Search results

This paper is the first to present empirical evidence consistent with models of signaling through unemployment and to uncover a new stylized fact using the 1988–2006 Displaced Worker Supplement (DWS) of the Current Population Survey (CPS), namely that, among white-collar workers, post-displacement earnings fall less rapidly with unemployment spells for layoffs than for plant closings. Because high-productivity workers are more likely to be recalled than low-productivity ones, they may choose to signal their productivity though unemployment, in which case the duration of unemployment may be positively related to post-displacement wages. Identification is done using workers whose plant closed as they cannot be recalled, and no incentives to signal arise.

Textbook knowledge about entrepreneurs and entrepreneurship is always very sterile because discussion treats enterprises and their actors in an “all are alike” approach as if there is a unique and average size and type. Entrepreneurship takes place in multiple sites and spaces and researchers must specify and contextualize rather than decontextualizing their cases. The chapter argues that the vast majority of entrepreneurs falls into the category of micro-entrepreneurs where economic activities are run without further employees paid by wage or salary. In the average of the European Union, more than 70 out of 100 entrepreneurs belong to this group of small business(wo)men. However, even this category is wide and covers many forms of activities under different labels, such as small farmers, freelancers, solo self-employed, independent professionals and others. In this context, also the development of new media and technologies as well as digitalization influence those economic activities of the actors due to their significant impact on processes and possibilities. Social media influences those one-(wo)men-firm owners privately and commercially but social media are – vice versa – also an object of influence since businesspeople use platforms to orchestrate themselves on the internet. Online platforms serve as tools to advertise where people create their own identity and typical brand. This chapter asks for the links between craftsmen, artisans and micro-entrepreneurs and their use and handling of social media by presenting first empirical results of an investigation which has been undertaken in Austria.

Hayek’s “Use of knowledge in society” is often misunderstood. Hayek’s point is not just that prices aggregate dispersed knowledge, but also that the knowledge embedded in prices would not exist absent the market process. Later, in The Constitution of Liberty, he argues that this same idea can also be applied to the study of political and collective choice phenomena. Democracy is not just about aggregating preferences. Absent the democratic process, the knowledge necessary to solve collective problems is not generated. We compare this perspective on democracy to Bryan Caplan’s and Helen Landemore’s theories, and we argue that Hayek’s account focused on “opinion falsification” is richer. Unlike Caplan or Landemore, who adopt a static perspective, Hayek is more interested in the long-term tendencies and feed-back mechanisms. For example, why do Western democracies seem to have gradually moved away from the most deleterious types of economic policies (such as price controls)? Hayek’s conjecture is that the democratic process itself is responsible for this. We connect Hayek’s conjecture about democracy to the broader argument made by Vincent Ostrom, who has claimed that public choice should study not just incentive structures, but also collective learning processes. We believe that this line of research, that is, comparative institutional analysis based on the collective learning capacities embedded in alternative institutional arrangements, merits a lot more attention than it has received so far. The question “Which collective choice arrangements have the best epistemic properties?” is one of the most important neglected questions in political economy.

Purpose – This study investigates the practice of dreaming in consumer culture – a phenomenon that has been excluded from previous CCT discussions despite its inevitable presence in consumers' everyday lives.

Methodology/approach – The chapter draws upon anthropological, sociological, and ethnological literature on dreaming and upon a practice-based literature on consumption so as to explore the reciprocal relation between dreaming and consumer culture. The theoretical starting point is, thus, that society dreams in us. Empirically, dream diaries are used as data.

Findings – The exploratory analysis indicates that both the content of dreams and the way dreams are conceived are shaped and structured by the practices, values, and symbols offered by the globalized media and consumer culture.

Implications – The insight that the market and media discourse organizes also the world of dreams has implications to the existing literature on fantasy and fun, marketization, and mediatization of everyday life and on the literature on consumption places and spaces. More generally, the study unsettles the disciplinary habit of taking the waking and alert consumer as the unquestioned starting point of knowledge production and theory-making in cultural consumer research. Dreams provide an angle for further theorizing many key aspects of consumer culture, such as the notion of active consumer and meaning-making.