Issue 320 December 04, 2023 web pdf Heterodox Economics Directory
It is now close to two months that another moral conundrum arising from path-dependent, historical lines of conflict has unfolded into an escalating spiral of violence. Such lock-ins into violent escalation, even if they should only be temporary, always come at an incredible human cost and leave me largely speechless. However, nonetheless the underlying dynamics of such conflicts – both in terms of actual armed confrontations as well as with respect to the continous reinforcement of latent conflicts due to exclusionary politics – can at least be rationalized using a cornerstone of heterodox political economy, namely the idea of self-reinforcing effects.
While such self-reinforcing effects are typically emphasized in the context of path dependency, distributional analysis (e.g. the notion of cumulative advantage) or analysis related to power asymmetries (e.g. the notion of preferential attachment), they are also somewhat helpful to better understand escalating, violent developments, that have the potential to lead to long-term gridlocks of conflict and hate. Such gridlocks leave participants with very small (or even empty) sets of morally legitimate options, which often contributes to prolonging and intensifying the respective conflicts. Similarly, self-reinforcing effects can be referenced to provide a possible explanation for the empirical observation that the 'intensity of armed conflicts' seemingly follows a power law (see, e.g., here).
This view could maybe inspire a novel take on the definition of heterdox economis as the 'true dismal science'. In this vein, the task of heterodox economics is to explain why so many things, that irritate our Smithian passions for sympathy and justice, emerge in this world (without assuming that people are evil from the start). While this might sound all-too defeatist at first, one should note that an applied version of a so-defined science could be one that effectively contributes to more peace among humans as its core question of interest asks for the emergence of violence, oppression and injustice in the first place.
Also, in a more technical matter, such reflections could also motivate us to think more deeply about, how exactly, a general notion of self-reinforcing effects permeates much of heterodox economics and whether and to what extent it makes sense to synthesize different variants and applications to make this (allegedly) general principle more explicit and accessible.
All the best,
Jakob
PS: A maybe more optimistic news item in this issue concerns the fact that one of the homes of the Heterodox Economics Newsletter – the Institute for Comprehensive Analysis of the Economy at Johannes Kepler University Linz – will expand its staff and activities in the upcoming year. If you are interested in participating in this expansion, check out the related post below!
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4-7 September 2024 | Kadir Has Üniversitesi, Istanbul, Türkiye
Conference Theme: The Changing World Economy, and Today’s Imperialism
While the capitalist world economy has always been in a process of continuous change, it is now undergoing many large and rapid changes similar in scope to the process of the birth of neoliberalism almost half a century ago. This is strikingly manifested in the de facto abandonment of two very influential, albeit far from ever universally applied, pillars of neoliberal ideology: “free markets” and a “minimalist state”. They are being openly rejected by governments throughout the Global North in favour of advocating and implementing both greatly increased protectionism, and greatly increased direction of the economy (in the interests of capital) by the state.
At least two major developments are important drivers of this change. The first is the new technologies that promise capitalists huge profits, thereby motivating huge investments, which have the potential to dramatically alter both capitalism’s labor and accumulation processes. Three of the most important of these technological changes that have been unfolding at an exponentially accelerating rate over the last decade are the human biological technologies, artificial intelligence, and the pressingly essential non-carbon renewable energy technologies.
The second major development has been unfolding for at least the last 40 or 50 years, the changed relation between the developed Global North and the less developed Global South as parts of the global capitalist system. It is widely accepted by advocates of a better world that value still flows out of the Global South to support the higher standards of living in the Global North. The way imperialism extracts this value, however, is clearly very different from that indicated in the classical radical theories of imperialism which were developed a hundred years ago. Dependency Theories and World System Theories, developed in the 1970s and 1980s, then greatly enriched the classical theories with insights from the very different post WWII capitalist world system. But the relative “decline of the North and the rise of the South” over the last 50 years, including in particular the rise of “the Asian economies” over the last few decades, has put the issue of the nature and role of Imperialism in today’s world economy back on radical political economy’s research agenda of “urgent issues”.
This is the preliminary Call for proposals for presentations at the conference on any aspects of political economy. Submissions may be made as (a) proposals for individual papers (which IIPPE will group into panels), (b) proposals for panels, (c) proposals for streams of panels, or (d) proposals on activism. Like last year, proposals will be made to an electronic platform. We expect to open the platform about December 15 with a deadline for proposal of February 1, 2024.
For more information please visit the conference website.
Submission Deadline: 1 February 2024
20-22 June 2024 | Sciences Po Bordeaux, Bordeaux, France
Conference Theme: Solidarity
The 20 international conference of the Charles Gide Association aims to examine the notion of "solidarity" in the light of the history of economic thought, while taking a multidisciplinary approach by calling on social sciences such as sociology, anthropology and political science, as well as philosophy, history, law and management sciences. It will be held at Sciences Po Bordeaux from June 20 to 22, 2024.
Nowadays, "solidarity" has a prescriptive and moral meaning, reflected in calls for donations and generosity. The term has a plural and polyphonic history, clearly reflected in the questions and controversies in social sciences.
Submission Guidelines
The 20th Gide Conference will examine the astonishing plasticity of the notion of solidarity. However, the history of economic thought is also used to shed light on contemporary issues. New questions call for new histories. Proposals should take the form of an abstract of between 300 and 600 words, with 5 keywords and a maximum of 10 bibliographical references. Session proposals are welcome. Proposals for papers and sessions have to be submitted on the Conference website. Click "Submit" on the left.
When submitting your proposals, please specify the relevant theme:
For further information, please contact the Organizing Committee at: colloque.gide2024@gmail.com
Submission Deadline: 15 December 2023
University of Naples Federico II, Department of Political Sciences 10-12 July 2024
The International Association for the Economics of Participation (IAFEP) gathers scholars dedicated to exploring the economics of democratic and participatory organizations, such as labor-managed firms, cooperatives and firms with broad-based employee share-ownership, profit sharing and worker participation schemes, as well as democratic nonprofit, community and social enterprises. The IAFEP Conferences, which take place every two years, provide an international forum for presentations and discussions of current research on the economics of participation. The 2024 IAFEP Conference will be held in Naples (Italy).
Submissions for the 2024 conference, are invited from all relevant fields of study, including comparative economics, labor economics, industrial organization, organizational economics, social economics, management studies, institutional economics, evolutionary economics, development economics, sociology, psychology, political science, geography, law, and philosophy. Interdisciplinary approaches are welcomed. We are also interested in proposals for complete sessions.
Papers are invited on the following key themes:
We invite communications on the impact of workers’ participation on firms’ economic performance (productivity, profitability, investment, and employment), as well as other outcomes – such as wages, working conditions, human resource practices, corporate social responsibility practices, etc.
The range of organizations implementing financial and decision-making participation is broad and growing, from profit sharing to employee ownership, flat-organizations, employee involvement, employees on the board, works councils, trade-unions, etc. The drivers of the different types of participation can be very diverse. We are interested in research about the evolution and implications of participation in these organizations in industrialized, post-industrial, transition, and developing economies and the social and economic history of financial and decision-making participation in different countries, industries, regions, and periods.
The creation, growth and stability of participatory firms are influenced by the economic and social environment as well as the public policies and laws surrounding firms and participation. Can political decisions favor or limit the development of participatory economic organizations and how? What future choices could have an impact, positive or negative, on the expansion of this phenomenon? We welcome communications about the incidence of this broad environment on participation, including historical and international comparative approaches.
Participation in firms raises the question of the relationship between economic participation and political democracy. On one hand, can economic participation affect political involvement of workers-citizens? On the other hand, is economic participation more likely to thrive in a democratic and more egalitarian environment? We welcome communications on this topic, including comparative approaches.
Over the past few decades, the world has faced many socioeconomic and environmental challenges entailed by different drivers including industrialization, fast urbanization, and exponential population rise. These rapid changes have caused an increase in demand for finite world resources namely land, energy, and water. This, in turn, led to an urgent need to face negative environmental impacts in pursuing the main goal of Sustainable Development in many parts of the world. This special session aims to address actions toward achieving Sustainable Development through innovative and solution-oriented research articles, review articles, graphical reviews, and perspectives that elaborate on the linkages between sustainable development and the implications for human well-being. We are interested in research about the similarities and differences between traditional companies and democratic cooperatives, identifying how participatory organizations can address issues such as ecological collapse, wealth inequality and all the other topics related to Sustainable Development Goals. We also invite communications on the role of financial and decision-making participation in emerging industries such as biotech, alternative energy, and environmentally-friendly ‘green’ technologies.
Extended Abstracts (max. 1000 words) in English should be sent by e-mail to Marina Albanese at albanese@unina.it by March 31, 2024. Abstracts should include full details of institutional affiliations and e-mail addresses. Proposals for complete sessions should include a brief description of the theme of the session and an abstract for each paper.
