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A bivariate probit model is used to predict the choice of an economics major in a sample of first‐year, undergraduate business students. The paper examines the statistical significance of a number of student‐related characteristics on the likelihood of choosing an economics major, along with the role of student personality and perceptions of the profession. Factors analysed include secondary studies in economics, accounting and business, grade point average and attendance pattern, along with perceptions of the economics profession arrayed along dimensions of interest, independence, structure and precision. It would appear that the primary influences on the selection of a major in economics comprise student personality and level of interest in the profession.

1976 was a double bicentennial year for American economists. On the one hand, it was the bicentennial year of the establishment of the United States of America as an independent, self‐governing country — an event that in recent years has become far more of a commonplace occurrence than it was in those revolutionary days two centuries ago. On the other hand it was the bicentennial of the publication of the first volume of Adam Smith's Wealth of Nations, the book that launched our discipline and gave it much of its pedagogic content and structure, at least until the Keynesian Revolution introduced the familiar textbook division between micro‐economics and macro‐economics. (1776, incidentally, was also the year of publication of Bentham's A Fragment on Government and Turgot's Six Edicts; not to speak of Gibbon's Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, a monumental scholarly work that probably should have received much more serious attention in the time of American bicentennary self‐congratulation and hoopla than it did.) The coincidence of the bicentennary of economics and of the United States naturally suggests combination of the two, in a discussion of what, if anything, are the distinctive and distinguishing characteristics of the American tradition in economics.

What do economists talk about? This seemingly innocent interrogation conceals a broader and innovative research programme, with the potential to renew the reflection on heterodox economics in a post‐crisis scenario. The aim of this paper is to show that convergence between language for specific purposes and economics is possible, so as to single out the genesis and the emergence of critical economic discourse.

After underlining the necessary collaboration between language and subject‐matter specialists, the paper addresses the question of the problematic use of economics textbooks in English‐speaking countries. Then, it deals with the fascinating question of the multiplicity of specialized meanings in economics. After pointing out the shortcomings of orthodoxy characterized by hyper‐formalization and its inevitable corollary, the mathematical nature of the discipline, it investigates the genesis of critical economic discourse, which requires the acknowledgement of pluralism and the components of heterodoxy, in order to converge towards a process of disciplinary acculturation that goes hand in hand with the learning process of language for specific purposes.

A deep‐seated renewal of economics, consisting of a methodological shift towards the components of heterodoxy, has the potential to enhance the effectiveness of teaching English for economics, so that the latter effectively conveys specialized meaning.

Teaching and researching English for specific purposes necessitates enhanced collaboration between subject‐matter specialists and applied linguists. However, this type of collaboration can be hampered by institutional or socio‐professional obstacles.

Discursive analysis has become indispensable in order to surmount the collective failure of mainstream economics in the aftermath of the global financial crisis. With the help of textbooks of a new kind, one must go beyond the vision of students as mere consumers of knowledge.

Language for specific purposes has long shown interest in economics, but is the reciprocal true? This paper proposes an original association, by putting the two disciplinary fields on an equal footing, and by bringing new synergies forward.

The purpose of the “Introduction” is to provide the motivation and context for the articles of this special issue and an overview and summary of the contributions that follow.

The paper provides an overview and summary of the contributions in the special issue.

It is argued that heterodoxies had gained a considerable and growing influence on research orientations, methodologies, and critical reflections, also on the mainstream publishing practices, even in the mainstream. This has been widely acknowledged as “hip heterodoxy” recently. Thus, many heterodox economists have developed optimistic expectations for the future of the profession. However, that influence has left the main mechanisms of reproduction of the mainstream untouched. These are mass teaching, public advising, journal policies, and faculty recruitment. Above that, the last decade has seen something like a “counterattack” to safeguard these mainstream reproduction mechanisms. The means used for this seem to be journal (and publisher) rankings based on purely quantitative citation measures and “impact factors”. These have an obvious cumulative “economies‐of‐scale” effect which triggers a tendency towards reinforcement and collective monopolization of the dominating orientation. Department rankings and individual faculty evaluations are then based on journals rankings. As a result, there are observable tendencies towards the cleansing of economics departments in a number of countries.

The paper also discusses potential reasons and methods for alternative approaches to measure citation interrelations, networks, cooperation, and rankings among heterodoxies (journals and departments), and for alternatives of publishing and the future of heterodoxies in general. Finally, it draws the picture of the present situation and the foreseeable future of heterodoxies as it emerges from the 11 contributions of the special issue.

