Issue 269 September 28, 2020 web pdf Heterodox Economics Directory
Notwithstanding the fact that we live in a time of crisis, I have to admit that I have a lot to cheer about these days.
For one, the long-time home-base of this Newsletter – the Institute for Comprehensive Analysis of the Economy (ICAE) at Johannes Kepler University Linz (Austria) – celebrated it's 10th anniversary last week. Since its foundation in response to the global financial crisis a decade ago, the ICAE has grown to be one of the main hubs for research in heterodox economics and political economy in the german-speaking area. In case you are interested in who we are and what we do, simply check out our website, where you can find information on our team, recent research projects and take a peek into our working paper series.
For another, it is a great pleasure for me to report that the 2020 Kurt Rothschild Prize has been awarded to my friend and colleague Achim Truger from the Institute for Socioeconomics at University Duisburg-Essen for his work on dysfunctional constraints in fiscal policy in general and the German "debt brake" in particular. In his capacity as a member of the German council of economic experts, Achim shows a strong commitment to bring some sanity to the German policy debate and always goes the extra-mile to make alternatives in economic policy and theory visible to as many people as possible (you can follow him on Twitter here).
Finally, I am personally super-happy about the development of our new MA program in Socio-Economics at the University of Duisburg-Essen. Actually we had more than 200 applicants within the first year – which not only indicates the attractiveness of our program, but also subtly points to the fact that there are too few places and institutions trying to develop alternative approaches towards educating future economists. However, as in most academic settings, this strong demand is not necessarily met by a corresponding increase in supply; rather the surge in students will force us to increase the entry-barriers for our program. To me this is a pity and the (legally enforced) downside of all this, simply because I would love to see even more students in our lectures. Unsurprisingly, I would much prefer a scenario, in which we were allowed to increase supply to actually meet demand...
All the best,
Jakob
© public domain
edited by Mike Rowe (University of Liverpool) and Matthew Brannan (University of Newcastle)
Organizational ethnography is concerned with contemporary organizations, with the way things are done and with the ways in which people interact with each other, with social structures and with technologies. It is both methodology, often associated with a pragmatist or critical realist concern to reveal and describe complexities rather than simple causal relationships, and method, classically concerned with close observation (whether participant, non-participant or covert) over time. Yet it is also a creative endeavour, which lends itself to experimentation and playfulness, a written work that emerges from and through our research.
This series will publish interdisciplinary books that employ observation to explore organizations. This is a deliberately broad scope because the series is open to the broadest understandings of both what constitutes ethnography (though note the emphasis on close observation over time) and what forms organizing takes. We will consider autoethnographies, visual and sensory ethnographies, netnogaphies and all manner of other innovations in ethnographic work.
We particularly welcome manuscripts that seek to play with the style of presentation and with the conventions of publishing in order to convey something of the world they describe.
Topics might include:
This will be a multi-disciplinary series. Manuscripts will be sought from scholars in a range of academic fields in addition to management and business studies including, for example, anthropology, politics, sociology, social policy, philosophy, development and community studies and cultural, communication and media studies.
Books in the series will typically be between 60,000 – 90,000 words in length. Research monographs will be the preferred format. Edited volumes will be considered where there is a clear rationale for the proposal and evidence of the quality of the individual contributions. Our commitment to playing with the form means that we will be keen to discuss ideas that will stretch the normal academic conventions.
If you would like to submit a proposal, or to discuss ideas, then please contact the Series Editors, Mike Rowe and Matthew Brannan.
edited by Steffen Roth, Michael Grothe-Hammer, Jari Kaivo-oja, Kristof van Assche and Harry F. Dahms
This special issue focuses on the often precarious relationship between evidence and simulation, a topic that has been in need of close examination at least since the early 1970s, when the pioneers of futures studies developed or replicated the first global system dynamics models and computer simulations such as the “World3” model of Meadows et al. (1972). Ever since, simulations have been applied to a broad spectrum of areas and topics, ranging from business strategy development, to aerospace and aviation engineering, traffic management.
On the one hand, simulations clearly help explore alternatives scenarios, theorise long waves, anticipate or avoid undesirable short-, medium- or even long-term developments, or replace tests and experiments that would otherwise be unfeasible or dangerous. For example, simulations of nuclear weapons have been deemed sufficiently strong, reliable, and predictive to replace the testing of those weapons.
On the other hand, the 2007-2008 financial crisis had already underscored the tremendous impact and risks of economic models and financial simulations, and simulations also have played a key-role in the 2020 coronavirus crisis, with the results of model or simulation applications often having been confused with, or deliberately presented as evidence. More concretely, in the current crisis, simulations have been or are being used to
In situations where problem definition, method choice, and success measurement are all based on simulations, however, we are confronted with the question of how we can at all distinguish between a simulated and an actual crisis. Overreliance on simulations may therefore be associated with the risk of (or suspicion regarding) academic or political dissimulation or immunization strategies that escape conventional forms of control or criticism. If simulations are confused with or replace classical methods, and entire research designs, theories, or fields of research turn into self-confirming networks of simulations, then science may indeed develop immunity against scrutiny and criticism and, thus, once again “become as oppressive as the ideologies it had once to fight” (Feyerabend, 2006, p. 360). Decision-making based on such simulated “truisms” and claims for the future might then result in the implementation of ill-informed or even deceitful policies.
These and similar issues are most critical both in the short-term assessment and management of the current coronavirus crisis and in the medium and long term. In fact, a recent simulation study published in Nature suggests that “prolonged or intermittent social distancing may be necessary into 2022” (Kissler et al., 2020). Given the tremendous extent of different types of collateral damage resulting from lockdowns and other non-pharmaceutical pandemic interventions, the impact simulations currently are having on life in general, and social life, in particular, could hardly be greater.
In the context of Futures Studies, Foresight and Anticipatory Systems, and against this backdrop, we welcome research papers and notes that are cognizant with the thin red lines between simulation and dissimulation, especially if they promise to illuminate general and/or specific aspects of the relationship between dis-/simulation and evidence, or address questions and challenges of the following non-exclusive type:
For further information please visit the website.
Submission Deadline: 30 June 2021
The Ecology of Economic Thought: online workshop January 2021
by Julia Nordblad (Uppsala) and Troy Vettese (Harvard)
One would think that environmental history and economic history would be peas in a pod. After all, central questions in the history of economic thought concern environmental issues such as the early-modern enclosures and the importance of water-power and coal to the industrial revolution. The meanings of 'the environmental' and 'the economic' have shifted over the centuries, especially as issues were traded between natural philosophy, political economy, and ecology. Part of the discipline of environmental history branched off from the Annales school, which was always a branch of economic history too. One would think that environmental and economic historians would have closely traced the exchanges between their cousin fields, yet remarkably little work has been done in this regard. There are exceptions: for example Fabian Locher traces the long shadow of Garett Hardin's 'tragedy of the commons' in both the environmental movement and economics; the immense impact of The Limits to Growth has been studied by Élodie Vieille Blanchard; Melinda Cooper and Jeremy Walker have studied how 'resilience' has been embraced by financial elites.
While much has been written on policy of various kinds, what we are after are works that lie at the convergence of environmental, economic, and intellectual history. What for example are the origins and contexts of 'Spaceship Earth', 'cat bonds', geo-engineering, externalities, cap-and-trade, and 'sustainability'? To write such conceptual and interdisciplinary histories, care should be taken to represent the diversity within economics, its competing schools, epistemologies, sets of postulates on society, nature, and human motivation. Economists' politics, vocabularies, methods have changed with the shifting trends in their discipline and its relationship to ecologists, historians, other disciplines, and governments. While neo-classicism—especially its branch of welfare economics—matters to the history we want to see written, we are also keen to explore the ideas of heterodox scholars who belong to schools of varying influence: neo-liberalism, Keynesianism, Veblenian institutional economics, ecological economics, Polanyian socialism, and Marxism. That being said, we are especially keen to receive submissions on the history of ecological economics and neo-liberal environmental thought. We encourage placing these concepts in a social context beyond internalistic histories of the disciplines themselves. We welcome perspectives from fields such as imperial history, history of international organizations, conceptual history, history of emotions, and gender history.
How to apply
As we hope to eventually publish these essays in a special issue for a journal on contemporary European history, submissions should be connected to European, British, and imperial concepts, actors, institutions, and events. The timeframe is restricted to 1918 to the present. Please send a 300-word abstract with a short (two pages max) CV to julia.nordblad@idehist.uu.se and tvettese@fas.harvard.edu by 30 September 2020. We encourage scholars of all backgrounds and career stages to apply. The workshop will focus on improving drafts into journal-ready publications, so we will pre-circulate papers and assign two discussants per paper. The workshop will be held online once a week during January 2021. Papers should be finalized for submission by 1 April 2021.
We are looking for papers on the following topics, though we are very open to other suggestions:
Submission Deadline: 30 September 2020
edited by Robert Ovetz and Jake Alimahomed-Wilson
We are currently accepting manuscript submissions for a special issue of New Global Studies on Global Labor and Supply Chains to be published in late 2021 or early 2022. To learn more about New Global Studies visit this website.
