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A collection of essays by a social economist seeking to balance economics as a science of means with the values deemed necessary to man′s finding the good life and society enduring as a civilized instrumentality. Looks for authority to great men of the past and to today′s moral philosopher: man is an ethical animal. The 13 essays are: 1. Evolutionary Economics: The End of It All? which challenges the view that Darwinism destroyed belief in a universe of purpose and design; 2. Schmoller′s Political Economy: Its Psychic, Moral and Legal Foundations, which centres on the belief that time‐honoured ethical values prevail in an economy formed by ties of common sentiment, ideas, customs and laws; 3. Adam Smith by Gustav von Schmoller – Schmoller rejects Smith′s natural law and sees him as simply spreading the message of Calvinism; 4. Pierre‐Joseph Proudhon, Socialist – Karl Marx, Communist: A Comparison; 5. Marxism and the Instauration of Man, which raises the question for Marx: is the flowering of the new man in Communist society the ultimate end to the dialectical movement of history?; 6. Ethical Progress and Economic Growth in Western Civilization; 7. Ethical Principles in American Society: An Appraisal; 8. The Ugent Need for a Consensus on Moral Values, which focuses on the real dangers inherent in there being no consensus on moral values; 9. Human Resources and the Good Society – man is not to be treated as an economic resource; man′s moral and material wellbeing is the goal; 10. The Social Economist on the Modern Dilemma: Ethical Dwarfs and Nuclear Giants, which argues that it is imperative to distinguish good from evil and to act accordingly: existentialism, situation ethics and evolutionary ethics savour of nihilism; 11. Ethical Principles: The Economist′s Quandary, which is the difficulty of balancing the claims of disinterested science and of the urge to better the human condition; 12. The Role of Government in the Advancement of Cultural Values, which discusses censorship and the funding of art against the background of the US Helms Amendment; 13. Man at the Crossroads draws earlier themes together; the author makes the case for rejecting determinism and the “operant conditioning” of the Skinner school in favour of the moral progress of autonomous man through adherence to traditional ethical values.

The purpose of this paper is to give a critical review of the City-State Theory by Wan Chin of Hong Kong. Chin is referred to as the “Father of Hong Kong Independence,” and his two books about the City-State Theory of Hong Kong are popular among the netizens in Hong Kong as a new model of Hong Kong-China (People’s Republic of China (PRC)), in which Hong Kong is considered a city-state and should be fully segregated from the PRC other than in seeking its help in military and diplomatic functions. This paper will aim to review his works with the view of nationalism and nativism theories.

This paper uses nationalism theories with particular focus on Benedict Anderson’s Imagined Communities and theories on American nativism. Then an effort is made to compare these theories against Chin’s arguments on his City-State Theory. This paper also compares his theories against China’s state-nationalism raised by Professors He and Guo.

This paper concludes that Chin advocates a “Hong Kong Nationalism,” a blend of traditional Chinese culture and moral values (he used the term Huaxia), but with a Western influence, into a typical Hong Kong culture. His theory fits into Anderson’s arguments of allowing Hong Kong citizens to imagine Hong Kong as a nation, through the “ramparts” of the city-state. His nativist advocacies also have shown strong nationalistic sentiments. He argues that China should be built in the Hong Kong model before the PRC intervention.

Despite his fame, this paper is the first comprehensive academic paper to review Chin’s theories. This paper introduced the notion of “ramparts” and how this has become the backbone of Chin’s nationalism advocacies.

This paper attempts to trace and describe the role played by the government sector – the state – in promoting economic growth in Western societies since the Renaissance. One important conclusion is that the antagonism between state and market, which has characterised the twentieth century, is a relatively new phenomenon. Since the Renaissance one very important task of the state has been to create well‐functioning markets by providing a legal framework, standards, credit, physical infrastructure and – if necessary – to function temporarily as an entrepreneur of last resort. Early economists were acutely aware that national markets did not occur spontaneously, and they used “modern” ideas like synergies, increasing returns, and innovation theory when arguing for the right kind of government policy. In fact, mercantilist economics saw it as a main task to extend the synergetic economic effects observed within cities to the territory of a nation‐state. The paper argues that the classical Anglo‐Saxon tradition in economics – fundamentally focused on barter and distribution, rather than on production and knowledge – systematically fails to grasp these wider issues in economic development, and it brings in and discusses the role played by the state in alternative traditions of non‐equilibrium economics.

Nobody concerned with political economy can neglect the history of economic doctrines. Structural changes in the economy and society influence economic thinking and, conversely, innovative thought structures and attitudes have almost always forced economic institutions and modes of behaviour to adjust. We learn from the history of economic doctrines how a particular theory emerged and whether, and in which environment, it could take root. We can see how a school evolves out of a common methodological perception and similar techniques of analysis, and how it has to establish itself. The interaction between unresolved problems on the one hand, and the search for better solutions or explanations on the other, leads to a change in paradigma and to the formation of new lines of reasoning. As long as the real world is subject to progress and change scientific search for explanation must out of necessity continue.

