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The paper provides a detailed historical account of Douglass C. North's early intellectual contributions and analytical developments in pursuing a Grand Theory for why some countries are rich and others poor.

The author approaches the discussion using a theoretical and historical reconstruction based on published and unpublished materials.

The systematic, continuous and profound attempt to answer the Smithian social coordination problem shaped North's journey from being a young serious Marxist to becoming one of the founders of New Institutional Economics. In the process, he was converted in the early 1950s into a rigid neoclassical economist, being one of the leaders in promoting New Economic History. The success of the cliometric revolution exposed the frailties of the movement itself, namely, the limitations of neoclassical economic theory to explain economic growth and social change. Incorporating transaction costs, the institutional framework in which property rights and contracts are measured, defined and enforced assumes a prominent role in explaining economic performance.

In the early 1970s, North adopted a naive theory of institutions and property rights still grounded in neoclassical assumptions. Institutional and organizational analysis is modeled as a social maximizing efficient equilibrium outcome. However, the increasing tension between the neoclassical theoretical apparatus and its failure to account for contrasting political and institutional structures, diverging economic paths and social change propelled the modification of its assumptions and progressive conceptual innovation. In the later 1970s and early 1980s, North abandoned the efficiency view and gradually became more critical of the objective rationality postulate. In this intellectual movement, North's avant-garde research program contributed significantly to the creation of New Institutional Economics.

This study aims to present the perspectives of heterodox economics and Islamic economics on environmental economics, as an alternative to mainstream economics, which takes economic growth as its main objective and argues that environmental problems will largely disappear when economic growth is achieved.

In this study, there was no intention to conduct a detailed analysis of heterodox economic models and Islamic economics. Instead, the approaches to the “environment,” which can be considered as an urgent need of the planet, were evaluated, and the inadequate proposals of the mainstream economics’ environmental approach were theoretically criticized and heterodox economics and Islamic economics were proposed as an alternative model.

Heterodox and Islamic economics offer alternative models of development prioritizing social and ecological justice to address environmental problems, which is in contrast to mainstream economics’ narrow focus on market mechanisms and individual rationality. Thus, engaging in more dialogue in the context of the environment is inevitable for both schools, considering the vast geography inhabited by Muslims and the proposed heterodox economic policies, and moreover, these approaches are modeled for the first time.

This article presents a synthesis of Islamic economics and heterodox thinking in contrast to mainstream economic policy, highlighting their similarities and differences and providing a more comprehensive understanding of the complexities and potential solutions of environmental problems. To the best of the authors’ knowledge, this approach has not been previously explored, making it an original contribution to the literature.

This study aims to investigate the viewpoints of heterodox economic thoughts and Islamic economic thought concerning the concept of waste. Additionally, it explores the shared criticisms that both perspectives hold against mainstream economic thought in relation to waste.

First of all, the concept of waste is examined and the global effects of waste are investigated. Criticisms directed in the context of waste in mainstream economics in the context of heterodox school thoughts are examined. Likewise, criticisms directed in the context of waste in mainstream economics in the context of Islamic economic thoughts are examined. Finally, the common and different aspects of heterodox and Islamic economic thoughts were discussed, and the common criticisms of mainstream economic thought’s point of view toward waste were examined. This study is a theoretical, qualitative study.

Although both ideas have different aspects, heterodox and Islamic economic thoughts believe that the mainstream economy, which is based on capitalism and materialism, creates waste by ignoring the long-term social and environmental consequences of economic activity. They argue that the pursuit of profits and growth, without considering the impact on society and the environment, leads to an inefficient and unsustainable use of resources.

The best author’s knowledge, by emphasizing the common and different aspects of Islamic economics and heterodox thoughts, this study is the first to examine the concept of waste in the context of the common aspects of these ideas.

Scholarship on America’s K-12 economics curriculum reveals an inattention to many harmful economic realities, specifically wealth inequality. Critics of the present curriculum posit that its emphasis on out-dated concepts and models ignores crucial elements of reality that impact economic interaction and identities. In response to the dominant economic paradigm and methods, this practitioner-focused paper discusses an economically pluralist, pedagogically critical approach to interrogating destructive economic realities. It details how three social studies classroom simulations based on the board game Monopoly may be integrated with certain informational texts to explore economic factors that contribute to America’s unique form of wealth inequality.

This paper describes wealth inequality in America and rationalizes the need to make this social problem a focus of study in the secondary social studies classroom. First, I survey the present curricular apparatus of K-12 economics education and then argue for a pluralist approach that expands the curriculum’s dominant neoclassical paradigm. Connecting economic pluralism to critical citizen education, I draw upon emerging critical economic citizen education scholarship to explain attendant pedagogical and instructional approaches. The described lesson builds upon a tradition of Monopoly simulations, is rooted in critical citizen education pedagogy and aligns with Soroko’s (2023) critical economic literacy framework.

This paper progresses the curricular movement of economic pluralism through its critique of America’s current K-12 economics curriculum that does not focus on immediate, lived social problems. It further defines critical economics, citizenship and pedagogy, then details an instructional practice that employs critical disciplinary tools to investigate contributing factors of American wealth inequality.