Global worker organizing has been surging since the start of the pandemic. This surge demonstrates an emerging recomposition of the global working class as precarious care and service workers increasingly self-organize, unionize and take increasingly disruptive action in strategically critical sectors and junctions of national and global economy. Such actions have taken place along various locations of the global supply chain not by accident but because workers and unions have become increasingly strategic in using tactics that disrupt various choke points along the global supply chain in order to apply leverage to extract concessions and other gains. In the past few years we have seen the release of increasingly important studies and analyses of the vulnerabilities of global supply chains to such worker organizing and direct action. This special issue would continue this work by publishing scholarly works on the tactics, strategies, organizational forms, and objectives of worker organizing and the impact on global supply chains. Among the topics we especially interested in for proposed articles include:
We encourage comparative analyses and multi-disciplinary collaborations between scholars, worker-organizers, and union staff. Please submit your proposed abstract by November 1, 2020 to both Robert and Jake at robert.ovetz@sjsu.edu and jake.wilson@csulb.edu. Proposed abstracts should be no more than 200 words and include an additional short biography. If your proposal is accepted you will be asked to submit your complete manuscript by July 1, 2021 of no more than 8,000 words. We welcome academic articles, workers’ inquiries, review essays, interviews, photo essays, and commentaries.
Submission Deadline: 1 November 2020
edited by Amit Bhaduri
Both one party systems and multi-party liberal democracies are increasingly affected by both political pathologies, such as spreading authoritarianism, virulent nationalism, and racism, and by economic illnesses such as growing inequalities of income and wealth, underemployment and long-term stagnation, and widespread insecurity of incomes.
Though there is no theoretical agreement yet, on the interlinkages between economic and political malaise, many observers consider the former to be a cause of the latter. A deterioration in the quality of life of those less well-off, as well as an increased risk of losing one’s status within the middle classes, are probably among the most immediate causes of the so-called wave of populism across the globe. In this context, the human suffering and the economic costs of the recent Covid-19 pandemic have both heightened pre-existing social tensions and have posed again the issue of efficiency and legitimacy of alternative socio-economic and political systems, starting from the organization of public/private health systems to more in general the degree and forms of public management of the economy. These trends help explain the renewed attention among the economists for political economy issues and for political developments and their relationship with the economy. In this light, the PSL Quarterly Review aims to organize a special issue on the foreseeable future and the options available for progressive economic policies, and for progressive reform at the global and/or national level.
In the spirit of pluralism that has always characterized the journal (and its predecessor, the Banca Nazionale del Lavoro Quarterly Review), contributions can apply any method and scientific paradigm, provided they are rigorous and relevant. Apart from logical reasoning, historical illustrations are welcome, and submissions are encouraged from authors adopting any political standpoint they wish – provided the character of the work remains of the highest scientific quality.
A non-exhaustive list of possible topics to be discussed is: the political economy of growth and distribution; the private/public mix in the provision of social welfare services; the design of decentralisation and its possible role in reducing bureaucratization; if/how can the usual fiscal and monetary instruments ensure the benchmark aim of classical social democracy, i.e. the socialization of consumption without socialization of the means of production; how far this should still be the main aim of progressive economic policy, and what new aims and instruments should be sought; the compatibility between these instruments and incentives for all economic players. To imagine alternatives is the aim of intellectual work.
For inquiries please contact Carlo D’Ippoliti, (editor). All submissions should be made through our online submission system, specifying that the submission is being made for the Special issue on the political economy of reform. More information can be found at the journal’s website.
Submission Deadline: 31 March 2021
Across the social sciences and within political economy, financialisation has become a prominent theme. It is most commonly defined as a rise in the role and power of financial interests, institutions and motives over politics, society and the economy broadly. This, in turn, includes diverse phenomena such as shareholder value orientation, real estate booms, shadow banking, securitisation and new forms of wealth. The concept of financialisation has been used to explain a slowdown in business investment, consumption booms based on rising household debt, a return of financial cycles, rising inequality and changing subjectivities. This set of changes is underpinned by various sub-processes, including broad macro-historical shifts, as well as developments of social and cultural transformation. Across the literatures, most scholars emphasise the relatively recent ascent of financialisation.
The special issue aims to take stock of the existing research as well as explore the frontiers and limitations of financialisation. We particularly
invite papers that address questions like:
We invite articles as contributions to the special issue of REPE. Papers will be original articles and will undergo blind peer-review. For queries please contact Anastasia Nesvetailova, Stefano Sgambati, or Engelbert Stockhammer.
If you intend to submit a paper, we appreciate an expression of interest with a title and abstract by 1 Oct (please send to Engelbert.stockhammer@kcl.ac.uk). Deadline for full paper submission: 11 Dec 2020. To submit a paper go to this website.
Submission Deadline: 1 October 2020
3- 5 July 2021 | online
After Covid? Critical Conjunctures and Contingent Pathways of Contemporary Capitalism
Thematic mini-conferences are a key element of SASE’s annual conferences. We are currently accepting submissions for mini-conferences for the 2021 annual SASE conference, to take place 3-5 July 2021. Preference will be given to proposals linked to the overarching conference theme, “After Covid? Critical Conjunctures and Contingent Pathways of Contemporary Capitalism”.
Before submitting a proposal, please consult the list of extant SASE networks. One of our goals in welcoming mini conferences is to bring to the fore issues that are not covered by existing networks. We therefore also particularly encourage proposals related to race and ethnicity, migration, and submissions that offer a worldwide perspective. Please consult programs from past conferences (https://sase.org/events/past-meetings-archive/) to view mini-conference themes from previous years. SASE is committed to diverse membership and lively intellectual debates, and encourages proposals that are offered by a diverse group of organizers and/or are likely to bring a diverse group of participants.
Proposals for mini-conferences must be submitted electronically to the SASE Executive Director (saseexecutive@sase.org) by 10 October 2020. All mini-conference proposals should include the name and email address of the organizer(s) and a brief (1 page) description of the mini conference theme. You may also include a list of possible participants. Proposals that would otherwise fit within a network will be expected to include an explanation as to why the topic should be discussed in a mini-conference format.
As in previous years, each mini-conference will consist of at least 3 panels, which will be featured as a separate stream in the program. If accepted, your mini-conference will be included in the general SASE call for papers (deadline in January), and you will receive applications through the conference submission system. You will review applications and create the panel sessions for your mini conference, which may also include participants and panels you have invited in advance. If a paper proposal cannot be accommodated within your mini-conference, we ask that you forward it to the most appropriate research network for consideration. As a mini-conference organizer, you will be expected to assign a discussant for each session that you organize. Presenters must submit a full paper for review by discussants by 1 June 2021.
Proposals should be submitted to SASE’s Executive Director, Annelies Fryberger: saseexecutive@sase.org. Please also feel free to reach out with questions about the application procedure. You will be notified of the status of your application (acceptance or rejection) by the end of October 2020.
Submission Deadline: 10 October 2020
During the last two decades, labor markets around the world underwent unprecedented pressures to bear the consequences of the financial crash first, of the sovereign debt crisis
later on, and more recently of the COVID-19 pandemic. Workers at the margin – young, female, migrant, those with non-standard work arrangements – often paid the highest
costs. Different countries reacted combining different policies, depending on their specific economic conditions and – not less importantly – international constraints. Comparing the
evidence on the specific strategies and related (un)successes represents a chance to identify valuable guidelines for the years to come.
Sinappsi, the official journal of the Italian Institute for Public Policy Analysis – INAPP, is opening a call for papers on Labor market policies during crisis years, for a special issue to
be published in Spring 2021. Topics include, but are not limited to, employment protection legislation (thereby including non-standard work, part-time and other forms of labor market deregulation), wage policies (including hiring subsidies), unemployment and short-time work benefits, collective bargaining, and ALMPs.
Interested authors are invited to submit an extended abstract – in Italian or in English – of between 500 and 1,000 words to sinappsi@inapp.org by September 30th, 2020. Authors of
selected proposals will be invited to submit a full draft of between 6,000 and 8,000 words by December 31st, 2020. Double-blinded reports are expected by January 31st, 2021 and
revised versions of non-rejected papers by February 28th, 2021. The final deadline for accepted articles will be March 31st, 2021. Contributions in English, with a comparative scope and/or highlighting continuities and discontinuities in the labor policies implemented during the crisis years will be privileged, although papers in Italian and single-country case studies (in Italian or English) will be considered too. Accepted articles exceeding the space available for the special issue will be published in the following issues of Sinappsi.
For more details please contact the editorial staff: sinappsi@inapp.org or the managing editors: Fabio Berton, Università di Torino, Italy (fabio.berton@unito.it) and Jesús
Ferreiro, Universidad del País Vasco, Spain (jesus.ferreiro@ehu.eus)
Submission Deadline: 30 September 2020
1 - 2 October 2020 | online
The final program of the 17 Annual STOREP Conference, “The power of economic ideas”, which will be held online on October 1-2, is now available, and reported below.