Authors will be notified by May 15, 2024 whether their papers are accepted for presentation. Complete drafts should reach us by 15 June 2024 in order to be handed out to Conference participants.
Conference Dates
The conference will consist of two full day sessions on July 11 and 12. A welcoming reception will take place on July 10.
Registration and Accommodations
Detailed information on registration (including fees) and local accommodations will be available on the conference website by April 2024.
Participants from Developing and Transition Economies and Students
A small amount of funding is available for participants from developing and transition economies and students. In order to be considered for the funding, researchers should clarify it in the abstract submission.
Horvat-Vanek Prize
The Horvat-Vanek prize is awarded every two years for a research paper of exceptional quality written by a young scholar in one of the areas of interest to IAFEP. The prize, of a value of US$ 1,000, will be awarded during the conference. In order to be considered for the prize, researchers and doctoral students aged 35 or under should submit one research paper in English (maximum length 10,000 words) by 15 May to nathalie.magne@univ-montp3.fr. Please, include your institutional affiliation and an abstract, and indicate clearly on the paper that you wish it to be considered for the Horvat-Vanek prize (the recipient will be requested to provide a passport or other official evidence of their date of birth in order to receive the prize).
Submission Deadline: 31 March 2024.
Growing inequality, precarious working conditions, the climate crisis, the loss of democratic capacity and the increase in territorial violence are some of the major global challenges of our time. In many cases, women and gender minorities are at the heart of these issues, both as victims but also as promotors of alternatives to curb the risks involved. The social economy and state-owned enterprises share a social and public mission to transform the economy, its methods and its outcomes, so that it serves sustainability and improves the well-being and empowerment of people, communities and territories in the economy. What roles do women and gender minorities play in the orientation, governance and management of such organizations? We propose a special issue that focuses on social economy and state-owned enterprises, identifying the spaces, challenges and opportunities these organizations share from a gender perspective.
We believe that in order to provide evidence and knowledge based on both quantitative and qualitative techniques, analyses from different disciplines such as economics, sociology, law or history are necessary.
Guest Editors:
Call for papers available here.
Submission Deadline: 1 April 2024
22-23 February 2024 | Bialystok, Poland
The conference "Institutions and Survival: Challenges for Sustainability" which will take place at the University of Bialystok in Poland on February 22-23, 2024, organized by the Forum for Institutional Thought - We would like to remind you that the deadline for submitting abstracts is January 15, 2024.
The conference is free of charge and you can also participate in it online.
Our keynote speakers are:
Professor Annica Kronsell, Chair Environmental Social Science, School of Global Studies, University of Gothenburg;
Professor Ewa Bińczyk, Faculty of Philosophy and Social Sciences, Nicolaus Copernicus University in Toruń.
You can register via the website or e-mail. All topics related to institutions, sustainability and feminism are very welcome! We are waiting for you!
Submission Deadline: 15 January 2024
12-14 March 2024 | Rio de Janeiro, Brazil
Conference Theme: Rethinking the History of Global Capitalism
Organizers: Tamis Parron and Sven Beckert
Capitalism pervades every aspect of our lives, from the ways we produce to the structures of our families, from state power to our most mundane daily routines. Its expansion in space and in society has been of such impact that some scholars now speak of the current geological era as the “capitolocene.” It is impossible to understand the world we inhabit without also understanding capitalism. For at least two centuries, scholars have tackled this strange way of organizing economic life. Adam Smith and Karl Marx, Max Weber and Rosa Luxemburg, Friedrich von Hayek and Nancy Fraser have all grappled with vital questions concerning the conceptual definition and the historical trajectory of capitalism. Their writings invariably evoked a deep sense of urgency in moments of turmoil, addressing either the social question of the nineteenth century, the world wars of the twentieth century, or the world economic order in the wake of the Cold War. In the twenty-first century we are again watching profound global upheaval, this time marked by the end of exceptional economic growth in the West, precarious employment, growing income inequalities, deepening social fractures, and widespread institutional failures. Now, however, the space for maneuver has been dramatically reduced, as an unprecedented planetary ecological crisis looms large on the horizon and rising Asian economies point to the emergence of a new geopolitical world order never seen before in the history of capitalism. It seems we are on the brink of the famous Gramscian interregnum: the old frameworks are crumbling, but the new ones have yet to emerge. It is a challenging scenario that demands new forms of thought.
The conference we are organizing in Rio de Janeiro urges scholars to rethink capitalism’s history from the vantage point of this new historical moment and to consider what are the most promising theoretical formulations, methodological approaches, and historical framings to define capitalism, identify its drivers, shed light on its mechanisms, periodize its cycles, incorporate previously neglected spaces or processes, and offer a prognosis of its current reconfiguring. While traditional analyses of capitalism’s history were centered on Europe, the United States, or the North Atlantic, new strands of scholarship recognize that such a narrow lens fails to capture the complexity of the global economy and its history.
Scholarship on the history of capitalism has witnessed a “global turn” in the last decade, bringing again to the fore big picture analyses once adopted by “world-system perspective,” “dependence theory,” “theories of imperialism”, and “critical theory.” One key difference between this new wave of global studies and previous works, however, is that older narratives often take a top-down approach from global to local, while newer studies are looking upward from the local to the global. While this shift has added complexity to historical inquiry, it has also introduced challenges such as fragmentation and a-theoretical writing. In this conference, therefore, we particularly encourage historical studies that introduce fresh theoretical, conceptual, or methodological perspectives.
We also encourage projects that aim to “southernize” the global history of capitalism. The histories of the Global South, encompassing regions such as Asia, Africa, and Latin America, possess rich and diverse narratives about their place, role, and impact in the global history of capitalism. While some scholars consider these spaces to be a categorically different sort of capitalism, others view them as key constitutive elements of the uneven structure of global capitalism. We invite scholarly exploration into how these regions have influenced and reorganized global commodity circuits, world competitive pressures, integration of labor processes, circuits of world money, the composition of capital, and forms of imperialism over the centuries. We also seek to recover and reinterpret the often-overlooked intellectual and epistemological traditions of the Global South that have the potential to transform our understanding of global capitalism and its changing hierarchies.
At its core, the conference aims to rethink capitalism from a global perspective. With a focus on interdisciplinary and comparative approaches, we encourage participants to open new avenues of inquiry. We particularly encourage theoretical-historiographical syntheses. We also welcome case studies insofar as they combine their empirical investigations with fresh theoretical, conceptual, or methodological perspectives that help us rethink more broadly historical capitalism as a changing global process. We ask prospective participants to be explicit about their methodological, theoretical and empirical contributions to the project of rethinking the global history of capitalism.
The Conference is organized by the Center on Global Inequalities at the Universidade Federal Fluminense (UFF) and the Weatherhead Initiative on Global History at Harvard University. We will meet in Rio de Janeiro in person from March 13 to March 15, 2024. Each panel will be anchored by a distinguished keynote speaker, and we will use the conference proceedings as a first step towards producing a book on Rethinking the History of Global Capitalism. We will cover travelling expenses (economy class) and accommodation for four nights in Rio. We can only cover expenses for one person per submission.
Application Process
If you are interested in participating in the conference and presenting a paper, we ask you to submit a double-spaced three-page proposal and a copy of your CV combined as a single PDF document as soon as possible, but no later than January 1, 2024. Please send your proposal to Jessica Barnard at wigh@wcfia.harvard.edu.
We will let you know if your paper has been selected no later than January 15, 2024. We especially encourage participation from scholars in the Global South. For questions, please email Tamis Parron at tamisparron@id.uff.br or Sven Beckert at beckert@fas.harvard.edu.
Submission Deadline: 1 January 2024
Cuardernos de Economia is calling for papers for a Special issue on "New Turn to the Left".
