Search results

Gives an account of Count N.S. Mordvinov (1754‐1845) who was a Minister of Economics, an economist and a scholar of Adam Smith′s economics who effectively politicized Smithian economic ideas and the need for economic freedom in Tsarist Russia. His advice, given to Tsar Alexander I and to Tsar Nicholas I, was embodied in legislation but did not appear to have administrative impact. Although the economic ideas of Adam Smith had a political dimension alien to the objectives of the Russian rulers, the Smithian values, as promoted by Count Mordvinov and embodied in his written works, having been imported as early as 1760‐1770, have not previously been discussed and debated in the twentieth century.

The loss of bio‐diversity has received increasing attention as one of the most serious environmental threats we face. Yet not only biodiversity is being lost at staggering rates, socio‐diversity is being lost as well. Sociodiversity is defined as the various social and economic arrangements by which people organize their societies, particularly the underlying assumptions, goals, values and social behaviours guiding these arrangements. Just as the loss of bio‐diversity has focused attention on the interface between human socio‐economic and ecological systems, so too can the interaction between these systems give us insights into the reasons for the loss of diversity in socio‐economic systems. Examines the assumptions and valuation concepts underlying economic theory and the ways in which mainline economic theory contributes to the loss of socio‐economic diversity. The analysis draws on ecologically relevant concepts and proposes that the base for economic theory and valuation be expanded to include five categories identified as relevant to sustain bio‐diversity. These are: context, participation, place, limits and temporality. These categories point to the need to expand, diversify and make concrete economic theory and methodology.

Economists have generally framed the question of welfare in terms of wealth creation and distribution. More recently this conception of welfare has been challenged by concerns for the unsustainability of expanding material wealth. Sustainability thus requires the expansions of welfare considerations to include the limits posed by the biophysical world within which all economic activity takes place. This paper pursues the question how the concept of ethics generally accepted and operative in mainline economics influences our understanding of sustainability. The question pursued is whether this concept of ethics can lead to sustainability or whether other ethical concepts are necessary to achieve a more compatible relationship between economic activity and sustainability? To pursue this question three ethical concepts are discussed: utilitarian ethic, discursive ethic, and the ethic of care. In each case the question is raised whether the ethical concept under consideration contributes to or undermines sustainability. The conclusion reached in this paper is that a utilitarian ethic leads to a perception of the links between economic activity and environmental context which is not likely to yield sustainable outcomes beyond an economically defined notion of sustainability. Discursive ethic and ethic of care have important contributions to make to redefining concept and implementation of broader sustainability goals.

Despite its now widespread use, the concept of sustainability remains ambiguous. Its varying definitions carry the marks of the disciplines defining it. Sustainability as defined in economics is commonly conceptualized as economic development constrained by considerations of environmental sustainability. This concept follows familiar notions of internalizing the externalities of economic activity into the framework of economics. In contrast to this common notion, this paper argues that sustainability cannot be achieved unless economics is internalized into the social and environmental context within which all economic activity takes place. Internalizing economics into contextual, material reality can also be described as the need to preserve three types of services: technological services; relational services; and ecosystem services. Much attention has been given to sustaining and expanding the first to the neglect and destruction of the latter two. This makes evident the fact that internalizing economics requires more than an awareness of physical context. It requires also an awareness of the ethical context which supports or undermines the sustaining of essential caring and ecosystems services. To illustrate this point the implications of utilitarian ethics for sustainability are contrasted with those of the ethics of care.

As Professor Ischboldin looks back, after decades of creative work, reflecting on his accomplishments and surveying the landscape of economics, I suspect he feels that his optimistic approach to economics was, after all, justified. Of course, a genetic economist is supposed to be always optimistic, even when the tide is running against him. And since the end of World War II the general trend has not always been too favourable for genetic economists. In the wake of the last revolution in our dismal science a regime of formalism was firmly established and cold technical elegance became the characteristic of the professional élite. Their mathematical sophistication, however, was not enough to prevent a crisis of major proportions, and, as we can witness these days, the forces of criticism cannot any longer be disregarded.