This paper contributes to the growing field of pluralist economic perspectives and pedagogies. Specifically, it enriches understanding of critical economics citizenship education by further defining attendant pedagogy and explaining Monopoly as an instructional tool for critical economics citizen education. Previous works have discussed Monopoly’s utility for teaching various concepts within the social studies disciplines. This simulation lesson is unique in its instructional approach that merges simulation experiences with certain informational texts to cultivate critical economic knowledge of American wealth inequality and critical economic skills for critiquing and transforming oppressive economic realities.

This study aims to discuss the behavioral economics and Islamic economic joint criticisms against the conceptual and economic political view of the mainstream.

The purpose of this study is to examine the effectiveness of mainstream economic policies in addressing unemployment. Furthermore, it critically assesses the mainstream perspective on unemployment within the contexts of Islamic economics and behavioral economics, separately. The commonalities and disparities between the approaches of Islamic economics and behavioral economics regarding unemployment are evaluated. Subsequently, the conventional viewpoint on unemployment is scrutinized from the combined standpoint of Islamic economics and behavioral economics. This article employs a theoretical approach to address these concerns.

Although there are some differences, the recommendations and values of Islamic Economics and behavioral economics in the context of unemployment are almost the same. And, more importantly, both approaches are similar in their emphasis on the ineffectiveness and distance from human values of mainstream economic policies.

This article is the first to examine unemployment from the joint perspectives of Islamic economics and behavioral economics. It is also the first article to criticize the mainstream view of unemployment from the common framework of these two approaches.

This paper aims to find out what attitudes Economics and Business students have towards sustainability and what they expect from their education in relation to the achievement of economic, social and environmental sustainability. The objective is to find out if the studies of Economics and Business favour the development of pro-sustainability attitudes, taking into account factors such as the gender of the students, the course in which they are enrolled and the economic training received before entering university.

A survey was designed covering ecological, social, cultural, economic and political aspects. The survey was conducted among students of the Bachelor’s Degree in Business Administration and Management and the Bachelor’s Degree in Economics. The authors used discriminant analysis and analysis of variance to test the research hypothesis.

Students are concerned about environmental problems and are aware of the need for action, but there is little consensus on the actions needed to overcome them. Some negationist traits are detected: those who rely more on technology give less importance to environmental problems and to the possibility of a major ecological catastrophe. Girls are more in favour of sustainability than boys, and students who have previously studied economics consider that their training has enabled them to evaluate the resources available and necessary to perform any job more than those who have not studied economics, regardless of their sex and year.

Many articles have focused on the importance of sustainability in higher education, but hardly any have analysed the role of economic education in achieving sustainability. Given the importance and the proven inter-relationship between economics and sustainability, with this article, the authors contribute to fill the gap in the literature. It is necessary that current students and future professionals receive adequate economic education.

In the years following the publication of A Theory of Consumption (1923), Hazel Kyrk’s book became the flagship of the field that would later be known as the economics of consumption. It stimulated theoretical and empirical work on consumption. Some of the existing literature on Kyrk (e.g., Kiss & Beller, 2000; Le Tollec, 2020; Tadajewski, 2013) depicted her theory as the starting point of the economics of consumption. Nevertheless, how and why it emerged the way it did remain largely unexplored. This chapter examines Kyrk’s intellectual background, which, we argue, can be traced back to two main movements in the United States: the home economics and the institutionalist. Both movements conveyed specific endeavors as responses to the US material and social transformations that occurred at the turn of the 20th century, notably the perceived changing role of consumption and that of women in US society. On the one hand, Kyrk pursued first-generation home economists’ efforts to make sense of and put into action the shifting of women’s role from domestic producer to consumer. On the other hand, she reinterpreted Veblen’s (1899) account of consumption in order to reveal its operational value for a normative agenda focused on “wise” and “rational” consumption. This chapter studies how Kyrk carried on first-generation home economists’ progressive agenda and how she adapted Veblen’s fin-de-siècle critical account of consumption to the context of the household goods developed in 1900–1920. Our account of Kyrk’s intellectual roots offers a novel narrative to better understand the role of gender and epistemological questions in her theory.

Earlier studies on employee turnover have invested enormous scholarly mileage to understand and address human resource challenges. Considering the substantial evidence on the negative and non-linear relationship between employee turnover and firms’ performance, the purpose of this study is to investigate the effects of employee turnover on the social outreach (e.g. breadth of outreach) of microfinance institutions (MFIs), also known as the financial inclusion agenda of the Sustainable Development Goals.

To achieve the study objective, the authors collected unbalanced panel data of 1,391 MFIs, covering a total of 96 economies and a period of 2010–2018. The organizational and macroeconomic data were obtained from the World Bank’s Mix Market and World Development Indicators databases, respectively, and subsequently analysed using the pooled ordinary least squares, random effects model, fixed effects model and generalized method of moments.

Overall, the authors found that employee turnover has a positive impact on the social outreach of MFIs, which suggests that employee turnover reduces organizational blindness and groupthink, potentiates efficiency gains and minimizes retention costs. On the contrary, this study does not find evidence of a non-linear effect of employee turnover on the outreach objectives of MFIs. Meanwhile, these effects were observed to vary depending on the proxy, sub-samples and techniques used in the analysis.

Motivated by the paucity of literature, the study has uniquely investigated the effect of employee turnover on the social outreach objective of MFIs by using relatively recent and global-level data. The study findings can help managers and the human resource departments to make optimum decisions about employee turnover management.