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Core economy is defined as the economic activity, which is mostly underestimated as the non-market economy. As a result of certain concurrent studies, it is however estimated to be 25% of the economy of the USA with 1.91 trillion USD for the year 1998, which can’t be measured directly in spite of generating direct benefits. District bazaars and marketplaces and the street economy, an intersection point of the ones tired of suppression and tyranny of the Landowners and Sheikhdom, snowed under the sectarian conflicts, the ones feeling outcasted from the society, who would like to enjoy the benefits of modern life, the ones without the sufficient capital to establish a business or a regular business, the ones who would like to contribute to their families, the ones who are outside and excluded from the professional life; some of the ones are thugs and ramblers and lumpen, and the ones with no jobs and got nothing as defined as ‘Bosiacs’ by Maxim Gorki.

While there are a number of theoretical traditions that study the interactions of business and society, research in these spaces has failed to sufficiently engage across these traditions. This volume aims to bridge these domains, creating a conversation among scholars working at the nexus of stakeholder theory, non-market strategy, and social movement theory. In this introductory chapter to the volume, we review the historical context of these three theoretical areas and explore how they connect in current research. We follow this discussion with our recommendations for common themes that might further integrate these subfields. Finally, we conclude the chapter with a description of each paper in the volume, highlighting how each contributes to our understanding of the dynamics of business and society, as well as the integration of our three focal subfields.

This chapter will address (only) one issue from the 1960s substantivist/formalist debate, the treatment of choice. The substantivists rejected the economic universality of the neoclassical axioms of choice under scarcity and the isolated and selfish nature of the choice process. A common formalist response was that their model based on these axioms could be modified to include whatever specific conditions economic choice was being made under. This chapter rejects that claim, based on a consideration not included in the debate. It is argued that the mathematical structure of the standard formal neoclassical model prevents it from incorporating the substantivist criticisms, and that to modify it in accord with these criticisms would necessarily result in a model that is outside the neoclassical approach to economic decision-making.

Starting from the middle of the 1990s, different initiatives linked to an “economy of solidarity” trend have emerged in the province of Quebec. Some of them, like the fair trade movement, seek to short-circuit global commodity chains; others, such as urban collective gardening and local exchange trading systems, rely almost entirely on local resources and contribute to local provisioning. Using empirical material from a study conducted in Quebec between 2001 and 2004, this article seeks to contribute to the understanding of marginal socioeconomic systems and practices in the context of globalization, anti-globalization, and alter-globalization movements.

Adam Smith, it is generally acknowledged, founded the modern discipline of political economy with the study entitled An Inquiry into The Wealth of Nations (1776) which he built upon the ethical system he presumed to exist in his Theory of Moral Sentiments (1759). Ricardo took Smith's observations somewhat further with his publication of On the Principles of Political Economy and Taxation (1817). When John Stuart Mill wrote his Principles of Political Economy in 1848, his considerations of economic processes were intimately connected with the political. By the time Marx published Das Kapital as a critique of political economy in 1867 the term was entrenched in both academic life and in common parlance and political circles. The study of economics was an integral part of the study of the state. Ironically, however, political economy was about to be upstaged by the development of economics as a separate and positivist discipline. William Stanley Jevons had published his “Brief Account of a General Mathematical Theory of Political Economy” in the Journal of the Royal Statistical Society in the previous year. This was much more widely read at the time than Das Kapital. By 1890, Alfred Marshall had published his Principles of Economics. The book began with these words: “Political economy or economics is a study of mankind in the ordinary business of life.” The great tradition of seeing economics as an integral part of politics and vice versa was disappearing. However, though economists were anxious to convert that part of political economy known as economics and see it as a scientific discipline, the reality, that is the integrated nature of the state and the economy, remained. Simply because certain ideologues decided to separate politics from economics did not mean that the state in any sense disentangled itself from the economy or the economy from the state.

Ritual economy is a theoretical approach for understanding and explaining the ways in which worldview, economy, power, and human agency interlink in society and social change. Defined as the “process of provisioning and consuming that materializes and substantiates worldview for managing meaning and shaping interpretation,” this approach forefronts the study of human engagement with social, material, and cognitive realms of human experience. This chapter explores the theoretical roots of ritual economy and how they are expressed in this volume's contributions, which ground the discussion in actual case studies applied to both capitalistic and noncapitalistic settings across a number of different cultural contexts. By knitting together two realms of inquiry that often are sequestered into separate domains of knowledge, ritual economy exposes for analysis how the process of materializing worldview through ritual practice structures economic behavior without determining it.

As the first decade of the 21st century drew to a close, the threats associated with economic crises, social inequalities, and human-induced environmental change focused unprecedented attention on global development trajectories. While questions about how the nature and impact of economic growth should be managed have long featured in environmentalist thought, the stark conditions created a new policy landscape of opportunity for alternative development strategies. National governments around the globe began to disseminate policy statements calling for ‘green growth’ and some, for example the United States, even developed stimulus packages aimed at restructuring economies towards a low carbon future. At the same time international non-governmental organisations such as the United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP) have developed entire initiatives focused on shaping what has come to be termed the ‘green economy’ (UNEP, 2011). Even large multinational corporations, such as Shell and their dialogues mechanism, are engaging with green economy discourses. New partnerships are emerging across governance sectors with Microsoft Corp and UNEP signing an agreement in 2009 to share knowledge collaboratively around green economy issues. In the United States, the BlueGreen Alliance is consolidating activity of labour unions and environmental organisations in order to maximise the number and quality of jobs in the green economy. With such a broad spectrum of actors and interests involved, it is unsurprising that there is no one agreed vision for a green economy. Some argue for development scenarios that promote reduced or no-growth pathways (Scott-Cato, 2009), others see the current crises creating innovation opportunities for new growth in different areas through processes of ‘creative destruction’ (Florida, 2010).

It has been observed that, in contrast to other Asian and Southeast Asian polities, there are no records of monetary transactions in Angkor's 6th–14th century inscriptions, and no reference to a unit of account after the late 8th century. Explanations for this have been offered, but none of them have much support. In fact, a considerable range of monetary concepts are expressed throughout the study period, and it is unlikely that there was no unit of account. Differences between records of temple inventories and exchange transactions suggest that perhaps display was more important in temples, and that quantitative values such as weights were important in the exchanges. An explanation for the lack of monetary transactions may lie in the fact that the epigraphy is written by and for an elite seemingly concerned more with merit, hierarchy and display of wealth than bureaucratic detail.