To access both papers and presentations, as well as to participate in plenary and parallel sessions, STOREP only asks you to become a member (possibly by September 28), by following instructions in its website (here). We are sure that your participation can fruitfully enhance the broad and lively debate in the Conference.
General Program
October 1, 2020
10:45 to 11:00: Institutional addresses and beginning of the Conference: Paolo Paesani
11:00 to 12:30: Raffaelli Lecture: Sheila Dow (University of Stirling, Scotland, and University of Victoria, Canada) "Marshall, Evolutionary Economics and Climate Change". Chair: Katia Caldari
14:00 to 15:30: Parallel Sessions A
16:00 to 17:30: Parallel Sessions B
17:45 to 19:15: Joint INET-STOREP initiative: "Alternative perspectives on aggregate investments and capital accumulation", with Anwar Shaikh (The New School for Social Research, NYC) and Fabio Petri (Università di Siena). Chair: Antonella Stirati
October 2, 2020
09:00 to 11:00: Parallel Sessions C
11:30 to 13:00: Parallel Sessions D
14:00 to 16:00 : Parallel Sessions E
16:15 to 17:15: STOREP members' General Assembly
17:30 to 19:00: Invited speaker: Amos Witztum (London School of Economics), "The value of prices and the price of values". Chair: Annalisa Rosselli
Parallel Sessions A
October 1, 2020 14:00 to 15:30
Parallel Sessions B
October 1, 2020 16:00 to 17:30
Parallel Sessions C
October 2, 2020 09:00 to 11:00
Parallel Sessions D
October 2, 2020 11:30 to 13:00
Parallel Sessions E
October 2, 2020 14:00 to 16:00
For more information please visit the conference webpage.
28.10. - 30.10.2020 | online
The Corona Crisis: Macroeconomic Implications and Policies for Sustainable Recovery
Due to the Corona crisis and the related international travel restrictions, we have been obliged to cancel the familiar conference in Berlin Steglitz for 2020. The conference will be replaced by an online event "The Corona Crisis: Macroeconomic Implications and Policies for Sustainable Recovery", which will consist of nine thematic panels on the dates of 28 till 30 October 2020 and feature online presentations and discussions by experts in the field. There will be no call for papers, but you can watch and engage in the online event. Speakers in the online Sessions:
For more details please visit the official website.
26 September 2020 | online
With the need for immediate climate action stronger than ever, we are bringing together actors from civil society, politics, activism, and academia to determine what climate leadership looks like in 2020 and what strategies, messages, and objectives will propel us forward.
This conference will act as a green networking event – with exchanges across a variety of different thinkers, topics, and backgrounds, in order to provide everyone with resources and connections in the run up to the Bonn Climate Change Conference, COP26, and further climate negotiations.
A detailed programm of the Conference can be found here. Please register online here.
17th October 2020 | online
The Green Economics Institute presents "Reimagining Food and Farming - A Virtual Event". The event will include interactive breakout sessions, debates and plenty of discussions around the topics; the event will have speakers from around the world.
Thousands of years ago humans across the world began moving away from being hunter-gatherers to cultivating and domesticating crops for food, fibre and other needs. Access to such resources allowed the human population to increase, and helped in the development of trade and industries; further boosted by the industrial revolution, agriculture has formed the bedrock of modern human society and allowed complex societies to develop.
Today, while on the face of it modern industrial agriculture has decreased economic costs and allowed for massive scaling up of food production, we are now reckoning with the darker consequences of the system. With climate change rapidly affecting the conditions conducive to agricultural and biodiversity loss triggered by human activities, the agricultural system is being destabilized and will be facing massive pressure in the coming years. In a feedback loop, industrialized agriculture is also one of the largest contributors of CO2 emissions industry wise.
Oceans, the other big source of food and on which approximately 3 billion people rely on for subsistence, are facing increasing pressure from being overfished, polluted and temperature rise. We have already seen the inefficiencies of the system exposed by the COVID-19 pandemic – supply chains being disrupted and massive amounts of food going to waste because they couldn’t be sold. The humans involved in these systems of food productions, already exploited and at the bottom rung, are themselves having their livelihoods affected.
How will we be able to feed humans all across the globe with our current systems on the verge of breaking down, and each new crisis exposing more fault lines in how we are doing things today? What will a farmer need to look like in the coming decades? What practices do we need to overhaul and replace with? What kind of inequalities do we need to address?
This virtual event aims to foster a platform for community focused dialogue – with experts as well as people all across the world – on how we can find holistic solutions to the issues facing, what we can learn from each other and how we can take individual and systemic action for a better future.
How to participate
If you want to participate in the online event please register here.
28 - 30 September 2020 | online + Berlin, Germany
30 years of unity - but the differences between individual regions in Germany are still striking. To this end, the Corona crisis has acted as a catalyst in uncovering the existing problems of the German economy. With numerous prominent speakers we want to analyze and discuss how the future of the German economy could look like and what went wrong in the past. The complete event can be followed here in the livestream and on zoom. All times shown are Central European Time (CET).
Day 1: Kickoff for our big workshop in light of the 30 year anniversary of the German reunification. The starting point will be made by politicians who discuss whether capitalism needs a fundamental renewal. Participants include Health Minister Jens Spahn and SPD leader Norbert Walter-Borjans. The closing point on Monday will be set by selected economic experts who will give a review and outlook on the Corona crisis.
Day 2: What is the future for the German economy? Federal Finance Minister Olaf Scholz and Nobel Prize winner Joseph Stiglitz are trying to get to the bottom of this just like Thomas Piketty. On day 2, numerous studies commissioned by the Forum New Economy will be presented, for example on inequality, fiscal policy and industrial policy.
Day 3: On the final day of the VII New Paradigm Workshop we will start with a panel on populism in Germany. Afterwards, Thomas Fricke will present a short study on narratives paradigm shifts. Finally, we will discuss the German role in the Eurozone with renowned experts from all around Europe. This day of the event will be entirely virtual.
To participate, please register online. For more information visit the official website.
1- 2 October 2020, 11:30 to 16:00 GMT | online
It is one year since the renowned Chilean economist, and winner of the "Alternative Nobel Prize", Professor Manfred Max-Neef, passed away. The Institute of Economics at the Universidad Austral de Chile (Max-Neef's main academic residency until his death), is organising an online two-day workshop to honor his memory and, at the same time, bring together original research related to his scholarly work. The program is:
Day 1:
Plenary 1: The legacy of Manfred Max-Neef
Session 1: Fundamental Human Needs – Theoretical developments
Session 2: Sustainability and Transdisciplinarity
Day 2:
Session 3: Fundamental Human Needs – Applications
Session 4: The “Scale” in Human Development
Plenary 2: Max-Neef and mainstream economics
Event will include 28 guest speakers from 4 continents.
Further information, including registration link, can be found here: https://www.economicas.uach.cl/workshop2020/
Job title: Senior Lecture in Economics
This a permanent appointment targeted towards pluralist economists; someone with expertise of teaching and research in heterodox economics would be particularly suitable. Applicants from underrepresented backgrounds are strongly encouraged to apply. The post is also open to applicants requiring Tier 2 sponsorship. This is a great opportunity to contribute to shaping the vision for teaching and research in the economics department in the future years, and to inspire a diverse body of students.
Located in a modern £300m campus in the heart of Birmingham City Centre, the Business School is a thriving, vibrant, and inspiring learning community committed to excellence in research, high quality teaching, and impactful industrial engagement. Building on continuous success in student growth and in sustained advancement of research activities, the school has embarked on a programme of extensive expansion funded by substantial long-term investments. Under the leadership of a new Director, the School is actively seeking AASCB, EPAS and BGA accreditation. In line with these ambitions we currently have an exciting opportunity within our Accounting, Finance and Economics Department, for a Senior Lecturer to join our dynamic and enthusiastic Economics subject team. The 2019 Good University Guide ranked the Economics team as12th for student satisfaction in comparison with other UK universities delivering the same disciplinary subject. This role will suit a teaching and research-active economist who is keen to contribute to a distinct pluralist curriculum that places importance on both the theoretical and applied aspects of economics.
You will support our focus of delivering excellent student experience, as well as assisting us to further enhance our strong links with employers and professional bodies. You will hold a PhD in Economics, or a related discipline, and be research-active. Furthermore, you will have significant teaching experience, and be prepared to assume module leadership responsibilities, across both undergraduate and postgraduate modules. Specifically, the successful candidate will be able to teach Economics from a pluralistic perspective, with understanding and appreciation of different schools of thought in economics, preferably within (but not limited to) two or more of the desired areas of expertise listed below:
Skills and Experience
Details of jobholder duties and candidate requirements can be found here.
How to apply
Application is possible via the online form. As part of your application, please attach your CV, Covering Letter and Highest Qualification. Candidates are advised to remove personal information, including names to ensure a fair and transparent recruitment process.
