exchange (LMX) serves as a moderator for this relationship. It is hypothesized that power distance in meetings would lead to higher levels of emotional labor in meeting attendees, and that higher levels of LMX would make this relationship even stronger.

The authors used a panel sample of full-time working adults from a variety of industries who regularly attend meetings. Participants completed a survey with items related to power distance, emotional labor, and LMX. Hypotheses were tested using moderated regression.

Findings reveal that power distance between the meeting leader and attendees does relate positively to emotional labor, both surface and deep acting. In addition, LMX moderates this relationship for deep acting, but not for surface acting indicating that when high levels of both power distance and LMX exist, meeting attendees will engage in more deep acting.

The results of this study suggest that meeting leaders influence the behavior of attendees through their perceived power and relationship with the attendees. The power distance measure and cross-sectional nature of the sampling strategy is a limitation that provides opportunities for future research.

The practical implications focus on meeting leaders, how they can help meeting attendees make meetings successful by expressing their true authentic emotions.

The current study is one of the first to focus on the power distance present in meetings related to emotional regulation through the social comparison theory. In addition, the current study investigates how LMX can serve as a moderator in this relationship.

Is labour's decline permanent, or is it merely a temporary weakening, as Beverley Silver suggests in her recent book, as the labour movement is unmade and remade in different locations and at different times? The article aims to examine this question in South Africa, one of the newly industrialised countries of the 1960s and 1970s, now largely bypassed by new manufacturing investment destined for countries such as India and China.

The paper concentrates, through six case studies, on the growing non‐core and peripheral zones of work and examines the impact of the restructuring on labour.

The evidence presented is ambiguous. While there have been significant innovative union organising experiments, it may be that the structural weakening of labour has been too great and that the new sources of power are too limited, to permit effective reorientation.

It is concluded that significant progress will only be made if there is a concerted effort to commit resources and above all to develop new associational strategies that recognise the potential for symbolic power as an alternative to the erosion of structural power of workers and the unions that represent them. Unless such a shift is made the crisis of labour movements internationally may be better understood as a permanent crisis than the temporary one Silver suggests.

The paper identities the potential for new strategies to develop and sustain associational and symbolic power that might compensate for weakened structural power and facilitate a remaking of the labour movement under new conditions.