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The purpose of this paper is to emphasize the multi-ethnic marketplace as the site of the emergence of service nepotism: the practice where employees bestow relational benefits and/or gifts on customers on the basis that they share a perceived common socio-collective identity. The authors draw on the contemporary turn to practice in social theory to explore why ethnic employees may engage in service nepotism even when they are aware that it contravenes organizational policy.

Given the paucity of empirical research which investigates the multi-ethnic marketplace as a locus for the emergence of service nepotism, the authors adopted an exploratory qualitative research approach to advance insight into service nepotism. The study benefits from its empirical focus on West African migrants in the UK who represent a distinct minority group living in urban areas of the developed world. Data for the study were collected over a six-month period, utilizing semi-structured interviews as the primary method of data collection.

The research highlights the occurrence and complexities of service nepotism in the multi-ethnic marketplace, and identifies four distinct activities (marginal revolution, reciprocal altruism, pandering for recognition, and horizontal comradeship), that motivate ethnic employees to engage in service nepotism, despite their awareness that this conflicts with organizational policy.

By virtue of the chosen theoretical lens, the authors were unable to demonstrate how service nepotism could be observed outside spoken language. Also, care should be taken in generalizing the findings from this study given the particularities of the sub-group involved. For example, since the study is based on a small sample of first generation migrants, the findings may not hold true for their offspring, whose socialization and marketplace experiences may be qualitatively different from those of their parents.

Service nepotism challenges fundamental western egalitarian ideals in the multi-ethnic marketplace. Organizations may wish to develop strategies to placate observers’ concerns of creeping favouritism in a supposedly equitable marketplace. The research could also serve as a starting point for managers objectively to assess the likely impact of service nepotism on the organizing value systems and competitiveness. In particular, the authors suggest that international marketing managers would do well to look beneath the surface to see what is really going on in international marketplaces, since ostensible experiences of marketplace consumption may not always reflect underlying reality.

By using service nepotism as an analytical category to explore the marketplace experiences of ethnic service employees living and working in industrialized societies, the research shows that the practice of service nepotism, whilst taken for granted, can have far-reaching impact on individuals, observers, and service organizations in an increasingly highly differentiated multi-ethnic society.

Considers a Wirkungsgeschichte of Hermann Heinrich Gossen, focusing on the reactions of the three stars of the Marginal Revolution: William Stanley Jevons, Léon Walras and Carl Menger. Although Hermann Heinrich Gossen is today known as one of the forerunners of the Marginal Revolution, it was only in 1879 that Jevons mentioned him in the second edition of the Theory of Political Economy, which contributed greatly toward making Gossen’s name known among English‐speaking readers. Later, in 1885, Walras wrote a famous article in the Journal des Economistes, entitled “Un économiste inconnu: Hermann‐Henri Gossen”. Investigates a Wirkungsgeschichte of Gossen, an ignored German mathematical economist.

This article attempts to tackle a fundamental methodological question in economics. The task is to investigate whether competing traditions in the history of economics are commensurable or not, that is, whether there is a firm ground on which a researcher could adjudicate the truth content of a theory. Thomas Kuhn in philosophy and Donald McClosky in economics among others are understood to advance the thesis that theories are incommensurable since there is no empirical ground to resort to in order to resolve disputes among traditions in economics. Karl Popper in philosophy and Mark Blaug in economics among others argue that theories are commensurable since there is a sharp and distinct criterion which could determine the scientific content of a theory. A more sophisticated version of Popper's falsificationism has been advanced in philosophy by Imre Lakatos and has been correspondingly followed in economics by Spiro Latsis, E. Roy Weintraub and others.

Based on Geoffrey Harcourt's Palgrave volumes, this review article attempts to picture how, in a Cambridge environment, Keynes's fragmentary monetary theory of production grew organically out of Marshall's equally fragmentary monetary theory of exchange. The dangers associated with Keynes's close links with Marshall are alluded to. Indeed, without taking account of the classical spirit of Sraffa's work, Keynes's monetary theory may quite easily be integrated into the Marshallian‐neoclassical framework of analysis. However, theorising, not literally, but in the spirit of Keynes and Sraffa, within a Ricardian‐Pasinettian framework of vertical integration, opens the way to a Classical‐Keynesian monetary theory of production.

