Issue 290 January 03, 2022 web pdf Heterodox Economics Directory
A new issue of the Heterodox Economic Newsletter seems to be the perfect way to start the new year, so here we are ;-)
I am super-happy to let you know that the Newsletter enters 2022 better prepared than ever before as Daniela Cialfi – a new member in our editorial team – joined us these days: Daniela is a cognitive and behavioural economist, heterodox economist and postdoctoral researcher at the University of Chieti-Pescara, Italy. Before this, she worked at Procter & Gamble. She holds a PhD in the Human Science curriculum in Economics and Statistics from the University of Chieti-Pescara and acts as a board member of the Society of Experimental Finance and the Italian Post-Keynesian Society. In her spare time, Daniela enjoys travel, reading, jogging, and coding. It goes without saying that we are all super-happy that Daniela joined the team ;-)
Aside from the usual Corona-induced calamities, one thing that pained me in 2021 was the fact that I could not find enough time to read a fair share of the excellent books we regularly feature in the Newsletter. Among those books that seemed to cover important issues for heterodox economists in general and that I probably should have discussed at some point in the editorial are Steve Keen's manifesto on"The New Economics", Tim Jackson's new book on "Post Growth"or de Muijnck/Tielemans' ambitious book "Economy Studies". While I will try to do better this year, let me add that the Newsletter is always happily accepting book reviews, especially on such titles that are, in some way, of general interest to heterodox researchers. In case you are interested to contribute here, please contact us anytime by writing us an email.
After publishing our last issue, we also received the sad news that Geoffrey Harcourt, a giant of heterodox economics and an always engaging supporter of the Newsletter, passed away at the age of 90. Until very recently Geoff wrote regular emails full of refreshing humor to the Newsletter pointing to upcoming events and noteworthy books as well as commenting on recent developments in the field. He will be greatly missed by our community.
All the best & have a good start,
Jakob
© public domain
27 - 29th April 2022 | Aalborg University, Aalborg, Denmark
Conference Theme: Economics at the Edge: Understanding and Rebuilding the world after Covid
The 5th Nordic Post-Keynesian Conference 2022 organised by Research group MAMTEP (Macroeconomic Methodology, Theory and Economic Policy) is taking place from 27-29 of April in Aalborg, Denmark.
The list of challenges facing our economies seems to be growing all the time. While many countries had not fully recovered from the "Great Recession", the COVID-19 pandemic has hit our societies hard, against the backdrop of rising inequality and the climate challenge. While the magnitude of the health and economic shock of COVID-19 has been amplified by the underfunding of systems over the past decades, it is concerning that voices are beginning to call for a return to austerity policies, when we should instead be investing in the ecological transition and other social cohesion and resilience policies. Despite its media and academic dominance, mainstream economics does not offer adequate tools to address real problems or formulate coherent policy proposals. To develop theories and policies that are relevant to the real world, we need to use theories other than the mainstream view. As such, post-Keynesian theory is a prime candidate to offer an alternative.
The avenues of research to be developed are both qualitative and quantitative, including issues of conceptualization, methodology, modeling, as well as empirically calibrated economic policy formulation. In particular, there is an urgent need to pursue research in the Stock-Flow Consistent (SFC) tradition and to promote the benefits of pluralism, cross-cutting and problem-based learning in economics education. Finally, particular emphasis should be placed on the inclusion of ecological and societal issues in formulations of economic theory and policy.
Keynote speakers: Özlem Onaran, Anna Carabelli, Louis-Philippe Rochon, Etienne Espagne, Peter Skott
Submission Process
For those interested in presenting at the conference please note: Abstracts should be approximately 500 words. All relevant details will be collected by the submission form in the link below. The submission form requires plain text, and we therefore recommend the preparation of a version without rich text formatting. Please submit abstracts via the online submission portal. Further information see here.
Submission Deadline: 01 February 2022
29 June - 01 July 2022 | Geneva, Switzerland
Conference Theme: Transforming Global Governance for Social Justice: Feminist Economics and the Fight for Human Rights
The current pandemic has brought attention to the need for international cooperation to help mitigate the impact of the pandemic and produce an inclusive recovery. The far-reaching consequences of COVID-19 on local, national, and global economies have yet to be fully realized but the pandemic has clearly exacerbated existing sex, gender, race, caste and other inequalities. There has been a global surge in cases of domestic violence and an exponential increase in the burden of women’s care and domestic work, both paid and unpaid, which enables the continuation of daily life. The pandemic has generated massive losses in lives, impacted people’s health, disrupted markets and livelihoods, and created profound reverberations in the home.
The pandemic has also demonstrated the imperative for a close look at the normative foundations of our economic decisions – as we have faced stark trade-offs between economic activities, resources, and human lives – along with other things we value outside of the monetized market economy. The human rights framework provides one ethical lens to evaluate economic and social policy, developed through decades of public deliberation and reasoning in an international setting. Globally, attention is being paid for the need to redirect international economic governance institutions towards a strategy that will ensure inclusion and equity both within and among nations. There is also an urgency to advocate for a global economy that puts the primacy of human rights, well-being of the planet and inclusive and sustainable economies at the core.
The global fallout of the COVID-19 pandemic is deeply connected with the kinds of issues that feminist economists have long investigated and can afford a deeper understanding of the crisis itself. The feminist economic analysis highlights the interconnected gender dynamics of work, social protection, macro-economic policy including issues such as debt, sustainability and overall well-being, and contributes to a fairer and gender-responsive COVID-19 recovery.
Conference Location: This conference will take place in Geneva, Switzerland, the perfect place to explore these issues and bring a feminist economic analysis to deliberations on building a more just and sustainable post-Covid world.
Submissions: We solicit paper, session and panel proposals that engage with links between theory and action on these topics as well as on a broader range of feminist inquiry into economic phenomena. Proposals with an interdisciplinary character are especially welcome.
Furthermore, submissions will open in early January. In particular, abstracts (400 words max.) must be submitted online via the IAFFE website ( http://www.iaffe.org) in English, French and Spanish. Submissions can be made for individual papers, organized sessions of papers, or panels and roundtables. We expect to have simultaneous interpretation provided for conference plenaries and for many of the sessions. Participants are limited to one paper presentation and one roundtable/panel appearance. Additional co-authored papers are allowed only if they are presented by the co-author. These limitations allow maximum participation by all members wishing to participate. Please see the IAFFE website, http://www.iaffe.org, for more submission guidelines.
The 2022 IAFFE Annual Conference will provide a forum for scholarship and inquiry that recognizes the methodological pluralism of our field. We define our field broadly and welcome research that brings a feminist lens to topics both micro and macro, local and global. We invite you to join us for this in-person (with hybrid access) conference, hosted by IAFFE and the Gender Centre at The Graduate Institute, Geneva, Switzerland. For more information please visit the official website.
Application Deadline: 15 March 2022
8-9 September 2022 | Grenoble, France
Conference Theme: Social Economy and 21st Century Crises
The 41st Annual Meeting of the Association d’ Économie Sociale (AÉS) is organised by the Centre of Research in Economics of Grenoble (CREG).
The magnitude and characteristics of the 2020 crisis deserve special attention as they are unprecedented and of critical importance to the sustainability of our economies. The health crisis due to the COVID-19 pandemic led to singular policies seeking to protect the population. These policies also resulted, by mechanical effect, in a worldwide recession while the consequences of the 2007-2008 global financial crisis have not yet been counterbalanced by a strong economic recovery.
While the economic fragilities of the 2007-2008 crisis continue to haunt political and social stability around the world and push many governments towards protectionist solutions, the pandemic is traveling the world along the lines of trade and population movements. It raises economic questions similar to those that have existed since the 1970s. These reflections concern the conditions of stability and growth of a capitalism that evolves on a neo-liberal wave. They also require an in-depth reflection on social economics and on health and social policies. In an "unprecedented" way, the pandemic marked the primacy of health over the economy: governments agreed to block certain economic activities to preserve health.
As a major global social event, this pandemic marks, to the dismay of certain economic forces, the political choice to place the economy in the background of governmental concerns everywhere in the world. It also marks the end of the conservative rules of European economic regulation based on the withdrawal of the State and neo-liberal approaches. In the 1990s and 2000s, the state was a supervisor through economic austerity policies (conservative monetary policies, limitation of budget deficits and public debt, liberalization of financial markets, etc.). In the face of the recession, the European Central Bank has opened the credit floodgates to governments that provide support and emergency measures. The European Commission supports public spending plans of unprecedented magnitude, without any real change in the perception that public decision-makers and economic circles have of the functioning of the economy and the needs of society. Do the practices inaugurated in 2020 herald a temporary increase in the share of public spending in GDP or a reconfiguration of the welfare state?
The old concepts of social market economy or social economy in the institutional sense of the term need to be revised in the light of the new challenges and the new prospects for economic recovery based on an economy moving towards ecological and digital transition. In order to develop these issues, we are opening up 4 main lines of communication:
1) New socio-economic fragilities and gender inequalities
The ILO's regular reports draw attention to the reduction in working hours in 2020 and 2021. This recession is not just about unemployment in the conventional sense. Governments everywhere have adopted support plans to limit social interactions and thus production and trade. With the support of international organizations, public financial support was provided everywhere and has limited company closures and massive layoffs, at least in the beginning. The support did not prevent the reduction of activities, employment, and the critical situations linked to the interruption of tourist, agricultural, cultural and sporting activities, etc.
Most of the world's workers live in countries hit by massive downturns. At the global level, part of this slowdown resulted in job losses resulting in unemployment, in a reduction of working hours although the public authorities sought to preserve the overall level of employment. Thus, the usual mechanisms of social protection (unemployment insurance and minimum social benefits) are under pressure. The French reform of unemployment insurance has been delayed. How can we assess the resilience of social protection?
The first victims of the recession are not only wage-earners but also small self-employed workers, shopkeepers, etc. Social categories that were previously independent have been hit by the recession and are requiring new urgent social protection linked to the crisis. A related question is then: Has a new poverty been born, or will it recede with an economic recovery? The solidarity-social economy has been strongly solicited in the course of the recession: what place will it regain at the end of the 2020 recession (if there is an end in the near future)?
The mechanisms of lockdown, school closures, and the generalization of working from home have put pressure on women, whether employed or not, who are most often in a position to do most of the domestic work in the household. Has gender inequality increased temporarily or does it herald a more lasting upsurge? The social economy looks at the issues related to gender inequality.
2) Social economy and development in the global South
In the South, the absence or great weakness of unemployment insurance systems raises very complex questions about the mechanisms of social exclusion. What social economy can be the departure point for development processes that could meet the needs of the population? In the progressive changes of the 2010 decade and the brutal socio-economic degradation of 2020, the associative world is placed on the front line. Emergency social needs are above all covered by a complex world of non-governmental organizations and solidarity associations. The third sector is called upon to help new populations that are threatened by social exclusion and requiring urgent material support. In this emergency environment, new ways of social action in the North as well as in the South are developing. In particular, the organizations representing employees are looking for new forms of solidarity because the problems are posed in a new way. The crisis is health-related and international. Trade unions can hardly remain within the restricted perimeter of stable salaried work, even if essential questions arise, such as working from home and the impact of digital transformations. What are the new social solidarities at work? What about their international dimension?
In the South, raising the issue of social inclusion and actions on this subject is a good way to question social action, which is too often reduced to formulas that can limit social work to a limited “reparation” action. Working on social inclusion makes it possible to link this work to actions in favour of development as close as possible to the ground, the concerns of territorial development and social action actors. The question of budgetary limits to social policies is a key issue here, and requires that increased spending be justified by a convincing justification of expenditure. Does the notion of social investment provide a key word for social action in this constrained economic context?
3) Economic Globalization, Health Globalization
In 2021, economic globalization is being impacted by global population health issues. Wealthy economies have been quick to respond to national health issues, but health issues are taking on a different scope. Is the health economy going global? An increased role for the social state is often expected to counterbalance the effects of the global recession. Public health priorities are reinforced by the global pandemic. Can they call for a new way of thinking about health policies at a supranational level?
The pandemic also brings to light an urgent need to think about democratic solutions at different territorial levels ranging from local life to global organization, depending on the issues to be resolved. The governance of economic and social affairs is then questioned. The practices of corporate social responsibility towards their stakeholders and towards the goals of economic recovery that would be consistent with environmental requirements should also be examined.
The notion of the common good is being questioned, as is the issue of corporate participation in the construction of this common good. The alternative ways of organizing cooperative, solidarity-based and social enterprises are to be reinterpreted in the context of the pandemic: what new “social contract” can be derived from the need to support private enterprises and to preserve employment level, and to frame relevant models of organization of humanly sustainable homeworking relations? What are the new social compromises that are being put in place?
4) Social economy, welfare state and ecological and digital transitions
Will the post-crisis period of 2020-2021 be a repeat of the post-crisis period of 2007-2008? Public support for companies and financial markets would quickly be followed by the return of high-yield speculative activities. Can we imagine an economic recovery that generates jobs and sustainable income without an alternative financing model that generates well-being for the world's populations? The mobilization of citizens acting at the local level to innovate and implement social change can bring alternatives based on citizen projects. The aspiration to a circular, solidarity-based and social economy does point to such alternatives. The development of local currencies might be regarded as an illustration. In a world undergoing digital, ecological and energetic transitions, the pandemic is leading us to rethink the modes of development based on the unsustainable exploitation of environmental resources. This evolution has multiplied the emergence of new global risks such as pathogenic contacts between wild animals and humans. Many initiatives aim to establish new models of development reconfiguring the relationship between humans and the environment (ecofeminism, short circuits, etc.), alternative models for financing medium and long-term societal transition projects. What analysis can be made of these models?
The new means of macroeconomic and financial regulation - which could be implemented in both developed and emerging countries- are still very uncertain. What are the roles of international organizations and central banks beyond immediate support for economic activity and the financial system, what new articulations between monetary and budgetary policies, and what is the future of international agreements such as the Eurozone, the European Union and the Franc Zone? Are we moving towards a redefinition of the international balance of power, both at the level of countries and institutions, and the creditors who are in a position to impose their logic? These are all questions that should be posed again in light of the current health crisis. Is the reflection on modes of development, based on a new social economy, breaking radically with the (neo)liberal ideology of the 1990s and 2000s on the agenda?
Beyond these core topics of the meeting, other proposals falling within the usual fields of the social economy, are also expected (health, housing, employment, public services, education etc.). The conference is open to different disciplines such as economics, sociology, political science, law, history, management sciences, life sciences, etc.
Standard requirements for the proposal submission
Paper proposals must be presented according to the following standard plan (2-3 pages maximum): First page: title of the paper, name(s) of author(s); postal and e-mail address(es) of author(s) [in case of co-authors, underline the name of the correspondent], affiliation of the author(s).
The paper proposal should include the following points:
These proposals must be submitted electronically before Monday, January 10, 2022, on the conference website: http://aes2022.sciencesconf.org. This website brings together all the information related to the 41st AÉS conference.
Articles that are received by March 24, 2022 at the latest on the conference website and that meet the standards available on the conference website are eligible for publication. Texts not selected for publication in the proceedings and texts received after March 24, 2022 will be posted on the website. To contact the organizers of the conference please use this link. You can download the full CfP here.
Submission Deadline (for Paper Proposals): 10 January 2022
1 August - 2 September 2022 | Cambridge, UK
The 52nd annual meeting will be held at Fitzwilliam College, University of Cambridge, from the 31st of August to the 2nd of September 2022. The History of Economic Thought Society (THETS) represents one of the longest established groups of scholars with an interest in the history of economic thought, the history of economics and economic knowledge. Annual meetings have been organized since 1968.
Papers dealing with any aspect of the history of economics from any period are welcome. We encourage submissions from disciplines across the humanities and social sciences. We also welcome papers taking a non-European or global perspective. Presentations by PhD students and early career scholars are particularly encouraged. The Society will make available a limited number of stipends to cover part of the cost of attendance for young scholars.
Submission Process
Abstract proposals (200 words min.) or full papers should be sent to cc2006@cam.ac.uk. Proposals should have THETS 2022 in the subject line. Please attach a copy of your CV if you wish to be considered for a young scholar stipend.
