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Review essay on Stephen A. Resnick and Richard D. Wolff’s, Class Theory and History: Capitalism and Communism in the USSR. New York and London: Routledge. xiv + 353 pp. 2002. The overwhelming ideological dominance of neo-liberalism has led to the widespread acceptance of the most facile explanations of the collapse of the Soviet Union, whose demise supposedly demonstrates the validity of Adam Smith’s critique of political intervention in the functioning of the market. In this book Stephen Resnick and Richard Wolff undertake the vitally important task of theorizing the rise and fall of the Soviet Union from a Marxist perspective. Resnick and Wolff follow the neo-liberals in seeing the Soviet Union as a form of capitalism administered by the state, but reject the neo-liberal critique of the inefficiency of state capitalism, celebrating the supposedly great economic achievements of the Soviet Union. The failure of the Soviet Union lay not in the dominance of the state, but in the failure to go beyond state capitalism to establish a communist society. Instead of building on the limited communist elements in soviet society, the Soviet Union was marked by the persistence of what Resnick and Wolff call the “ancient” and “feudal” class structures which ultimately proved its undoing, by undermining the state capitalist appropriation of the surplus and providing the cultural and political foundations for a return to private capitalist forms of surplus appropriation.

The purpose of this paper is to illustrate the contribution offered by Wolff’s sociology of knowledge to organizational ethnography and to enrich the lexicon of practice-based studies with the concept of surrender-and-catch.

Drawing on Wolff’s writing, the surrender-and-catch perspective is introduced and how to be inspired by it is illustrated in relation to three working practices.

The centrality of the body and of sensible knowledge for doing ethnographies of working practices is affirmed and the surrender-and-catch perspective is interpreted as an art of seeing connections.

Surrender-to may be included in the methodology for studying knowing-in-practice and it may help students to get prepared to conduct an organizational ethnography.

A contribution to frame the legacy of a sociologist of knowledge little known in organization studies. Its contribution stresses the importance of a plurality of forms of knowing alongside the rational-analytic one. Therefore Kurt Wolff’s work becomes relevant within the practice-based studies.

This study is a replication of Wolff and Reed’s (2000) work. The purpose of this paper is to examine how the combination of resources brought to joint ventures influence parent-firm performance. This study is also interested in whether or not the exposure of immobile resources through the semi-transparent membrane of the joint venture can have negative effects on parent-firm performance.

The sample consists of two-parent joint ventures formed by publicly traded US firms between 1997 and 2013. The event-study methodology is used to calculate each parent-firm’s abnormal returns. This work also uses content analysis to analyze parent-firms’ annual reports (10-K).

While Wolff and Reed’s results on resource allocation within joint ventures were not statistically significant, this replication study provided strong support to the resource allocation hypothesis. It was found that intangible resource heterogeneity within a joint venture creates higher performance gains for parent-firms than tangible resource heterogeneity. This work also successfully replicated Wolff and Reed’s findings on the negative impact of immobile resources exposure on parent-firm performance. Wolff and Reed’s results on resource complementarity were, however, not successfully replicated.

This replication study goes beyond simply showing that engaging in a joint venture strategy creates value for parent-firms. Through the use of a new content analysis method, this study was able to provide strong support for Wolff and Reed’s theory on the performance gains provided by resource heterogeneity in a joint venture setting, and to confirm the results on potential adverse performance effects of immobile resources exposure.

This paper examined the impact of the coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) pandemic on people, place, product and services in Jamaican academic libraries. It also compares the Jamaican academic library’s COVID-19 experience with US academic library’s COVID-19 preliminary experience.

The local academic libraries in higher education in Jamaica (also referred to in this paper as university libraries) were surveyed.

Government mandates, university mandates and the absence of a vaccine influenced academic library response. The measures implemented, though unplanned and developed on-the-go, constituted a behavioural change model (BCM). COVID-19 has had a positive-negative impact on library people, place, product and services and has created a new normal for Jamaican academic libraries.

This paper captures the preliminary response of Jamaican academic libraries to the first wave of the COVID-19 pandemic and its impact on library people, place, product and services. As such, a follow-up survey on changes, challenges, strengths, impact, lessons and plans would be a useful complement to this paper. As COVID-19 information is rapidly evolving, this preliminary response of Jamaica is neither the final nor complete response to the pandemic.

The COVID-19 pandemic has revealed a gap in the literature on disaster management generally and pandemic management in particular, and on the management of health disasters in academic libraries; this paper seeks to fill this gap, albeit incrementally, through Jamaica's preliminary response to the COVID-19 pandemic.

This paper gives voice to the Caribbean academic library’s COVID-19 experience, through the voice of Jamaica. It is the first scholarly paper on the impact of COVID-19 on university libraries in the Jamaican / English-speaking Caribbean, and so presents the elements of the BCM implemented by Jamaica, which provides an important guide to Caribbean academic library leaders. The findings can also inform the Latin American and Caribbean section of international library papers on COVID-19 impact on academic libraries globally.

Little is known about what emotionally un(intelligent) CEOs really say to their close collaborators within the boardroom. Would the rhetoric content differ between an emotionally intelligent and an emotionally unintelligent CEO, especially during a crisis? This chapter aims to answer this question.

40 CEOs of large corporations were asked to deliver a verbal address to their board members in reaction to a vignette describing a critical situation for the company. Participants were provided with the Schutte self-report emotional intelligence (EI) test. The verbal content of CEOs' closed-door discourses was analyzed using Cognitive-Discursive Analysis (CDA) and, subsequently, Geometric Data Analysis (GDA).