Latin America is experiencing a resurgence of left-wing movements. With Lula Da Silva’s presidential victory in Brazil on October 2022, thirteen countries in the region have, for the first time, turned to the left of the political spectrum. This change marks a historical milestone also because, for the first time, the major economies of Latin America are headed by left-wing governments. Nonetheless, the question remains as to whether this new left-wing wave, with all its national specificities and accompanying restrictions and contradictions, will lead to a tectonic shift in the way of doing politics and economics, or whether it will merely reinforce the prevailing development model. The causes of the change in the political course of the region respond to a complex set of national and international factors. On the political side these include, among others, the discontent with the modus operandi of traditional politics that has led to their delegitimization, the loss of confidence in institutions, and the failure to tackle corruption. The lack of solid improvement in social conditions have also contributed, in no small manner, to the switch in government regimes. Latin American countries exhibit high and persistent levels of poverty (and in some countries extreme poverty); unacceptable levels in inequality in income, wealth, and in levels and access to education, which limits and frustrates expectations of social mobility and improved economic well-being. These social vulnerabilities worsened during the Pandemic. Macroeconomic factors such as the downward trend in the long-term economic growth rate, the stagnation of productivity, the lack of productive transformation, which is accompanied by thecreation of low-quality jobs are also part of the explanation. Certainly, this context formed the backdrop to the social outburst in 2019 that shook several of the countries which after this event, elected left-wing governments. The current leftist governments face common challenges and do not envisage revolutionary changes in the economic and social structure of society. Yet, they are far away from being a coherent whole. They have marked differences and exhibit national singularities in the formation of their governments, in the forms and ways in governing (which includes autocratic forms on the one hand and ways of governing based on firmer commitments to democratic processes on the other), and in their political and economic objectives. Moreover, there is no ideological convergence among the leaders of this new left.
The political bases of several of the new governments are not rooted in the traditional parties. Rather their political legitimacy is founded on fragile coalitions, which weakens their power and limits the scope of their political projects. A common denominator to almost all the new leftist governments is the contradictory combination between a high social sensitivity including an explicit recognition of indigenous and indigenous peoples; rights with fiscal conservatism (voluntary or inherited from the past) and generally embodied in fiscal rules. This can severely restrict the space for economic policy and the use of public spending to spearhead a change in economic and social development. Indicative questions and topics for the special issue on A New Turn to the Left in Latin America? include the following non-exhaustive list:
The contributions must be in line with the objective of disseminating at the national and international levels, theories, methodologies, and empirical applications in economics rooted in plural epistemological perspectives. Please refer to the editorial guidelines on the website of Cuadernos de Economía.
Articles submitted must be written in English, with a maximum length of 8,000 words, including notes and references. The accepted papers will be published as open access articles. There are no publication fees. For more details, please refer our website.
26—27 April | University of Warwick
We are delighted to share the call for abstracts for next year’s European PPE Network Conference. With this conference, we offer an opportunity for members of the “Philosophy, Politics, and Economics” community (broadly conceived) to come together in Europe and discuss recent papers and work in progress. We invite papers in the field of “PPE”, broadly construed, from historical, methodological, and normative perspectives. We also welcome submissions from public health and health economics.
This year’s conference and keynote theme is “African PPE”. The keynote speakers are Prof. Samantha Vice (Wits) and Prof. Leonce Ndikumana (UMass). In addition, we will reserve roughly one third of the presentation slots for papers on this conference theme. A portion of papers on the conference theme will be considered for a special issue of the Review of Social Economy devoted to ‘African Political Economy’.
Funding is available to support full travel and visa expenses for a limited number of scholars based in Africa.
Please note that you will need to register to attend this event. Registration opens in February 2024. Fees for academics are £100, and fees for graduate students are £50. Fee waiver bursaries are available for scholars travelling from Africa, junior academics, and graduate students. Please indicate on your application if you would like to be considered for funding.
To submit a proposal, please complete the submission form and provide a short (max 500 words) abstract. Note: talks should not exceed 25 minutes in length.
We are circulating this on the Network’s mailing list first, but would be grateful if you could also help us publicise it by circulating it among your colleagues and broader networks as well.
Submission Deadline: 5 January 2024
Alan Freeman and Guido De Marco will edit a special issue of RiPE (Research in Political Economy) devoted to Money, Value, and Marx’s Circuit of Capital. This will focus on the issues raised by recent critical attention given to Marx’s treatment of the circuit. These call into question a number of ‘standard’ assumptions originally introduced by von Bortkiewicz and other scholars as ‘simplifications’, notably the supposition that all capital turns over annually and completely, and that prices and values change only at the end of the circuit. Marx himself did not make these assumptions. When they are dropped, many standard results are called into question.
We call for contributions from Marx specialists who have been studying this question, focussed on the turnover of fixed capital and the effect of price and value changes while production is in process. De Marco will contribute a piece on the circuit of commodity capital and Freeman on the issue of value and price changes in continuous time. The articles will discuss the noncorrespondence of the standard assumptions with Marx’s.
We seek contributions both from Marxist scholars and from non-Marxists whose studies deal with related issues, notably theorists of stock-flow consistency, circuitists and post-Keynesians. They will comment on Marx’s theory of the circuit of capital in the light of their own scholarship, but will refrain from simply expounding this scholarship without reference to Marx.
We also ask for contributions discussing the consequences of the different conceptual frameworks in terms of analyzing contemporary capitalism and the changes that have occurred in the last century, as well as the policies suggested for a left-wing perspective.
This will, we hope, encourage wider dialogue on the specificity of Marx’s ideas on these questions.
The deadline to present the proposals is June 1, 2024 and the abstracts should be 1000 words or less, with keywords and author affiliations. The contributors will be informed within two weeks of submission if their proposal is accepted. The deadline for actual contributions is September 2024.
The limit for final papers is 8000 words but longer submissions will be considered.
The email for submission here.
Submission Deadline: 1 June 2024
Labour-related questions lie at the heart of current events and are working their way up social science research agendas. While some topics have always drawn attention (unemployment, underemployment, etc.), many issues have gained prominence since the health crisis: job quality, inadequate wages and questions about purchasing power, pay gaps between men and women and within firms, matters relating to platform work, working times, remote working, the individualization of work, the repercussions of the development of artificial intelligence, the revival and transformation of social or trade-union struggles, and so on.
This Call for Papers looks to publish contributions with an interest in labour and employment, more specifically to ascertain whether new industrial relations are emerging and how they can be understood in keeping with the editorial line of the Revue de la régulation. This issue will be a continuation of research previously published by the Revue de la régulation (Ballon et al., 2023; Girard et al., 2022; Erb and Reynaud, 2021; Berthonnet and Clos, 2019; Mazuyer 2013; Michel and Vallade, 2007). To be included in the issue, contributions may cover any geographical area, just as they may take the form of theoretical papers or of macro, meso or micro analyses.
The specificity of institutionalist approaches is to situate their theoretical process in the long term and in the analysis both of changes and of levels of conflict.
Accordingly, the regulationist analysis of the wage-labour nexus historicizes labour as a permanent component of capitalist production relations and shows that labour changes with the constraints of accumulation and levels of social conflict (Boyer 2002). The wage-labour nexus describes, for a given time, an alignment of labour organization, workers’ ways of life and the ways in which they are reproduced. As such, it corresponds to the labour side of relations of production. The other side, capital, is represented by accumulation regimes. Regulationist Theory has shown that a prevailing form of wage-labour nexus corresponds to each of those regimes. Being central to past accumulation regimes, the flexibility of wage and employment levels was also periodically their main limiting point (Boyer 1978).
The study of the determinants and effects of changes in the functional distribution of income is central to post-Keynesian analysis, too (Berr, Monvoisin and Ponsot (eds), 2018). Within that analysis, the substantial shifts observed in that distribution and the increasing inequality in wages are major determinants of the 2008 global financial crisis and the macroeconomic dynamics observed (Stockhammer, 2012). The diversity of growth regimes can also be explained by the differences in operation of employment markets or by the structural characteristics of the economies examined. Moreover, in this strand of thought, inflation is analysed as the consequence of the distributional conflict between capital and labour (Lavoie, 2022), in a tradition in which inflation is of the cost-push type (Bastian et al., 2021).
In conjunction with the accumulation of capital, the dominant forms of the wage-labour nexus follow on from one another historically by hybridization, within a situation of social conflict capable of tweaking the employment-framing institutions or, more radically, of founding new settlements. The changing pattern of labour, employment and the wage-labour nexus may be investigated in this thematic dossier particularly through two key lines of enquiry:
Documenting the long decline of the Fordist wage-labour nexus (Aglietta, 1998) is a first issue in this Call for Papers. That decline has helped to impart fresh impetus to the competitive determinants of wages and employment and has probably thrown up new components of the employment relation. And yet, it does not seem to have given rise to a coherent wage-labour nexus. Why is that?
The fluctuations of the industrial reserve army have made it possible to reboost the flexibility of wages and employment. To achieve this outcome, the centre of gravity of the employment relation and its norms has shifted away from national – or sectorial – collective actors and towards firms, or has even been caught up in a movement of individualization of the wage-labour relationship (Perez et al., 2015). The unpicking of the Fordist employment norm has provided scope for renewing a form of organization of labour under the constraint of the employment crisis, that is now partly consolidated in a re-write of employment law.
The current inflationary context is driving substantial wage claims. While the legitimacy of those claims is not generally contested, the threat of reactivating the price-wage spiral is usually raised as an objection whereas the price-profit spiral certainly does not come in for enough discussion. Are those wage claims liable to break the long period of wage austerity that began in the 1980s and that has distorted the sharing of value added to the advantage of income from capital?