It was not until the late 1960s that housing attracted much attention from academic social scientists. Since that time the literature has expanded widely and diversified, establishing housing with a specialised status in economics, sociology, politics, and in related subjects. As we would expect, the new literature covers a technical, statistical, theoretical, ideological, and historical range. Housing studies have not been conceived and interpreted in a monolithic way, with generally accepted concepts and principles, or with uniformly fixed and precise methodological approaches. Instead, some studies have been derived selectively from diverse bases in conventional theories in economics or sociology, or politics. Others have their origins in less conventional social theory, including neo‐Marxist theory which has had a wider intellectual following in the modern democracies since the mid‐1970s. With all this diversity, and in a context where ideological positions compete, housing studies have consequently left in their wake some significant controversies and some gaps in evaluative perspective. In short, the new housing intellectuals have written from personal commitments to particular cognitive, theoretical, ideological, and national positions and experiences. This present piece of writing takes up the two main themes which have emerged in the recent literature. These themes are first, questions relating to building and developing housing theory, and, second, the issue of how we are to conceptualise housing and relate it to policy studies. We shall be arguing that the two themes are closely related: in order to create a useful housing theory we must have awareness and understanding of housing practice and the nature of housing.

Aims to examine the issue of industrial strategy (IS), paying particular attention to the case of Britain. Sets out to assess the possibility and nature of an industrial strategy for Britain, in Europe, and within the global scene, taking into account the world we live in as we see it. Accordingly, the perspective is driven and shaped by a quest for a realistic, feasible and sustainable industrial strategy. In order to achieve these objectives, first examines the theoretical arguments behind much of British, and more generally, Western industrial policies. Following this, outlines and assesses British industrial policy post‐Second World War then compares and contrasts British industrial policy with that of Europe, the USA, Japan and the newly industrialized countries. Then examines recent developments in economics and management which may explain the “Far Eastern” miracle, and points to the possibility of a successful, narrowly self‐interested, IS for Europe and Britain, based on the lessons from (new) theory and international experience. To assess what is possible, develops a theoretical framework linking firms in their roles as consumers and/or electors. This hints at the possibilities and limits of feasible policies. All these ignore desirability which, in the author′s view, should be seen in terms of distributional considerations, themselves contributors to sustainability. Accordingly, discusses a desirable industrial strategy for Britain in Europe which accounts for distributional considerations, and goes on to examine its implications for the issue of North‐South convergence. Concludes by pointing to the limitations of the analysis and to directions for developments.

One of the most important recent developments in company finance has been that of state preference theory, although the basics of the theory are not new. In how many finance textbooks do we read the following?

This paper engaged in theory-building from social movement and knowledge management (KM) theories and applied the case study method to explore the role of knowledge complexity in administration–society collaborations on knowledge. Complex knowledge is a kind of knowledge that consists of many interdependent elements, some of which are tacit. Complex knowledge creates challenges when external social groups attempt to transfer their knowledge to public organizations. Thus, the purpose of this paper is to investigate the following question: how do social groups acting as knowledge agents transfer their knowledge if it is complex?

A single-case study methodology informs the theory-building in this paper. The paper examined a case of collaboration between the natural childbirthing social movement and state maternity hospitals in Russia and Ukraine. The case was constructed from interviews, primary sources and secondary sources.

Social movement and KM theories were used in a case analysis to formulate theoretical propositions about the complexity of social movement knowledge, why and how movements transfer their knowledge through collaborations with the state, and how administrators assess movement knowledge and its transfer. The case suggests that administrators’ lack of capacity to recognize and deal with complex knowledge results in the underutilization of social groups’ knowledge. In particular, administrators treat complex knowledge as simple, and they misunderstand and underestimate its effects on collaboration.

To the best of this author’s knowledge, this paper is the first attempt in public administration to engage in theory-building from social movement and KM theories.

The economic science is again in a crisis and a new solution prolegomena to any future study in economics, finance and other social sciences has just been published by the International Institute of Social Economics in care of the MCB University Press in England. The roots of the major financial and economic problems of our time lie in an open conflict between theory and practice. In the 1930s and before the conflict was between classical theory and given realities. In the 1990s the conflict appears between the now prevailing modern, Keynesian theory and the actual realities. In addition during the twentieth century a great argument developed between the two schools of thought, argument which is not yet settled. In one sentence, the prolegomena tried and was successful to solve the conflict between theory and practice and the big doctrinal dispute of the twentieth century. It was a struggle of research and observation over half a century between 1947 and 1997.

There is hardly any other field of knowledge where there is more conflict or controversy between ideas and solutions proposed by theoreticians and statesmen than in politics. To date, adequate methodological tools have not been developed which enable the truth or validity of the liberal or conservative approaches to be tested. A new research programme using a simultaneous equilibrium versus disequilibrium approach is proposed which has full application in politics as well as in economics and the social sciences. This research programme shows the organic relationship between society, state, economy, money and form of government, and thus leads to a methodological unification of all the social sciences, to a new principia politica.