For more information, please check the THETSwebsite.
Submission deadline: 31 April 2022
May 4-7, 2022 | Hilton Rose Hall, Montego Bay, Jamaica
The Association for Social Economics invites papers for an in-person session at the 2022 Eastern Economic Association International (EEA). We welcome proposals for complete sessions or individual papers centered around LGBTQ issues with a particular focus on the Caribbean.
For individual paper submissions, please submit the title, JEL code, and an abstract (250 words) along with your contact information to Pete Vechsuruck [vechsuruck@uri.edu]. For complete sessions, please submit that information for all papers and authors. Some ASE funding may be available to support graduate student travel for those presenting. Please indicate whether you are a graduate student, and if so, if you’re requesting funding consideration. For further information about their 2022 conference please see EEA conference website .
Submission Deadline: January 5, 2022.
30 March - 2 April 2022 | Denver, Colorado, USA
The Association for Social Economics (ASE) invites papers for in-person sessions at the 2022 Western Social Science Association (WSSA) annual meetings. ASE welcomes individual papers on any aspects of social economics as well as proposals for complete sessions including roundtables centered around a common theme or pedagogical discussions.
For individual paper submissions, please submit the title and an abstract (250 words) along with your contact information to Rojhat Avsar (ravsar@colum.edu). For complete sessions, please submit that information for all papers and authors. Some ASE funding may be available to support graduate student travel for those presenting. Please indicate whether you are a graduate student and if so, if you’re requesting funding consideration. Please visit the WSSE page for further information about the 2022 conference.
Submission deadline: 20 January 2022
De Gruyter Handbook of Degrowth: Propositions and Prospects
Degrowth is one of the most exciting and contentious frameworks for thinking about and contesting the sanctity of growth as a dominant economic framework. Less a discipline or theoretical framework, degrowth is a set of propositions about the social and ecological dangers of structuring society around ever-increasing material throughputs and GDP growth. It is also a set of propositions about the kinds of post-growth society that must be achieved to build a world of human and non-human flourishing.
This De Gruyter Handbook of Degrowth aims to critically appraise degrowth’s propositions and prospects. It will bring together proponents of degrowth along with those who engage critically with these ideas from a wide variety of disciplines to assess degrowth’s contributions to some of the most pressing issues of our times. In so doing, the handbook will capture and reflect the current state of degrowth scholarship and debates, making it an ideal introduction to degrowth for undergraduates and postgraduates or a point of reference for researchers.
Following Emanuel Wallerstein, the handbook takes an ‘undisciplinary’ approach to degrowth, welcoming contributions from within and outside of the academy. We are especially keen to feature the work of new researchers as well as established scholars in order to capture the critical emerging debates. We invite chapter proposals that further research on degrowth, or provide critical reflections on degrowth. Themes include but are not exclusive to:
We invite interested participants to submit a chapter title and abstract of around 300 words by the deadline of 15 February 2022. Please send submissions (with subject heading of “[last name] degrowth handbook contribution proposal”) to eastwole@plattsburgh.edu AND k.heron@bbk.ac.uk
Submission Deadline: 15 February 2022
26 May 2022 | University of Warwick, UK
The Humanities Research Center at University of Warwick is organising a symposioum on Marxism, Culture, Extraction, and Enclosure with Keynote Speaker Dr Daniel Hartley (Durham University).
Capital comes into the world ‘dripping from head to foot, from every pore, with blood and dirt’, Marx observes in the first volume of Capital (1867), in his account of ‘so-called primitive accumulation’. Responding to Marx, Rosa Luxemburg’s Accumulation of Capital (1913) theorises the actuality of an ongoing primitive accumulation, ransacking the colonies to solve the problem of underconsumption in the core. Marxist feminists engaged in the housework debates of the 1970s began to conceive of women’s unpaid labour as a continuous form of expropriation. In recent years, responding to neoliberalism’s wave of privatisations, David Harvey, Peter Linebaugh, Massimo De Angelis, and Nancy Fraser have placed the question of an ongoing primitive accumulation (or ‘accumulation by dispossession’) on the agenda once more. Jason Moore’s work on the capitalist appropriation of ‘cheap nature’ underscores the ecological stakes of such dispossessions, while Brenna Bhandar and Robert Nichols have sharpened our understanding of how ‘racial regimes of ownership’ and logics of dispossession functioned, historically, in the settler colony.
This symposium proposes to explore what cultural analysis can contribute to this rich re-examination of the history and theory of dispossession. Where has capitalist expropriation found expression in novels, poems, plays, films, and other cultural forms? Where has it not? How have such representations (or absences) been inflected by class, race, gender, and sexuality? More broadly, how might attention to capital’s ‘blood and dirt’—its dispossessions and extractions, enclosures and plantations—challenge or complement schools of Marxist cultural criticism centred on abstraction, reification, and ideology? How do cultural texts themselves help us totheorise the connections between capitalist abstraction and what Michael Denning calls ‘wageless life’? Might a renewed focus on such concepts open up Marxist theory to a more thoroughgoing exchange with world-systems theory, feminism, postcolonial theory, the environmental humanities, or other theoretical paradigms?
Dispossession, enclosure, extraction, plantation: such are the keywords that this symposium proposes to read through cultural form. We invite proposals that conceive of our keywords in a broad way (as material histories, social logics, or imagined futures) and explore their relationship to capital and culture, conceived equally broadly. Papers need not follow any particular ‘approach’ or methodology and might consider thematic, formal, theoretical, sociological, or historical elements of cultural production. We welcome proposals relating to any time period or geographical area, and we encourage submissions from graduate students,early career researchers, and affiliated and independent scholars.
Papers may consider, amongst other topics:
Abstracts of 300 words for approximately 20-minute papers, along with a short bio, should be submitted to dispossessedsymposium@gmail.com. We will aim to notifyspeakers of acceptance of their proposals by 11 February.
Submission deadline: 4 February 2022
9-11 June 2022 | Padua, Italy
Conference Theme: Markets, Productivity, and Happiness in a Historical Perspective
The European Society of History of Economi Thought (ESHET) annually organizes a conference on a specific theme in the history of economic thought. This year's conference is going to take place from 9-11 June 2022 at the University of Padua. More information on the general Conference will be available soon on the official website.
ESHET Young Scholars' Seminar
ESHET invites young scholars – persons currently enrolled in a PhD, or who have been awarded a PhD no more than two years prior to the date of the relevant ESHET conference (and regardless of age) – to submit their work to the Young Scholars Seminar to be held on the occasion of the ESHET Conference at the University of Padua Italy, 9-11 June 2022. Papers co-authored by PhD supervisors or other senior researchers are not eligible. The grants for the scholars selected to the Young Scholars Seminar are sponsored by the European Journal of the History of Economic Thought.
Up to six submissions will be selected: The travel expenses will be covered up to €300, the accommodation costs up to €80/night for three nights, and no registration fee will be charged. Moreover, the grantee scholars will be invited to the conference dinner. The authors of the selected papers will have 20 minutes each to present the paper, and a senior scholar will discuss it. Papers may be on any topic relevant to the history of economics and are not restricted to the conference theme.
ESHET encourages young scholars to participate in the conference. A one-year ESHET membership is offered to all young scholars who submit a paper. Papers that have not been selected for the grant will be considered for presentation at other ESHET 2022 conference sessions.
Candidates should e-mail a paper no longer than 9000 words to Professors SYLVIE RIVOT (rivot@unistra.fr) and CHRISTIAN GEHRKE (christian.gehrke@uni-graz.at) and KATIA CALDARI (katia.caldari@unipd.it).
Please include documentation of your (and your co-authors’) position vis-à-vis your PhD and indicate in the subject of your e-mail: For Young Scholar Seminar.
Submission deadlines (Young Scholar Seminar): 14 February 2022
In 2006, French Marxist theorist Daniel Bensaïd made an urgent plea to reopen the strategic debate within the anti-capitalist Left. Fifteen years later, and after a major capitalist crisis, a series of important movements and also significant defeats of the Left, a pandemic and a new major economic crisis, along with the rise of the far Right and the impeding climate disaster, we are within the contours of a conjuncture where strategic questions seem to be more urgent than ever. If Bensaïd attempted to reopen the strategic debate in a conjuncture marked by the exhaustion of the alterglobalisation and anti-war movements, today we need to reopen it in a situation marked by important social movements which have not had a conclusive political impact
Moreover, one can say than some of the strategic failures and defeats of the Left can be attributed exactly to the lack of a strategic debate that consequently leads to the prevalence of a conceptualisation of left-wing politics that has more to do with populist strategies of electoral politics and the mechanics of political communication rather than the dynamics of social transformation.
The result is an increased tendency to think mainly in terms of tactics, of questions based on everyday challenges, including those posed by the electoral cycle and the immanent antagonisms of the political scene, rather than in terms of the necessary links between everyday struggles and political projects focused on the confrontation with the capitalist relations of exploitation, oppression, and ecological catastrophe. And, even when strategic notions or lines of demarcation are evoked, these are mainly used to support tactical – in the narrowest sense of the term – choices, rather than actual strategies.
This has led to a discussion within large segments of the political Left and radical social movements which tends to oscillate between a full immersion in traditional, bourgeois politics and a sectarian exodus from any confrontation with the actual complexities of political power and potential of the conjuncture.
However, this is not the only aspect of the contemporary debates. There is also an increased interest in more strategic questions. This takes the form of both a return to previous important strategic debates within the working-class movement and an attempt to rethink contemporary movements and challenges in a more strategic manner (from climate change to questions of social reproduction).
Recent important struggles and movements (from the ‘Arab Spring’ and Occupy! to the Greek or Catalan crises, to Black Lives Matter, to Indigenous movements, to important social uprisings such as the one in Chile in 2019, not forgetting the new dynamics of feminist movements and ecological struggles from Fridays For Future climate strikes to Extinction Rebellion) offer the experiences that can fuel strategic theoretical debates and pose the urgent questions.
Questions of governmental power at national, local and municipal levels also became pertinent, due to the challenges anticapitalist organisations and currents faced, leading to a revival of interest in the strategic debates around the question of political power, from the debates around dual power to the renewed interest in left social-democratic and Eurocommunist theories and controversies. The experiences of SYRIZA in power or of the leadership of Jeremy Corbyn in the Labour Party also stirred the pot of questions around political power.
The struggles and movements that have erupted over the past years around questions of race, gender and sexuality, reproductive rights, indigenous demands and aspirations, the impending ecological disaster and so on, have also brought forward new questions about the social dynamics that could be transformed into a political movement for social transformation and emancipation, new challenges for the very notion of a politics based on a working-class perspective and an urgent need to rethink programmes and transitional demands (from questions of growth/degrowth and energy transition to questions of reparations, decarceration, abolition of the police etc.).
At the same time, the strategic and organisational crises of important political currents and organisations of the anticapitalist Left point to the need to rethink the questions of organisation and of political practice associated with a strategy for communism. Of particular importance is the way the question of the ‘united front’ has been brought to the fore as we face the challenge to overcome the fragmentation of both movements and anticapitalist organisations but also to connect strategy and tactics.
The new wave of research on the history of revolutionary movements is also an indication of the urgency of strategic debate and the need to revisit the relationship between strategic and tactical questions. From questions about the degree to which the October revolution was actually an example of dual power, to research on how national liberation movements conceived the link between national and social emancipation to the revival of the interest on specific writers from different traditions and past periods of the working-class movement, it is obvious that there not only historical preoccupations involved but also strategic stakes.
The recent renewed interest in these questions, especially from a younger generation of militants, scholars and researchers offers reasons to be more hopeful, but, at the same time, points to the need to open the debate to the fullest extent. Moreover, some of the important contemporary strategic debates are, to a large degree, shaped by national experiences and specific politico-cultural contexts, and this makes necessary an effort to internationalise them, without decontextualising the debates and the specific experiences.
Historical Materialism wants to contribute to this debate by dedicating a special issue to the question of strategy today. To that end, we would like to see contributions dedicated to questions of strategy and, in particular (although not exhaustively), the following questions
Please send article proposals to email. Proposals should include the provisional title and an abstract (up to 400 words). Please indicate in the subject of the email that it is for the ‘Strategy CFP’. Proposals that will be selected will then have to be submitted as full texts by the end of May 2022. All texts will be submitted to a peer-review process.
Submission Deadline: 31 January 2022.
8-9 September 2022 | Paris, France and online
Conference Theme: The History of Regulation Theory and its Contributions to the Analysis of Global Capitalism Following the Covid-19 Crisis
Regulation theory (RT) arose to large extent from the crisis of Fordism in the United States in the 1970s. Drawing on Marx and Keynes, its analysis of this crisis developed a socio-economic and institutionalist approach to examining the historical evolution of capitalism. Thus, regulation theory demonstrated how the post-war regime of intensive capital accumulation in Europe and the United States was the result of a historically-located mode of regulation called Fordism, and how its crisis in the 1970s was largely the consequence of endogenous factors. Like any mode of regulation, Fordism was based on a number of social trade-offs that, taken together, constituted a system. Modelled at the level of national economies by five institutional forms (see below), RT demonstrated the importance of the wage nexus and forms of competition. The Fordist compromises consolidated capital’s ability to organize production in exchange for wage growth, proportional to productivity growth, which also included higher socialized wages. This form of capitalism was stabilised on the one hand by the standardised production of mass consumer goods involving large economies of scale, and on the other hand by wage increases that enabled output to find markets and that encouraged continued investment. However, the overall coherence of the social and economic institutions of Fordism broke down during the stagflation of the 1970s, under pressure from national tensions eroding the compromise between labour and capital, as well as the internationalisation of financial flows and the changing organisation of production. These trends were accompanied and caused by neoliberal doctrines weakening public authority from the late 1960s onwards.
The agenda for regulationist research then focused on the characterisation of a post-Fordist regime. While the debate on this is still open, there is some consensus about several components of capitalism’s current dynamics, including: the deepening of neoliberal policies despite recurrent crises (finance, commodities, etc.), first in the old industrialised countries, then in much of the world, to the benefit of the accumulation of private capital and to the detriment of the Fordist wage compromise. This has involved an analysis of the mechanisms of institutional change, using a varieties of capitalism approach, and based on the identification of regularities of change in five institutional forms: the wage nexus, money, forms of competition, the state, and international integration. The regulationist research agenda has subsequently also developed other, less well-known, levels of analysis, initiated as early as 1980, including: sectoral analyses, territorial issues, corporate governance and regulation, environmental issues, etc.
The 2007-2008 financial crisis and the Covid-19 pandemic both represent deep, yet very different crises. They have largely impacted – though not fundamentally undermined – the presuppositions of neoliberal policies, by the re-regulation of finance to prevent systemic risks, though not the financialisation of economies; while massive state intervention has often been ad hoc, to stem the spread of crises. It may therefore be asked whether the Covid-19 pandemic, the threat of similar crises, and the dangers of climate change have really changed the global situation? There are sometimes-contradictory factors to be analysed here, which are unfolding in several social fields (political, cultural, etc.). To be sure, public spending has been exceptional in supporting the incomes of private companies and employees during the Covid-19 pandemic. At the same time, the international institutional environment that shaped trade liberalisation after World War II, and more recently globalisation, is being challenged by “Trumpism” in the US and China’s spectacular economic rise. Since joining the WTO in 2001, the latter has forged its own economic model that deeply challenges the historical narrative according to which markets and political pluralism go hand in hand as capitalism develops. Moreover, as the world economy appears to be recovering from Covid-19 (October 2021), major supply-chain bottlenecks and skills shortages are increasing inflationary pressures. With more than a decade of quantitative easing by major central banks and the emergence of cryptocurrencies, the neoliberal monetary regime is facing new challenges.
The aim of this conference is to continue to review the history of regulation theory and to explore the extent to which its contributions can be applied to capitalism(s), following the Covid-19 pandemic and the ensuing economic crisis. Work on these topics has already been published in the Revue de la Régulationand elsewhere. In a multidisciplinary approach, the conference seeks to develop these analyses and will be structured in four half-day sessions, considering the following topics:
Communications can address these issues, but also how other disciplines in turn have impacted further developments in regulation theory. These include, for example, the role of history in the evolution of institutions, the influence of philosophy, and how structuralism has provided operational concepts to better understand the transformation of accumulation regimes, their internal diversity, etc. Communications may be in English or French. But we aim to provide language support for the conference proceedings to be published in English on the Recherche & Régulation website to ensure a rapid and broad dissemination of the research presented. Articles based on communications may also be submitted later to the Revue de la Régulation, subject to the usual selection and review procedures.