National employment markets have undergone reforms designed to make them more flexible. The reforms promote individual initiatives in unequal employment relations. In France, the reforms make firms the focus for negotiations and rely on the prerogatives of works councils for firms with more than 11 employees, where workplace conditions presuppose a non-existent expertise and genuine difficulties in unionization. Yet unemployment and job insecurity, developing since the 1970s, had already seen the return of competitive mechanisms in setting wages and conditions.
Unemployment and job precarity have contributed to the rise of miscellaneous activities on the borderline of salaried employment or on the other side of that line. The social and solidarity economy supports some of those activities, sometimes involving the question of the control of the means of production by workers themselves through cooperatives (Lamarche & Richez-Battesti, 2023). Uberization or platformization of employment support others (Montalban 2023). Platformization concerns an offer of activities from e-tech firms. Supported by self-employment, it ties in (rather low) income from business activity with individuals being entirely free in the apportionment of their working hours. It relies on transferring the financing of capital and welfare risks to the worker.
The health crisis has accelerated emerging questions about the salaried work relationship or the meaning of work (Supiot 2019). These questions trigger rejections of the ways in which work is organized. For the time being, the responses have been above all of an individual nature. Although the manifestations of it are hazy and miscellaneous, such as the great resignation, quiet quitting, and so on, their statistical depth can be readily perceived. At the same time, there has been a revival of trade unionism in France, Europe and the United States. The results obtained in terms of demands may be significant or, on the contrary, non-existent and the diagnostic level matters.
2. More structural queries about work, about its new make-up, about features liable to bring about alternative industrial relations may have attracted less attention (Michel 2023). A space beyond wage-employment may be in the offing. On the confused and shifting boundaries, the question of a new “social relationship of activities” (Laurent & Mouriaux 2008) may be raised; clarifying this question underpins a second issue in this call for papers.
Since the 1970s, one of the Fordist drivers of profit-making has been de-activated: capitalist economies are confronted with a lasting slow-down in the growth of labour productivity. This phenomenon needs to be investigated via the rise in service jobs as a proportion of total employment or via the rise in social control through bullshit jobs (Graeber 2019). What has become of the possibility (or necessity) of a massive fall in work time, notably as imagined and called for by Keynes in 1930 in his “Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren”?
Against this background of continuing weak gains in labour productivity, innovations on the cutting-edge of technology are generating, on the contrary, substantial productivity gains, that go hand in hand with wage gains and therefore unequal earnings. Does the specificity of this exception lie in the fact that labour productivity continues to support innovation; or does it lie instead in the deterioration of the historical regime of growth of labour productivity that now seems to depend on skilled labour and its output? Does this phenomenon help to explain the financialization of economies and the extension of global production chains? What wholesale changes or developments might be generated by the development of Artificial Intelligence (it can be imagined that entire areas of skilled work might be undercut here)? What might be the impacts of the ecological transition or bifurcation which requires us to look again at modes of production?
So far, no coherent labour regime has arisen articulating the market development of the labour force via the development of workers themselves. And yet, effects of this transformation are very much present in the accumulation regime or in the ways of determining the terms of distribution conflicts. Is the emergence of an anthropogenetic model (Boyer 2022) at issue?
1 Around 30 per cent for welfare risks and about 8 per cent for education across the board.
Through education, health, care for the elderly, and so on, labour is the subject of a major production activity, for both the labour force and the population. Depending on the country concerned, this spending may be public, social or private. Whatever its nature, its share in national GDP comes close to 40 per cent in what are deemed developed countries.1 How and why do historically distinct means of financing come to give rise to a comparatively uniform outcome? Can they be inferred from structural transformations of the accumulation regime and how do they influence it?
Extension of the field of social protection sees one source of finance through welfare contributions cohabit with another source of finance through taxation. The taxing of social protection contributions is gaining ground throughout Europe. This movement goes along with exemptions for business financing of compulsory social protection for effects on the scale of employment about which there is no consensus. Finally, social policies invariably contribute to supporting household income, without managing to counter the rise in poverty; but they also contribute to the long-term downturn in wages. Fordist institutions continue to support the minimum wage as the norm, and to extend it internationally, while the taxing of the financing of social protection tends to erase it.
Sectorial control over public and social spending as sought by many governments is reflected by the declining quality of services. Private investment in these activities steamrolls workers and leads to the ill-treatment of the elderly, children, students and others for largely fictitious profitability levels tethered to public financing. These policies give rise to inequalities that amplify the deterioration of market remuneration of the workforce. The health crisis was a powerful indicator of the true social cost of the fight against these “costs” (Boyer 2020).
These sea changes come about in a context of necessary ecological transition and transformation of our modes of production and exchange (Peugny & Rieucau 2021). Since 2009, the concept of fair transition, combining its concrete or prospective proposals remains fuzzy and essentially defensive, questioning the reallocation of workers currently employed by activities related to brown capital. Worker involvement in managing the transition cheek-to-jowl with production has already been raised and implies the terms of a new compromise instituting new industrial relations.
In all of the avenues of enquiry listed, the conflicts and compromises they may generate raise the question of economic democracy (coordination, allocation of resources and capital) in novel terms.
Accordingly, this call for papers seeks to gather proposals for institutional analyses (especially influenced by Regulationist Theory or post-Keynesian analysis) that shed light on developments in the wage-labour nexus or on transformations of work. We invite, then, any submission on these matters in economics, law, sociology, history and in the social sciences more generally. We also ask for proposals that bear on case studies (micro, sectorial or meso analyses, conflict analyses, etc.), that question the impact of the transition or that investigate the dynamics of the individualization or autonomization of work, along with proposals relating to non-wage remunerations. In line with the state of knowledge on the wage-labour nexus, the call for papers does not favour any country or geographical area: the circulation of norms is real, conflict-ridden and adaptive for what is both a national and an internationalized institutional form. Submissions likely to renew knowledge of the wage-labour nexus and the hierarchy of institutional forms also fall within the scope of the call for papers. Lastly, we would welcome contributions examining the development of the conflict over distribution between capital and labour, or among workers themselves within the recent inflationary dynamic.
Papers may be written in French or English, in line with the “instructions for authors” of the Revue de la régulation. It should be sent to the following e mail address: regulation@openedition.org.
Calendar:
If they wish, contributors may advise the issue organizers they intend to submit a contribution or contact them with any questions:
Jonathan MARIE: jonathan.marie@univ-paris13.fr
Sandrine MICHEL: sandrine.michel@umontpellier.fr
Planned publication date: June/July 2025
Deadline for submission of papers: 15 March 2024
A conference at Leuphana University, Luneburg Germany Feb 27-28, 2024
“It seems like nobody wants to work these days,” we’re told daily by the news media. And really, why would we? In the midst of innumerable polycrises, why invest time in writing stupid little emails, submitting invoices, building careers with negligible chance of evading precarity? Today, even in the wealthiest societies in human history, children are dying at work in meat packing plants, retirement ages are being retrenched, and extreme weather events increasingly render deadly even the most basic jobs.
There has perhaps never been a better moment to say with our whole chests: fuck work.
The compulsion to earn a living by selling one’s labor time in exchange for a wage is one of the defining features of capitalism. While liberals excoriate bad jobs, and strive for a “fair” wage, radicals of various stripes have long argued there is no such thing as a good job or a fair wage in an economy premised on unfreedom and economic coercion, seeking not the improvement of work but its abolition. This conference presents an opportunity to examine the insights of theorists and practitioners of antiwork politics.
How might we understand the radical potential and limitations of work refusal? Did classic radical theorists seek the perfection of work or its overcoming? Is work refusal a pessimistic, individualistic stance or can it be part of a broader emancipatory project? How might we refuse the compulsion of wage labor without becoming parasitic on the efforts of others? What does degrowth have to say about the possibility less work in the future? What “non-reformist reforms” might support antiwork demands? What are the limitations and possibilities for antiwork politics in practice? What strategies have been effective for cohering political blocs around resistance to work? Is Marxism antiwork? And the ever-present query: “But who will take out the trash?!”
Topics of interest include: contradictions of the welfare state; unemployment; surplus populations; operaismo and Autonomia; the Great Resignation, Tang Ping or the Laying Flat Movement; post work imaginaries; Marxist v. Anarchist notions of work refusal; vagabondage; marronage; disability; retirement; laziness; work refusal in art, literature, cinema; antiwork politics and the relationship to the formal labor movement; wages against housework; abolition; climate crisis and work refusal; social reproduction and work refusal; periodization of antiwork politics; the problem of antiwork politics in the archive; amorous absenteeism (or why the temporality of horniness might be antiwork); and more!