Application Deadline: 10 October 2020
Job title: academic researcher
The "Stiftung Europa-Universität Viadrina Frankfurt/Oder" offers a academic researcher position starting with 1 November 2020. The successful candidate will be working at the department for "Sociology of Economy" (Sascha Münnich).
Your tasks include:
Your profile includes:
We offer:
Please send an application to bewerbung@europa-uni.de with indentification number 1307-20-01. Additionally you can find the website of the Department for Sociology of Economy here.
Application Deadline: 30 September 2020
Job title: Pre-Doctoral Researcher
The Department of Social Sciences at Goethe-University Frankfurt, Germany (Chair of International Political Economy: Prof. Dr. Andreas Nölke) invites applications for a fixed term position - available on 1st December 2020 for a Pre-Doctoral Researcher (m/f/d), 65%-part time. The position is limited to three years. The salary grade is based on the job characteristics of the collective agreement applicable to the Goethe University.
The position is part of the transnational, interdisciplinary project “Populist Backlash, Democratic Backsliding, and the Crisis of the Rule of Law in the European Union (POPBACK)”, funded in context of the NORFACE governance framework. The POPBACK project aims to inform strategies to increase democratic resilience by studying the mechanisms ‘exclusionary populists’ use to increase their power. The position will work on the work package “The Political Economy of Backlash and Backsliding”. This work package investigates how multinational enterprises and domestic firms deal with governments where populist parties are in power. The candidate will have to conduct interviews with companies and business associations in Poland and Slovenia, possibly also in Austria, Germany and the UK. Tasks also include project management, data analysis (NVivo), transcription of interviews, desk research and the preparation of publications. The project will be conducted in cooperation with academics from Austria (Vienna), Poland (Polish Academy of Sciences), Slovenia (Peace Institute), the UK (Loughborough University, University of Cambridge, and the LSE) and the US (University of Delaware).
Qualifications
To be eligible for employment, the applicant is expected to have finished a scientific Master`s degree program in the Social Sciences (preferably Political Science/Political Economy) with excellent results. Applicants are expected to be highly proficient in oral and written English as well as Polish. Proficiency in Slovenian is a major asset. Proficiency in German is welcome, but not necessary. In the selection of qualified candidates, particular attention will be paid to the applicants’ potential to conduct theory driven and structured research in the area of Political Economy. Weight will be accorded to methodological skills that have been successfully applied in prior work. Considerable weight will also be accorded to the applicants’ ability to work in groups and interact with colleagues. If you wish to further inquire about the position, please contact Prof. Dr. Andreas Nölke.
How to apply
Please send your application with a motivation letter, CV and a copy of the MA certificate in a single pdf file to the Dean of the Department of Social Sciences at Goethe-University Frankfurt, Prof. Dr. Birgit Blättel-Mink by 4th October 2020. Please state the reference number 21/2020 in your application.
Application Deadline: 4 October 2020
Job title: Early Stage Reseracher (ESR)
We offer an Early Stage Researcher position to a candidate with strong interest in national accounting and the informal economy for participation in a 4-years Marie Sklodowska-Curie Actions Innovative Training Network (ITN) project ‘MARKETS: Mapping Uncertainties, Challenges and Future Opportunities of Emerging Markets: Informal Barriers, Business Environments and Future Trends in Eastern Europe, The Caucasus and Central Asia’. Coordinated by Dublin City University, MARKETS is a business- and policy-oriented PhD training equipping 15 fellows with theoretical knowledge, analytical skills and complementary training to understand and deal with practical and business problems in the region.
The Early Stage Researcher position at the KU Leuven allows:
For more information please contact em. prof. dr. Jozef Pacolet. You can apply for this job via the online application tool. For additional job details please visit the official websites here and here.
Application Deadline: 15 October 2020
Job title: tenure-track position on public policy at the Assistant Professor level
The University of Denver is pleased to announce a search for a tenure-line Assistant Professor in the Douglas and Mary Scrivner Institute of Public Policy at the Josef Korbel School of International Studies. The position offers an extraordinary opportunity for a faculty member with training in one or more disciplines with a policy emphasis to contribute to a robust research program and help build the Institute's engagement, impact, and visibility locally, nationally, and internationally.
The University of Denver is the oldest independent university in the Rocky Mountain region, with approximately 11,700 students in undergraduate and graduate programs. DU is classified as a Doctoral/Research University with high research activity.
The Scrivner Institute of Public Policy at the University of Denver was made possible by a generous gift from Douglas and Mary Scrivner in 2018. The Institute is housed within the existing Josef Korbel School of International Studies, a top-ranked international affairs program with a range of both graduate and undergraduate degrees and a dynamic research profile that prepares students for careers in the public, private, academic and nonprofit sectors. Its programs provide students with the knowledge, skills, and networks to design policies, implement programs, and realize outcomes that enhance human capabilities around the world. By relaunching the University's public policy program that has existed since the mid-1980's, the Scrivner Institute and the Korbel School together are creating an innovative, local-to-global public policy enterprise that trains students to meet 21st-century challenges in both domestic and international spheres. Supporting path-breaking, multidisciplinary research and local, national, and international policy engagement are critical components of the Institute's vision.
The Scrivner Institute of Public Policy is strongly aligned with the University of Denver's strategic plan, DU Impact 2025, and is committed to the student experience, experiential learning, and serving the public good. It offers an undergraduate major in public policy and a Master of Public Policy degree, both of which have great potential to grow in innovative programming and enrollment. The Scrivner Institutes multidisciplinary design attracts public policy research and teaching from faculty members across the University's colleges and schools and beyond.
We seek candidates with broad competence in public policy, and teaching and research interests in economic and social inequality and stratification. The search is multidisciplinary and encourages applications from candidates examining the intersections between inequality and stratification with other important issues, including but not limited to urbanization and community development, public health, regulation, the future of work, environmental policy, artificial intelligence, and automation. We are particularly interested in candidates who examine the role of race, gender, and other dimensions of marginalization on public policy development, implementation, and outcomes, including those using critical and/or intersectional approaches. We welcome candidates trained in the fields of public policy, economics, law, history, political science, sociology, anthropology, urban studies, geography, and adjacent fields. Candidates with a record of peer-reviewed publishing and grant success are particularly encouraged to apply. We also welcome applications from those at the advanced assistant professor level. The Scrivner Institute is strongly committed to building a diverse and inclusive educational environment, which is in full accord with the value that DU places on its commitments to diversity, equity, and inclusion. Candidates must demonstrate the ability to integrate content and issues relating to, and to work effectively with, ethnically/racially diverse populations. The position will begin on September 1, 2021.
Required Qualifications
Preferred Qualifications
How to apply
Candidates must apply online to be considered. Only applications submitted online will be accepted. Please include the following documents with your application:
For more information please visit the official website.
Application Deadline: 1 November 2020
Job title: 3 tenure-track positions in international studies at the Assistant Professor level
The Josef Korbel School of International Studies at the University of Denver is seeking to fill three tenure-track positions at the assistant professor level to begin September 2021. The Korbel School is a recognized leader in international studies education and scholarship that serves an undergraduate major, MA students, and a small, selective PhD program. The school is strongly committed to building a diverse and inclusive educational environment in full accord with the value that DU places on its commitments to diversity, equity and inclusion.
We are interested in candidates working in the following areas related to global concerns: security (broadly construed), development and its alternatives, sustainability and the environment, and/or long-term integrated assessment modeling, scenario building and quantitative methods. We are especially interested in candidates with research that crosses disciplinary boundaries, connects these broad areas to each other or to additional Korbel priorities in social justice and democracy, and can contribute to diversity, equity and inclusion through their teaching, research, and service.
Required Qualifications
Special Instructions
Candidates must apply online to be considered. Only applications submitted online will be accepted. Questions about the position can be directed to Professor Deborah Avant. Please include the following documents with your application:
The University of Denver is committed to enhancing the diversity of its faculty and staff. We are an Equal Opportunity/Affirmative Action Employer. All qualified applicants will receive consideration for employment regardless of age, race, color, national origin, religion, sex, sexual orientation, gender identity, disability, military/ veteran status or any other status protected by law.
For more information please visit the official website.
Application Deadline: 15 October 2020
Job title: 2 Research Associates in Finance and Geography
We are seeking to appoint two Research Associates to work on the project ‘Cities in Global Financial Networks: Financial and Business Services and Development in the 21st Century’, funded by the European Research Council. CityNet is a frontier research project investigating the nature and dynamics of Financial and Business Services and their implications for the world economy. The project investigates the processes of financialisation, globalisation, urbanisation and development in the context of tumultuous changes of the early 21st century, including the global financial crisis, shift of economic activity to Asia-Pacific, digital revolution, and Brexit. The successful candidate will contribute to a team working on a large and exciting project on the cutting edge of financial geography.