The results revealed that CEOs with low EI tend to evoke unpleasant emotions, talk about competition, and often blame some – or all – of the board members for their (poor) actions in comparison to CEOs with high or medium EI. In contrast, CEOs with high EI tend to use terms in relation to decision or realization and appear to be more cooperative than those with lower EI and were also ready to make decisions on behalf of team.

Previous research has mainly focused on CEOs' public speeches. But the content of CEOs' speeches within the boardroom might noticeably differ from what they would say in a public address. The results of our exploratory study can serve CEOs as a basis toward improving their closed-door rhetoric during a crisis.

It would be interesting to enlarge the size of our population in order to strengthen our statistical analyses as well as explore other cultural and linguistic environments and other channels through which emotions can be expressed (e.g., human face, gesture, vocal tone).

Lester and Wolff (2013) find little empirical support for the Austrian business cycle theory. According to their analysis, an unexpected monetary shock does not alter the structure of production in a way consistent with the Austrian view. Rather than increasing production in early and late stages relative to middle stages, they find the opposite – a positive monetary shock typically decreases production in early and late stages relative to middle stages. We argue that the measures of production and prices employed by Lester and Wolff (2013) are constructed in such a way that makes them inappropriate for assessing the empirical relevance of the Austrian business cycle theory’s unique features. After describing how these measures are constructed and why using ratios of stages is problematic, we use a structural vector autoregression to consider the effects of a monetary shock on each stage of the production process. We show that, with a clearer understanding of what is actually being measured by the stage of process data, the results are consistent with (but not exclusive to) the Austrian view.

I find that median wealth plummeted over the years 2007–2010, and by 2010 was at its lowest level since 1969. The inequality of net worth, after almost two decades of little movement, was up sharply from 2007 to 2010. Relative indebtedness continued to expand from 2007 to 2010, particularly for the middle class, though the proximate causes were declining net worth and income rather than an increase in absolute indebtedness. In fact, the average debt of the middle class actually fell in real terms by 25 percent. The sharp fall in median wealth and the rise in inequality in the late 2000s are traceable to the high leverage of middle-class families in 2007 and the high share of homes in their portfolio. The racial and ethnic disparity in wealth holdings, after remaining more or less stable from 1983 to 2007, widened considerably between 2007 and 2010. Hispanics, in particular, got hammered by the Great Recession in terms of net worth and net equity in their homes. Households under age 45 also got pummeled by the Great Recession, as their relative and absolute wealth declined sharply from 2007 to 2010.

Reflecting on “The Rehabilitation of Karl Marx” as a theoretical economist 100 years after his death, Robert Paul Wolff, on the way to writing Understanding Marx, noted that Marx had written, “at a conservative estimate, five thousand pages of theoretical material”. Therefore, in order to understand Marx's theoretical achievement, which Wolff compares with Darwin, Freud and Einstein (p. 714), “The simplest sort of common sense demands that we estimate Marx's place in the intellectual history of our civilization on the basis of this mass of economic theory” (p. 713). In addition to the three volumes of Capital, the three volumes of the Theories of Surplus Value, the Grundrisse, and the Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy, however, “Marx also wrote, as a young man, a handful of exuberant, obscure, derivative, romantic reflections on the human condition…The same sort of common sense dictates that we not construe these youthful speculations as the final utterances of the true Marx” (p. 713). With these assertions, Wolff is reviving an old issue, for the benefit of a “modern mathematical reinterpretation of Marx” (pp. 715–16), that some had thought was laid to rest by the widespread availability of the Grundrisse.

This study aims to examine the behavioral health disorders and trauma exposure are disproportionately represented among incarcerated men. Historically, prisons have been inadequately equipped to respond to the behavioral health needs of incarcerated people. Given the abundance of behavioral health need and the relatively limited availability of prison-based treatment resources, population health management strategies, particularly need stratification, are vital.

A sample of 943 male inmates from three Spanish prisons completed a structured questionnaire. Need groups are based on current depression, anxiety and stress symptoms assessed by the DASS-21 and were validated using adverse childhood experiences (ACE), prison-based abuse, prison-based substance use, social support and resilience.

Three need groups were identified, namely, minimal, mild/moderate and severe, each representing about one-third of the sample. The severe group had the highest level of all three types of psychological distress, ACE and prison-based adversity and substance use. No statistical differences in social support and resilience were found among the groups. These findings provide a platform for future research to explore how the complexity of behavioral health care need can be identified and stratified for strategic and rational treatment matching. Proving whether a population health management approach improves behavioral health and personal safety outcomes within funding-constrained carceral environments is the next research priority.

This study is the first to group co-morbid psychological distress into need categories using a social determinants of health framework for validation.

Networking refers to goal-directed behaviors focused on building and cultivating informal relationships to obtain career-related resources. According to Gibson et al.'s (2014) model, personality traits represent prominent and important antecedents of networking. This study seeks to provide robust evidence on relationships between personality and networking by summarizing prior research using meta-analytical tools.

The authors classify linking attributes between networking and personality into social, idea-related, task-related and affective behavioral domains and additionally include three compound traits that relate to several domains. They investigate two potential moderators: internal vs. external networking and prominent networking measures. Their comprehensive literature search identified 41 studies with 46 independent samples.

The authors find that social, idea-related and task-related traits have positive relationships with networking of medium effect size, whereas affective traits exhibit small but significantly positive effects. The compound trait of proactive personality appears to be the best predictor of networking. Moderator analyses indicate that there were hardly any differences concerning internal and external networking and also prominent measures.

The present study goes beyond narrative reviews contributing the first quantitative summary of these relationships. It identifies four behavioral domains that represent characteristics relevant to networking. The findings largely corroborate, but at times correct, narrative reviews on dispositional antecedents of networking. The authors highlight the importance of compound traits that have yet been overlooked by narrative reviews (e.g. self-monitoring).