We welcome proposals for individual talks or complete panels. We also encourage submissions that deviate from traditional conference presentations in form, medium, etc. Participants will be invited to contribute articles based on their talks to an edited collection.
Please submit a ~300 word abstract by December 6, along with a brief bio to workrefusalconference@gmail.com participants will be notified of selections by Dec 20
Funds for travel grants (transport + lodging) exist and will prioritize precarious scholars and activists.
Submission Deadline: 6 December 2023.
The Association for Evolutionary Economics (AFEE) South American Conference is a 2-day event hosted by the Federal University of Paraná (Curitiba, Brazil), taking place on May 22nd-24th 2024, with a combination of workshops (22nd May) and paper presentations (23rd-24th May).
The conference theme is “Understanding economic challenges from original institutionalist and post Keynesian perspectives”. We encourage submission of papers discussing: (1) the use of Original institutionalism and post Keynesianism as lenses to understand economic and social issues, notably within Latin America, 2) potential cross-fertilizations between original institutionalism and post Keynesianism from a historical and/or methodological view, and (3) diversifying original institutionalism and post Keynesianism from the perspective of identity, gender, and location.
The conference will be free of charge. Young scholars selected for the workshop may receive funding (full or partial) to support their travel costs to attend.
Academics who do not qualify as early-career researchers (5 years after their PhD completion) are also welcomed and encouraged to submit, but will not be eligible for funding.
Application Process
Submission of extended abstracts (maximum of 1,000 words) will be open until January 20th via the link.
Application Deadline: 20 January 2024
22-24 May 2024 | Federal University of Paraná (Curitiba, Brazil)
Conference Theme: Understanding economic challenges from original institutionalist and post Keynesian perspectives
A group of Latin American institutionalists are organizing an AFEE Conference in Brazil. The Association for Evolutionary Economics (AFEE) South American Conference is a 3-day conference hosted by the Federal University of Paraná (Curitiba, Brazil), taking place on the 22nd-24th May 2024. The conference will be organized by the Graduate Program in Economic Development (PPGDE) and Postgraduate Program in Public Policy (4P) of the Federal University of Paraná (UFPR), Brazil, in partnership with the Association for Evolutionary Economics (AFEE), the Brazilian Keynesian Association (AKB), and the EINST group, which organized the first institutionalist conference in Brazil. The Brazilian Minister of Education and the Young Scholars Initiative will partlially sponsor the conference.
The conference theme is “Understanding economic challenges from original institutionalist and post Keynesian perspectives”. We encourage submission of papers discussing: (1) the use of Original institutionalism and post Keynesianism as lenses to understand South American economic and social issues, (2) possible cross-fertilizations between original institutionalism and post Keynesianism from a historical and/or methodological view, and (3) diversifying original institutionalism and post Keynesianism from the perspective of identity, gender, and location.
The conference will be free of charge. Selected young scholars will be totally or partly founded (travel stipends and housing accommodation) to attending the conference. Academics who do not qualify as early-career scholars (normally, 5 years after their PhD completion) are also welcomed and encouraged to apply, but without support from the conference.
Application Process
Submission of extended abstract (maximum of 1,000 words) will be open in late November 2023 by early January 2024. Submission should be made via the online form.
Submission Deadline: 31 January 2024
Call for proposals for an online workshop in February 2024 (as a preparation for submitting a proposal for a Cambridge Companion to Women’s Economic Thought).
Organized by Miriam Bankovsky, Rebeca Gomez Betancourt, and Marianne Johnson
The teaching of economics and its history in schools and universities has not often included the economic thought of women and LGBTQA+ people, a phenomenon that also extends to the voices courted by media and by governments. The reasons why are both complex and simple – simple because quantifiably, there are few women and openly LGBTQA+ economists. The story becomes complex when we try to explain why this has been the case at different points in time and across different locations.
Historically, myriad structural and socio-cultural factors have interacted to impact the ability of women to study, practice, and publish economics. Some of these factors have worked to surface the contributions of women to economic thought; for example, the rise of home economics as the empirical study of consumption or the role of women in governmental agencies during the Second World War. More commonly, however, the contributions of women – from Jane Marcet to Elinor Ostrom – have been obscured, marginalized as ‘not economics.’
Unsurprisingly, inclusion and recognition deficits for women in economics are heightened when their subject position intersects with other forms of social marginality or disadvantage, including race, sexuality, and gender. Economists who are lesbian, gay, transgender, non-binary, Black, or Indigenous have often brought lived experiences of marginality to their economics, generating new ideas, methods, and theories. Even when their work appears to carry no immediate or direct relation to lived experiences of marginality, there remain visibility deficits. There exists no clear disciplinary sense of how women, including socially marginalized women, have contributed to disciplinary thinking or what these contributions consist of.
This online workshop will facilitate general discussion on these and related topics, resulting in a volume that will build on the recent body of work that has featured selections of women’s economic thinking in history. These include Kirsten Madden’s and Robert Dimand’s edited handbook of women’s economic thought (2019), the first biographical dictionary of women economists by Robert Dimand, Mary Ann Dimand and Evelyn Forget (2000) and their book on women economists (1995). More recently, the History of Political Economy (2022) and Œconomia (2022) have collected discrete studies of individual economic thinkers in special issues. Ann Mari May (2022) and Edith Kupier’s (2022) volumes illustrate the many challenges women faced securing advanced training in economics and employment in academe. Also important to note is Giandomenica Becchio’s History of Feminist and Gender Economics (2020), which explores the engagement of feminism with economic thought.
To these collections, we would like to add a volume on the theme of women and the economics of social cooperation and organization. We encourage authors to think beyond single biographies and to present work in ways that uncover broader systemic themes and groupings and to imagine ways in which their contribution can support the inclusion of more women into contemporary economic teaching at the undergraduate and graduate level.
A subsidiary theme is how, why, and to what impact women have worked around the edges of what might be considered mainstream economics in their effort to address social cooperation and organization. This could include activists, home economists, sociologists, political scientists and individuals in fields that tend to have a high interdisciplinary quotient such as development economics.
Possible topics might include the following.
Socialist cooperative revolutions to domestic labor: chapters might consider how domestic labor is treated and valued in economic thought or the alternatives that have been proposed to traditional divisions of labor in the production of household output. Another approach would be to examine the history and impact of the time-use surveys of farm, town, and college women produced by the U.S. Department of Agriculture and the Bureau of Home Economics in the 1930s.
Women’s labor market economics: topics might include a women’s minimum wage, payments for household labor, and/or women in the labor market. Women who worked on early labor topics are also of interest, including, Theresa Schmid McMahon, who was both a labor activist and professional economist, or Frances Perkins, the first woman cabinet member in the United States; she served as the Secretary of Labor during the New Deal.
Consumer and agricultural economics: we are also interested in chapters on how family units and households are conceptualized for statistical use. Chapters could deal with agricultural and consumer economists, and their use of demand studies to understand the determinants of prices and incomes as well as consumption choices. Topics might include household production theory, hedonic price theory, definitions of poverty thresholds, or works explaining consumer behavior and consumer welfare.
Welfare state and women and the family: for individuals such as Alva Myrdal or Barbara Wooten, the welfare state was envisioned to free women from the constraints of home production and allow them to enter the labor force on equal terms with men. State subsidized childcare, extended school days, school lunches, and even communal kitchens, particularly when combined with labor-savings devices, all proposed to reduce the in-home labor time of women with significant implications for labor markets, national income, and quality of life. We are interested in chapters that would examine individual contributions, broad analyses of the welfare state, and/or discussion of specific policies.
Feminist economics: the field of feminist economics is relatively recent, compared to other sub-disciplines of economics (Orozco Espinel & Gomez Betancourt 2023). However, the presence of women economists in this field goes back decades before the 1990s. We welcome contributions focusing on diversity, equality, sorority, gender-aware, and inclusive economic analysis. We are particularly interested in the role played by activists, policy theorists, and practitioners on topics neglected in economics, such as care work, intimate partner violence, or economic theories. The idea is to give a better picture of economic reality by incorporating gendered effects and interactions, such as those existing between paid and unpaid sectors of economies.
LGBTQ economics: postmodern, post-structuralism, literary theory, critical cultural studies as treated by Deirdre McCloskey or Lee Badgett are of interest. Another approach would be to consider the impact of definitions of the ‘household’ in empirical ventures such as the Survey of Consumer Purchases or for governmental use in tax assessment or welfare payments. Similarly, we are interested in conceptions of ‘the family’ in economic models in labor economics, macroeconomics, and other fields.