Duties include qualitative and quantitative analysis of the Financial and Business Services sector activities, including the development of new financial technology and reviewing, adopting and refining existing theories and methodologies. You will work in a research team contributing to the burgeoning interdisciplinary field of financial geography by publishing working papers, journal articles, policy and strategy reports, with opportunities to present at international conferences and seminars. You will contribute to the creation of the Atlas of Finance. You will also promote the project through Internet, social media and using the platform of the Global Network on Financial Geography, chaired by Professor Wójcik.
You will hold, or be close to completing, a PhD in economic geography, business studies, economics, data science, sociology, anthropology, political science or other discipline relevant to the project, have skills in quantitative analysis (statistics and /or econometrics), and a strong interest in finance and business services, as well as financial technology. Experience of working with spatial datasets (e.g. GIS, ArcGIS) is required. A track record of peer-reviewed publications on relevant topics is essential.
The appointments will be available from 1 November 2020, initially until 31 July 2021 (with possible extension of up to 12 months pending funder approval). Applications are particularly welcome from candidates who identify as female or BAME, who are under-represented in academic posts in Oxford. SoGE is committed to equality and values diversity. Applications for this vacancy are to be made online. You will be required to upload a CV and supporting statement as part of your online application. For more details please visit the official website.
Application Deadline: 1 October 2020
In his works, Kurt Rothschild has repeatedly called for putting economic research in a broader context. In order to reach meaningful conclusions that take into account the social, political and ecological conditions for economic processes, political economics has to account for the interaction between economic systems, societies and natural environments (Rothschild, 1989). In this spirit, the Kurt-Rothschild-Award 2019 is given to researchers and projects that direct their focus of analysis towards this immanent embeddedness of economic developments. This year’s awardees accept the additional challenges, complexities and difficulties that come with such an approach and put them at the centre of their work.
This year's winners are:
For more details on the award winners and their awarded work follow this link.
Susan O’Leary, David Smith: Moments of resistance: An internally persuasive view of performance and impact reports in non-governmental organizations
Farzana Aman Tanima, Judy Brown, Jesse Dillard: Surfacing the political: Women’s empowerment, microfinance, critical dialogic accounting and accountability
Conor Clune, Brendan O’Dwyer: Organizing dissonance through institutional work: The embedding of social and environmental accountability in an investment field
Johan Graaf, Gustav Johed: “Reverse brokering” and the consumption of accounting: A broker desk ethnography of an investment case
Matthew Day: The short happy life of the affluent working class: Consumption, debt and Embourgeoisement in the Age of Credit
Alex Mathers: Universal basic income and cognitive capitalism: A post-work dystopia in the making?
Minsun Ji: With or without class: Resolving Marx’s Janus-faced interpretation of worker-owned cooperatives
Cecilia Rikap and Hugo Harari-Kermadec: The direct subordination of universities to the accumulation of capital
Christian Stache: Conceptualising animal exploitation in capitalism: Getting terminology straight
Lars Erik Løvaas Gjerde: Behind the veils of discourse: Analysing the connection between discourse and exploitation on the ‘social’ internet
Daniel Gaido and Manuel Quiroga: A forgotten economic work by Rosa Luxemburg
Special Issue on Convergent and divergent trajectories of corporate governance
David Gindis, Jeroen Veldman, and Hugh Willmott: Convergent and divergent trajectories of corporate governance
Jeroen Veldman and Hugh Willmott: Performativity and convergence in comparative corporate governance
Andreas Jansson: Global financial reporting convergence: A study of the adoption of International Financial Reporting Standards by the Swedish accountancy profession
Ulf Larsson-Olaison: Convergence of corporate governance systems: A legal transplant perspective
Umakanth Varottil: Proliferation of corporate governance codes in the backdrop of divergent ownership structures
Olivier Butzbach and Gennaro Rotondo: Italian banking regulation and the legal obstacles to corporate governance convergence
Andréa Wiktor Gabriel, Sophie Madelrieux, Philippe Lescoat: A review of socio-economic metabolism representations and their links to action: Cases in agri-food studies
Johannes Lohwasser, Axel Schaffer, Andreas Brieden: The role of demographic and economic drivers on the environment in traditional and standardized STIRPAT analysis
Joana Wensing, Vincenzina Caputo, Laura Carraresi, Stefanie Bröring: The effects of green nudges on consumer valuation of bio-based plastic packaging
Adam J. Daigneault, Brent L. Sohngen, Roger Sedjo: Carbon and market effects of U.S. forest taxation policy
Andrés Vargas, Juan Pablo Sarmiento Erazo, David Diaz: Has Cost Benefit Analysis Improved Decisions in Colombia? Evidence from the Environmental Licensing Process
Idiano D'Adamo, Pasquale Marcello Falcone, Enrica Imbert, Piergiuseppe Morone: A Socio-economic Indicator for EoL Strategies for Bio-based Products
Belinda Barnes, Anthony D. Arthur, Nathaniel J. Bloomfield: A Stochastic Economic Framework for Partitioning Biosecurity Surveillance Resources
Sechindra Vallury, Joshua K. Abbott, Hoon C. Shin, John M. Anderies: Sustaining Coupled Irrigation Infrastructures: Multiple Instruments for Multiple Dilemmas
Bill Tomlinson, M. Six Silberman, Andrew W. Torrance, Nick Nikols, Rebecca W. Black, Kurt Squire, Paramdeep S. Atwal, Ameya N. Mandalik, Sahil Railkar, Mary Kate Workman: “Environment-selected directors”: An interactive simulation experiment of environmental representation on corporate boards
Peter Legg, Darla Hatton MacDonald, Rosalind H. Bark, Mark Tocock, Dugald Tinch, John M. Rose: Cultural Values, Deep Mining Operations and the Use of Surplus Groundwater for Towns, Landscapes and Jobs
Nicolas Pécastaing, Carlos Chávez: The impact of El Niño phenomenon on dry forest-dependent communities' welfare in the northern coast of Peru
Jussi Lankoski, Alrik Thiem: Linkages between agricultural policies, productivity and environmental sustainability
Ines Chiadmi, Sidnoma Abdoul Aziz Traoré, Jean-Michel Salles: Asian tiger mosquito far from home: Assessing the impact of invasive mosquitoes on the French Mediterranean littoral
Louis Larue: The Ecology of Money: A Critical Assessment
Niharika Tyagi, Smriti Das: Standing up for forest: A case study on Baiga women's mobilization in community governed forests in Central India
Sam Bliss, Megan Egler: Ecological Economics Beyond Markets
Conrad Stanley: Living to Spend Another Day: Exploring Resilience as a New Fourth Goal of Ecological Economics
Special Issue on The Euro at 20 - Macroeconomic Challenges
Jan Behringer, Sebastian Gechert, Torsten Niechoj, Jan Priewe and Andrew Watt: The Euro at 20 – Macroeconomic Challenges
Agnès Benassy-Quéré: Recovering from Maastricht
Jörg Bibow: Stuck on the Wrong Track: 20 Years of Euro Disillusion, Denial, and Delusion
Gennaro Zezza: Fiscal policies in a monetary union: the Eurozone case
Peter Bofinger: The ECB’s policy under the presidency of Mario Draghi: A curse or a blessing for Europe?
Vitor Constancio: Fiscal and financial conditions for a stronger euro area
Special Issue on Cambridge-Cambridge Controversies
Torsten Niechoj and Marc Lavoie: Cambridge-Cambridge Controversies
Harald Hagemann: The Cambridge - Cambridge Controversy on the Theory of Capital: 50 Years After. Introduction
Carl Christian von Weizsäcker: Böhm‐Bawerk and Hicks Modernized
Bertram Schefold: What remains of the Cambridge Critique of Capital Theory, if Reswitching and Reverse Capital Deepening are Empirically Rare and Theoretically Unlikely
Heinz D. Kurz: The Theory of Value and Distribution and the Problem of Capital
Anwar Shaikh, José Alejandro Coronado and Luiza Nassif-Pires: On the empirical regularities of Sraffa prices
Irene Van Staveren: Economic perspectives from the global south and why they matter for economics worldwide
Mark Maier and Tim Thornton: Roundtable on economics education in community colleges
Mark Maier and Tim Thornton: A survey of economics education at US community colleges
Franz Prante; Alessandro Bramucci; Eckhard Hein; Achim Truger: Pluralist macroeconomics - an interactive simulator
John T. Harvey: Post Keynesian modelling and simulation for the classroom
Daniel A. Underwood Welcome to macroeconomics!
Leo Ahrens & Fabio Bothner: The Big Bang: Tax Evasion After Automatic Exchange of Information Under FATCA and CRS
Jens van ’t Klooster & Clément Fontan: The Myth of Market Neutrality: A Comparative Study of the European Central Bank’s and the Swiss National Bank’s Corporate Security Purchases
Atle Midttun & Nina Witoszek: The Competitive Advantage of Collaboration – Throwing New Light on The Nordic Model
Anna Kowalczyk: Transnational Capitalist Classes and the State in Chile
Samantha May: Islamic Charitable Giving in the UK: A ‘Radical’ Economic Alternative?