Proposals for communication must be 500 words long at the most, as well as with a short biography. They should be sent to nicholas.sowels@univ-paris1.fr by 17 January 2022, and we will reply to you by the end of January 2022. Contributions by PhD students and young researchers are especially welcome.
Organising Committee: Nadeera Rajapakse (PHARE), François Morvan (PHARE), Pierre Fray (PhD student ENS Paris-Saclay) and Nicholas Sowels (PHARE).The conference is sponsored by the following research centres and departments: PHARE and the DDL at the Université Paris 1; CREW and ICEE at the Sorbonne Nouvelle; and Ladyss (UMR 7533).
Extended Submission Deadline: 17 January 2022
In the aftermath of the 2008 Credit Crisis, studies of capitalism made a rapid resurgence within American history-writing: works such as Sven Beckert’s Empire of Cotton, Bethany Moreton’s To Serve God and Walmart, Jonathan Levy’s Freaks of Fortune and Destin Jenkins’ Bonds of Inequality all raised serious questions not just about capitalism but also about adjacent issues of race, gender, religion, and the environment.
Irish Capitalist Studies has so far not emerged, despite the 2008 Crisis being especially devastating in Ireland and despite Ireland being a key laboratory of capitalism from the early modern period onwards: from the Cromwellian plantations that remade patterns of landownership to the construction of Ireland as a dependent market before and after the Act of Union to the obsessions with personal responsibility during the Famine and economic restructuring and social engineering after it. Modern Irish history cannot be understood outside of the capitalist contexts in which it unfolded. It is not at all a coincidence that when Marx wrote Capital in 1867 and sought to create a general theory of capitalism’s origins and development, Ireland was the only non-British space he discussed at length. This special issue seeks to bring Capitalism Studies into a fruitful conversation with Irish Studies
Potential topics could include (but are not limited to):
We particularly welcome contributions from historically under-represented groups.
Articles should be no longer than 10,000 words
Submission Deadline: 1 February 2022
University of Castilla-La Mancha, Spain | 8-9 September 2022
After the Great Financial Crisis of 2008, in the context of an incipient phase of secular stagnation and a growing concern for environmental and gender issues, the crisis provoked by the measures to contain the spread of the Covid-19 pandemic has meant an unprecedented shock in advanced market economies since the Great Depression.
The XVIII Jornadas de Economía Crítica, to be held at the University of Castilla-La Mancha, in Cuenca, on 8 and 9 September 2022, aim to be a meeting place to discuss, from a heterodox point of view, the responses adopted to the crisis and the future economic perspectives conditioned by the health emergency, among other issues.
We encourage you to send your papers, on these topics or others traditionally dealt with in previous conferences, as well as to propose parallel sessions that bring together papers with certain shared aspects. The contact address for sending proposals is: jornadas.economiacritica2022@uclm.es
Submisssion deadlines: Abstract submission 31 January, 2022,
For anyone who is doing scholarly work in heterodox finance, monetary theory, money and sustainability, community-oriented monetary instruments or in monetary technologies: The International Journal of Community Currency Research is the oldest academic journal in heterodox finance and accepts submissions for review and publication.
The submitted work can be a research paper, a literature review or other scholarly work like short pieces presenting Ideas for Debate. IJCCR is a peer-reviewed open access journal that accepts scholarly work submitted by affiliated and non-affiliated scholars and welcomes empirical reports from the field, whether written by academics or practitioners.
For further details and instructions concerning submissions please visit the official website. For submission, please use the online tool.
17-18 March, 2022 (Milan) and 6-7 October, 2022 (Duisburg)
Workshop Theme: "The Individual and Contextual Effects of Economic Scarcity on Political Integration"
The Institute for Socio-Economics at the University of Duisburg Essen and the ERC-funded project “Deindustrializing Societies and the Political Consequences (DESPO)” at the University of Milan are happy to announce their collaboration to host a two-part workshop on the theme: The Individual and Contextual Effects of Economic Scarcity on Political Integration.
The spring workshop will be held at the University of Milan on the 17-18 March, 2022 while the fall workshop will be held at the University of Duisburg-Essen on the 6-7 October, 2022. Applications for both or only one of the two workshops are possible. A large and growing literature is concerned with the questions of how economic hardship impacts turnout, party preferences or different forms of alienation from the political system. Overall, we believe that research on the link between politics and economic hardship is too fragmented in separate debates about specific outcomes. Rather than addressing apathy, radicalization, populism, and preferences in isolated research strands, they could be jointly theorized. This would help us to understand the conditions in which individual economic hardships favor one of these outcomes over another. Our goal is to bring together cross-disciplinary research exploiting the richness of different methodological angles. We welcome in particular presentations that adopt qualitative and mixed-methods approaches to study economic problems on the level of families, communities and individual biographies (including descriptive work). We also strongly encourage presentations using longitudinal data of individuals or communities as well as experimental approaches.
Finally, we would like to emphasize our openness for transnational approaches and theoretical contributions. Although the two workshops can be attended singularly, we encourage participants to try to attend both meetings to present the progress of their work. The spring workshop is, hence, particularly suitable for more preliminary research ideas. However, we are open as well to more advanced papers.
Submissions and any clarifying questions should be sent via email to Franco Bonomi Bezzo. Submissions are considered for both workshops and should take the form of an abstract (maximum 500 words) and they should be sent by 10 January, 2022. Although we would like to encourage participation in both events, it is also possible to apply for only one of them. Notification of acceptance for presentation will be sent by 20 January, 2022. There are no participation fees and we aim to cover as much as possible of travel and accommodation expenses, granting preference to junior scholars. The organising committee: Anne-Marie Jeannet (University of Milan), Paul Marx (University of Duisburg-Essen), Franco Bonomi Bezzo (University of Milan).
Submission Deadline: 10 January 2022
30 August - 2 September 2022 | Newcastle University, Newcastle, UK and online
The RGS-IBG Annual International Conference regularly attracts over 2,000 geographers from around the world. This year, the conference is taking place at Newcastle University, with in-person, online, and hybrid ways to participate. The conference will be chaired by Professor Rachel Pain of Newcastle University, on the theme Geographies Beyond Recovery. It will take place at Newcastle University, from Tuesday 30 August to Friday 2 September 2022, with a strong in-person element, and with hybrid and online ways to participate.
Recent work on labour regimes has provided one way to re-invigorate labour geographic research on contemporary and historical capitalism. Labour regimes have been conceptualised “as the core of networked, scalar systems of economic integration and production. At its core, a labour regime signals the combination of social relations and institutions that bind capital and labour in a form of antagonistic relative stability in particular times and places” (Baglioni et al 2022). At the same time, there is a rich and growing body of work on environmental labour studies (Natarajan and Parsons 2021; Räthzel, Stevis and Uzzell 2021). This includes research on working class environmentalism (Bell 2020), on the labour of environmental stewardship — or the “eco-precariat” (Neimark et al. 2020), on the social and ecological indeterminacy of the labour process and the materiality of global value chains and production networks (Baglioni and Campling 2017; Sinha 2021), and on the vital need to jettison methodological nationalism and narrow definitions of the worker in thinking about work and ‘just transitions’ (Velicu and Barca 2020; Stevis and Felli 2020). In these contexts, Coe (2021) has recognised the critical need for a research agenda at the interstices between labour geography and political ecology; one that centres labour in discussions of climate and biodiversity crises and transformation. What this provides is a space to think through what the opportunities and challenges might be for developing research on the labour regime-nature-ecology nexus. Such a framing provides the potential to extend some political ecological work that has to some extent focused on organised labour’s responses to, and labour’s mobilisations in relation to, the environmental and climate crisis (e.g. Barca 2019). Inspired by possibilities of bringing together labour regime analysis and environmental labour studies, these sessions seek to include research on the processes and mechanisms that inscribe regimes of labour control and modes of regulation in the ecological metabolisms of production and social reproduction. They also provide an opportunity to ask what more needs to be done to think through these articulations: how do we understand labour, ecology and racial capitalism (e.g. Pulido 2017), for example? These sessions seek to build this agenda by examining the co-constitution of social and natural processes, and by bringing together both theoretical and empirical work on labour regimes, nature and ecology. We welcome abstracts for papers engaging with this emerging terrain, which might examine any of the following areas through both conceptual and empirical (or ideally combined) research, although this list is by no means exhaustive. We are open to a range of perspectives seeking to examine how labour and ecology intersect and how this might inform labour regimes analysis:
Submission Process
Please submit abstracts (250 words maximum) to Adrian Smith (a.m.smith@qmul.ac.uk) and Liam Campling (l.campling@qmul.ac.uk) by 28 January 2022. Abstract authors will be notified by 11 February 2022 and those accepted must complete the abstract submission and conference registration process with the RGS-IBG before 25 March 2022. For further information please visit the official website.
Submission Deadline: 28 January 2022
From the perspective of intellectual history, decision theory is a very recent discipline. While having some notable antecedents, its main developments come from the Twentieth Century. Since then, theories about rational decision-making have had an enormous impact on economics, psychology, and philosophy.
Even though concepts like decision and uncertainty may have a short philosophical lineage, reflections on them can be found throughout the history of Western philosophy. In Protagoras, Plato claims that wisdom can be sufficient for virtue, if it takes into full account future sensations – in contemporary terms, this would support a utility calculus with no discount rates for the future. Framed in this way, Plato’s view can enter into modern debates about inter-temporal decisions and biases, just as these debates can help the scholar who wants to understand classical ideas about wisdom and virtue. More recently, political philosophy has provided important material for decision theorists. Nineteenth Century utilitarianism has found new arguments in Harsanyi’s and Broome’s formalisations, and social contract approaches to society have been revived and enriched with game-theoretical models. Finally, a famous example of the type of contribution that historians can find in decision theory is provided by Hacking’s (1972) influential formalisation of Pascals’s wager on the opportunity to believe in God.
Scattered as they may be, examples like these show how a historical perspective could provide important insights on decision-making to our modern theorising, just as formal clarity and the interdisciplinary tools of decision theory can deepen our understanding of crucial aspects in the history of thought. And yet, the dialogue between these two traditions – decision theory and history of philosophy – has been no more than casual so far. This call for papers is intended as a first step to bridge this gap and allow decision theorists to re-discover historical reflections on decision, while providing historians with new instruments to interpret classical debates.
Selected contributions will appear in a dedicated section in Rivista di filosofia, one of the oldest Italian philosophical journals (founded 1909). In addition to theoretically-oriented studies and investigations, with particular attention to analytic philosophy, Rivista di filosofia offers reflections and documentation about the status of philosophy and its relations to scientific thought, its history and institutions, and its methodologies.
Link to the call on the journal website
Submissions: Manuscripts to be submitted should be sent to email.
Deadline: 30 March 2022
9-11 July 2022 | Amsterdam, Netherlands
Conference Theme: "Fractious Connections: Anarchy, Activism, Coordination, and Control"
The overarching theme of the SASE 2022 conference will be to explore the paradox of Fractious Connections. This will be done through the lens of four key concepts that have received varying degrees of attention in comparative political economy: Anarchism, Activism, Coordination, and Control.
The concept of Coordination in comparative political economy has received considerable attention in relation to debates around the Varieties of Capitalism. But has digital disruption undermined this coordination? The concept of Control has been used to understand the labor process; but how is this evolving in relation to digital surveillance at work and in politics? The concepts of Anarchy and Activism have, relatively speaking, received much less attention within the SASE community. Activism is frequently discussed within an Industrial Relations framework. While traditional male, manufacturing union membership has declined; a plethora of new forms of organizing for an emergent “gig” workforce has included the voices of younger, female, and ethnically diverse communities. We need to know more about these developments evolving outside established organizations. Anarchy is not often discussed in comparative political economy, although there is a vibrant discourse in international relations (Hedley Bull 1977), and in the work of Chomsky (1994). Understanding how disruptive digital practices have emerged anarchically exposes new structures and organization of power, opportunity, and oppression.
Re-examining these concepts and developments relates back to the work of Granovetter in connecting the individual experiences with global societal structures to understand the paradoxical way fractious connections are evolving. While these concepts will inform the overall theme of the 34th SASE annual conference, a wide range of contributions are encouraged to participate in one of the 18 vibrant networks, or submit proposals to host a mini-conference. Please find the link to the detailed call for paper in the last issue of Heterodox Economic Newsletter here.
Mini Conferences
Mini-conferences consist of 3 to 5 panels, which will be featured as a separate stream in the program. Submissions are open to all scholars on the basis of an extended abstract. The following mini-conferences additionally require a full paper from accepted participants, to be submitted by 15 June 2022: TH03, TH04, TH05, TH06, TH07, THO8 (6,000 words), TH09, TH10 (max 9,000 words), TH15, and TH16. If a paper proposal cannot be accommodated within a mini-conference, organizers will forward it to the most appropriate research network as a regular submission.
TH01 Mini-Conference "Connecting the Dots between Global Capitalism and National Capitalisms"
Organizers: Fulya Apaydin (Institut Barcelona d'Estudis Internacionals), Arie Krampf (Academic College of Tel Aviv Yaffo), Andreas Nölke (Goethe University Frankfurt), Merve Sancak (Loughborough University London)
We welcome submissions of both abstracts (~500 words) and panel proposals ( 3-5 papers). We will try to provide opportunities for online participation particularly to those from the Global South (tbc).
Theme Description
Comparative political economy (CPE) and international political economy (IPE) constitute two main fields trying to understand how capitalism(s) (do not) work. While providing important insights, these fields have important shortcomings that can be addressed by bringing them together. The CPE literature, especially studies on comparative capitalisms (CC), has been criticised for not accounting for the linkages of the national with the global. The Regulation School and the recent growth models perspective (GMP) partially address these shortcomings. Nonetheless, there is still a need for a deeper understanding of the connections between national capitalist systems and global capitalism, and amongst different types of national capitalisms. The IPE literature studies these connections, but is limited to explain whether inter-state dynamics have a meaningful impact on national capitalisms or account for the variations between countries.
This mini-conference aims to fill this void. It invites theoretical and empirical contributions that bring together the CPE and IPE approaches to understand contemporary capitalist societies. It focuses on the late industrialising countries —including middle-income and low-income countries— which have experienced industrialisation and global integration at very different stages and thus, have unique institutional structures and distinct relations with the global economy. It is necessary to study global capitalism from the perspective of the periphery and the semi-periphery, and growth models and capitalist systems in the Global South must not be studied as unsuccessful attempts to emulate growth strategies of the North, but rather as strategies designed to address their subordinated position in global capitalism. We especially welcome studies that focus on underrepresented geographic regions in CPE and IPE.
The mini-conference invites contributions that examine different areas of ‘connection’ between the national and the global, the Global North and South, and the South-South linkages. As for the theorisation of the ‘national’, we invite contributions focusing both on the macroeconomic/demand side (GMP) and on the microeconomic/supply side (CC), and those connecting the two approaches. As for the theorisation of the ‘international’, we invite contributions focusing on the role of international institutions and/or transnational flows.
Some of the suggested lines of inquiry include but are not limited to:
TH06 Mini-Conference “Financial Infrastructures: From Colonial Trajectories to Global Digital Transformations”
Organizers: Barbara Brandl (Goethe-University Frankfurt), Malcolm Campbell-Verduyn (U. of Groningen), Carola Westermeier (Goethe-University Frankfurt)
Financial infrastructures are the lifeblood of political economies worldwide. Financial infrastructures are, therefore, considered by policy-makers worldwide as physical ‘things’ requiring protection in avoiding potentially catastrophic consequences of their failures. Inspired by conceptual developments from the field of Science and Technology Studies financial infrastructures, however, have also widened to encapsulate sociotechnical processes. Not merely cables and computer servers, but the relations of financiers and other humans to these and other physical objects, financial infrastructures are the processes sustaining essential activities such as
cashless payments, government transfers, and bond trading. Often taken-for-granted, assumed and backgrounded, these relations are rendered visible when they fail, cease to function, or undergo profound changes.
