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Peter Boettke and I had taken Don Lavoie's graduate Comparative Economic Systems course during the Fall of 1985. Lavoie had just published Rivalry and Central Planning (Lavoie, 1985b) and National Economic Planning: What is left? (Lavoie, 1985a), and was at the cusp of establishing himself as a major player in the comparative systems and contemporary critique of socialist planning literature.¹

Developing an alternative and more realistic modeling of the firm, the key point of this paper is that workers cooperatives represent a form of corporate governance, which is a subset of the participatory organizational form, that constitutes a competitive alternative to the typical relatively hierarchical and narrowly controlled firms. An important component of the cooperative advantage lies in its capacity to increase the quantity and quality of effort inputs into the ‘production process.’ However, to do so incurs economic costs. Thus, cooperatives can yield competitive outcomes without driving out of the market non-cooperative organizational forms. To some extent, whether cooperative or other participatory solutions are adopted depends upon the preferences of economic agents since cooperatives are shown to be competitive even in an extremely competitive environment. However, dominant or not, the cooperative solution can yield higher social–economic welfare levels to members.

This chapter explores if alternative participatory co-creation approaches have the potential for deploying an emancipatory urbanism that is able to contest the urban dynamics of (digital) capitalism. It does so by focusing on the Barcelona case. Barcelona fully embraced a “smart citizen” approach in 2011 to become a European referent in smart urban strategies. However, in 2015, with the arrival of a new municipal government, Barcelona has situated itself contesting the “smart city” and at the forefront of alternative possibilities with its “technological sovereignty” strategy. This shift aims to remake the smart city agenda for citizens through the advancement of the right to information and guarantees to open, transparent, and participatory decision-making through new digital and platform technologies. The chapter argues, first, that “technological sovereignty” has been instrumental in re-politicizing the notions of (smart) citizenship and technology, deploying initiatives aimed at regaining public control on data and citizens participating in policy-making. Second, Barcelona’s technological sovereignty strategy, though framed as locally and bottom-up, is based on a global comprehension and diagnosis of the global dynamics of digital capitalism. However, sometimes, there still remains an over-optimistic stance concerning digital technology. Thus, for any alternative to the neoliberal smart city, it is necessary to decenter the debate from the technologies themselves or the local, and recognize that any emancipatory strategy is also about acknowledging that technology-led solutions are not autonomous of broader relations of production and complex political economy geographies.

Davos World Economic Forum (2008a–d) sparked off a number of critical points on global economic remodeling. They bring forth social and economic facts that are to be addressed in a framework quite different from the conventional policy-theoretic reasoning of age-old socioeconomics. The prevalent reasoning continues on the traditional paradigm of growth and sharing, but in an unequal world of power, politics, and self-interest. In the present status quo, resources do not flow between the top and bottom, the industrialized and the developing countries, the rich and the poor, except by means of handouts and relief (Hans Singer and Ansari, 1988).

In this chapter, we aim to illustrate some of the forms taken by informal employment in the global south and how these can best be understood by adopting a wider analytical lens than has been applied in much of the precarious employment literature. We draw on the findings of a recent study of the working conditions of urban informal workers from 10 cities in the global south. The study consisted of focus groups (15 in each city) conducted through the framework of a participatory informal economy appraisal as well as a survey of 1,957 home-based workers, street vendors, and waste pickers. Our findings illustrate a number of ways in which these three groups of informal workers are embedded within the formal economy. While they are not engaged in wage employment, they play subordinate roles to both formal sector firms within global production networks and unequal production relations and to the state through, inter alia, constrained access to public spaces and regulation. In order to interpret these findings, we apply Agarwala’s (2009) “relational” lens to demonstrate how risks and costs are transferred to workers who constitute the “real economy” in much of the global south. Given the often disguised connections between informal employment and the formal economy, this approach also provides a bridge to understanding precarious working conditions and the effects of globalization outside of the industrialized north.

This conceptual chapter develops a discussion expounding the Islamic perspective of corporate governance as a special case of a broader decision-making theory that uses the premise of Islamic socio-scientific epistemology. This chapter contributes fresh knowledge in corporate governance theory in the light of two central issues. First, the central issue is of organic preference formation studied systemically by process model. The second issue is of transaction cost minimization while pursuing such a discursive and participatory model of decision-making in an environment governed by a systemic meaning of unity of knowledge as its episteme. Relevant institutional policies are shown to be capable of formulation in the light of such systemic discursion under the episteme of unity of knowledge understood and applied in the systemic organic sense.

Corona has been used as a mask for the deepening crisis of the capitalist system. It deepened the damage of those who suffered the most from the system. It deepened the harm of precarious street workers even more, making living conditions difficult. Not enough resources were allocated to street workers, only pocket money and food packages. At the same time, the Corona crisis strengthened the streets, making the street more visible. Street workers prevented inflation by providing goods and food at low prices in poor neighbourhoods throughout the stay period. Many products with scarcity supplied by street workers. Millions of unemployed people became entrepreneurs in the form of new simple street jobs. Increasing number of street entrepreneurs attracted local governments. Local governments developed projects to regulate the sales by street vendors. Very small-scale street entrepreneurs also developed a sense of solidarity by establishing cooperatives among themselves. The surveys showed that the poor were in solidarity with street vendors. Even street vendors bought products directly from producers who could not sell their products, distributed for free in poor neighbourhoods or sold at half the price of markets. Street economy is the most important component of the social economy. It was once again understood that the streets are not a problem but, the system created the problem. Street economy is not a problem. It is a spontaneous solution to the problems and crises of capitalism.

There are the interesting words of Myrdal in respect of the universality and commonness of what a scientific problem means:From then on more definitely I came to see that in reality there are no economic, sociological, psychological problems, but just problems and they are all mixed and composite. In research the only permissible demarcation is between relevant and irrelevant conditions. The problems are regularly also political and have moreover to be seen in historical perspective. (Myrdal, 1979, p. 106)

To establish these definitions we revisit expression (5.3) of Chapter 5. Since this expression describes a phenomenological model of knowledge transmission from its epistemic origin to the world-system by learning processes, therefore, we first summarize the arguments on what can be the nature of (Ω,S) in this expression. Our arguments were centered on the contrasting nature of moral absolutism and the ethical meaning so derived. This axiomatic core of the arguments stood up against moral relativism of both the rationalist and religious types on which is premised a different meaning of ethics.

This paper examines roles of mandated employee participation rights (EPRs), such as works council legislation, in corporate governance. Links between employment and corporate relationships are stressed. Market failure arguments are developed, predicting that EPRs, and the interaction between EPRs and investments in skills, can positively impact productivity; preliminary evidence from German establishments is generally supportive. A qualitative appraisal concludes that EPRs have not harmed economies that adopt them. Policies to expand EPRs in the US are introduced, jointly encouraging skill development and employee decision-making participation, full rights for employee stock ownership plan (ESOP) participants, legal regulation of terms such as “participation,” and EPR extension services.