Brigitte Young: A Macro-Level Account of Money and Credit to Explain Gendered Financialization
Ewa Karwowski , Mimoza Shabani & Engelbert Stockhammer: Dimensions and Determinants of Financialisation: Comparing OECD Countries since 1997
Ramona Coman: Transnational Economists in the Eurozone Crisis: Professional Structures, Networks and Ideas
Dóra Piroska & Ana Podvršič: New European Banking Governance and Crisis of Democracy: Bank Restructuring and Privatization in Slovenia
Leonard Seabrooke , Eleni Tsingou & Johann Ole Willers: The Political Economy of Policy Vacuums: The European Commission on Demographic Change
Iain Hardie , Ailsa Henderson & Charlotte Rommerskirchen: The Impact of Treasury Yields on US Presidential Approval, 1960–2010
Laszlo Bruszt & Julia Langbein: To the Memory of Wade Jacoby
László Bruszt & Julia Langbein: Manufacturing development: how transnational market integration shapes opportunities and capacities for development in Europe’s three peripheries
László Bruszt & David Karas: Diverging developmental strategies beyond “lead sectors” in the EU’s periphery: the politics of developmental alliances in the Hungarian and Polish dairy sectors
Visnja Vukov: European integration and weak states: Romania’s road to exclusionary development
Gergő Medve-Bálint & Vera Šćepanović: EU funds, state capacity and the development of transnational industrial policies in Europe’s Eastern periphery
Vera Šćepanović: Transnational integration in Europe and the reinvention of industrial policy in Spain
Julia Langbein & Olga Markiewicz: Changing modes of market integration, domestic developmental capacities and state-business alliances: insights from Turkey’s automotive industry
Julia Langbein: Shallow market integration and weak developmental capacities: Ukraine’s pathway from periphery to periphery
Olga Markiewicz : Stuck in second gear? EU integration and the evolution of Poland’s automotive industry
Laszlo Bruszt, Ludvig Lundstedt & Zsuzsa Munkacsi: Collateral benefit: the developmental effects of EU-induced state building in Central and Eastern Europe
Angeliki Papadopoulou & Giorgos Gouzoulis: Social Structures of Accumulation in Greece, 1980–2014
Riccardo Pariboni, Walter Paternesi Meloni & Pasquale Tridico: When Melius Abundare Is No Longer True: Excessive Financialization and Inequality as Drivers of Stagnation
Tilman Hartley, Jeroen van den Bergh & Giorgos Kallis: Policies for Equality Under Low or No Growth: A Model Inspired by Piketty
Niroj Bhattarai, Alexandra Bernasek & Anita Alves Pena: Factors Affecting School Attendance and Implications for Student Achievement by Gender in Nepal
Santiago José Gahn: Is There a Declining Trend in Capacity Utilization in the US Economy? A Technical Note
Symposium: Economics and Sociology
Guillaume Vallet & Steven Pressman: Economics and Sociology: An Introduction
Stephen D. Parsons: Entrepreneurs and Uncertainty: Max Weber and the Sociology of Economic Action
Erwin Dekker, Blaž Remic & Carolina Dalla Chiesa: Incentives Matter, But What Do They Mean? Understanding the Meaning of Market Coordination
Samuel Klebaner & Matthieu Montalban: Cross-Fertilizations Between Institutional Economics and Economic Sociology: The Case of Régulation Theory and the Sociology of Fields
Alan Freeman: Creative Labor, Mental Objects and the Modern Theory of Production
Wei Xiaoping: Understanding Marx's Concept of Justice
David Laibman: Incentives, Optimization, and Democratic Planning: A Socialist Primer
Steve Ellner: Conspiracies in the Age of Neoliberalism
Paul Blackledge: Marxist Class Theory for a Skeptical World
Kaan Kangal: More Than Just Another Marx Biography
The Future of Work
Anne Junor and Al Rainnie: A note from the Editors: Exploring contested terrains
John Burgess and Julia Connell: New technology and work: Exploring the challenges
Du Yuhong and Wei Xiahai: Task content routinisation, technological change and labour turnover: Evidence from China
Peter Waring, Azad Bali, and Chris Vas: The fourth industrial revolution and labour market regulation in Singapore
Jesús M Artero, Cristina Borra, and Rosario Gómez-Alvarez: Education, inequality and use of digital collaborative platforms: The European case
Paul Glavin: Multiple jobs? The prevalence, intensity and determinants of multiple jobholding in Canada
Josep Ubalde and Amado Alarcón: Are all automation-resistant skills rewarded? Linguistic skills in the US labour market
Zhiwei Zhao, David Walters, and Desai Shan: Impediments to free movement of Chinese seafarers in the maritime labour market
Michael Quinlan: Five challenges to humanity: Learning from pattern/repeat failures in past disasters?
Obituary: GC Harcourt: Mark Gerard Hayes (21 September 1956–15 December 2019)
n this book, Michael Lebowitz deepens the arguments he made in his award-winning Beyond Capital. Karl Marx, in Capital, focused on capital and the capitalist class that is its embodiment. It is the endless accumulation of capital, its causes and consequences, that are central to Marx’s analysis. In taking this approach, Marx tended to obscure not only the centrality of capital’s “immanent drive” and “constant tendency” to divide the working class but also the political economy of the working class (“social production controlled by social foresight”). In Between Capitalism and Community, Lebowitz demonstrates that capitalism contains within itself elements of a different society, one of community.
Whereas Marx’s intellectual construct of capitalism treats it as an organic system that reproduces its premises of capital and wage-labor (including a working class that looks upon the requirements of capital “as self-evident natural laws”), Lebowitz argues that the struggle of workers in common and activities based upon solidarity point in the direction of the organic system of community, an alternative system that produces its own premises, communality, and recognition of the needs of others. If we are to escape the ultimate barbarism portended by the existing crisis of the earth system, the subordination of the system of capitalism by that of community is essential. Since the interregnum in which capitalism and community coexist is marked by the interpenetration and mutual deformation of both sides within this whole, however, the path to community cannot emerge spontaneously but requires a revolutionary party that stresses the development of the capacities of people through their protagonism.
Please find a link to the book here.
by Hubert Buch-Hansen and Peter Nielsen | 2020, Red Globe Press
This new textbook offers a succinct yet broad introduction to critical realism, an increasingly popular approach to the philosophy of science that provides a holistic alternative to both positivism and postmodernism. This text sets out the central concepts, arguments and understandings in critical realism and relates them to social scientific practice. In addition to answering the question ‘what is critical realism?’, the authors consider critical realism in light of two crucial themes in contemporary society – neoliberalism and climate change – which run as common threads throughout the chapters. While some introductions to the topic focus exclusively on the work of Roy Bhaskar – critical realism’s best-known proponent – this text covers a much wider range of thinkers and social researchers, and also features Key Concept boxes and CR in Action boxes throughout to aid the reader through this complex yet rewarding subject.
This text is the perfect entry point for all those studying critical realism for the first time, or for those seeking to re-familiarise themselves with this approach. Whether you’re studying critical realism as part of a broader course on the philosophy of science or seeking to apply critical realist methods to a particular research project, this book is essential reading for the social sciences, humanities and beyond.
Please find a link to the book here.
by Kevin B Anderson | 2020, Daraja Press
This book collects four decades of writings on dialectics, a number of them published here for the first time, by Kevin B. Anderson, a well-known scholar-activist in the Marxist-Humanist tradition. The essays cover the dialectics of revolution in a variety of settings, from Hegel and the French Revolution to dialectics today and its poststructuralist and pragmatist critics. In these essays, particular attention is given to Lenin’s encounter with Hegel and its impact on the critique of imperialism, the rejection of crude materialism, and more generally, on world revolutionary developments. Major but neglected works on Hegel and dialectics written under the impact of the struggle against fascism like Lukács’s The Young Hegel and Marcuse’s Reason and Revolution are given full critical treatment. Dunayevskaya’s intersectional revolutionary dialectics is also treated extensively, especially its focus on a dialectics of revolution that avoids class reductionism, placing gender, race, and colonialism at the center alongside class. In addition, key critics of Hegel and dialectics like Jacques Derrida, Michel Foucault, Antonio Negri, Pierre Bourdieu, and Richard Rorty, are themselves analysed and critiqued from a twenty-first century dialectical perspective. The book also takes up the dialectic in global, intersectional settings via a reconsideration of the themes of Anderson’s Marx at the Margins, where nationalism, race, and colonialism were theorized alongside capital and class as key elements in Marxist dialectical thought. As a whole, the book offers a discussion of major themes in the dialectics of revolution that still speak to us today at a time of radical transformation in all spheres of society and of everyday life.
Please find a link to the book here.
by Ron Harris | 2020, Princeton University Press
Before the seventeenth century, trade across Eurasia was mostly conducted in short segments along the Silk Route and Indian Ocean. Business was organized in family firms, merchant networks, and state-owned enterprises, and dominated by Chinese, Indian, and Arabic traders. However, around 1600 the first two joint-stock corporations, the English and Dutch East India Companies, were established. Going the Distance tells the story of overland and maritime trade without Europeans, of European Cape Route trade without corporations, and of how new, large-scale, and impersonal organizations arose in Europe to control long-distance trade for more than three centuries.