Women’s contributions to sub-fields of economics: a common perception, supported by some evidence, suggests the segregation of women into particular subfields of economics, including education, labor economics, and economic development (Benito, Bosca, Ferri, and Garcia 2021). Chapters that consider the evidence and reasons for this segregation, as well as empirical assessments of the existence of segregation represent some potential topics. We are also interested in chapters that surface the contributions of women in areas less considered such as econometrics, money, and macroeconomics. Network analyses would be welcome.
Global South women – The history of economics has been taught mainly via the reference point of a white male from the Global North. In this seminar and book, we seek to pay attention to the voices from the Global South, often absent in the historiography of economics, and to fill in the absence and/or devaluation of women and men of color in the history of economics discipline. The characters of this book would be diverse and multifaceted, studying the role of women and men of color in other parts of the world. Country case studies are welcomed. We also look forward to works that argue that economics in the Global South largely depends on improved reproductive rights, gender equitable laws on ownership and inheritance, and education policies.
Colonialism, economic development, and the commons: the experience of women in economics has not been homogeneous across the globe, as levels or degrees of marginalization and discrimination exist. Chapters examining colonial, neocolonial, and post-colonial contributions of Global North women such as Joan Robinson, Ursula Hicks, and Mary Jean Bowman would be welcome, as would be comparisons of women working in economic development in the North compared to the South. Also of interest are critical examinations of Elinor Ostrom’s empirical field work on the commons and social decision-making.
Important dates and process:
We seek proposals for presentations in a virtual workshop to take place in February 2024. From these presentations, we anticipate inviting individuals to contribute chapters for a book to be published in the Cambridge Companion Series. Details about the series can be found at this website.
Submission Deadline: 1 December 2023
29 July - 3 August 2024 | Berlin (Germany)
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 like Robert Blecker (USA), Yannis Dafermos (UK), Sebastian Gechert (Germany), Eckhard Hein (Germany), Heike Joebges (Germany), Marc Lavoie (France/Canada), Maria Nikolaidi (UK), Miriam Rehm (Austria) and Mark Setterfield (USA), covering the following areas:
The summer school language is English. Participants will be provided with an accommodation and meals during the summer school. There is no participation fee for the Summer School. Travel costs cannot be covered but a selected number of students may receive a partial travel stipend from INET's Young Scholar Initiative (YSI) based on their application and travel requirements. Please note that we share your application information with YSI for the purpose of selection of travel grants.
Application: Please apply through the web-form available on the summer school website. The application form will ask for a short CV (as a list) and a short letter of motivation (max. 400 words) to participate, 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.
In case of any questions, please contact : fmm@boeckler.de
Application Deadline: 29 February 2024
19 January 2024, Paris, France
We are happy to announce a conference taking place on 19 January 2024 at the Maison de la Recherche, Sorbonne Nouvelle University, 4 Rue des Irlandais, Paris.
Anyone wishing to attend in person, please submit your details to the link.
Central Banks and the Common Good
Two decades of successive crises have tested the resilience of economic and financial systems, and eroded the trust that societies place in their monetary institutions. The financial crisis of 2007-2008 ushered in an era of turbulence, the latest manifestation being the cost of living crisis in 2022. The return of inflation and the prospect of economic recession lie behind a critical reappraisal of the role and actions of central banks. This transdisciplinary international conference aims to evaluate and revisit the strategies of US, British and European central banks over several decades in tackling economic, political and social crises.
Les crises qui se succèdent depuis deux décennies ont éprouvé la résilience des systèmes économiques et financiers et érodé la confiance que placent les sociétés dans leurs institutions monétaires. La crise financière de 2007-2008 a inauguré une ère de turbulences dont la baisse brutale du pouvoir d’achat en 2022 est la dernière manifestation. Le retour de l’inflation et le spectre de la récession économique incitent aujourd’hui à un examen critique du rôle et de l’action des banques centrales. Ce colloque transdisciplinaire propose d’évaluer et de confronter les stratégies qu’adoptent, en particulier, les banques centrales américaine, britannique et européenne depuis plusieurs décennies face aux crises économiques, politiques et sociales.
Programme
From 8:45 Welcome coffee
9:15-9:30 Opening remarks
9:30-10:15 Keynote speech
Yves-Marie Péréon (Université Paris Panthéon-Assas, CERSA)
The Chairman and the President
10:15-10:30 Coffee break
Session 1 Communication & Social Policy (Chair: Laurence Harris)
10:30-11:00 Sylvérie Herbert (Banque de France)
Vers plus de clarté dans la communication des banques centrales
11:00-11:30 Stefan Kesting (University of Leeds Business School) & Hendrick Theine (Vienna University for Economics and Business)
Central Bank communication for the common good? How can Habermas’s theory of deliberative democracy underpin central bankers’ communication as a monetary policy tool, a source of data on the state of the economy and as an instrument to foster a sense of legitimacy?
11:30-12:00 Serena Merrino (University College London) & Keagile Lesame (National Treasury, South Africa)
The effects of macroprudential policy on credit allocation in South Africa
12:00-12:30 Frédéric Lebaron (ENS Saclay, IDHES) & Aykiz Dogan (Université de Paris 1 Panthéon Sorbonne, IEDES)
La féminisation des positions dirigeantes au sein des banques centrales : quelques données et hypothèses
12:30-14:00 Buffet lunch
14:00-14:45 Keynote speech
Shiv Chowla (Bank of England)
Central Bank Digital Currency (CBDC) – Public money for the public good?
14:45-15:00 Coffee break
Session 2 Central Banks & Climate Change (Chair: Jézabel Couppey-Soubeyran)
15:00-15:30 Jérôme Deyris (Université Paris Nanterre, EconomiX, CNRS)
Warning Words in a Warming World: Central Bank Communication and Climate Change
15:30-16:00 Paola D'Orazio (Universität Chemnitz)
Navigating the Green Dilemma: Central Banks’ Quest for Climate Resilience and Market Neutrality
16:00-16:30 Ismail Ertürk (University of Manchester)
Green Swan Central Banking and Central Bank Mandate for Climate Risk
16:30-16:45 Coffee break
16:45-17:45 Roundtable
Banques centrales : techniciennes ou acteurs (géo)politiques ?
Jézabel Couppey-Soubeyran (Université Paris 1 Panthéon Sorbonne, CES)
Clément Fontan (Université Catholique de Louvain)
Laurence Harris (Université Sorbonne Nouvelle, CREW)
Jean-François Ponsot (Université Grenoble-Alpes, PACTE)
Laurence Scialom (Université Paris Nanterre, EconomiX)
17:45-18:00 Closing remarks
Organisers: Jézabel Couppey-Soubeyran (Université Paris 1 Panthéon Sorbonne, CES), Laurence Harris (Université Sorbonne Nouvelle, CREW)
Partners: Centre d'Economie de la Sorbonne (CES), Centre for Research on the English-Speaking World (CREW), Sorbonne Alliance (Université Paris 1 Panthéon Sorbonne, Université Sorbonne Nouvelle, ESCP Business School)
We look forward to seeing as many of you as possible on 19 January.
Participation at the conference is free, but places are limited. Registration required by filling this form.
13 - 15 December 2023 | Universidade de Brasília, Auditório IREL/IPOL
Conference Theme: Plantationocene: Racial Capitalism, Land and Labour
Despite the centrality of the topic of labour in Cedric Robinson's Black Marxism (1982), studies and research in the area of labour and agrarian studies have paid little attention to the conception of racial capitalism. Robinson's central thesis is that the first proletariat was formed on the plantations of the colonized countries in the 16th century, questioning the centrality of the proletariat in the factories of England to the emergence of the labor movement. For Robinson, the uprisings of enslaved workers and the organization of maroon communities in almost every country in the Americas are the first forms of global working class organization. Robinson's thesis connects with Immanuel Wallerstein's claim of the existence of a diversity of forms of labour as the basis of capitalism. Thus, Robinson questions the centrality of wage labor to global capitalism. This conference aims to ask about labor and land from a racial-ethnic perspective, thus how the notion of racial capitalism elucidates the debate in labour studies and agrarian studies, involving studies on maroon movements and racism in the countryside, making the Plantationocene explicit.
The Plantationocene, in Haraway's terms (2015), appropriates the notion of (colonial and imperialist) 'plantation' practices of appropriation and exploitation of land, agriculture, pastures, and forests, as extractive plantations (monocultures), relying on slave labor and other forms of exploited, alienated, and largely migrant labor. This colonial heritage is perpetuated in contemporary times, and the Plantationocene is also present in the global production of industrialized meat, in the huge monocultures and replacement of multi-species forests by monoculture tree plantations, such as the African palm tree, expanding the exploitation of (racialized) labour and compromising the sustenance of human and non-human creatures. The notion of the Plantationocene is, therefore, about the logic of large-scale production based on the overexploitation of labor, the basis of the productive organization of the plantation, which offered the model for the industrial organization of factories. Moreover, the Plantationocene reminds us that profound changes in the planet's ecology began and continue based on industrial agriculture that contributes massively to carbon emissions, among other harmful aspects to the environment.
