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This essay is a tribute to Jaroslav Vanek who spent 32 years at Cornell University where he founded the Program on Participation and Labor-Managed Systems (PPLMS) in 1970, which became the home for economic research on these issues in the US. It is a brief intellectual history of a multi-dimensional scholar.

Vanek's seminal work in the American Economic Review in 1969 marked the culmination of a decade of work on labor management inspired by his brother Jan's work on Yugoslavia, considered then to be a worker-managed economic system. In two rapidly following tomes, Vanek laid out the landscape for the development of a new subfield in economics by providing precursors to many of the results to follow. In that previous decade, Vanek produced papers in traditional economic theory, e.g. international trade and economic growth.

Vanek's mindset persists in the interplay between the emerging theory of labor-managed firms and traditional economic literature that takes seriously the role of organizational form. This essay develops that cross-pollination and seeks to identify the remaining questions and issues for future work that the economics profession owes to Jaroslav Vanek.

Connection of strands of literature in the economic theory with the literature on labor-managed firms and worker-managed economies tracing the evolution of the latter to the work of Jaroslav Vanek.

The main aim of this paper is to provide an assessment of the intellectual impact of the work of Jaroslav Vanek in the related fields of participation and labor management (hereafter, PLM) and participation and employee ownership (hereafter, PEO).

This paper used mixed methods including bibliometric analysis.

Vanek's work, particularly the General Theory of Labor-Managed Market Economies, (Vanek, 1970) is the building block for the modern scientific study of cooperatives and for helping to establish the fields of PLM and PEO. Vanek (1970) continues to be the highest cited publication each year that investigates the pure case of a labor-managed firm. Arguably his work has played a significant role is setting the stage for the development of adjacent fields in economics such as the new institutional economics. For an economist, his work has had an unusually strong impact on work outside of economics.

No similar assessment has been undertaken before.

The purpose of this article is to summarize the relationship between the research of Jaroslav Vanek on labor-managed firms (LMFs) and the research of Gregory K. Dow on the same topic.

The article reviews the research of Jaroslav Vanek in the 1970s and explains how this influenced the publications of Gregory K. Dow extending from the 1980s to the present. A particular focus involves Dow's book “The Labor-Managed Firm: Theoretical Foundations” published by Cambridge University Press in 2018. The methodology is to present an intellectual history in narrative form. The scope of the paper is the economic theory of the LMF.

The article finds that Dow's interest in LMFs was stimulated by Vanek's publications from the early 1970s. However, Dow's publications in the 1980s were motivated to a large degree by efforts to overcome the limitations of Vanek's theory of the LMF, a goal that shaped much of Dow's later research in the field.

The paper illuminates the strong intellectual influence Jaroslav Vanek exerted on the economic theory of the LMF. Readers who want information about the influences on Dow's work may also find it useful.

Jaroslav Vanek argues that the ecological degradation of the planet is more severe in a capitalist system than it would be in a fully democratic one. At the heart of the ecological preservation question is how the classic public goods problem can be solved, and we are skeptical that a fully democratic system could solve this problem any better than the capitalist system, particularly given that consumer demand for environmental protection appears to be income elastic and that the capitalist system can be expected to generate higher levels of societal wealth than the democratic system. While we disagree with Vanek's conclusion and with many of its underlying arguments, we agree that the ecological well-being of the planet is of great importance, that it is expected that economic activity will have ecological implications, and, therefore, that it is well worth comparing the expected ecological impacts of alternative socio-economic systems.

This book is a policy proposal aimed at the democratic left. It is concerned with gradual but radical reform of the socio‐economic system. An integrated policy of industrial and economic democracy, which centres around the establishment of a new sector of employee‐controlled enterprises, is presented. The proposal would retain the mix‐ed economy, but transform it into a much better “mixture”, with increased employee‐power in all sectors. While there is much of enduring value in our liberal western way of life, gross inequalities of wealth and power persist in our society.

Five years ago in a review of Jaroslav Vanek's The Labour‐Managed Economy published in this journal, the present writer ventured, inter alia, two general observations on the economics literature of the labour‐managed firm. First, “Vanek has contributed more words and analysis on this subject than the rest of the economics profession put together”. Secondly, “In spite of the increasing concern shown by the ‘men of deeds’ with participation, income sharing and producers' cooperatives over the last ten years the majority of the ‘men of words’ who have offered any advice have been of the sociological species… This reviewer is optimistic enough to hope that this is not because economists have nothing to contribute”. A review of three new books on the subject provides a timely opportunity to reassess these observations.

There is now a considerable literature on the Illyrian firm (that is, the firm which is assumed to maximise income per worker), and it has been argued that the analysis may have relevance for the labour‐managed or co‐operative enterprise. Significant contributions to this literature have been made by Domar (1966), Vanek (1970), Meade (1972, 1974) and others but the seminal paper is generally recognised to be that of Ward (1958).

In this chapter, we aim to illustrate some of the forms taken by informal employment in the global south and how these can best be understood by adopting a wider analytical lens than has been applied in much of the precarious employment literature. We draw on the findings of a recent study of the working conditions of urban informal workers from 10 cities in the global south. The study consisted of focus groups (15 in each city) conducted through the framework of a participatory informal economy appraisal as well as a survey of 1,957 home-based workers, street vendors, and waste pickers. Our findings illustrate a number of ways in which these three groups of informal workers are embedded within the formal economy. While they are not engaged in wage employment, they play subordinate roles to both formal sector firms within global production networks and unequal production relations and to the state through, inter alia, constrained access to public spaces and regulation. In order to interpret these findings, we apply Agarwala’s (2009) “relational” lens to demonstrate how risks and costs are transferred to workers who constitute the “real economy” in much of the global south. Given the often disguised connections between informal employment and the formal economy, this approach also provides a bridge to understanding precarious working conditions and the effects of globalization outside of the industrialized north.