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At the turn of the 20th-century railroad regulation was hotly debated in the United States. Railways were accused of abusing of their monopolistic position, in particular by discriminating rates. Public opinion’s pressure for tighter regulation led to the 1906 enactment of the Hepburn Act, which strengthened the powers of the Interstate Commerce Commission. American economists actively participated in the debate. While most of them sided with the pro-regulation camp, the best economic analysis came from those who used the logic of modern law and economics to demonstrate how most railroads’ practices, including rate discrimination, were simply rational, pro-efficiency behavior. However, as relatively unknown Chicago University economist Hugo R. Meyer would discover, proposing that logic in public events could at that time cost you your academic career.

At the turn of the twentieth century, various Socialist parties vied for a place in the American political system, making alliances where possible and convenient with elements of organized labor. Robert Franklin Hoxie, an economist at the University of Chicago whose principle contributions lay in his writings on the labor movement, wrote a series of essays in which he scrutinized the activities of the Socialist Party of America as it appeared to be at the time poised to become a viable force in American politics. This essay examines Hoxie’s writings on the conventions of the Socialist Party within the context of the political dynamic of the period and reveals his interpretations of events based on contemporary accounts and first-hand observations.

Responding to the increased visibility of populist demagogues in the critical and cultural discourses of contemporary Western society, recent activity within the academy has sought to clarify, develop and (re)define populism as a phenomenon. Via analyses of Aliens (Cameron, 1986), The Running Man (Glaser, 1987) and Robocop (Verhoeven, 1987), this chapter draws upon these conceptualisations to revisit a sample of action heroes from the eighties action cinema. Exploring the intersection of these gendered identities with the aesthetics of ideational populism, the chapter demonstrates how such texts have helped shape the nature of the action cinema genre from the outset. In doing so, the chapter considers (1) how these narratives construct a duality of homogenous antagonistic groups, organised around a virtuous people and corrupt self-serving elite, thereby mirroring the fundamental conditions of populism, (2) how the super-objectives guiding the principles and actions of characters operate as gendered and thin-centred ideologies which fail to offer meaningful solutions to the wider socio-political issues encountered, and (3) how Richards, Ripley and Robocop are positioned as self-appointed demagogues, who pursue personal, rather than common, solutions and often operate without conventional societal constraints.

In today’s markets, many organizations feel pressure to become more responsive to their customers. Managing your business to deliver superior value to targeted customers may provide a strong avenue to improved performance. The route from value-based strategies to share holder value can be complicated, however. These strategies have the most direct impact on performance with your customers in the form of customer satisfaction, word of mouth and loyalty. Successful customer performance should translate into higher market performance, as evidenced by a supplier’s higher customer retention rates and sales. Finally, market performance provides the engine for increasing company performance or shareholder value. Attaining shareholder value through customer value strategies requires committing major management attention to how best to create, deliver and communicate superior value to targeted customers.

Since the rise of rationalism (Bond, 1935) the imagination has often been considered too subjective, and at times regarded with scholarly skepticism (Burke, 2008). Yet, imagination seems to provide basic psychological functions for the human intellect and our understanding particularly of large problems (Hillman, 1975), (Winnicott, 1971). More than the mere ‘fancy’ criticized by Dr Johnson (Havens, 1943), the imagination serves both speculative and interpretive functions, displaying distinct use of cerebral imagery to solve complex environmental and interpersonal challenges. Yorke (2013) argues that humans experience the world dialectically, interpreting everything as cause and effect. Imagination plays a vital role in these universal narratives, shaping our cultural heritage, expression and experience (Zittoun & Gläveanu, 2018). Our oldest tales feature monsters, creatures who are often more interesting and memorable than the heroes who fight them. Halberstam (1995) theorises that monsters are meaning machines. Monsters serve an admonitionary role, and their transgressive nature defines them while displaying a distinct visuality. Like imagination, monsters enable us to analyse and approach difficult topics in innovative ways.

H. P. Lovecraft is one of the most influential horror writers of the twentieth century (King, 1985). Imagination, the visual and the monstrous find a unique balance in his works. Using Lovecraft's copious correspondence, his drawings and his 1927 short story The Call of Cthulhu as a lens, the relationships between imagination, the visual and the monstrous are examined. These postulate an underlying mutual interdependence between the normative and the monstrous and suggest Lovecraft's imaginative use of the visual and monstrous to transgress the bounds of conventional epistemologies and experiences, thereby displacing the anthropocentric focus of conventional narratives.

Capitalism has proved to be by far the best society at producing surpluses. Other societies at particular points in history have been effective, too. For instance Ancient Egyptians were obviously good at it, directing their surplus into building pyramids and great monuments. The Mayans, Incas and Aztecs were good at it too, in the same way as were the Neolithic builders of Stonehenge in England, the Callinish stones in the Hebrides and Carnac in Britanny. Capitalism, however, is unique in the sense that its capacity to produce surpluses far exceeds that of any other period or system. In addition, the capitalist system involves a threefold possibility for the utilization of the surpluses: consumption by individuals, consumption by the state for civil and military purposes and reinvestment by capitalists to produce more surplus. The balance among these three determines the stability of the system and the pace of growth. Consumption by the state is the least new phenomenon; here again, the pyramids of the Aztecs, Mayans and Egyptians are examples. What is new, and certainly new on the scale we now observe, is that the capitalist system is dependent on those individuals who collectively make up the absorptive class, and on the host of small and medium capitalists and the huge corporations to reinvest the surplus to make more capital. However, the system as a whole serves to destroy the surpluses when capitalist processes are such that the capacity to consume diminishes in relation to the quantities produced.