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Our chapter discusses the myriad ways in which Frank H. Knight’s Risk, Uncertainty, and Profit (RUP) has been incorporated by different streams of scholarship dedicated to institutional analysis since 1990, when bibliometric evidence indicates a revival of interest in his classic work. Using citation analysis, the authors identify clusters of scholarship that build on Knight’s contributions, assessing which of his insights were absorbed by different subfields and how these have been connected to recent topics and concerns. The authors then qualitatively explore these results to throw new light on the recent history of institutional economics, using Knight’s RUP as a window into the evolution of (and inter-relations between) different research traditions that currently populate the field, including new economic sociology, comparative politics, evolutionary economics, entrepreneurial studies, environmental social sciences, international political economy, and the anthropology of finance. The authors conclude that Knight’s legacy remains unsettled, with different groups selectively absorbing a subset of his ideas and developing them in relative isolation from research conducted elsewhere. Nevertheless, boundary work connecting these separate areas reveals possible spaces for collaboration among scholars who study institutions building explicitly on Knightian insights.

This paper introduces the readers to Neo-Transitional Economics – a volume which aspires to reinvigorate scholarly interest in transition economics research. The classical transition storyline is briefly revisited, and new directions for empirical and policy-relevant research that target post-transition economies in the post-crisis paradigm are highlighted.

John C. Beghin is the Marlin Cole Professor of International Agricultural Economics in the economics department at Iowa State University (ISU). He is the former director of the Food and Agricultural Policy Research Institute at ISU which he led from 1999 to 2007. He is a leading scholar on agricultural trade policy analysis, with a long-term interest in nontariff measures. He has held positions at North Carolina State University, the OECD Development Centre, the Institut National de la Recherche Agronomique, the International Labor Office, and the University of Sydney. He has consulted for various international and governmental agencies and private clients including the American Farm Bureau Federation, FAO, OECD, US Army Corps of Engineers, US General Accountability Office, the US Grains Council, and the World Bank among others. He holds a PhD in agricultural and resource economics from the University of California, Berkeley. His research work has appeared in the American Journal of Agricultural Economics, Canadian Journal of Economics, Ecological Economics, Economics Letters, Environment and Development Economics, Health Economics, Journal of Comparative Economics, Journal of Development Economics, Oxford Economic Papers, Review of Economics and Statistics, and World Development, among other journals.

Although Research in Economic Anthropology (REA) actually hit the quarter-century mark in 2003 with the publication of Volume 22, the series has now done so also in terms of the number of volumes. Twenty-five seems like an important milestone, and perhaps this edition can be noted for passing that, but it also marks the third editorial change in the history of REA. When a new editor takes over, it seems prudent to offer a summary of the book series’ evolution to date. As many know, George Dalton was the original editor – beginning in 1978 (REA was then published by JAI Press). Dalton subsequently handed the reins to Barry Isaac, who produced Volumes 6 through 20, along with a number of supplemental publications that focused on specific topics or regions and contained only chapters of an archeological or ethnohistorical nature. In fact, Isaac is still recognized for his efforts at granting archeology an equal footing with ethnology in the study of human economic behavior.¹ While Dalton included previously published material in the pages of REA and welcomed works by non-anthropologists, Isaac considered only original manuscripts and generally limited his selection of chapters to those written by anthropologists. Since Volume 20, REA has been published by Elsevier.

This essay addresses the issue of incorporating comparative and international education research into teacher education by addressing how the field of comparative education is defined, the essential skills and knowledges that students must have in order to properly “consume” comparative research, the degree to which teacher education is presently equipped to effectively incorporate comparative research into its programming, and the changes needed to bring comparative research more squarely into the domain of teacher education. I argue that the study of comparative education research necessitates a foundational base, formed through serious and rigorous engagement with core courses in the social sciences and humanities as well as social foundations course in education. I advance that without this base, we run a greater risk of seeing comparative research become appropriated into a technocratic paradigm that governs much of what presently constitutes teacher education. The essay calls for the introduction of comparative education research into teacher education simultaneously with the advancement of the other social foundation courses, along with aggressive advocacy for a broader liberal arts core.

Isaac O. Amoako is a researcher at the Centre for Enterprise and Economic Development Research (CEEDR) and lecturer in enterprise and small business at the Department of International Management and Innovation, all at Middlesex University Business School, UK. He completed his Ph.D. in 2012 in the same university and his paper on “alternative institutions” used by exporting SMEs in Ghana has been accepted and forthcoming in International Small Business Journal (ISBJ). His research interests include enterprise and small business start-up and management, interorganizational trust, culture and organizations, and international business management. Prior to his academic career he was an entrepreneur starting and managing his own businesses for over 20 years.

Corporate governance has attracted enormous attention both in the area of law and in the area of financial economics. In comparative corporate governance studies, many people have devoted their energy to find a best corporate governance model. I argue that a functional analysis does not support the view that there is a single best corporate governance model in the world. I further use the transplantation of an English style takeover law into China to show that the importation of foreign law is not always based on careful analysis whether the imported foreign law is the best in the world. Furthermore, I use the subsequent adjustment of the transplanted English takeover law in China to show that the imported foreign law is subject to local political and economic conditions. If there is no best corporate govern model and the transplantation of foreign law into other countries with different social and political background does not achieve similar objectives, the search for a best corporate governance model is misguided. Just as tort law or constitutional law regimes may have diversified models, so do corporate governance regimes in countries with different historical, social and political backgrounds.