For further information please visit the website.
7-8 March, 2024 | Madrid, Spain
This event is scheduled to take place on March 7th and 8th 2024 at Universidad Complutense de Madrid and aims to facilitate inclusive discussions among a diverse group of participants, including doctoral students from Spain and the broader region. Furthermore, each day will start with a special session with keynote speakers, followed by the student sessions where the participant will have the chance to present their research and receive contributions.
The selected participants will receive accommodation and a partial travel stipend. Applications including short motivation letters and abstracts (max 200 words) are expected by January 31st, 2024. We invite to young scholars to send proposal on the following topics:
Application form: https://forms.gle/cSxLvjuhURKGTZbR9
The recent episode of Smith and Marx Walk into a Bar: A History of Economics Podcast is out now. This week, the hosts Jennifer Jhun, François Allisson, and Çınla Akdere are joined by Glory M. Liu (Johns Hopkins University) to discuss her new book, Adam Smith's America: How a Scottish Philosopher Became an Icon of American Capitalism.
Please find a link here.
Job title: PhD position in International Value Chain Economics
The Economics of Technology and Innovation (ETI) section of Delft University of Technology (TU Delft) offers a 4-year PhD position to support its research on international value chains at.
International value chains are a defining feature of the globalization wave of the 1990s and 2000s and are currently in the process of being reorganized. This reinforces the general interest in technology, economic policies, and geopolitical events as drivers of international production networks but also opens up new questions, such as the vulnerability of value chains and possible remedies.
Applicants are expected to perform research in the field of global value chain economics and complete a PhD dissertation within four years. They conduct quantitative research that is both original and related to 'real world' problems, thereby contributing to the broad research agenda of the ETI section.
Location: Delft, Netherlands, Starting date: between 01-04-2024 and 01-09-2024.
Job requirements
The full details of the job posting are found here.
Application Deadline: 5 January 2024
Job Title: 1 Year Post-Doc Research Associate
The Europa University Flensburg has an interesting job offer: the Interdisciplinary Centre for European Studies at Europa-Universität Flensburg seeks to fill a one-year Post-Doc position where the main task is to develop a grant proposal. Please note that the Centre stands for a very broad definition of European Studies.
The idea of the position is that the applicant submits this proposal to finance her or his position beyond the one-year contract period. Thus, the position comes with a lot of freedom to develop one’s own research project. Moreover, the academic environment at the EUF in general, but at the ICES in particular is very amicable and stimulating. There are a lot of very interesting scholars working on timely topics such as the political economy of socio-ecological transitions, global inequality or energy transformations. For question please contact Claudius Graebner-Radkowitsch.
You can find more information about the posing here.
Application Deadline: 15 December 2023
Job Title: Professor in International and Development Economics (1 year)
The HTW Berlin is seeking a temporary replacement for the role of a professor in the field of General Economics, particularly International and Development Economics, in the Department of Business and Legal Studies. This position is for the period from April 1, 2024, to March 31, 2029.
The candidate should hold a university degree in Economics and represent the field of General Economics with a focus on "International and Development Economics" in teaching. We are looking for a candidate with a PhD, relevant teaching experience, and international experience in research, publication, and practice (including securing third-party funding), both in relation to industrialized countries and developing and emerging countries. Participation in academic self-administration is expected.
The teaching responsibilities will be in the programs of Department 3 – Business and Legal Studies, primarily in the Master's program "International and Development Economics" and in the Bachelor's and Master's program "International Business" in English, and in the Bachelor's program "Business Administration" in German. The ability to teach in both German and English and experience in supervising student research projects and academic theses, including at the Master's level, is a prerequisite.
Research and teaching experience in the following areas are desired (in order of priority), although applicants do not necessarily need to have experience in all the listed areas:
Applicants must meet the hiring requirements according to § 100 of the Berlin Higher Education Act. The employment is on a part-time basis of 18 semester hours per week with a monthly salary corresponding to the W2 salary group.
HTW Berlin promotes equality and a discrimination-free environment. It offers good conditions for balancing family and career and cooperates with the Dual Career Network Berlin. Therefore, women are expressly encouraged to apply. Applicants with disabilities will be given preferential consideration if they have the same qualifications.
For more information, please visit our website.
Please send your meaningful application (by email as ONE PDF document) by December 4, 2023, to the Dean of the Department of Business and Legal Studies at HTW Berlin, Prof. Dr. Peter Zaumseil. The email address is: dekan-fb3@htw-berlin.de Contact person: Prof. Dr. Peter Zaumseil, Email: dekan-fb3@htw-berlin.de
New research center for socio-ecological transformation is soliciting statement of interests
Due to successful project acquisitions – most notable the START Prize of the Austrian Science Fund for the project SETER – the Institute for Comprehensive Analysis of the Economy at the Johannes Kepler University of Linz will expand its research group in the field of the political economy of socio-ecological transformation in the course of 2024.
Context
In the face of escalating multiple crisis phenomena, i.e. the interplay of social, economic, political and ecological crises, it is no longer a question of whether socio-ecological transformation will take place, but how. Overshooting planetary boundaries, such as climate change, biodiversity loss, or ocean acidification, requires far-reaching changes in production, consumption, and lifestyles. At the same time, however, enormous socioeconomic inequalities and shortfalls in health, education, political participation, and gender equality persist, both nationally and internationally. Thus, on the one hand, the SETER project deals with the preconditions and different scenarios of sustainable socio-economic transformation.
On the other hand, the project focuses on the role of the currently prevailing economic thinking in this process. More specifically, we will examine in detail how mainstream economic thinking, which largely analyzes economic action in isolation from social and environmental implications, is an additional and central obstacle to the necessary profound transformation. The impact of economic thinking will be located and analyzed in the field of knowledge production and transfer, but also in the field of political reform debates and public discourses. In recent years, it has become clear that (i) a narrow understanding of economic rationality, (ii) the unquestionability of economic growth, (iii) the sole focus on competitively organized markets as the superior form of economic interaction, and (iv) the associated primary focus on individual incentive structures significantly limit the possibilities and scenarios of sustainable socio-economic transformation.
Statements of interest
Against this background, we aim to expand our interdisciplinary research group at the Institute for Comprehensive Analysis of the Economy and search for colleagues with an (interdisciplinary) background in heterodox economic traditions (particularly ecological economics), social studies of economics and political economy. Methodologically, we seek expertise in both, qualitative and quantitative methods as well as expertise in economic modeling related to issues of socio-ecological transformation (e.g. IO-Analysis, ecologically informed SCF-models, material flow analysis…). Furthermore, we aim to establish and further deepen transdisciplinary collaborations with organizations working in the field of just transition and de-growth. Therefore, interest or experience in science communication and with collaborations with political and societal actors is also important to us.
If you think your profile and skills fit this agenda and if you would like to come to Linz to join the Institute for Comprehensive Analysis of the Economy, please do let us know and send us a copy of your CV and a (short) statement of interest commenting on your main motivation(s) to come to Linz (to either stephan.puehringer@jku.at and/or jakob.kapeller@jku.at).
Job Title: Tenure-Track Assistant Professor in Corporate Finance
The Department of Economics and Finance at Saint Peter’s University invites applications for a tenure-track appointment at the Assistant Professor level beginning in the Fall of 2024. Candidates should preferably have already earned (or are near the completion of) a Ph.D. in economics.
Candidates should be committed to excellence in both teaching and scholarly research. The successful candidate will teach courses at both the undergraduate and graduate levels in corporate finance, econometrics and quantitative methods, and specialized economics and finance areas, such as behavioral economics and/or ecological economics. Candidates should also be willing to teach introductory principles-level courses. Strict preference will be given to the candidate with an ability to demonstrate a teaching and research agenda involving the financialization of the business enterprise.
Saint Peter’s University is a liberal arts university with a demonstrated commitment to diversity. EOE.
Candidates should electronically submit a cover letter, CV, graduate transcript, research sample, three letters of recommendation, teaching evaluations, statement of teaching philosophy, and statement on academic pluralism to Devin T. Rafferty, Chair of the Department of Economics and Finance, Saint Peter’s University, 2641 John F. Kennedy Blvd., Jersey City, New Jersey, USA, 07306 at the following website.
The cover letter should speak to how you would build an active classroom setting when dealing with complex conceptual economic and financial issues in a diverse educational environment, and the academic pluralism statement should demonstrate expertise in multiple approaches to the discipline. Applications will be accepted until the position is filled.
