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This chapter provides an alternative interpretation of the emergence of the “Ramsey-Cass-Koopmans” growth model, a framework which, alongside the overlapping generation model, is the dominant approach in today’s macroeconomics. By focusing on the role Paul Samuelson played through the works he developed in the turnpike literature, the author’s goal is to provide a more accurate history of growth theory of the 1940–1960s, one which started before Solow (1956) but never had him as a central reference. Inspired by John von Neumann’s famous 1945 article, Samuelson wrote his first turnpike paper by trying to conjecture an alternative optimal growth path (Samuelson, 1949 [1966]). In the 1960s, after reformulating the intertemporal utility model presented in Ramsey (1928), Samuelson began to propound it as a representative agent model. Through Samuelson’s interactions with colleagues and PhD students at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), and given his standing in the profession, he encouraged a broader use of that device in macroeconomics, particularly, in growth theory. With the publication of Samuelson (1965), Tjalling Koopmans and Lionel McKenzie rewrote their own articles in order to account for the new approach. This work complements a recently written account on growth theory by Assaf and Duarte (2018).

Certain elements of Hayek’s work are prominent precursors to the modern field of complex adaptive systems, including his ideas on spontaneous order, his focus on market processes, his contrast between designing and gardening, and his own framing of complex systems. Conceptually, he was well ahead of his time, prescient in his formulation of novel ways to think about economies and societies. Technically, the fact that he did not mathematically formalize most of the notions he developed makes his insights hard to incorporate unambiguously into models. However, because so much of his work is divorced from the simplistic models proffered by early mathematical economics, it stands as fertile ground for complex systems researchers today. I suggest that Austrian economists can create a progressive research program by building models of these Hayekian ideas, and thereby gain traction within the economics profession. Instead of mathematical models the suite of techniques and tools known as agent-based computing seems particularly well-suited to addressing traditional Austrian topics like money, business cycles, coordination, market processes, and so on, while staying faithful to the methodological individualism and bottom-up perspective that underpin the entire school of thought.

Because clustering of organizational activities in space induces – and at the same time emerges from patterns of imperfect connectivity among interacting agents, the study of geography and strategy necessarily hinges on assumptions about how agents are linked. Spatial structure matters for the evolutionary dynamics of organizations because social systems are prime examples of connected systems, i.e. systems whose collective properties emerge from interaction among a large number of component micro-elements. Starting from this proposition, in this paper we explore the value of the claim that a wide range of interesting organizational phenomena can be represented as the outcome of processes that occur in overlapping local neighborhoods embedded in more general network structures. We document how patterns of spatial organization are sensitive to assumptions about the range of local interaction and about expectation formation mechanisms that induce temporal interdependence in agents’ choice. Within the lattice world that we define we discover a concave relation between the sensitivity of individual agents to new information (cognitive inertia) and system-level performance. These results provide experimental evidence in favor of the general claim that the evolutionary dynamics of social systems are directly affected by patterns of spatial organization induced by network-based activities.

Last decades scholars in the field of human resource management (HRM) have intensely examined the contribution of HRM to organizational performance. Despite their efforts, at least one major research shortcoming can be identified. In general, they have devoted far too little attention to an aspect of HRM potentially beneficial for organizational performance: worker participation, and especially its indirect or representative forms. In contrast, for academics embedded in the industrial relations tradition, worker participation is a prominent theme, even though less emphasized in its relationship with company objectives. One might defend traditional scholars' reservations by arguing that participations main goal concerns workplace democratization and not organizational prosperity. However, several writers state that industrial democracy involving worker participation can channel conflicts of interest between employees and employers and stimulate desired employee attitudes and behavior, consequently enhancing organizational performance (e.g., Gollan, 2006; Ramsay, 1991; Taras & Kaufman, 1999). And, indeed, several studies have shown positive effects of both direct participation (e.g., European Foundation for the Improvement of Living and Working Conditions, 1997) and indirect participation (e.g., Addison et al., 2000, 2003; Frick & Möller, 2003) on organizational performance.

Nevertheless, to date, the absence of an integrated model explaining the connection between worker participation and organizational performance leads to the following question that still is in need of an answer: how do direct and indirect forms of participation – separate as well as in combination – affect organizational performance? This chapter aims to contribute to the filling of the aforementioned knowledge gaps. In so doing, we focus on direct and indirect, nonunion participation on the firm level, using a Western European and especially Dutch frame of reference.