Aim of the present monograph is the economic analysis of the role of MNEs regarding globalisation and digital economy and in parallel there is a reference and examination of some legal aspects concerning MNEs, cyberspace and e‐commerce as the means of expression of the digital economy. The whole effort of the author is focused on the examination of various aspects of MNEs and their impact upon globalisation and vice versa and how and if we are moving towards a global digital economy.

In this article we shall argue that the Keynesian revolution was a revolution in the sense of Kuhn and that Kuhn's conceptual framework provides a better understanding of the convulsive changes that took place in macro‐economics in the twenties and thirties than alternative growth of knowledge theories that are being discussed in the economics literature at the present time. In the last ten years or so economists have become increasingly interested in the various growth of knowledge theories that have been developed by philosophers of science such as Kuhn, Popper, Lakatos and others. This heightened interest on the part of economists is to be explained by the fact that these new theories are based on the actual behaviour of scientists. The new philosophers of science devote their attention not to “correct scientific method” but to the actual behaviour of scientists. It is because of this revolution in the historiography of science that economists have been able to relate these new theories to their own work and to the development of economic theories in the past.

Distribution concerns who gets what. But does “who” refer to the personal distribution of income among individuals or the functional distribution of income among suppliers of productive factors? For nearly 150 years, Anglophone distribution theory followed the Ricardian emphasis on functional distribution – the income shares of labor, land, and capital. Only beginning in the 1960s, and consolidated by a research outpouring in the early 1970s, does mainstream economics turn to the personal conception of distribution. This essay documents Anglophone (primarily American) economics’ move from functional to personal distribution, and tries to illuminate something of its causes and timing.

This chapter provides a comprehensive survey of the contributions of the Austrian school of economics, with specific emphasis on post-WWII developments. We provide a brief history and overview of the original theorists of the Austrian school in order to set the stage for the subsequent development of their ideas by Ludwig von Mises and F. A. Hayek. In discussing the main ideas of Mises and Hayek, we focus on how their work provided the foundations for the modern Austrian school, which included Ludwig Lachmann, Murray Rothbard and Israel Kirzner. These scholars contributed to the Austrian revival in the 1960s and 1970s, which, in turn, set the stage for the emergence of the contemporary Austrian school in the 1980s. We review the contemporary development of the Austrian school and, in doing so, discuss the tensions, alternative paths, and the promising future of Austrian economics.

The purpose of this paper is to explore the origin of economics as a separate science.

A very comprehensive approach is presented for determining the origin of economics as a science. Three kinds of inter‐related issues are discussed: how to interpret and evaluate earlier, particularly ancient, writings, the specification of the requirements for declaring economics as a science and the definition, scope and methodology of economics.

Application of the most stringent requirements for declaring economics as a separate science to Kautilya's Arthashastra validated A.K. Sen's claim that it is the first book on economics.

According to Kautilya, economics is a separate science but not independent of other disciplines and particularly of ethics. Whereas, most of the current research ignores this inter‐dependence and consequently does not fully capture reality.

It implies that the inter‐dependence between economics and other disciplines should be encouraged and vigorously explored.

It validates Redman's assertion, “The history of economics as a science is, in my view, still waiting to be properly written”.

A characteristic feature of economic development is the ever-changing structure of consumption patterns. Reducing the explanation of this phenomenon to changing prices, ultimately caused by changes in the availability of goods (or characteristics), would neglect a major force driving this change, namely, the variation of consumer wants and consumer knowledge. The present paper sketches an evolutionary framework for the analysis of consumer behaviour that takes account of these features.

For this purpose, Carl Menger's theory of goods is taken as starting point. Whereas economists after the ‘marginal revolution’ were almost exclusively concerned with the determinants of exchange value and developing price theory, Menger puts as much emphasis on user value as on exchange value. Focusing on how user value changes establishes a connection between Menger's 19th-century theory of goods and 20th-century learning theories. The problem of how to get from individual learning processes to aggregate consumption patterns is approached by recollecting the genetic underpinnings of human learning and its dependence on certain physical and social conditions. Taking into account that these conditions are also dynamic, we are able to interpret collective learning processes as historical events, which renders them useable for the analysis of economic change.