The global pandemic has reminded many of our dependence on increasingly digital infrastructures. The ongoing digitization of infrastructures, including those enabling the global circulation of currencies, credit, and debt, as well as the disbursement of government aid and loans, attracts both the geopolitical interest of leading policymakers, as well as the everyday notice of citizens and consumers. The development of central bank digital currencies and attempts to ‘disrupt’ established financial infrastructures by the likes of Facebook with its diem (formerly Libra) currency have drawn the attention of regulators and citizens alike to payment infrastructures that have up to now remained out of the spotlight.
The growing concern of social scientists and the general public regarding the impacts of the digitalization of financial infrastructures requires more nuanced analysis of patterns of continuity and change that can emanate from interdisciplinary analysis of financial infrastructures. The goal of this mini-conference is to explore the past, present and future of financial infrastructures. We seek contributions exploring themes broadly related to the following questions:
This mini-conference will take up these and related questions concerning the agential qualities of infrastructures, as well as regarding the historical and ongoing contemporary development of financial infrastructures in and beyond the dominant Anglo-American centres of finance. Crucially, we seek wider perspectives from beyond the West, including much needed post-colonial and (post-) socialist approaches and findings
This mini-conference will take up these and related questions concerning the agential qualities of infrastructures, as well as regarding the historical and ongoing contemporary development of financial infrastructures in and beyond the dominant Anglo-American centres of finance. Crucially, we seek wider perspectives from beyond the West, including much needed post-colonial and (post-) socialist approaches and findings.
TH09 Mini-Conference "Labour and Collective Action in Transformation"
Organizers: Donatella della Porta (European University Institute, Florence), Irene Dingeldey (University of Bremen), Heiner Heiland (Technical University Darmstadt), Jeremias Herberg (Radboud University Nijmegen), Franziska Laudenbach (University of Bremen), Martin Seeliger (University of Bremen)
The current constellation is in flux: While the production system is rearranging in terms of space (European integration and globalisation) and the means of production and distribution (tertiarization and digitalisation), rising sea levels, burning forests and rain-driven floods are calling for a decarbonisation of the economy. The challenges created are interdependent, just as the means of production, the metabolic framework conditions, as well as the scope and structure of the political system are. This complex constellation will result in multiple transformations, one of which is to take place in the field of labour and industrial relations far beyond ongoing deregulation and liberalization. Strategies of decarbonisation, or the so-called Green New Deal, are already creating new social conflicts between winners and losers, possibly increasing fractious relations on a sectoral and global scale within and between different nations.
In our mini-conference we want to analyse the respective changes and their effects on the transformation of labour and collective action, overall applying Granovetter’s idea on paradoxical effects of strong and weak ties, but also exploring new forms of coordination and activism. In order to strengthen workers’ position to influence the ongoing multiple transformations, this mini-conference invites both conceptual and empirical contributions of all methodological varieties exploring the following issues
Panel I: Paradoxes of Labour Mobilisation in Digital Capitalism
Digital technologies allow for new practices, both for anarchism, activism, coordination and control. This is especially true for work and employment. Digitalisation increases connectivity and expands communication, so that large amounts of information and data can be used practically anytime and anywhere. Along with this come new forms of agency in labour relations.
On one hand, companies extend their agency since they utilise comprehensive digital control regimes, reducing workers’ autonomy: Digital technologies allow automatic and individualised control (e.g. algorithmic management) and coordination from globally distributed micro-tasks to complex large-scale projects in corporate networks. On the other hand, digital technologies are used by workers to establish self-organised communities (e.g. platform cooperativism) and new cultures of solidarity. Furthermore, digitalisation offers workers more and new forms of communication which serve to organise them via online communities, campaigns, transnational networking. This results in new autonomous forms of agency for workers that enable them to articulate and assert their interests. Overall mobilization within digital capitalism may again strengthen anarchy and activism as forms of collective action - often being in competition with already institutionalized forms of workers' organisations.
In view of this paradox various questions arise:
Panel II: The Conditions and Consequences of Decarbonization
Climate change acts as a great equalizer due to its global impact. At the same time, it triggers profound and existential inequalities. The decarbonisation of coal, oil or gas-based industrial activities is one of the most critical, but also difficult aspects in this context. In this panel we discuss how locally specific, and globally influential re-articulations of industrial relations emerge in the wake of decarbonisation policies.
Certain sectors, regions, and groups are more affected than others by the need for climate action and the consequences of inaction. This concerns climate emergencies, but also sheds a critical light on the conditions and consequences of the industrial dependencies on fossil fuel. The so-called sustainability transformation is particularly complicated by labour relations, property relations, corporatist alliances, and identitarian narratives that emerged with fossil industries. Trade unions and other groups currently discuss what a “just energy transition" could look like. They focus on the job market consequences of decarbonisation in the remaining, and in some cases expanding, coal mining sectors in Central Europe and Northern America, but also in China, Australia, Latin America, or South Africa. More broadly, researchers have recently pointed out that individuals and local groups, such as miners or local policymakers, see decarbonisation as disintegration and subjective alienation from the industrial heritage that traditionally provided an anchor of stability. The experience of industrial decline, which has its forerunners in post-fordist and post-socialist ruptures of the 20 century, is remembered and often rhetorically used for populist mobilization. While some groups engage in a divisive discourse of us vs. them, industry vs. ecology, others try to act as brokers. Trade unions in particular, but also other forms of organized interests, are using discursive platforms such as Just Energy Transition to build strategic bridges between decarbonisation policies, industrial labour relations, and local communities.
The proposed panel discusses the conditions and consequences of decarbonisation as a network of disrupting and re-connecting industrial legacies at different levels. The notion of industrial labour and care work, the relationship between government and industry, the nexus of local action and global discourses, and the role of science, technology, and innovation are articulated in close interaction with the industrial past and socioecological futures.
Panel III: The paradox of transnational solidarity in transforming working relations
The globalisation of production, digitalisation and the transnationalisation of policy making opens up new opportunities for collective action and workers’ solidarity. However, different positions within global and multilevel production networks, differences in economic development and wage levels create both competition and dependencies among workers’ organisations. Collaboration is restraint by a multitude of contradictory and sometimes even conflicting national regulations and normative ideals developed within different systems of industrial relations. Paradoxically, both on the international level and in the European Union places and acts of workers’ solidarity have arisen, as for example transnational union organisations and the Social Dialogues in the EU.
The proposed panel seeks to show when and how fractious connections are overcome by acts of solidarity. Hence, we search for more places, acts and motives of transnational solidarity, including more or less spontaneous activism as well as institutionalised forms of coordination. The chosen examples should theorise and indicate, how to create solidarity on international and transnational level to give workers voice to shape the above mentioned transformations:
TH12 Mini-Conference "Spatial Competition as a Mean for Coordination or Control? Discourses, Institutions, and Everyday Practices"
Organizers: Carina Altreiter, Claudius Gräbner-Radkowitsch, Stephan Puehringer, Ana Rogojanu, Georg Wolfmayr
The mini-conference discusses the impact of an increasingly strong reliance on competition, competitiveness, and particularly ‘spatial competition’, as a prime mode of social organization and as a core concept for designing social institutions on different ontological levels of social reality: (1) international and national policies and institutions (macro-level), (2) regional institutions, organizations, and discourses (meso-level), as well as (3) everyday practices (micro-level).
More precisely, the mini conference deals with the following questions:
Main research questions
We particularly welcome contributions that explore the following issues:
Interdisciplinary and pluralist orientation
The mini-conference is open to contributions from a variety of disciplinary backgrounds, including (but not limited to) anthropology, cultural studies, economics, geography, political science, sociology. Since the aim of the mini-conference is also to facilitate a transdisciplinary view on the multi-level impact of the economic concept of ‘competition’, interdisciplinary approaches to the issue are considered particularly strong contributions. Moreover, individual contributions may focus on one particular level, yet contributions that explore the interrelations of ontological levels are especially welcome.
To facilitate the transdisciplinary discourse, the communication and exchange across different paradigms, and to allow all presenters to benefit from their participation, the mini-conference will feature a short co-presentation(max. 5 minutes) for each paper. To this end, each presenter will be asked to prepare such a short co-presentation for one of the other papers to be presented in her session. Sessions will be organized in a way that is still enough time for both general, and paper-specific exchange.
Abstracts must not be longer than 1000 words and should be submitted through the official SASE submission system. Please make sure you choose the right mini-conference to ensure the correct allocation of your submission. The full papers will be distributed to the discussants who will prepare a short co-presentation. Full papers do not need to be finished papers, but should allow the discussants to prepare a constructive co-presentation.
Submission Procedure (for all Mini-Conferences)
We welcome two types of submissions:
For more information about the SASE annual conference, please visit the conference page. For those interested, please make sure to check out the submission guidelines.
Submission Deadline: 25 January 2022
9-11 June 2022 | Padua
The theme of the conference is inspired by a rather widespread thesis in today’s economic debate: namely, that shifting the focus of economic discourse from individual utility to the concept of happiness might deeply affect our way of thinking about productivity (as a measure of the power to meet needs) and the market (as an institutional device for negotiating transferable rights). In fact, once happiness replaces individual utility, the link, traditionally taken for granted, between increase in productivity and competitiveness and higher utility for at least someone without sacrifice for anyone is no longer so obvious. Whatever its definition, happiness is a qualitative concept that cannot generally be reduced to a completely comparable order in terms of “more”, “less”, “equal”. Moreover, happiness is an organic/relational concept that is generally not divisible into individual portions independent of each other and of the whole.
Productivity and the extension of competitive markets influence happiness not only through the well-known effects on quantities and prices of goods and services, but also in that they define people’s lifestyles and inter-personal relationships. All these aspects are determinants of happiness at least as important as the attainable levels of material satisfaction. The variations they produce are not only of scale but also of pattern, and therefore they require more complex value judgments than the “more = better” criterion usually referred to by economists. This latter kind of judgment could justify some economists’ claim of “cognitive neutrality” for their discipline but judging the quality of happiness or unhappiness associated with a given social pattern inevitably brings to the fore the ethical and political dimensions of any such assessment.
As historians of HET we may wonder whether the foregoing is something new and opens to hitherto unknown perspectives or instead it is simply new verbal wrapping for long existing problems dealt with in different ways in the past.
Moreover, we may wonder if and how the emphasis on happiness involves discontinuity and rupture rather than enrichment and integration with respect to previous theories. Purely by way of example, without claiming to be exhaustive, we indicate some of the problematic areas that seem to us most directly involved in the theme of the conference:
Scientific Committee
Richard Arena, Université Côte d’Azur
Katia Caldari, University of Padua
Marco Dardi, University of Florence
Fulvio Fontini, University of Padua
Christian Gehrke, University of Graz
Maria Teresa Musacchio, University of Padua
Maria Pia Paganelli, Trinity University
Mario Pomini, University of Padua
Sylvie Rivot, UNiversité de Haute-Alsace
Paolo Silvestri, University of Turin
Claudia Sunna, University of Lecce
Gianfranco Tusset, University of Padua
Richard Van Den Berg, Kingston Business School
An abstract of about 400 words for a paper and 600 words for a session should be submitted on the conference website.
Submission deadlines:
14 February 2022.
Decisions will be notified by 31 March 2022.
Note that: a) published papers are not eligible for submission; b) only one conference presentation is allowed per person (but more than one submission may be accepted, if involving co-authors who are also presenting); c) session proposals must conform with standard format (3 papers, 90 minutes).
The decision to hold the conference entirely in person may be subject to later changes in accordance with the evolution of the pandemic.
11-18 June 2022 | New York, USA
The Levy Economics Institute of Bard College is pleased to announce it will be holding a summer seminar June 11–18, 2022. Through lectures, hands-on workshops, and breakout groups, the seminar will provide an opportunity to engage with the theory and policy of Modern Money Theory (MMT) and the work of Institute Distinguished Scholars Hyman Minsky and Wynne Godley. Intended for those who are introducing themselves to these approaches as well as those who are looking to deepen their understanding, the seminar will be of particular interest to graduate students, recent graduates, and those at the beginning of their academic or professional careers.
Topics will include the history and theory of money, central bank and treasury operations, inequality and austerity, the job guarantee, MMT and developing economies, current debates over inflation, the Green New Deal, the stock-flow consistent approach to macroeconomic analysis and modeling, financial innovation and the financialization of the economy, cryptocurrency and central bank digital currencies, and more. The teaching staff will include well-known economists, legal scholars, monetary historians, writers, and financial market professionals working in the relevant topic areas.
The seminar will be limited to 60 attendees. Admission will include the provision of room and board on the Bard College campus. The fee for the seminar will be $3,000; a fee waiver is available for all those in need.
Applications may be made to Emily Ungvary (eungvary@levy.org) and should include a current curriculum vitae and letter of application. Your letter should indicate the nature of your interest in the program and, if applicable, your reasons for requesting a fee waiver. Applications will be reviewed on a rolling basis.
13-15 January 2022 | online
The Department of Economics at the University of Kerala, India is organising a 2nd Online-Conference on Cooperatives, Mutual Aid and Solidarity Economies. Sub-Themes include
To participate please register online (free registration). For further information please contactDr. Christabell P. J., Associate Professor (Department of Economics, University of Kerala).
25-30th July | Berlin
The summer school aims at providing an introduction to Keynesian macroeconomics and to the problems of European economic policies to interested graduate students (MA and PhD) and junior researchers. It will consist of overview lectures, a panel discussion, student study groups, an SFC lab, and a poster session. The summer school will feature leading international researchers such as Robert Blecker (US), Yannis Dafermos (UK), Sebastian Gechert (Germany), Eckhard Hein (Germany), Heike Joebges (Germany), Annina Kaltenbrunner (UK), Marc Lavoie (France/Canada), Maria Nikolaidi (UK), Miriam Rehm (Austria) and Mark Setterfield (US), covering the following areas:
The summer school language is English. There is a fee of EUR 100 for each participant for accommodation and meals, payable after acceptance. The application form will ask for a short CV (as a list), a short letter of motivation (max. 400 words), in particular on how the Summer School relates to your study and research interests, and the name and e-mail address of one academic adviser who may be contacted for reference. Applicants will be informed by mid-May and participants will be provided with a reading package.
Apply via the website.
Submission Deadline: 31 March 2022
8 July 2022 | Amsterdam, Netherlands
SASE Conference Theme: Fractious Connections: Anarchy, Activism, Coordination, and Control
SASE will host its seventh Early Career Workshop at its 2022 Conference in partnership with the Digital Futures at Work Research Centre (Digit). The SASE/Digit Early Career Workshop (ECW) is a one-day workshop that provides an opportunity for a longer and deeper discussion of applicants’ conference papers. This year it will be hosted by senior SASE and Digit professors. Applicants must be PhD students or researchers having obtained their PhD within 3 years of the annual SASE meeting. If you would like to apply for the Workshop, your paper abstract should be submitted and accepted to the main conference through the normal process. Applicants must also submit:
All of this must be submitted via the submissions system before the general submissions deadline passes (25 January 2022). Any application without all of these elements will not be considered for inclusion in the Workshop. While two papers may be submitted to the SASE conference, applicants may submit only one paper to be considered for the ECW. Only those papers accepted to the main conference will be considered for inclusion in the Workshop.
Conference registration and membership fees are waived for ECW participants. Full conference accommodation will also be provided, including the additional night of accommodation for the Workshop. Travel costs will be covered based on need and available funds. Participants not requiring support for travel or accommodations should state this in their one-page letter. Participants will receive a certificate of participation. In the case of co-authored papers, please note that only one author may participate in the Workshop for a given paper.
There will be approximately 15-20 competitively allocated spots in the Workshop. Notification of acceptance will be made by April 2022. These spots will be awarded on the basis of the quality of the paper submitted to the SASE main conference, as assessed by the ECW Committee and Faculty. Additional criteria for ranking papers receiving the same quality assessment include PhD status, academic status, and co-authorship. In particular, priority will be given to:
Throughout the selection process, the SASE/Digit ECW Committee and Faculty are committed to ensuring gender and geographical balance at equal paper quality levels. Previous Workshop participants are not eligible to participate a second time.