Ron Harris shows that by 1700, the scene and methods for global trade had dramatically changed: Dutch and English merchants shepherded goods directly from China and India to northwestern Europe. To understand this transformation, Harris compares the organizational forms used in four major regions: China, India, the Middle East, and Western Europe. The English and Dutch were the last to leap into Eurasian trade, and they innovated in order to compete. They raised capital from passive investors through impersonal stock markets and their joint-stock corporations deployed more capital, ships, and agents to deliver goods from their origins to consumers.
Going the Distance explores the history behind a cornerstone of the modern economy, and how this organizational revolution contributed to the formation of global trade and the creation of the business corporation as a key factor in Europe’s economic rise.
Please find a link to the book here.
edited by Guillaume Vallet | 2020, Edward Elgar Publishing
Inequalities and the Progressive Era features contributors from all corners of the world, each exploring a different type of inequality during the Progressive Era (1890s-1930s). Though this era is most associated with the United States, it corresponds to a historical period in which profound changes and progress are realized or expected all over the globe.
The original and international perspectives of the book make it possible to examine important issues or authors of the Progressive Era, who have at times been neglected or insufficiently discussed. This analysis allows us both to know more about this key period of the history of capitalism, and to consider contemporary debates regarding the treatment of inequalities with a pluralistic approach.
Academics and students of all levels, from PhD and Master degree students to undergrads will appreciate the original focus on the roots and treatments of inequalities, and this innovative collaboration between researchers of various fields in social sciences.
Please find a link to the book here.
by Anjan Chakrabarti, Anup Dhar and Serap A. Kayatekin | 2020, Routledge
While Marxian theory has produced a sound and rigorous critique of capitalism, has it faltered in its own practice of social transformation? Has it faltered because of the Marxian insistence on the hyper-secularization of political cultures? The history of religions – with the exception of some spiritual traditions – has not been any less heartless and soulless. This book sets up a much-needed dialogue between a rethought Marxian praxis of the political and a rethought experience of spirituality.
Such rethinking within Marxism and spirituality and a resetting of their lost relationship is perhaps the only hope for a non-violent future of both the Marxian reconstruction of the self and the social as also faith-based life-practices. Building on past work in critical theory, this book offers a new take on the relationship between a rethought Marxism and a rethought spirituality (rethought in the life, philosophy and works of Christian thinkers, anti-Christian thinkers, Marxian thinkers, those critical of Marxist Statecraft, Dalit neo-Buddhist thinkers, thinkers drawing from Judaism, as well as thinkers drawing critically from Christianity).
Contrary to popular belief, this book does not see spirituality as a derivative of only religion. This book also sees spirituality as, what Marx designated, the "sigh of the oppressed" against both social and religious orthodoxy. In that sense, spirituality is not just a displaced form of religion; it is a displaced form of the political too. This book therefore sets up the much needed dialogue between the Marxian political and the spiritual traditions.
The chapters in this book were originally published in Rethinking Marxism – A Journal of Economics, Culture and Society.
Please find a link to the book here.
by Axel T. Paul | 2020, IIPPE Pluto Series
This is a comprehensive, critical introduction to the sociology of money, covering many currently taught topics, from the origins of money to its function today. Though our coins, bank notes and electronic tokens do function as means of exchange, money is in fact a social, intangible institution. This book argues that money does indeed rule the world.
Exploring the unlikely origins of money in early societies and amidst the first civilisations, the book moves onto its inherent liaison with finance, including the logic of financial markets. Turning to the contemporary politics of money, monetary experiments and reform initiatives such as Bitcoin and positive money, it finally reveals the essentially monetary constitution of modern society itself. Through criticising the simplistic exchange paradigm of standard economics and rational choice theory, it argues instead that money matters because it embodies social relations.
Please find a link to the book here.
by Wendy N. Whitman Cobb | 2021, Routledge
This book explores the privatization of space and its global impact on the future of commerce, peace and conflict. As space becomes more congested, contested, and competitive in the government and the private arenas, the talk around space research moves past NASA’s monopoly on academic and cultural imaginations to discuss how Elon Musk’s SpaceX and Jeff Bezos’ Blue Origin is making space "cool" again.
This volume addresses the new rhetoric of space race and weaponization, with a focus on how the costs of potential conflict in space would discourage open conflict and enable global cooperation. It highlights the increasing dependence of the global economy on space research, its democratization, plunging costs of access, and growing economic potential of space-based assets.
Thoughtful, nuanced, well-documented, this book is a must read for scholars and researchers of science and technology studies, space studies, political studies, sociology, environmental studies, and political economy. It will also be of much interest to policymakers, bureaucrats, think tanks, as well as the interested general reader looking for fresh perspectives on the future of space.
Please find a link to the book here.
edited by Maria Fernanda Madi, Renny Reyes and Vicente Bagnoli | 2020, World Economics Association
“The book shows that a law and economics framework is invaluable for policy analysis in situations for which existing law provides no answer, like a financial crisis. This diverse group of authors… use an economic framework to compare a reservoir of legal and policy alternatives, not merely theoretical but actually tested in the aftermath of the financial crisis. It is a positive project in all respects, oriented towards looking for solutions for a better future.” Ann-Sophie Vandenberghe, Associate Professor, Erasmus School of Law
“This book is an important contribution to the literature and policy insights which emerged following the latest financial crisis. With a broad legal and geographical view, it offers a critical look into the institutional and social changes that came about after the crisis. The collection of articles offers a unique mixture of theoretical arguments and practical recommendations. It combines a look into present practices with insights for future steps, all given past experiences. It is interesting for readers familiar with law and economics and at the same time accessible to readers new to the field.” Elena Kantorowicz-Reznichenko, Assistant Professor of Law and Economics at the Erasmus University Rotterdam
Please find a link to the book here.
by Matthew Thompson | 2020, Liverpool University Press
Reconstructing Public Housing unearths Liverpool’s hidden history of radical alternatives to municipal housing development and builds a vision of how we might reconstruct public housing on more democratic and cooperative foundations. In this critical urban history, Matthew Thompson brings to light how and why this remarkable city became host to two pioneering social movements in collective housing and urban regeneration experimentation. In the 1970s, Liverpool produced one of Britain’s largest, most democratic and socially innovative housing co-op movements, including the country’s first new-build co-op to be designed, developed and owned by its member-residents. Four decades later, in some of the very same neighbourhoods, several campaigns for urban community land trusts are growing from the grassroots – including the first ever architectural or housing project to be nominated for and win, in 2015, the artworld’s coveted Turner Prize. Thompson traces the connections between these movements; how they were shaped by, and in turn transformed, the politics, economics, culture and urbanism of Liverpool. Drawing on theories of capitalism and cooperativism, property and the commons, institutional change and urban transformation, Thompson reconsiders Engels’ housing question, reflecting on how collective alternatives work in, against and beyond the state and capital, in often surprising and contradictory ways.
Please find a link to the book here.
by Paul Mattick | 2020, Historical Materialism Book Series, Brill
How is scientific knowledge of social life possible? If there are social sciences, must they employ methods different from those of the natural sciences? In Social Knowledge, Paul Mattick argues that the well-known difficulties of the social sciences – in particular the predictive and explanatory failures of economics – are due not to an inherent resistance of social life to scientific explanation, but to the failure of social scientists to include their own categories of social explanation among the objects of scientific study.
Looking at Marx as an anthropological theorist, Mattick compares his critique of political economy with Evans-Pritchard’s analysis of Azande witchcraft. Just as the British anthropologist attempted to explain Azande ideas and rituals in terms of their place in native life, Marx wished to explain the continued faith in economics – despite its striking weakness as a science – in terms of the central role played by this system of ideas in the daily lives of natives of capitalist society. This comparison leads to the questions about the nature of scientific thinking and its relation to our everyday knowledge of social reality that are the subject of this book.
Please find a link to the book here.
by Herman Bril, Georg Kell and Andreas Rasche | 2021, Routledge
This book tells the story of how the convergence between corporate sustainability and sustainable investing is now becoming a major force driving systemic market changes. The idea and practice of corporate sustainability is no longer a niche movement. Investors are increasingly paying attention to sustainability factors in their analysis and decision-making, thus reinforcing market transformation.
In this book, high-level practitioners and academic thought leaders, including contributions from John Ruggie, Fiona Reynolds, Johan Rockström, and Paul Polman, explain the forces behind these developments. The contributors highlight (a) that systemic market change is influenced by various contextual factors that impact how sustainable investing is perceived and practiced; (b) that the integration of ESG factors in investment decisions is impacting markets on a large scale and hence changes practices of major market players (e.g. pension funds); and (c) that technology and the increasing datafication of sustainability act as further accelerators of such change.