Clem Tisdell is one of Australia’s pre‐eminent economists who has made decisive contributions in several areas of economics, perhaps most notably development economics, environmental economics and natural resource economics. Tisdell is presently Professor of Economics at the University of Queensland in Brisbane, Australia, and is also a long‐standing member of the editorial advisory board of the International Journal of Social Economics. This interview, which falls in the tradition of Klamer, was recorded in his Brisbane home in November 1995 and seeks to explore Tisdell’s extraordinary career, the development of his thinking about economics in general and his prodigious research output in particular. Tisdell answered the questions in his customary quietly‐spoken and good‐humoured manner.

In order to answer this question, it will first be necessary to distinguish between political and economic correctness on the one hand, and then between Austrian and mainstream economics on the other.

This paper aims to make a submission to the UK's Economic and Social Research Council as part of its international benchmarking review of economics.

The approach takes the form of a discussion of the health of economics in the UK from the perspective of heterodox or pluralist economists who are members of the Association for Heterodox Economics.

Research assessment based on peer review is damaging economics in the UK because, as currently conducted, it does not promote pluralism. This will lead to a monolithic discipline that will reject new and controversial ideas and arguments.

The current research assessment and subject benchmarking approaches must be completely changed so as to promote pluralism.

This is the first document by a heterodox economics association to challenge the research assessment and subject benchmarking conventions in the UK and also in Europe.

For Leftists engaged in the study of political economy during the 1960s and 1970s, Cuba and China held particular promise as postrevolutionary states working to construct systems of production and distribution which were predicated on solidarity and mutuality, rather than on the exploited and alienated labor upon which capitalism depended. Against the claim that the desire for individual material gain was irreducibly a part of the human experience, China and Cuba offered the possibility of – in the parlance of the time – a “new man”: a political subject whose motivations were in alignment with a socialist economy rather than a capitalist one.

Based on research in multiple archives, this paper explores efforts on the part of radical economists in the United States – including the Marxists at Monthly Review, the young academics who founded the Union for Radical Political Economics (URPE), and a handful of older Left-Keynesians – to witness Third World experiments in nonmaterial incentives firsthand. What have often been dismissed as pseudo-religious “pilgrimages” were, in reality, voyages of discovery, where radicals searched for the keys to develop a sustainable, rational, and moral political economy.

While many of the answers that radicals found in Cuba and China were ultimately unsatisfying, Third-World experiments in moral incentives serve as a powerful example of “solidarity in circulation” during the “long 1960s,” and as an important reminder that attempts to keep social science research free of political contamination serve to reify disciplinary norms which are themselves the product of the political culture in which they were formed.

Whilst demands for benefit cost analysis (BCA) to be applied to a wide variety of policy decisions are growing, there remains a degree of dissatisfaction amongst policy makers, non‐economist specialists and some economists with its use. Part of that dissatisfaction arises because of a degree of confusion relating to what is meant by the term value as it is used in BCA. Furthermore, proponents of other techniques that have been suggested as substitutes for BCA are keen to cast doubts on the ability of BCA to perform its role in consolidating the disparate information relating to the outcomes of alternative policies. An attempt is made to clarify the notion of value as it is used in a variety of guises. These alternative notions are assessed in terms of their abilities to assist in policy formulation. Second, some of the alternative techniques are critiqued, with particular attention being paid to the use of the value concept. Concludes that clarity in the specification of the goals to which a specific concept of value is to be applied is vital. Different concepts relate to different goals and the application of the wrong concept to a goal could be costly. In a final section, the confusion that has arisen within the discipline regarding the concept of value that underpins some non‐market valuation techniques is explored.

Despite Max Weber’s assertion that bureaucracy is domination on the basis of knowledge, mainstream public administration literature has paid little attention to the role of experts and expertise in bureaucratic organisations. A particular blind spot concerns the academic professions or disciplines that supply the experts and expert knowledge used in government bureaucracies. It is well known that the educational composition of the civil service varies across countries and over time. However, knowledge about what explains the varying position of expert professions within state bureaucracies is scarce. The chapter examines this issue through a comparative-historical investigation of the role in government of a particular expert profession, namely economists. Focusing on a small set of countries – Norway, Denmark, New Zealand and Ireland – over the period from 1930 to 1990, it poses the question: How can we account for the variation in the position of economists within government bureaucracies across countries and over time? To answer this question, the chapter draws on theory from the sociological literature on professions and historical-institutionalist work on the influence of economic ideas.