Submission Deadline: 25 January 2022
9-10 January 2022 | online
Organized by Geoff Schneider, Presidential Professor of Economics at Bucknell University, and Executive Director of the International Confederation of Associations for Pluralism in Economics (ICAPE)
Program
Session 1: Heterodox Economics and Fiscal Space
This panel concerns fiscal space -- what is it, does it matter, and why? How should fiscal institutions interact with monetary institutions, and vice versa? To what degree does tacit or explicit cooperation already exist? This panel considers these concepts theoretically, empirically, and historically.
Session 2: The dissemination of heterodox ideas (AFEE)
Session 3A: Heterodox Challenges to the Mainstream (AFEE)
Session 3B: Issues in uneven development in Pakistan, Brazil and the developing world
Session 3C: Macro, Money and Financialization
Session 3D: Stratification and inequality
Session 4A: Radical Ecological Economics: A view from the Global South
Radical Ecological Economics (REE) sets itself apart from the principles and perspectives of dominant economics, proposing to analyze appropriation processes of nature with a view to promoting environmental justice – a joining of concern for environmental balance with social justice. Epistemologically, it maintains that sustainability is a matter of socio-environmental justice, challenging the Global North’s “civilization project”, and its predatory economic rationality.
Session 4B: Household labor, production and care work
Session 4C: Our current crises and how to address them
Session 4D: Teaching Pluralist Economics in a SLAC Environment
Educators from pluralist Small Liberal Arts and Community Colleges discuss best practices and pedagogical approaches to teaching, including problematizing critical engagement, strategies of reflexivity in teaching methods, and participatory pedagogical tools and methods for teaching in the conditions of the “new normal” in the covid-era classroom.
Session 5A: Macroeconomic theory and contemporary issues
Session 5B: Teaching Principles Pluralistically: A roundtable on Economic Principles and Problems: A Pluralist Introduction by Geoffrey Schneider
Session 5C: Industries and exploitation in the COVID era
Session 5D: Heterodox economic theory and society
If you would like to attend sessions, please register for the conference using this link and you will receive the Zoom links for each session.
First half of 2022 | hybrid
This Seminar Series is curated by Professor Lena Lavinas, Leverhulme Visiting Professor at SOAS Economics, and aims to bring together scholars specialised in different topics in the realm of social policy to discuss fresh approaches to frame and address contemporary issues such as the financialisation of welfare regimes, the climate emergency and the consequences of the COVID-19 pandemic.
With confirmed cases and deaths from Covid-19 escalating, and the WHO declaring a pandemic in March 2020, an unusual set of public measures to prevent the economic fallouts from stay-at-home orders and lockdowns were laid out. Surprisingly, even if with their own tweaks, states, legislators and politicians all converged—quasi-unanimously—towards endorsing and passing unprecedented measures to provide substantial relief and assistance in an attempt to fix responses that had at best been half-hearted against the severity of a pandemic that had been downplayed for too long. Indeed, after four decades of neoliberalism, it has become universally acknowledged in practice that corresponding changes, or lack of changes, within and across welfare provisioning had been exposed as sorely systemically inadequate, certainly in light of the pandemic and, prospectively, in its wake. In part, as a response to lockdowns, State actions were massively oriented toward preserving employment and earnings through direct payments. Furlough schemes and short-lived stipends were adopted “fast-track” to prevent acute poverty and guarantee a minimum income for many of those forced out of their jobs. Consequently, fiscal and monetary policies that previously reflected constrained public spending, greatly reducing the scale and extent of social policies, were set aside. Nonetheless, at first glance, such policy responses to cope with the Covid-19 outbreak have mostly been “ad hoc” measures, one-off initiatives generally at the margins of, or as adjuncts to, social protection systems. Multibillion-dollar emergency relief packages have privileged transitory budgets and programmes, rather than renewing and extending welfare institutions that have faced decades of underfunding and dysfunctional restructuring. Was this all just a temporary aberration in the current social order, so deeply marked by an ideology of austerity, market fundamentalism and individual agency? If so, the strategies adopted may simply ease the imposition of new rounds of neoliberal measures once the worst of the Covid-19 crisis is deemed to be behind us.
This would be a significant missed opportunity to reshape public systems of provisioning in light of lessons drawn from the pandemic. In recent years financial interests and actors have made the spheres of social reproduction (health, education, housing, water and sanitation, social care) a privileged locus of wealth accumulation, to the detriment of people’s wellbeing. The pause in this trajectory of social policy provided by the pandemic could instead allow for more equitable modes of provisioning to be placed at the top of the policy agenda. This could be a moment for the transformation of social provisioning systems, in which the ethos of the public and the collective can regain scale and scope. To examine these issues, as part of a programme for her visiting Leverhulme Professorship, Lena Lavinas, supported by Kate Bayliss, Julia Chukwuma, Ben Fine and Elisa Van Waeyenberge, invite you to participate in a seminar series, aimed at reflecting on the challenges for social policy in the post-covid conjuncture and the corresponding economic and social forces and trends that underpin evolving uncertainties. While the unprecedented public spending response triggered by the pandemic caused some to suggest that the state is back and neoliberalism is dead, in the seminar series we will question whether the state ever went away, whether neoliberalism remains alive and well, and what directions will be assumed by the putative renewal of state interventions.
The Financialisation of Social Policy: Pandemics, Climate Emergency and Policies Seminar Series will take place once a month at SOAS, University of London, on a Tuesday, between 17:00 and 19:00, starting on 11 January 2022. Seven sessions have been scheduled as well as a final Symposium on 24 May 2022, gathering multilateral organisations and NGOs involved in the making of social policy.
Detailed Programme
The idea is to have at least three speakers per session: two presenters and a chair who also acts as discussant. Each speaker would have twenty minutes and the Chair/Discussant ten minutes with the aim of their contribution to be to raise some pertinent questions that allow the subsequent debate to be framed (sixty minutes). The presentations will discuss work-in-progress/new insights, and we would aim for the contributions to be brought together in an edited book (with complementary option of a journal Special Issue).
Session 1: Framing and contextualising: the way forward for social policy (11 January 2022, 5-7pm)
Session 2: COVID-19 and the financialisation of social care (8 February 2022, 5-7pm)
Session 3: COVID-19 and the financialisation of health (1 March 2022, 5-7pm)
Session 4: Income-support policies: limits and strengths (22 March 2022, 5-7pm)
Session 5: COVID-19 and the democratization of housing (19 April 2022, 5-7pm)
Session 6: COVID-19 and the financialisation of utilities (water & power) (3 May 2022, 5-7pm)
Session 7: Connecting the dots between debt and welfare regimes (24 May 2022, 10am-12pm)
SYMPOSIUM
Challenges for policymakers in the aftermath of the pandemic outbreak (24 May 2022 2-4pm)
Final Remarks (24 May 2022 4-5pm)
Please join us online via Zoom.
28 March - 1 April 2022 | Landschaftspark Duisburg, Germany
The Spring School aims to question simplistic diagnoses and to analyse which, partly competing, partly complementary, ideas and hypotheses are hidden behind these labels. In three panels we aim to investigate specifically how the humanistic ideals of public spirit and community, openness and tolerance shape and are being shaped, striven for, as well as negotiated and contested by contemporary society.
Keynotes:
- Carolina Alves (Economics: University of Cambridge): Economic science and development policy as colonial practices
- Naika Foroutan (Integration Research and Social Policy: Humboldt University of Berlin): Identity politics.
- Ludger Pries (Sociology: University of Bochum): Sense of community despite or because of transnationalisation?
We invite doctoral students of Arts, Social Sciences and Humanities to participate in the Spring School and present part of your work. A selected presentation will be scheduled to take 25 minutes (10 minutes presentation + 15 minutes discussion). Please submit a brief CV (max. 1 page), an abstract on your doctoral research (max. 500 words), a motivation for your application (max. 250 words), an indication of preference of panel workshops (please indicate your priorities) and an indication of choice for the performative-participatory laboratory.
Please apply here: udue.de/dCXOW Notifications will be sent out by the end of January.
Further Information: www.uni-due.de/de/mercator-graduiertenkolleg-weltoffenheit/spring_school_en.php
Submission Deadline: 10 January 2022
We have seen failing states, declining cultures, the failing of partial or entire systems, be they economic, financial, social or ecological, local, national or global. We have witnessed the breakdown of systems recently in terms of rain & flood, wind and fire disasters, or the huge, and avoidable, pandemic death toll; and climate change, last not least, demonstrates the danger of system failure in the largest spatial dimension and most existential way for humankind. Such disasters, failures, declines and breakdowns are usually preceded and accompanied, caused and aggravated by the decline and collapse of institutions and entire institutional arrangements. This is illustrated by the fact that in any such crisis, we can observe the complete absence or large deficits of appropriate and functioning (instrumental) institutional arrangements.
In this ASE webinar session, Mikidadu Mohammed, Odile Mackett and Mathias Akuokodiscussed about energy economics, the oil stocks and their macroenomics implications, and the quality of work and unpaid reproductive labour in the South African labour market.
Please find a link to the YouTube recording here.
The videos from the 2021 HES conference are now freely available on our website. You can also find the program here: https://historyofeconomics.org/2021-virtual-conference/
The next conference will take place June 16 to 19, 2022 at the University of St. Thomas downtown Minneapolis campus.
The legal-economic nexus podcast intends to broaden listeners appreciation of different approaches to understanding the economy. It takes a focus on institutional economics.
You can find the first 5 Episodes with Emily Hrovat, Charles Whalen, William Waller, Mary Wrenn and Anne Mayhew here.
At the beginning of the 21st century, the Covid-19 pandemic has marked the future of humanity, exacerbating social problems in Latin America and abroad, and making it increasingly difficult to achieve general wellbeing in a context of greater contamination that aggravates the situation. Current generations face a singular health challenge that has had widespread effects on the various activities and living conditions of the population a new fact that has not only deepened old problems, but revealed new ones as well. Although the origin of the problem is common the SARS-Cov-2 virus its impacts on different societies, nations, and regions of the planet are and will continue to be heterogeneous; likewise its effects on economies, social relations, well-being, and rights in the short-, medium-, and long-term.
At the beginning of this century, the region of Latin America was continuing to insert itself into the international economy, largely through the export of commodities. The financial crisis of 2008-2009, and then the pandemic, interrupted and reduced growth rates in several countries, while others were able to reduce the impact thanks to the diversity of their resources. Countries such as Argentina found themselves below the average growth rate of 1.8% and others, such as Mexico, Chile, Colombia, and Peru, above. From a social perspective, it has not been possible in recent decades to reduce the massive levels of poverty that affect a large part of the inhabitants of Latin America, nor to reduce the historical socio-economic inequality that has characterized it. And the reactions to the spread of the coronavirus have brought with them a weakening of social cohesion and greater expressions of discontent and vulnerability.
The high mortality, the huge demands on resources for public health, and the paralysis of the physical mobility of goods and people is taking a significant economic toll on all countries in the region. Relatedly, the closure of parts of industry and the reduction of international flights and transport, for example, have meant a decreased use of fossil fuels, which has contributed to reducing air pollution, leading to a degree of optimism regarding environmental sustainability. Such optimism, however, may well be temporary, since it is probable that pollution will begin where it left off upon reactivation.
From a political point of view, Latin America entered the 21st century after a period of expansion of democratic methods for the election of its governments, although in general this did not translate to more governance or the consolidation of states and laws. As such, democratic institutions in several Latin American countries appear to be undergoing processes of deconstruction. In general, the prospects for economic reactivation both at the world level and in the Ibero-American continent as a whole depend, in the first instance, on the success of the dissemination of scientific advances to immunize the population. Following that, prospects depend on the implementation of economic and social policies that pursue more economically, socially and environmentally sustainable development for the region.
If you weren't able to join us for SASE's 5th Ibero-American regional conference, "Climate Change, Social Inequality and Health Crisis in Ibero-America Countries", you can now watch recordings of the featured speakers and special panels on the YouTube channel.
Job Title: Coordinator (m/w/d) Content und Community Management
The Network "Exploring Economics" is offering a position as Coordinator Content and Community Management. The Deadline for Application is 9th of January 2022. For more information please visit the official website, the following job posting is in german only.
Wir sind auf der Suche nach einer begeisterungsfähigen, strukturierten und teamfähigen Persönlichkeit, die Lust hat Exploring Economics zu betreuen und weiterzuentwickeln. Als Koordination des Content und Community Management nimmt die Stelle eine zentrale Rolle bei der laufenden Betreuung und Weiterentwicklung der e-learning Plattform ein. Die Stelle ist im Kernteam von Exploring Economics angesiedelt und beinhaltet insbesondere die inhaltliche Ausrichtung von Exploring Economics, die Koordination verschiedener Projekte, des Redaktionsteam und die Zusammenarbeit mit unseren Partnerprojekten.
Zu Deinen Aufgaben gehören
Was wir bieten
Arbeitsweise
Die Arbeitstätigkeiten finden grundsätzlich im Home-Office statt. Es gibt wöchentliche Videokonferenzen sowohl des Exploring Economics Teams, bestehend aus vier bis sechs Personen, als auch von kleineren Arbeitsgruppen zum Content- oder Community Management innerhalb des Projektteams. Neben den wöchentlichen Teammeetings versuchen wir, in regelmäßigen Abständen physische Teamtreffen in Deutschland (zumeist in Berlin) zu organisieren. Neben dem Home-Office ist ein regelmäßiges Co-Worken im Co-Working Space in Berlin möglich (bzw. auch sehr erwünscht).
Diversität
Wir möchten Menschen, die in der Gesellschaft struktureller Diskriminierung ausgesetzt sind (Frauen*, BIPoC, LGBTQIA, Menschen mit Behinderungen, Menschen mit Migrationserfahrungen und Menschen aus nicht-akademischen Hintergründen) nachdrücklich zu einer Bewerbung ermutigen.
Bewerbungsprozess
Bitte schicke uns bis zum 09.01.2022:
an stellen-exploringeconomics@plurale-oekonomik.de
Bei Rückfragen steht Dir Jorim Gerrard (j.gerrard@plurale-oekonomik.de) gern zur Verfügung. Umfangreiche Informationen über das Netzwerk Plurale Ökonomik e.V. findest Du auf unserer Homepage und auf Exploring Economics. Wenn Deine Bewerbung zu uns passt, werden wir Dich zu einem Videogespräch einladen. Dieses findet voraussichtlich am 21. Januar 2022 statt.
Bewerbungsfrist: 9. Januar 2022
Job title: Postdoctoral Fellow (m/f/d)
The Jacobs University of Bremen offers a full-time Postdoctoral Position limited for 48 months on “Dynamics of Inclusiveness and Generosity in the Chinese Welfare Regime”. The position is a fixed term position until December 31, 2025. The position is part of one of the world’s foremost social policy research clusters, the Collaborative Research Center 1342 “Global Dynamics of Social Policy” (SFB Globale Entwicklungsdynamiken von Sozialpolitik) at the University of Bremen, funded by the German Research Foundation DFG.
We are looking for a highly motivated postdoctoral researcher to join the China project at the Collaborative Research Center 1342 “Global Dynamics of Social Policy”.In this project, led byTobias ten Brink and Armin Müller, the social policy expansion in the People’s Republic of China since the 1990s is analyzed. Starting as early as possible in 2022, the core task will be to analyze how social policy was influenced both by China’s integration into the world economy and by ideational factors. A focus will be on the inclusiveness and generosity of social security in pensions, healthcare (including maternity) and unemployment, and on the East Asian region and productivism. We offer a contract for 4 years with potential for extension should the project be prolonged upon successful evaluation.
If you enjoy a dynamic international working environment and like to work in a highly motivated and friendly team, you are exactly right with us! You can expect an open corporate culture with flat hierarchies as well as interesting and challenging tasks. As part of your induction, you will be optimally prepared for your area of responsibility.