The book goes beyond standard economic theory approaches to sustainable investing and emphasizes that capitalism founded on more real-world (complex) economics and cooperation can strengthen ESG integration. Aimed at both investment professionals and academics, this book gives the reader access to more practitioner-relevant information and it also discusses implementation issues. The reader will gain insights into how "mainstream" financial actors relate to sustainable investing.
Please find a link to the book here.
edited by Dóra Piroska and Miklós Rosta | 2020, CEU Press
In this volume, leading social scientists, empirical analysts, and policy practitioners demonstrate the various ways in which the insights of János Kornai, a renowned early analyst and critic of the command economies of Eastern European communist states, are stirring academic and policy discussions about current challenges. While dissecting the economic theories and practices in the Soviet Bloc, Kornai devised and applied concepts such as soft-budget constraints, rush versus harmonic growth, surplus versus shortage economy, non-Walrasian equilibrium, bureaucratic coordination, and the invisible power of the communist party. These concepts are commonly applied to a variety of issues in the contexts of fundamental transformation. The cases discussed in this volume include the transitional paths of postcommunist economies, the pitfalls of East European market-building, economic repercussions of the dissolution of Yugoslavia, and the process of integration in the Eurozone. The volume concludes with János Kornai's remarks about the value of democracy and other research topics, delivered at the conference celebrating his 90th birthday in February, 2018.
Please find a link to the book here.
by Gonzalo Castañeda | 2020, Centro de Estudios Espinosas Yglesias
With the recent developments in computing technologies and the thriving research scene in Complexity Science, economists and other social scientists have become aware of a more flexible and promising alternative for modelling socioeconomic systems; one that, in contrast with neoclassical economics, advocates for the realism of the assumptions, the importance of context and culture, the heterogeneity of agents (individuals or organisations), and the bounded rationality of individuals who behave and learn in multifaceted ways in uncertain environments. The book synthesises an extensive body of work in the field of social complexity and constructs a unifying framework that allows developing concrete applications to important socioeconomic problems. This one-of-a-kind textbook provides a comprehensive panorama for advanced undergraduates and graduate students who want to become familiar with a wide range of issues related to social complexity. It is also a pioneering text that can support professors who wish to learn techniques and produce research in this novel field.
After reviewing the main concepts, premises and implications of complexity theory, the book frames this vision within the history of economic thought. Then, it articulates a meta-theory in which interdependent agents are embedded in a social context and whose collective and decentralised behaviour generates socio-economic phenomena. Such a framework builds on theories from evolutionary, institutional and behavioural economics, as well as analytical sociology. The book then reviews different computational tools for modelling complex adaptive systems, such as cellular automata, networks, and agent-based models. It elaborates on their analytical advantages in comparison to equation-based models, and how they can be calibrated/estimated and validated with empirical data. Finally, the book advocates for the practical use of these computational tools and makes a case for policy applications and the study of causal mechanisms.
Please find a link to the book here.
by Richard D. Wolff | 2020, Democracy at Work
Published by Democracy at Work, The Sickness is the System is a unique collection of over 50 essays which collectively argue that "returning to normal" no longer responds adequately to the accumulated problems of US capitalism. The coronavirus pandemic, the deepening economic crash, dangerously divisive political responses, and exploding social tensions have thrown an already declining American capitalist system into a tailspin. What is necessary is transition toward a new economic system that works for all of us.
With 2020 elections looming, Americans are looking for answers that explain the past and prepare for a better future. To aid that process, this book is intended to provide a relatable and useful read for anyone interested in understanding the current crisis of US capitalism.
The System is the Sickness answers the following questions: Was the 2020 crash caused by COVID-19? Or was it just a trigger to an already unstable system?, How is the capitalist system unable to prepare for or contain a crisis like the coronavirus pandemic?, How are our social crises perpetuated, worsened and used by capitalism?, Why won’t reforms be enough to cope with our current economic, political and social crises? and What are the signs that a system change is already underway?
Please find a link to the book here.
by Juan Pablo Mateo Tomé | 2019, Palgrave
This book has a dual purpose. First, it analyses the concept of economic crises within economic theory, showing the various theoretical foundations and controversies amongst different schools of economic thought. Second, it presents an empirical analysis of the Great Recession in Spain, addressing the growth period of 1995 to 2007-08, the subsequent depression until 2013-14 and the recovery that followed. It also shows the way in which the inner contradictions of capital manifests itself in an European peripheral economy under a real estate bubble, emphasizing the role of the Spanish economy in European capitalism.
This theoretical and empirical heterodox approach will be of interest to students and scholars in political economy, and those with an interest in the Eurozone.+
Please find a link to the book here.
by Massimiliano Vatiero | 2020, Routledge
Despite abundant literature on transaction costs, there is little to no in-depth analysis regarding what the transaction is or how it works. Drawing on both Old and New Institutional Economics and on a variety of interdisciplinary sources, this monograph traces the history of the meaning of transaction in institutional economics, mapping its topicality and use over time.
This manuscript treats the idea of ‘transaction’ as a construct with legal, competitive and political dimensions, and connects different approaches within institutional economics. The book covers the contributions of key thinkers from different schools, including (in alphabetical order) Ronald H. Coase, John R. Commons, Robert Lee Hale, Oliver Hart, Mancur Olson, Thorstein Veblen and Oliver E. Williamson. This book will be of interest to advanced students and researchers of institutional economics, law and economics, and economics, and the history of economic thought.
Please find a link to the book here.
A prospective PhD student is sought to apply to an IRC (Irish Research Council) PhD scholarship (full scholarship--fees, stipend, research expenses). Students of any citizenship can apply, but the success rate is higher with EU nationals (including the UK).
The proposed project is about the financialisation of Ireland’s nursing home sector--global investors have increasingly entered and reshaped the sector in recent years. The project will document this and examine some of the consequences. This project’s conclusions will be relevant to other countries because the same phenomenon is happening elsewhere. Issues and academic fields covered include:
The project is relevant in light of Covid-19, because it will shed light on how certain types of nursing homes have dealt with Covid-19. Ireland has had a very high number of deaths in nursing homes and so constitutes an ideal case study. There is space to modify the details of this project depending on the student’s background, so please get in touch with Julien Mercille to discuss.
Application deadline: October 2020
The Levy Economic Institute of Bard College is pleased to announce that both our M.A. and M.S. program are now accepting students for spring 2021.
Designed as preparation for a professional career in economic research and policy formulation, the Levy Economics Institute Graduate Programs in Economic Theory and Policy offer an alternative to mainstream programs in economics and finance. To find out more about our innovative programs that combine a rigorous course of study with exceptional opportunity to participate in advanced economics research alongside the Institute’s global network of researchers, visit bard.edu/levygrad or follow the program's Facebook page.
Applications for spring 2021 are now open. Interested students should contact the program recruiter, Martha Tepepa (mtepepa@levy.org), to discuss their options. Scholarships are available.
The University of Greenwich is offering a full PhD scholarship on
"Government measures to contain economic fallout from the Covid-19 crisis: A comparative study across the United Kingdom and European Union"
to be supervised by Rob Calvert Jump, Professor Ozlem Onaran, and Dr Alex Guschanski. For further information please contact the supervisor: Robert Calvert Jump. This PhD project will investigate two broad questions:
The first question could be approached by means of semi-structured interviews with policymakers and policy economists, using a snowball sampling technique. The second question could be approached by cross-country statistical analysis using high frequency economic indicators.
The project will also consider the role of structural factors such as gender relations, unionisation rates, and informal and casual employment practices in shaping both the choice and effects of different policy packages across European countries. For example, the student might assess why certain countries imposed restrictions on worker lay-offs alongside firm-level subsidies while other countries did not, and analyse the socio-economic consequences of these decisions.
Bursary available (subject to satisfactory performance):
Year 1: £15,285
Year 2: In line with UKRI rate
Year 3: In line with UKRI rate
The successful candidate will receive a contribution to tuition fees equivalent to the university’s Home/EU rate, currently £4,407, for the duration of their scholarship. International applicants will need to pay the remainder tuition fee, currently £10,593, for the duration of their scholarship. This fee is subject to an annual increase. Scholarships are available for three years, full-time study from the date scholars first register as an MPhil/PhD student with the university. Applicants must meet the programme entry requirements.
How to apply
Applications need to be made online. No other form of application will be considered. All applications must include the following information. Applications not containing these documents will not be considered:
*upload to the qualification section of the application form.
Attachments need to be in PDF format. The scholarship must commence before 31st December 2020. For additional information about the scholarship please visit the official website.
Application Deadline: 19 October 2020 (00:00 UTC)
Integration of the world economy has thus far favoured the strong, argues Christoph Scherrer, and prices – the key mechanism coordinating a market economy – do not take into account the social and environmental costs of world trade. Measures such as internalising external costs are needed, he argues, to build an inclusive world trade order.
Christoph Scherrer is professor in Globalization and Politics at the University of Kassel, Germany, executive director of the International Centre for Development and Decent Work, and a member of the steering committee of the Global Labour University.
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