This paper surveys the contribution of economics and industrial relations (E/IR) to the development of the field of personnel/human resource management (P/HRM). A brief review of existing accounts of the evolution of the field reveals that they give little mention to the role of E/IR. A re‐examination of the early years of P/HRM suggests, however, that this is a serious omission. It is demonstrated, for example, that E/IR was in fact the principal disciplinary base for research and teaching in P/HRM in US universities into the 1940s and that for the first two decades of the field’s existence the most influential and authoritative academic‐based writers came from the ranks of economists and economics‐trained IR scholars. After describing the reasons for this close relationship, The centrifugal forces that caused a gradual split between E/IR and P/HRM are described. This split had roots in the 1920s, became increasingly visible in the 1950s and beyond, and by the late 1980s had reached a point where the two subject areas had little intellectual or organizational interaction. The paper ends with a brief review of recent developments that herald a modest rapprochement between E/IR and P/HRM.

The purpose of this paper is to examine the institutional context of the entrepreneurial discovery of blockchain applications.

This paper draws on institutional and entrepreneurial theory to introduce the economic problem entrepreneurship in the early stages of new technologies, examines the diversity of self-governed hybrid solutions to coordinating entrepreneurial information and draws policy implications.

To perceive a valuable and actionable market opportunity, entrepreneurs must coordinate distributed non-price information under uncertainty with others. One potential class of transaction cost economising solution to this problem is private self-governance of information coordination within hybrids. This paper explores a diverse range of entrepreneurial hybrids coalescing around blockchain technology, with implications for innovation policy.

This paper points to the problem of how the defining of the innovation problem as either choice-theoretic or contract-theoretic changes the remit of innovation policy. Innovation policy and blockchain policy should extend beyond correcting sub-optimal investments or removing barriers to action, to incorporate how polices impact entrepreneurial choices over governance structures to coordinate information.

This paper is concerned with the quantitative/qualitative divide as a particular feature of recent methodological debate in organization research. While substantively this divide is questionable and problematic, it has figured prominently in the so‐called “paradigm wars”. The purpose of this paper is to relate these controversies to a similar debate in economics and draw out the implications of this comparison for the methodological practice of organization research.

The paper takes the form of a conceptual critique.

The paradigms debate can be interpreted as a twentieth‐century instance of the methodenstreit in nineteenth‐century social science, and is argued to resolve along the faultlines of mainline organizational analysis and its periphery. Further methodological progress in the field requires the abandoning of paradigmatic duality in recognition of methodological plurality as a defining feature of organization research.

Management methodology and economic methodology have largely developed as separate literatures alongside each other, with little cross‐fertilisation. This paper links key issues in management methodology to longstanding debates in economic methodology, thereby making progress towards a shared debate on issues of equal significance to both fields of inquiry.

This study measures the impact of ICT on Malaysia’s aggregate output in the period 1965‐2005. It closes a gap in existing literature by using the 3SLS technique on a country specific study. Telecommunication penetration rate is used as a proxy for ICT and analysed in both macro‐economic and micro‐economic perspectives. The findings of this study suggest that there is a causal relation between ICT and aggregate output in Malaysia and that the MSC and the privatisation policy of the telecommunication sector, are found to be indifferent to achieving expected economic growth in Malaysia.

In this paper, the authors examine how religious and political factors affect a firm's corporate governance diversity policies.

The authors develop five basic empirical models. Model 1 examines how religious beliefs and political affiliation determine whether a firm will establish diversity incentive in its senior executives' performance assessment. Model 2 investigates how the diversity goal, religious beliefs and political affiliation separately affect the level of actual diversity achieved. Model 3 examines how the diversity goal and environmental factors interact to affect the level of actual diversity achieved. Model 4 and Model 5 examine whether the diversity incentive in senior executives' compensation plan and the environmental factors (religious belief and political affiliation) help to reduce the compensation differentials between male and female executives.

The authors find that firms located in more liberal counties with more Mainline Protestants and less Republican voters in the United States are more likely to include workforce diversity as a criterion in evaluating their senior executives. The authors also provide evidence that firms with diversity goals have more female directors, more female senior executives and more minority directors. However, they find no evidence that the compensation differentials between male and female executives are smaller in these firms. Finally, they find that external environment affects the effectiveness of the implementation of the diversity goals.

In line withthis branch of research, the authors expand the literate on the link between corporate culture and corporate decision-making by investigating the non-financial performance measures. Besides the corporate decision-making in investment, financial reporting and social responsibilities as documented in prior studies, the authors argue that the religious beliefs and political affiliations could also affect the development and implementation of corporate non-financial performance goals in executive incentive contracts.