For further information regarding this position, please contact Prof. Dr. Tobias ten Brink (t.tenbrink@jacobs-university.de). Please upload your relevant documents (cover letter, CV, publication list, one representative publication, copies of degree certificates) with details of your availability in the application tool online. The review of applications will begin immediately and will be closed on 05.01.2022. It would be an advantage to begin work in Bremen as early as possible in 2022, given that December 2025 will be the end of the contract irrespective of the starting date.
Submission deadline: 5 January 2022
Job title: Associate Lecturer (temporary sabbatical cover)
Dr. Lucy Ford is reaching out to Ph.D. students or newly graduated Ph.Ds interested in a temporary lecturing experience to cover two courses during her sabbatical. The courses are a post-graduate optional module on Global Politics and the Environment, and a second-year undergraduate module on Global Governance and Civil Society. Both modules are offered at the Oxford Brookes University in the following manner:
It might be possible to move the MA module to Thursday afternoon if the same person agrees to do both.
The semester runs from the end of January for 11 weeks, until just before Easter.
If any Ph.D. students or recent Ph.D. graduates would be interested, please reach out to Dr. Lucy Ford directly at lford@brookes.ac.uk for more details.
job title: Limited-Term Position in Economics
The Department of Economics, St. Thomas University, invites applications for a 10-month limited-term appointment at the rank of Assistant Professor, to begin August 1, 2022, pending budgetary approval. St. Thomas University is an undergraduate, liberal arts institution with a full-time enrolment of 1,800. Its students graduate with Bachelor of Arts, Applied Arts, Education, and Bachelor and Master level Social Work degrees. The faculty members are distinguished teachers, researchers, and scholars, and the university holds two Canada Research Chairs. The Department of Economics seeks candidates with a demonstrated potential for excellence in undergraduate teaching, including familiarity with political economy approaches. The candidate will be expected to teach three courses per term including introduction to economics, political economy theory, perspectives on underdevelopment, quantitative methods (statistics), and intermediate macroeconomic theory.
A Master’s degree in economics/political economy is required. A PhD (in Economics or closely related field) or imminent completion is preferred. Completed applications must include a letter of application that describes the applicant’s teaching experience, scholarly interests and achievements, and potential contributions to the program as specified in the qualifications listed above. The application must also include a curriculum vitae and a teaching dossier that provides evidence of teaching effectiveness, such as sample course syllabi, teaching evaluations, and a statement of teaching philosophy. Applicants should also submit samples of scholarly work and arrange to have three letters of reference sent directly to Dr. Andrew Secord, Chair of the Economics Hiring Committee, St. Thomas University, 51 Dineen Drive, Fredericton, NB, E3B 5G3. Electronic applications may be sent to economicshire@stu.ca.
Closing Date: February 14th, 2022, or when the position is filled. Applicants are responsible for ensuring that their completed applications, including letters of reference are sent directly from the referee to the Chair by this date. Only short-listed candidates will be contacted.
Offers of employment will be conditional upon a candidate providing proof of full vaccination against COVID-19 (or a valid medical or religious exemption). An equal employment employer, St. Thomas University is committed to employment equity for women, Aboriginal persons, members of visible minority groups, and persons with disabilities. All qualified candidates are encouraged to apply; however, Canadian and permanent residents will be given priority. We respectfully acknowledge that St. Thomas University is situated on the Territory of the Maliseet/Wəlastəkwiyik.
Application Deadline: 14 February 2022
Job title: Associate Professor in Circular Economy and Innovation
The University of Bradford is looking to appoint an Associate Professor in Circular Economy and Innovation. The successful candidate will sit within the Business Analytics, Circular Economy and Supply Chain (BACES) Research Centre, in the School of Management.
The ideal candidate must possess a Doctorate in a relevant field and will be expected to have a research track record at 3* or 4* CABS journal level and continue to be research active with grant capture activity and ambition. The candidate will be expected to lead and contribute to the development and direction of the CE and Innovation area focusing on developing research as well as teaching materials in terms of CE resource flows such as food, water, plastics, climate change, renewables and any other similar topics at School and University level. Ideally, the candidate must have technical skillsets such as data analytics, modelling and simulation and have prior knowledge of teaching within a business and management context. The post holder will be expected to contribute to digital learning teaching, working closely with established partners and contributing towards the School's leading FT ranked distance learning MBA programme and world's first and only MBA focused on Innovation, Enterprise and Circular Economy, developed and co-created with the Ellen MacArthur Foundation. The successful candidate will also need to evidence business and community engagement activities with local and international business/organisations.
For more details and to apply visit the official website.
Job title: 3-year Postdoctoral position
The University of Louvain (IACCHOS-CridDIS-TED) offers a 3-years Postdoctoral position in the Social sciences on Organizational processes leading to successful ecological transition at firm level.
About the post-doc position
Applicants should possess a PhD in one of the fields of the social sciences (sociology, political economy, economic anthropology, industrial relations, etc.) with interests in work (a.o. quality of work, the future of work debates), labour studies, organizational studies, corporate governance, social dialogue, and the topic of sustainability transition or/and decarbonization. The position will require a demonstrable affinity with policy related questions and profound knowledge in qualitative research and comparative case-studies modelling. Experience with working in teams is a plus.
We also expect excellent written and spoken proficiency in English and one of the two languages French and Dutch, or both ideally. The candidate should like to work in close partnership and be a team player in the context of the larger inter-university multi-disciplinary LAMARTRA team.
The candidate will be hired at UCLouvain on a temporary work contract for 3 years (1+2).
About the institutional environment
The post-doc will collaborate closely with Professor Isabelle Ferreras. She/he will be affiliated with the CriDIS (Centre for interdisciplinary research Democracy, Institutions, Subjectivity)/IACCHOS (Institute for the Analysis of Change in Contemporary and Historical Societies) at the University of Louvain (Louvain-la-Neuve, Belgium).
About the research programme to conduct
In the context of WP5 of the LAMARTRA project, the post-doc researcher will team up with Isabelle Ferreras and the members of the TED research group and be responsible of leading the following research programme:
This WP will zoom in onto specific organizational processes within each of the four LAMARTRA key economic sectors identified through the research carried out in other WP’s during 2021 and 2022. The in-depth case studies will investigate 4 cases (spending approx. 6 months on each of these cases), selected along a “best in class” rationale inside the Belgian economy: these cases will be organizations which constitute examples where the interests of workers and of the environment appear to be reconciled in innovative ways, particularly through possible dynamics of internal democratization or innovative corporate governance practices. This focus on critical, ‘positive examples’ helps to explore the particular conditions under which both kinds of interests have been supported. It is safe to hypothesize that workers in these organizations must have had access to many useful resources in navigating the firm-level transition processes. The analytical framework will be based on the work of Amartya Sen (2001) focusing on individuals’ resource mobilization, their generation of capabilities towards desired change, and on their involvement in the development of collective capabilities (Ferreras 2012). Then, the four cases will be analysed in a comparative light in order to identify regularities in the strategies that bring together workers, trade unions, and employers, and more broadly stakeholders, governmental actors, NGOs potentially, in seeking to steer and cope with low-carbon/labour transitioning, and hopefully succeed in the dual transition.
Deadline for application: 10 January 2022
Job title: Lecturer in Development Economics
The University of Manchester seeks to appoint a Lecturer in Development Economics and is looking for applications from candidates who specialise in Development Economics and can contribute to research-informed teaching that complements existing clusters of activity. This post is intended to enhance the GDI’s research and teaching capacity in development economics, and the successful candidate will be attached to the Development Economics and Public Policy cluster within the GDI.
Applications are welcomed from appropriately qualified candidates in all areas of development economics; the GDI is particularly interested in an appointment that will strengthen its ability to address questions relating to global poverty, economic growth, global inequalities, environmental change, urban development, and/or sustainable development.
The University invites applications for the above post which is tenable from 1st April 2022.
Salary will be Grade 6/7 (£37,467 to £51,799) per annum according to relevant experience.
Interviews will be held in February /March 2022.
As an equal opportunities employer we welcome applicants from all sections of the community regardless of age, sex, gender (or gender identity), ethnicity, disability, sexual orientation and transgender status. All appointments are made on merit.
Our University is positive about flexible working – you can find out more here
Blended working arrangements may be considered
Please note that we are unable to respond to enquiries, accept CVs or applications from Recruitment Agencies.
Enquiries about the vacancy, shortlisting and interviews:
Name: Professor Khalid Nadvi, Managing Director and Head of the Global Development Institute (GDI)
This vacancy will close for applications at midnight on the closing date.
Please find further information on the website.
Application Deadline: 31 January 2022
Positions for five PhD students
Uppsala University is a comprehensive research-intensive university with a strong international standing. Our ultimate goal is to conduct education and research of the highest quality and relevance to make a long-term difference in society. Our most important assets are all the individuals whose curiosity and dedication make Uppsala University one of Sweden’s most exciting workplaces. Uppsala University has over 45,000 students, more than 7,000 employees and a turnover of around SEK 7 billion.
Uppsala University welcomes applications for doctoral student positions in sociology based at the Department of Sociology. The Department seeks to appoint up to four candidates with excellent academic merits who can demonstrate their potential for research in any area of sociology. One further candidate will be appointed with an emphasis on housing and/or urban research and will be employed by the Institute for Housing and Urban Research (IBF) (www.ibf.uu.se). This candidate will follow the doctoral program of the Department of Sociology and will conduct his or her doctoral research in collaboration with supervisors at both the IBF and the Department of Sociology. Applicants interested in the doctoral position at the IBF must explicitly indicate it.
In addition to the dissertation work, the doctoral education program includes also both obligatory and elective courses. For further information on the PhD program.
The Department of Sociology offers opportunities for developing research as part of the established research groups.
Requirements: To be admitted to the Ph.D. program basic as well as specific qualifications are required. To meet the basic qualifications applicants must have a degree at an advanced level, or to demonstrate some equivalent and equal form of knowledge. The specific qualification requires an applicant to have at least 90 credits in sociology or equivalent in order to be considered eligible (or to demonstrate equivalent and equal knowledge).
The position of doctoral candidate is demanding in scholarly terms and the Department of Sociology wishes to appoint candidates who can thrive in and contribute to the Department’s research environment. The terms and conditions of employment for doctoral researchers at Department of Sociology are internationally highly competitive in order to secure the appointment of candidates with excellent academic merits. To be accepted, the applicant must be deemed to have the capacity to finish the doctoral program.
An evaluation of the applicant’s capacity to successfully finish the program is of crucial importance for the admission. The evaluation is primarily based on the academic record as documented in the texts and the research plan submitted by the applicant. Personal qualities that are desirable in a doctoral candidate include good communication and time management skills, flexibility and ability to work in harmony with co-workers. An excellent command of written and spoken English are requirements for all the PhD positions. The availability of suitable supervision within the applicant’s research area will also be considered in the admission.
The application must include:
Research plan: A short research plan of about 2000 words (excluding references) describing the sociological topic of the proposed doctoral thesis should be included in the application. The plan should briefly review previous research, formulate a research problem and aim, and present the potential theoretical perspectives and methodological approach to be adopted. The applicants will be ranked based on the quality of the research plan and the materials that they submit with their applications. The research plan is used not only to test applicants’ capacity to structure a research project (in relation to sociological theory and existing research as well as decide on appropriate methods to answer the research questions that the plan poses), but also to get an idea of the applicant’s research interest.
For more information about the research plan, see the document.
Individual interviews with the highest ranked applicants may be used as well. Therefore, the candidates should be available for interview, either in person or via Skype, on Wednesday March 30th 2022.
Employment Conditions: Successful candidates will be awarded employment as doctoral candidates for a full period of four years. The employment starts 2022-09-01 or as otherwise agreed, and is placed in Uppsala. The scope of the employment is 100% and salary will be paid according with the guidelines of Uppsala University.
The employed doctoral students must primarily devote their time to their own dissertation research. Other departmental duties may also be included in the position, such as, teaching or administrative tasks, but at no more than 20%. The duration of employment will be extended for a period corresponding to the time spent on departmental duties.
Contact the following for further information:
Director of Doctoral Studies, Associate Professor Reza Azarian or the Head of the Department, Professor Hannah Bradby. For the position in housing and urban sociology at the IBF, contact Professor Miguel A. Martínez.
Are you considering moving to Sweden to work at Uppsala University? If so, you will find a lot of information about working and living in Sweden at www.uu.se/joinus. You are also welcome to contact International Faculty and Staff Services at email.
Please do not send offers of recruitment or advertising services.
Submit your application through Uppsala University's recruitment system.
Deadline to apply: 15 February 2022.
Job title:Three PhD students in International Political Economy (m/f/d)
The Vienna University of Economics in Austria is looking for three PhD students in International Political Economy to work on the politics of debt, finance, investment, or trade.
The position is guaranteed for 6 years. The yearly gross salary is 31.200 Euros (2,228 Euros, 14 months a year) or about 35.000 US Dollars. The position can start as early as March 1, 2022, but there is flexibility regarding the start date. High proficiency in English required, German skills not necessary but a plus. Generous conference travel budget and research support available. If necessary, the university also offers assistance with the process of obtaining a visa. The deadline for applying is January 12, 2022.
For more information see here.
The SASE Alice Amsden Best Book Award committee considers books submitted by a SASE member with a first edition publication date from one to two years prior to the next annual conference date, and which are not edited volumes, with the aim of selecting an outstanding scholarly book that breaks new ground in the study of economic behavior and/or its policy implications with regard to societal, institutional, historical, philosophical, psychological, and ethical factors. The prize comes with an award of $2,000.
Only current SASE members are invited to nominate a book for the prize, and authors are welcome to nominate their own work. Nomination periods open at the beginning of winter and close at the end of winter each year. During this time, those who wish to submit a book for consideration may send 4 hard copies to the SASE office at the address below or, preferably, send a pdf copy directly to the committee at sasebookaward@gmail.com. Nominations must be accompanied by a brief nomination letter that states how the book contributes to SASE’s intellectual mission. All books/submissions must be in English. Please note that achieving diversity and inclusion is a priority for SASE. Applications for the 2022 SASE Alice Amsden Best Book Award are currently open.
Deadline for Nominations: 24 January 2022
The Centro di Ricerche e Documentazione “Piero Sraffa” is pleased to announce that the Pierangelo Garegnani Thesis Prize 2021 has been awarded to Dr Davide Romaniello for the doctoral thesis "L'isteresi nella disoccupazione e il ruolo della disoccupazione di lunga durata quale causa delle rigidità salariali: un approccio critico".
For more details see the website.
edited by Luca Fiorito, Scott Scheall, Carlos Eduardo Suprinyak and Ross B. Emmett | Emerald Publishing Limited, 2021
Research in the History of Economic Thought and Methodology (Volume 39C) released a symposium on the centenary of Risk, Uncertainty and Profit that originated in a symposium at the Center for the Study of Economic Liberty, Arizona State University in January 2021.
Per Bylund, Understanding the Limits of Pure Theory in Economics: Knight and Mises (pp. 3-18): Knight’s Risk, Uncertainty, and Profit is, by the author’s own account, “a study in ‘pure theory’.” From pure theory, the scientific method’s “successive approximations” explain empirical phenomena. But Knight did not fully develop the boundary conditions for theory. In this chapter, the author elucidates the demarcation of pure theory in Risk, Uncertainty and Profit. For comparison and contrast, the author uses Mises’s Austrian aprioristic methodology praxeology and its strict distinction between theory and thymology. The author finds that Knight and Mises largely agree on the nature and importance of pure theory but differ on its meaning and use. The author’s findings suggest that Knight, while arguing for aprioristic pure theory, still places empirical observation first.
Carlos Eduardo Suprinyak and Thiago Oliveira, The Unsettled Legacy of Frank H. Knight's Risk, Uncertainty and Profit: A Bibliometric Exploration (19-38): Our chapter discusses the myriad ways in which Frank H. Knight’s Risk, Uncertainty, and Profit (RUP) has been incorporated by different streams of scholarship dedicated to institutional analysis since 1990, when bibliometric evidence indicates a revival of interest in his classic work. Using citation analysis, the authors identify clusters of scholarship that build on Knight’s contributions, assessing which of his insights were absorbed by different subfields and how these have been connected to recent topics and concerns. The authors then qualitatively explore these results to throw new light on the recent history of institutional economics, using Knight’s RUP as a window into the evolution of (and inter-relations between) different research traditions that currently populate the field, including new economic sociology, comparative politics, evolutionary economics, entrepreneurial studies, environmental social sciences, international political economy, and the anthropology of finance. The authors conclude that Knight’s legacy remains unsettled, with different groups selectively absorbing a subset of his ideas and developing them in relative isolation from research conducted elsewhere. Nevertheless, boundary work connecting these separate areas reveals possible spaces for collaboration among scholars who study institutions building explicitly on Knightian insights.
