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The purpose of this paper is to examine the nature, causes and consequences of the UK’s productivity problems and whether these may be addressed through the new technologies of artificial intelligence (AI).

This paper reviews the literature on productivity to explain how it relates to earnings within different theoretical frameworks, advocating a “power over rents” framework as most realistic. It explains the UK’s twin productivity problems and reviews their potential causes, critically assessing the capacity for new technologies of AI to address them. It highlights the enduring importance of distribution and the design of work to improving the UK’s productivity.

The authors find that the UK’s productivity problems will not be solved by AI technologies due to technical and socio-technical challenges which will require the significant re-design of work. The authors highlight the importance of aggregate demand, which has been inhibited by the shifting distribution of income towards capital and rising inequality of earnings. These issues suggest an important role for trade unions and a renewal of the institutions of employment regulation and collective bargaining. While reversing recent trends raises considerable challenges, the authors observe renewed interest in trade unions from previously hostile thinktanks and international institutions including the IMF and OECD.

This paper advocates adopting a “power over rents” theoretical framework to understanding productivity and the distribution of gains. This provides a clear rationale for the role of trade unions, employment regulation and collective bargaining in improving distributional outcomes, raising firm-level productivity and achieving real productivity growth at an aggregate level.

The “war on terror” has nothing to do with protecting the U.S. and world's people from “terrorists”, and everything to do with securing the American empire abroad and muzzling democracy and human rights at home. The 9-11 attacks were the pretext which sold the myth of evil Muslim terrorists imminently threatening Americans. That tale allowed the Cheney-led members of the Project for the New American Century (PNAC) to implement their 1990 DPG plan for world control. The “war on terror” is modelled on Islamophobic stereotypes, policies, and political structures developed by the Israeli Likkud and Bush Sr. in 1979. It is designed to inspire popular support for U.S. wars of world conquest. To defeat this plan, we must overcome our Islamophobic fear of “terrorists” and stand in solidarity with Muslims.

This chapter uses the theory of complex systems as a conceptual lens through which to compare the work of Friedrich Hayek with that of Vincent and Elinor Ostrom. It is well known that, from the 1950s onwards, Hayek conceptualised the market as a complex adaptive system. It is argued in this chapter that, while the Ostroms began explicitly to describe polycentric systems as a class of complex adaptive system from the mid-to-late 1990s onwards, they had in fact developed an account of polycentricity as displaying most if not all of the hallmarks of organised complexity long before that time. The Ostromian and Hayekian approaches can thus be seen to share a good deal in common, with both portraying important aspects of society – the market economy in the case of Hayek, and public economies, legal and political systems, and environment resources in the case of the Ostroms – as complex rather than simple systems. Aside from helping to bring out this aspect of the Ostroms’ work, using the theory of complex systems as a framework for comparing the Hayekian and Ostromian approaches serves two other purposes. First, it can be used to show how one widely criticised aspect of Hayek’s theory of society as a complex system, namely his account of cultural evolution via group selection, can be strengthened by an appeal to the work of Elinor Ostrom. Second, it also helps to resolve a tension – ultimately acknowledged by the Ostroms themselves – between some of their explicit methodological pronouncements and the actual, substantive approach they adopted in their analysis of polycentric systems.

The purpose of this chapter is to examine the influence exerted on the thought of F.A. Hayek by the work of the biologist and founder of system theory, Ludwig von Bertalanffy. The author’s methodology includes textual analysis and archival work. It is argued first of all that Bertalanffy provided Hayek with a conceptual framework in terms of which he could articulate the philosophical significance of his theoretical psychology. In particular, Bertalanffy’s work afforded Hayek a set of concepts that helped him to articulate the relationship between mental and physical events – that is, between mind and body – implied by his theory. The second part of the chapter builds on the first by exploring how Hayek subsequently applied the abstract conceptual framework or ontology set out by Bertalanffy to the economy. In this way, Bertalanffy’s ideas helped Hayek to articulate and shape his emerging view of the economy as a complex adaptive system, which consists of different ‘levels of organisation’, which displays ‘structural’ or ‘emergent properties’, and which evolves over time on the basis of those group-level properties.

In the last four years, since Volume I of this Bibliography first appeared, there has been an explosion of literature in all the main functional areas of business. This wealth of material poses problems for the researcher in management studies — and, of course, for the librarian: uncovering what has been written in any one area is not an easy task. This volume aims to help the librarian and the researcher overcome some of the immediate problems of identification of material. It is an annotated bibliography of management, drawing on the wide variety of literature produced by MCB University Press. Over the last four years, MCB University Press has produced an extensive range of books and serial publications covering most of the established and many of the developing areas of management. This volume, in conjunction with Volume I, provides a guide to all the material published so far.

In the 1980s trade unions developed a policy commitment to the unemployed, but research suggests that unions are seen solely as organisations for people in work. What benefits and services can trade unions usefully provide for the unemployed? How can trade union provision for the unemployed be improved? What organisational structures might be developed for the unemployed? These are the questions that this article attempts to address. Providing job information, retraining and legal services appear to be the most promising way forward. Moreover, there is support among the unemployed for these to be provided within a trade union context. However, finance is a problem because the unemployed cannot pay for what they receive. Unions should see provision for the unemployed as an investment in goodwill which is likely to have a pay‐off in terms of future membership stability and strength.

I. Introduction For over forty years, a model for Third World development has gained widespread acceptance. Three key premises underpin the traditional development model: (1) the identification of “development” with the maximization of the rate of national economic growth; (2) the quest to achieve Western living standards and levels of industrialization which require the transfer of labor from the agricultural to the industrial sector as well as increased consumerism; and (3) the integration into the interdependence of Third World nations in the global economy and the global marketplace. Increasing the demand for a Third World nation's exports (in other words, export‐led growth) is viewed as leading to the maximization of a nation's Gross National Product (GNP).

By 1980 unemployment was an important social, economic and political issue. Also by 1980, trade unions were experiencing membership losses for the first time in half a century.