Richard E. Wagner, Frank Knight, James Buchanan and Virginia Political Economy: The Long Shadow of Risk, Uncertainty and Profit (39-53): I have been asked to explore how James Buchanan’s work on public finance and constitutional political economy might have emerged out of themes present in Frank Knight’s oeuvre, especially his Risk Uncertainty, and Profit. Buchanan’s body of work has inspired the development of a style of political economy sometimes described as Virginia or Constitutional Political Economy to distinguish it from the Chicago Political Economy with which George Stigler is associated, and with Stigler and Buchanan both being students of Knight. While Buchanan, unlike Stigler, did not write his dissertation under Knight’s supervision, this is a minor distinction because Buchanan regarded Knight as his de facto supervisor even though Roy Blough was his de jure supervisor. The author explains how Knight’s scholarly oeuvre can in large measure be detected in Buchanan’s effort to fashion an alternative approach to public finance and to articulate the field of study now called constitutional political economy.
Ross B. Emmett, What Can We Learn about Frank Knight's Economic Theory from the Prefaces to the Reprints of Risk, Uncertainty and Profit?: In 1933, Lionel Robbins asked Frank Knight if he could republish Knight’s Risk, Uncertainty and Profit (RUP) in order for students at the London School of Economics to continue to have access to the book. He also asked Knight to write a preface to provide an update on Knight’s changing economic views. Between 1933 and 1957, Knight wrote four new prefaces for reprint editions of RUP outlining changes in his views. In the prefaces, he identified four aspects of the theory expounded in RUP that he came to reject: (a) the method of successive approximation; (b) the separation of production from distribution; (c) the tri-partite division of the factors of production; and (d) any notion of a period of production. These rejections placed him squarely in opposition to F. A. Hayek’s theoretical work. He also identified the key features he had sought to develop in a monetary theory that would oppose J. M. Keynes and John Hicks. At the same time, he sought to identify the new theoretical ideas he was developing, including an enterprise-based theory of market exchange, and the adoption of a unitary resource, called capital. He also pointed to the work in social philosophy that he had begun in the 1940s, especially the need for a combined approach to social science using economic theory, ethics and social philosophy. The prefaces came to serve as a bridge between Knight’s original theory and what he would argue at the conclusion of his career.
Please find a link to the book here.
Daniel Faber, Benjamin Levy & Christina Schlegel: Not all People are Polluted Equally in Capitalist Society: An Eco-Socialist Commentary on Liberal Environmental Justice Theory
Laura Corradi & Translated by Salvatore Engel-Dimauro: Intersectional Alliances in Soledad Prison: The Exemplary Life of John Brown Childs
Marco P. Vianna Franco: Ecological Utopianism in Narodnik Thought: Nikolay Chernyshevsky and the Redemption of Land
Cynthia Morinville & Nicole Van Lier: On Nature, Degradation, and Life-Making in Late Capitalism
Alexander Dunlap: Toward an Anarchist Decolonization: A Few Notes
Gregory Morgan Swer: How Technology Drives the History of the Green Revolution
John Szabo: Fossil Capitalism’s Lock-ins: The Natural Gas-Hydrogen Nexus
Robert MacNeil: On the Immorality and Futility of Canadian Climate Policy under Trudeau
Ryan Boyd: Staircases
Jill Trinh & Michael McLure: Piketty’s (r−g) Law Is Pareto’s Law: ‘Bad Faith’ in the Analysis of Income Inequality?
William Jefferies: Marx’s Forgotten Transformation Solution: The Transformation of Values into Prices of Production in Marx’s Grundrisse and Maksakovsky’s The Capitalist Cycle
Franck Jovanovic: Ludwig Hamburger (1890–1968): From Relaxation Oscillations to Business Cycles
Bruce Littleboy: An Interview with Emeritus Professor H. M. (Ted) Kolsen
Nobuhiko Nakazawa & Yoshifumi Ozawa: Milton’s Paradise Lost and Malthus’s An Essay on the Principle of Population: A Neglected Intertextuality
Marek Hudon and Camille Meyer: Managing complementary currencies and the blockchain technology: a conversation with Bernard Lietaer
Barbara Priolo: I Buoni di Riace: A complementary currency as a strategic tool to resist the mafia and transform the migration crisis into an opportunity
Sanel Alberto Contreras Ramirez: Degrees of consensus and experts’ views on Community and Complementary Currencies
Samo Kavčič: The thoroughly disaggregated quantity equationChristoph Stamm: Understanding the recent dynamics of local currency initiatives in Switzerland
Wesley C. Marshall: A Friendly Critique of Minsky's Financial Instability Hypothesis
Marta Vaz Silva & João Carlos Lopes: Varieties of Capitalism, Growth Regimes, and Structural Change in Eurozone Core and Peripheral Countries: Germany as a Role Model for Portugal?
Alicia Girón & Jacobo Silva: The Indian Banking System, Financial Fragility, and Deregulation
Mikael Randrup Byrialsen & Hamid Raza: Assessing the Macroeconomic Effects of COVID-19 in an Empirical SFC Model for Denmark
Gabriel Brondino & Ariel Dvoskin: An Assessment of Samuelson’s Ricardo-Sraffa Trade Model
Alexandra Bernasek & Melanie G. Long: Graduating During the Great Recession: The Effects of Student Loan Debt on Early Career Labor Market Outcomes and Graduate School Enrollment
Judith Derndorfer & Stefan Kranzinger: The Decline of the Middle Class: New Evidence for Europe
Latifa Barbara, Gilles Grolleau & Naoufel Mzoughi: How Relative Concerns Affect Unethical Behaviors
Paolo Silvestri & Stefan Kesting: An Institutional Economics of Gift?
Joy Jeounghee Kim: Violations of the U.S. Minimum Wage Laws: A Method of Wage Theft
Eduardo Garzón Espinosa, Bibiana Medialdea García & Esteban Cruz Hidalgo: Fiscal Policy Approaches: An Inquiring Look From The Modern Monetary Theory
Dongmei Li, Zhe Peng & Kainan Xiong: Usury Crimes in Post-Crisis China: The Underlying Economics and Beyond
Sam Levey: Modern Money and the War Treasury
Konstantinos Fotiadis & Prodromos Chatzoglou: Tax Morale: Direct and Indirect Paths between Trust Factors: Empirical Evidence from Greece
Tae-Hee Jo: A Veblenian Critique of Nelson and Winter’s Evolutionary Theory
Jerzy Hausner, Michał Możdżeń & Marek Oramus: Fragility of Social and Economic Systems and the Role of “Modality”
Juniours Marire: Comparative Analysis of Richard H. Tawney and Thorstein B. Veblen’s Conceptions of Property
Guglielmo Carchedi und Michael Roberts: The Economics of Modern Imperialism
Adam Hanieh: The Commodities Fetish? Financialisation and Finance Capital in the US Oil Industry
Mariano Féliz: Notes For a Discussion on Unequal Exchange and the Marxist Theory of Dependency
Vladimir Tikhonov: ‘The Soviet Problem’ in Post-Soviet Russian Marxism, or the Afterlife of the USSR
Umut Bozkurt: State–Bourgeoisie Relations under Neoliberalism with Turkish Characteristics
Michael Lazarus: The Lives of Marx: Hägglund and Marx’s Philosophy after Pippin and Postone
Franco Moretti: History, Materialism, Historical Materialism: A Response to Carolyn Lesjak and Stefano Ercolino
Ross B. Emmett: Uncertainty and the social organization of economic activity
Scott Burns, G. P. Manish, Malavika Nair: Knightian uncertainty in non-market institutional settings: the case of democracy and nonprofit civil society
Claus Wiemann Frølund: Institutions, uncertainty, and entrepreneurial judgment
Malte F. Dold, Mario J. Rizzo: Frank Knight and the cognitive diversity of entrepreneurship
Marek Hudik, Per L. Bylund: Let's do it Frank's way: general principles and historical specificity in the study of entrepreneurship
Marian Eabrasu: Bet against yourself: integrating insurance and entrepreneurship
Chris Clarke: The legacy of Frank H. Knight for the politics of financial governance
Joyce K. Nabisaalu, Per L. Bylund: Knight, financial institutions, and entrepreneurship in developing economies
David B. Audretsch, Maksim Belitski: Frank Knight, uncertainty and knowledge spillover entrepreneurship
Peter J. Boettke, Rosolino A. Candela: The common sense of economics and divergent approaches in economic thought: a view from Risk, Uncertainty, and Profit
Joseph T. Salerno, Carmen Elena Dorobat, Matthew C. McCaffrey: Monopoly as a ‘culture-history fact’: Knight, Menger, and the role of institutions
Itay Fischhendler, Lior Herman & Lioz David: Light at the End of the Panel: The Gaza Strip and the Interplay Between Geopolitical Conflict and Renewable Energy Transition
Eric Brown & Dóra Piroska: Governing Fintech and Fintech as Governance: The Regulatory Sandbox, Riskwashing, and Disruptive Social Classification
Samuel Knafo: The Power of Finance in the Age of Market Based Banking
David M. Webber: Towards an ‘Everyday’ Cultural Political Economy of English Football: Conceptualising the Futures of Wembley Stadium and the Grassroots Game
Genevieve LeBaron, Remi Edwards, Tom Hunt, Charline Sempéré & Penelope Kyritsis: The Ineffectiveness of CSR: Understanding Garment Company Commitments to Living Wages in Global Supply Chains
Nick Bernards: The World Bank, Agricultural Credit, and the Rise of Neoliberalism in Global Development
Leo Steeds: The Social Ecology of Adam Smith: Reconsidering the Intellectual Foundations of Political Economy
Brett Christophers: Fossilised Capital: Price and Profit in the Energy Transition
Patrick Gallagher: Large Banks, Market-based Banking, and the Financialisation of Danish Mortgage Markets
Stockhammer, E., Sgambati, S., & Nesvetailova, A.: Financialisation: continuity and change— introduction to the special issue
Leaver, A., & Martin, K.: ‘Dams and flows’: boundary formation and dislocation in the financialised firm
Auvray, T., Durand, C., Rabinovich, J., & Rikap, C.: Corporate financialization’s conservation and transformation: from Mark I to Mark II.
Davis, L., & McCormack, S. : Industrial stagnation and the financialization of nonfinancial corporations.
Mantoan, E., Centeno, V., & Feijo, C. : Why has the Brazilian economy stagnated in the 2010s? A Minskyan analysis of the behavior of non-financial companies in a financialized economy.
Fuller, G. W. : The financialization of rented homes: continuity and change in housing financialization.
Datz, G. : Ties that bind and blur: financialization and the evolution of sovereign debt as private contract.
Lysandrou, P., & Ranjbaran, T. : Financialisation reinforced: the dual legacy of the covid pandemic.
Extra Topics/Temas Extras
Pablo Álvarez Aragón: Sobre los premios "Nobel" de Economía
Articles/Artículos
Alan A. Deytha Mon, A. Sebastián Hdez. Solorza: La intensidad del trabajo desde la teoría marxista, una propuesta de medición alternativa.
Miriam Sosa, Edgar Ortiz, Alejandra Cabello: Financiación empresarial con cripto-tokens: Riesgos y su valuación.
Interventions/Intervenciones
Albert Recio Andreu: Capitalismo y crisis ecológica: Una cuestión civilizatoria.
Classics and Forgotten/Clásicos u Olvidados
Diego Guerrero: Sismondi y la Economía política clásica.
Simone de Sismondi: Nuevos principios de Economía política (textos seleccionados).
Ross, S., & Savage, L.: Work reorganization in the neoliberal university: A labour process perspective.
Guthrie, R., & Babic, A.: Employers’ potential liability for family and domestic violence: An Australian overview.
Kim, J. J., & Allmang, S.: Wage theft in the United States: towards new research agendas.
Villanueva, P., & Cárdenas, L.: Unemployment in Spain: The failure of wage devaluation.
Chica-Olmo, J., Checa-Olivas, M., & Lopez-Castellano, F. : Regional characteristics of the gender employment gap: A spatio-temporal approach.
Lopes, H., & Calapez, T. : Job polarisation: Capturing the effects of work organisation.
Richard van den Berg, Pencho Penchev & Hans-Michael Trautwein: Introduction
Rogério Arthmar & Michael McLure:On continuity and general equilibrium: Pareto, Cassel, and the foundations of neoclassical economics
Eyüp Özveren & M. Erdem Özgür: The Turkish Kadro pioneers of a Balkan Dependencia in the interwar period: rethinking underemployment, monetary policy, and technology
Robert W. Dimand & Sylvie Rivot: From “science as measurement” to “measurement and theory”: the Cowles Commission and contrasting empirical methodologies at the University of Chicago, 1943 to 1955
Stavros A. Drakopoulos: The marginalization of absolute and relative income hypotheses of consumption and the role of fiscal policy
Fabio Masini: William Nordhaus: A disputable Nobel [Prize]? Externalities, climate change, and governmental action
Maxime Desmarais-Tremblay & Andrej Svorenčík: A prosopography of the European Society for the History of Economic Thought
Interview
Hans-Michael Trautwein & Heinz Rieter: “It might be good to know on whose shoulders we stand – and why”: a conversation with Heinz Rieter
Obituary
Tamotsu Nishizawa & Richard van den Berg: Obituary: Takumi Tsuda (1929–2021)
Review Essay
A. M. C. Waterman:Against “Capitalism”: Eugene McCarraher on “The Enchantments of Mammon” — A Review Essay
Books Reviews
Peter Spahn: Raising Keynes. A twenty-first-century general theory
Jacob Jensen: The soul of classical political economy: James M. Buchanan from the archives
Julius Horvath: A History of Czech Economic Thought
Marius Kuster: Futures past. Economic forecasting in the 20th and 21st century
Emmanuelle Bénicourt, Sophie Jallais and Camille Noûs: The riddle of the use of impossible examples in microeconomics textbooks
Shimshon Bichler and Jonathan Nitzan: The 1-2-3 toolbox of mainstream economics: promising everything, delivering nothing
M. Shahid Alam: Capitalists are dispensable, laborers are not
Blair Fix: Redistributing income through hierarchy
John Komlos: The Becker model of discrimination is anachronistic and should no longer be taught
Nat Dyer: “Susan Strange saw the financial crisis coming, Your Majesty”
Adam Fforde: Measuring economic transformation: what to make of constant price sectoral GDP
David R Richardson: Booming wealth alongside fiscal concerns about ageing populations
Carlos Guerrero de Lizardi: Price indices suitable for the monetary policy
Jamie Morgan with Andrew P. Baker: From the political economy of financial regulation and economic governance to climate change
by Muhammad Ali Nasir | palgrave mcmilla, 2022
This book describes the history of European integration and the Eurozone, before presenting ways in which the European Union can move forward. Charting integration from before the Second World War, the foundations of the Eurozone are examined to provide insight into the challenges faced by the European Union, including the Global Financial Crisis, over recent decades. The impact of TARGET2 and the European Monetary System are also discussed.
This book aims to highlight ways that current challenges to European integration, such as the COVID-19 crisis, environmental degradation, and fiscal debt, can be overcome to promote economic growth and social advancement. It will be relevant to students, researchers, and policymakers interested in the political economy and European economic policy.
Please find a link to the book here.
by Kate Bedford | Oxford University Press, 2019
Casinos are often used by political economists, and popular commentators, to think critically about capitalism. Bingo - an equal chance numbers game played in many parts of the world - is overlooked in these conversations about gambling and political economy. Bingo Capitalism challenges that omission by asking what bingo in England and Wales can teach us about capitalism and the regulation of everyday gambling economies. The book draws on official records of parliamentary debate, case law, regulations and in-depth interviews with both bingo players and workers to offer the first socio-legal account of this globally significant and immensely popular pastime. It explores the legal and political history of bingo and how gender shapes, and is shaped by, diverse state rules on gambling. It also sheds light on the regulation of workers, players, products, places, and technologies. In so doing it adds a vital new dimension to accounts of UK gambling law and regulation.
Through Bingo Capitalism, Bedford makes a key theoretical contribution to our understanding of the relationship between gambling and political economy, showing the role of the state in supporting and then eclipsing environments where gambling played a key role as mutual aid. In centring the regulatory entanglement between vernacular play forms, self-organised membership activity, and corporate leisure experiences, she offers a fresh vision of gambling law from the everyday perspective of bingo.
Please find a link to the book here.
Edited by Caroline Shenaz Hossein and Christabell P. J. | Oxford University Press, 2022
People across the globe engage in social and solidarity economics to help themselves, their community, and society on their own terms. Community Economies in the Global South examines how people who conscientiously organize rotating savings and credit associations (ROSCAs) bring positive changes to their own lives as well as others. ROSCAs are a long-established and well documented practice, especially those organized by women of colour. Members make regular deposits to a fund as a savings that is then given in whole or in part to each member in turn based on group economics. This book spotlights women in Latin America, the Caribbean, Africa, and Asia who organize and use these associations, composed of ordinary people belonging to similar class origins who decide jointly on the rules to suit the interests of their members. The case studies show how they vary greatly across countries in the Global South, demonstrating that ROSCAs are living proof that diverse community economies do exist and have been around for a very long time. The contributors recount stories of the self-help, activism, and perseverance of racialized people in order to push for ethical, community-focused business, and to hold onto local knowledge, grounded theory, and lived experience, reducing the need to rely on external funding as people find ways to finance sustainable, debt-free business ventures. The first collection on this topic edited by two women of colour with roots in the Global South, this volume is a rallying call to other scholar-activists to study and report on how racialized people come together, pool goods, and diversify business in the Global South.
Please find a link to the book here.
By Richard Westra | Routledge, 2021
Various strains of heterodox economics have sought, and largely failed, to dismount orthodoxy from its dominant position. This book critiques the criticizers, explaining why heterodox economics challenges have faltered, and then presents a coherent alternative paradigm of its own. This simultaneously exposes the vacuousness of neoclassical economics, the limitations of heterodox critique and the subverting of Karl Marx’s revolutionary economic thought by his own disciples.
The book draws in particular on two key intellectual traditions in making its arguments: critical realism and Marxism. From the refounding of critical realist philosophy of science in the hands of Roy Bhaskar, emphasis is placed upon the position that the ontological nature of the object of study determines the form of its possible science. However, in their theoretical constructions, neither orthodox economics nor heterodox economics problematizes the unique ontology of capitalism to the detriment of knowledge about the social world. The book maintains that a century of misthinking over Marx’s corpus has resulted in a missed opportunity to construct a paradigmatic alternative to orthodox economics. Drawing upon the tradition of the Japanese Uno approach to Marxism, and supported by Bhaskar’s development of critical realism as underlaborer for science, the book defends Marx’s writing in his monumental Capital as founding an economic science adequate to its ontological object of study. It then elaborates upon how Marxian economic theory exposes the hidden scourges of capitalism and what is required to unleash the potential of this theory for comprehensive analysis of capitalist vicissitudes, the study of economic life in precapitalist societies and the design of a desperately needed postcapitalist social order.
Broadening its appeal as it sets out to reclaim Marx’s revolutionary legacy, this original volume critically traverses writings in mainstream and heterodox economics, cutting edge philosophy of science and Marxian political economy and introduces readers to a reconstruction of Marx’s Capital engineered in Japan. This provocative book is essential reading for everyone interested in heterodox economics, critical realism, Marxian economics and critiques of capitalism.
Please find a link to the book here.
George García-Quesada | Brill, 2021
Through a discussion with current perspectives in philosophy of history – especially with a critical approach to Paul Ricœur’s work – and a rigorous reading of Karl Marx’s oeuvre, Karl Marx, Historian of Social Times and Spaces proposes an interpretation of Marx's concept and method of historical knowledge. In this sense the examination of Marx's concepts of social space and social time serve to highlight the possibilities of his work in terms of the explanation of the dynamics of complex multilinear development of human societies and of capitalism in particular.
For more information see here.
by Paul Zarembka | Haymarket Books, 2021
This innovative book hones in on key elements of Marx's vast oeuvre, focusing on his contribution to social theory. Themes addressed include the declining utility of Hegelian philosophy, deepening confrontation with Ricardian political economy, translations from the French edition neglected in Engels’ distorting publication of Capital, the place of the accumulation of capital, and especially of ‘primitive accumulation’, as well as highlighting the contributions of Rosa Luxemburg to political economy and to nationalism, and closing with a consideration of state conspiracies.
Please find the link to the book here.
by Sanford M. Jacoby | Princeton University Press, 2021
Winner-award of Economic historian
Since the 1970s, American unions have shrunk dramatically, as has their economic clout. Labor in the Age of Finance traces the search for new sources of power, showing how unions turned financialization to their advantage. Sanford Jacoby catalogs the array of allies and finance-based tactics labor deployed to stanch membership losses in the private sector. By leveraging pension capital, unions restructured corporate governance around issues like executive pay and accountability. In Congress, they drew on their political influence to press for corporate reforms in the wake of business scandals and the financial crisis. The effort restrained imperial CEOs but could not bridge the divide between workers and owners. Wages lagged behind investor returns, feeding the inequality identified by Occupy Wall Street. And labor’s slide continued.
A compelling blend of history, economics, and politics, Labor in the Age of Finance explores the paradox of capital bestowing power to labor in the tumultuous era of Enron, Lehman Brothers, and Dodd-Frank.
Please find a link to the book here.
By Rolf Kunneke, Claude Ménard and John Groenewegen | Cambridge University Press, 2021
This book is about network infrastructures. We consider network infrastructures as socio-technological systems characterized by the interdependence and complementarity of their two dimensions: institutions and technology. Relying on a combination of nodes and links, these infrastructures require coordination along both dimensions in order to fulfill functions identified as ‘critical.’ Critical functions determine the capacity of a network to deliver expected services in line with societal values. Thus understood, network infrastructures cover a wide range of sectors, from energy, water and sanitation, urban transportation, to telecoms and internet. These networks provide the backbone of economic as well as social activities. The key argument underlying our analysis is that alignment between the two dimensions, institutions and technology, is central to the fulfillment of performance expected from these networks. Misalignment can generate discrepancies or gaps challenging the integrity of a network and its capacity to meet its goal.
Throughout the entire book, our focus is on identifying and characterizing the different and interdependent layers that shape the institutional as well as the technological dimensions of network infrastructures. Our goal is to provide conceptual tools for assessing the conditions under which the alignment or misalignment of the two dimensions and their internal coordination determines the performance of specific network infrastructures. We substantiate our approach through the examples of energy transition, water and wastewater management, and automated vehicles.
Please find a link to the book here.
by Sergio Cesaratto | Diarkos, 2021
With renewed civic passion and intellectual irony, the author of Heterodox Challenges in Economics introduces readers to the role of money and monetary policy. Drawing on the contributions of qualified scholars, particularly from central banks, and heterodox economic thought, the lessons dismantle the textbook view of monetary policy. Not only does this offer scholars and students, politicians and journalists, and citizens and activists interested in social issues a tool for understanding monetary decisions, in particular those of the ECB, but it also provides further evidence of the fallacy of dominant economic theories. The book interweaves analytical explanations with the events of the financial crisis and the economic impact of the pandemic, with a particular look at the future of Europe and Italy.
Please find a link to the book here (Italian only).
by Pavlina R Tcherneva | Cambridge, UK: Polity, 2020
One of the most enduring ideas in economics is that unemployment is both unavoidable and necessary for the smooth functioning of the economy. This assumption has provided cover for the devastating social and economic costs of job insecurity. It is also false. In this book, leading expert Pavlina R. Tcherneva challenges us to imagine a world where the phantom of unemployment is banished and anyone who seeks decent, living-wage work can find it - guaranteed. This is the aim of the Job Guarantee proposal: to provide a voluntary employment opportunity in public service to anyone who needs it. Tcherneva enumerates the many advantages of the Job Guarantee over the status quo and proposes a blueprint for its implementation within the wider context of the need for a Green New Deal.
Published in 6 languages already and 2 forthcoming, this compact primer is the ultimate guide to the benefits of one of the most transformative public policies being discussed today. It is essential reading for all citizens and activists who are passionate about social justice and building a fairer economy.
Please find a link to the book here.
by Rod Hill and Tony Myatt | Zed, 2022
Mainstream textbooks present economics as an objective science, free from value judgements. The Microeconomics Anti-Textbook demonstrates this to be a myth – one which serves to make such textbooks not only off-puttingly bland, but also dangerously misleading in their justification of the status quo and neglect of alternatives.
In this fully updated and expanded edition of their celebrated book, Professors Rod Hill and Tony Myatt lay out the essentials of each topic in the standard texts in a clear and concise way, before presenting an 'anti-text' analysis and critique. Challenging the assumptions, arguments, and models, Hill and Myatt provide the essential guide to decoding the textbooks, and show that real economics is far more interesting - and subversive - than the simplistic version presented to students.
Please find a link to the book here.
Jan Eeckhout | Princeton University Press, 2021
In an era of technological progress and easy communicatioa, it might seem reasonable to assume that the world’s working people have never had it so good. But wages are stagnant and prices are rising, so that everything from a bottle of beer to a prosthetic hip costs more. Economist Jan Eeckhout shows how this is due to a small number of companies exploiting an unbridled rise in market power―the ability to set prices higher than they could in a properly functioning competitive marketplace. Drawing on his own groundbreaking research and telling the stories of common workers throughout, he demonstrates how market power has suffocated the world of work, and how, without better mechanisms to ensure competition, it could lead to disastrous market corrections and political turmoil.
The Profit Paradox describes how, over the past forty years, a handful of companies have reaped most of the rewards of technological advancements―acquiring rivals, securing huge profits, and creating brutally unequal outcomes for workers. Instead of passing on the benefits of better technologies to consumers through lower prices, these “superstar” companies leverage new technologies to charge even higher prices. The consequences are already immense, from unnecessarily high prices for virtually everything, to fewer startups that can compete, to rising inequality and stagnating wages for most workers, to severely limited social mobility.
A provocative investigation into how market power hurts average working people, The Profit Paradox also offers concrete solutions for fixing the problem and restoring a healthy economy.
Please find a link to the book here.
The Center for the History of Political Economy at Duke University is now accepting applications for the 2022-23 Visiting Scholars program.
Application Procedure
All applicants should submit the following materials. Items a through d should be sent as a single PDF document. Do not send four separate documents.
The application process is competitive; only a portion of applicants will be selected. Please submit your materials by e-mail to chope@econ.duke.edu. If you apply and do not, in a day or two, receive an acknowledgment that we have received your application, please email us to ensure that your application is received.
For a complete description of the program and how to apply, please visit the Center website at Visiting Scholars Program | Center for the History of Political Economy (duke.edu).
Application Deadline: 3 January 2022
The Open University Business and Law Schools invite applications for a number of full-time funded Ph.D. studentships beginning 1 October 2022. The project "DAF04 Social and Economic Inequality in a Financialized Society" welcomes applications from candidates wishing to explore the aspects of gender and racial inequalities in a financialized society. Candidates must be keen to employ a critical finance approach and address underlying power relationships inherent in the process of financialization. We particularly welcome interdisciplinary projects which engage with methodological pluralism, for instance, incorporating qualitative research within a mixed-methods approach.
Your proposal, covering letter, fully completed application form, and copies of certificates and transcripts should be emailed to next email address by the closing time and date.
More information about the project and supervisors can be found here.
More information about the submission can be found here.
Deadline for application: 16 February 2022
On the 7th December the great Australian economist Geoff Harcourt, 90, passed away after a short illness.
He was one of the doyens of Australian economics (find a short piece about his work here). He was founder member of the history of economic thought society of Australia and a distinguished fellow of the society. He was awarded of Companion in the Order of Australia - that nation’s highest honour – in 2018 citing his ‘eminent service to higher education as an academic economist and author, particularly in the fields of post-Keynesian economics, capital theory and economic thought’. He wrote an excellent biography of Joan Robinson (With Prue Kerr). Many scholars will recall that Geoff was a mentor to hundreds of HET students and that many, owed their careers to his influence and advice. He cared deeply to make the world a better place, economics more honest, and for those around him to be successful in life. we will sorely miss him
Giving Condolences
Because the pandemic prevented planned celebrations, a website was created in June for Geoff Harcourt’s 90th birthday. Many of you contributed testimonials, and he was able to read all of them. With his death, the family is continuing the website as a celebration of Geoff’s life. If you would like to contribute a remembrance or message to the family, please use this link. Even if you have posted elsewhere, please submit so that his family can more easily access your words. These messages are a great comfort to them all.
The network aims to promote study initiatives and in-depth seminars, presenting itself as a place for research and plural comparison between the different souls of heterodox economic thought in Italy. The Italian post-Keynesian network (IPKN) proposes a critical approach to the study of economic and social phenomena, following the contributions of Karl Marx, Rosa Luxemburg, John Maynard Keynes, Joseph Schumpeter, Michal Kalecki, Joan Robinson, Nicholas Kaldor, Piero Sraffa and their heirs. Although sometimes associated with apparently heterogeneous theoretical strands, these authors are united by a vision of capitalist economies as monetary systems of production, in which the demand for goods and services defines the level of economic activity in the short and long term. The rejection of methodological individualism and the favour for a holistic or organicist approach to the analysis of social phenomena is another fundamental aspect of this approach. In particular, the idea that the behaviour of individuals and social groups can be reduced to a temporal problem of constrained maximization is rejected. Rather, the fundamental uncertainty that characterizes economic relations makes agents rely on routines, conventions and codified procedures. On the other hand, the emerging behaviour of the economic system can never be reduced to the simple linear combination of individual behaviours, due to the interaction of heterogeneous economic agents in a complex environment that includes social classes, institutions and ecosystems.
On the epistemological level, the functionalist philosophy that underlies the economic approach of neoclassical derivation still today hegemonic is rejected and replaced by a realist approach, based on the identification of stylized facts and laws of motion. On the level of economic policy, the dominant narrative is criticized according to which the forces of competition and individual interest, if left free to operate, would push towards the full employment of the workforce and, in general, towards the social optimum. . On the contrary, economic instability, financial fragility, depletion of natural resources, distributional inequality and unemployment can coexist, and indeed seem to represent an endemic feature of capitalist market economies. For this reason, post-Keynesian economists look favourably on the stabilizing intervention of the public sector, both through policies of regulation, investment and redistribution and through forms of democratic planning of part of the production.
The favour for critical thinking and the plurality of methods of scientific investigation has characterized the post-Keynesian lines of study from their origins. This is a position that goes against the current trend. Precisely the climate of scientific conformity and methodological conservatism that has characterized the Italian economic debate for some decades has pushed and pushed us to create a network of post-Keynesian studies. The goal is threefold. First of all, it is a question of encouraging the comparison and the emergence of alternative theoretical positions, both within the academic world and outside it. The second goal is to connect female students and students, PhD students and PhD students, and young researchers and researchers who in recent years have dedicated their efforts to the development of post-Keynesian ideas and methods. The third objective is to help break the condition of isolation and job insecurity in which all female researchers who engage in critical investigation programs of the dominant paradigm in economic science find themselves working. Note that the existence of a plurality of competing approaches has long been recognized as a fundamental condition for the vitality of the scientific debate. To this end, the Italian post-Keynesian network organizes and promotes study days, workshops and seminars, presenting itself as a place for research and plural comparison between the different souls of heterodox economic thought with a view to recovering and renewing the theoretical lesson of giants of Italian critical economic thought such as Pierangelo Garegnani, Augusto Graziani, Luigi Pasinetti and Paolo Sylos-Labini.
For more information see the network website: https://sites.google.com/view/ipknetwork