Job Title: Tenure-Track Assistant Professor in Microeconomics
The Department of Economics and Finance at Saint Peter’s University invites applications for a tenure-track appointment at the Assistant Professor level beginning in the Fall of 2024. Candidates should preferably have already earned (or are near the completion of) a Ph.D. in economics.
Candidates should be committed to excellence in both teaching and scholarly research. The successful candidate will teach courses at both the undergraduate and graduate levels in microeconomics and specialized topics within finance, although they should also be willing to teach econometrics and quantitative methods as well as introductory macroeconomics courses. The ability to oversee and administer the Department’s Student Managed Investment Fund will be a significant asset.
Saint Peter’s University is a liberal arts university with a demonstrated commitment to diversity. EOE.
Candidates should electronically submit a cover letter, CV, graduate transcript, research sample, three letters of recommendation, teaching evaluations, statement of teaching philosophy, and statement on academic pluralism to Devin T. Rafferty, Chair of the Department of Economics and Finance, Saint Peter’s University, 2641 John F. Kennedy Blvd., Jersey City, New Jersey, USA, 07306 at the following website.
The cover letter should speak to how you would build an active classroom setting when dealing with complex conceptual economic and financial issues in a diverse educational environment, and the academic pluralism statement should demonstrate expertise in multiple approaches to the discipline. Applications will be accepted until the position is filled.
Job Title: Lecturer (Teaching) in Business Economics
The University of Bath School of Management is seeking to appoint an Assistant Professor (Lecturer - Teaching) in Business Economics, to join the Business Economics Group of the Marketing, Business & Society Division.
The School of Management is a vibrant and productive community. In the 2021 Research Excellence Framework (REF), Times Higher ranked the School 7th in the UK for Business and Management Studies and 4th in the UK for its research environment. 93% of research is classed as world leading and internationally excellent. It was ranked 1st for Marketing (the Complete University Guide 2021) and 3rd for Business & Management Studies (the Complete University Guide 2021).
The Business Economics group plays an active role in many areas of the School and achieves teaching excellence on our highly rated undergraduate and master’s degrees. We offer a strongly supportive environment for all our students, from undergraduate to PhD, and deliver a first-class student experience. The successful candidate will have proven ability for teaching, ideally including previous experience of teaching economics to business/management focussed students.
Further information
The School is currently undergoing a period of faculty expansion and facility improvement, which includes the development of a state-of-the-art new building. Informal enquiries may be made to Dr Sarah Glozer, Head of the Marketing, Business & Society Division (S.Glozer@bath.ac.uk) and Dr Rob Branston, Subject Group Lead for Business Economics (J.R.Branston@bath.ac.uk).
For further information and application please visit the website.
Application Deadline: 11 December 2023
Job title: Post-doc on social science approaches to rapid decarbonisation
About the role
This is an opportunity for two Postdoctoral Research Fellows to join a multi-disciplinary team of scholars focused on understanding and overcoming community roadblocks to achieving net-zero. In the last 15 years, humans emitted a quarter of the greenhouse gases ever emitted by our species. Reversing this trajectory will require extraordinary levels of community support in the face of painful transformations of our society. This project will understand the psychological factors underpinning climate (in)action, test strategies capable of catalysing action, and deliver a suite of impact tools for government, industry, and green innovators. The significant benefits that will emerge will assist in future-proofing the economy, increasing government flexibility to drive change, and reducing social conflict. The project will inform Australia’s transition from a fossil fuel dependent economy to a leader in rapid decarbonisation.
Application Instructions
Visit the Instats jobs page to apply.
Application Deadline: 20 December 2023
The statements of the 2023 EAEPE prizes winners have now become available on the EAEPE website.
Robinson prize:
The 2023 EAEPE Robinson Prize went ex aequo to (1) Edith Kuiper for her book titled A Herstory of Economics published by Polity, (2) Thomas Marois for his book titled Public Banks: Decarbonisation, Definancialisation and Democratisation published by Cambridge University Press and (3) Cecilia Rikap for her book titled Capitalism, Power and Innovation: Intellectual Monopoly Capitalism Uncovered published by Routledge. Read the statements here: https://eaepe.org/?page=awards&side=eaepe__joan_robinson_prize&sub=2023
Kapp prize:
The 2023 EAEPE Kapp Prize went ex aequo to (1) Karsten Kohler for his paper titled “Capital flows and geographically uneven economic dynamics: A monetary perspective” published in Environment and Planning A: Economy and Space and (2) Roberta Terranova and Enrico M. Turco for their paper titled “Concentration, stagnation and inequality: An agent-based approach” published in the Journal of Economic Behavior and Organization. Read the statements here: https://eaepe.org/?page=awards&side=eaepe__william_kapp_prize&sub=2023
Simon prize:
The 2023 EAEPE Simon Prize went ex aequo to (1) Mads R. Hansen and Natalia I. Molina for their paper titled “Democratizing Finance: The ‘Citizen Fund’ as an Institutional Proposal to Structurally Consider Non-Pecuniary Returns in Investment Decisions” and (2) Nitin Nair for his paper titled ““When Minsky and Godley Met Structuralism: A Stock-flow Consistent Approach to the Currency Hierarchy”. Read the statements here: https://eaepe.org/?page=awards&side=eaepe__herbert_simon_prize&sub=2023
The ESHET Council is inviting nominations for the Awards that will be announced at the next annual Conference in Graz, Austria, 9-11 May 2024.
Nominations should be sent as soon as possible, but not later than 30 December 2023 to the Chair of the relevant panel:
Please note also the following points:
Self-nominations are not accepted for any of the prizes.
(1) Nominations for the book and article prizes should include:
(2) Nominations for the Young Researcher Award should include:
Subsequently each nominee will be asked to submit to the Council three publications on which s/he wishes to be judged. The final decision on each of the prizes will be made by the Council of ESHET in Liège.
Rules for Awards
Nomination Deadline: 30 December 2023
The New Leviathan: Usurping Democracy and the Rule of Law
Issue Edited by: Elizabeth Woodworth, Matthew Witt, Clifford W. Cobb
Introduction
Elizabeth Woodworth, Matthew Witt, Clifford W. Cobb: The new leviathan: Usurping democracy and the rule of law
Original Articles
David Bell: Pandemic preparedness and the road to international fascism
Harvey A. Risch :Plausibility, not science, has dominated public discussions of the COVID pandemic
Kees van der Pijl: From indirect to direct rule? Transnational policy planning bodies and global governance in the COVID crisis
Ray McGinnis: 9/11, the power elite, and the U.S. think tanks that plan the future
David Ray Griffin, Clifford W. Cobb: NATO/US false‐flag attacks in Europe
Alfred de Zayas: Who will guard over the guardians?
Piers Robinson: The corrupt politics of chemical weapons
Elizabeth Woodworth: How the World Economic Forum damages the credibility of climate science
Clifford W. Cobb: The great reset: Could Henry George be the antidote to the world economic forum?
Maria Bastida, Ana Olveira, Miguel Ángel Vázquez Taín: Are cooperatives gender sensitive? A confirmatory and predictive analysis of women's collective entrepreneurship
Anjel Errasti, Ignacio Bretos, Carmen Marcuello: Classifying the degree of cooperative multinationality: Case study of a French multinational cooperative
Michael Adusei, Kwasi Poku, Samuel Akomea: Manager bonding and the technical efficiency of cooperative credit unions-parametric and non-parametric analyses
Wannes Slosse, Jeroen Buysse, Koen Schoors, Ivan Godfroid, Michaela Boyen, Marijke D'Haese: The socio-economic impact of certification schemes in conflict-affected regions: The case of arabica coffee in the Eastern DRC
Anthony Piscitelli: Classifying responsible investors: Identifying clusters of Ontario investors
Imad Jabbouri, Rachid Jabbouri, Karim Bahoum, Yasmine El Hajjaji: E-commerce adoption among Moroccan agricultural cooperatives: Between structural challenges and immense business performance potential
Nazik Beishenaly, Frédéric Dufays: Entrepreneurial ecosystem for cooperatives: The case of Kyrgyz agricultural cooperatives
Cemil Ozan Soydemir, Mehmet Erçek: The resurrection of earlier imprints post mortem: Explaining the Turkish agricultural cooperative movement with an imprinting theory lens, 1888–1937
Nicola Matteucci, Raffaella Santolini, Silvio Di Fabio: ICT diffusion in public administrations and business dynamics: Evidence from Italian municipalities
Ryota Nakatani: Productivity drivers of infrastructure companies: Network industries utilizing economies of scale in the digital era
Fan Zhang, Fei Wang, Qiao Wang: Does the mixed-ownership reform improve the productivity of state-owned enterprises? Evidence from companies listed in Chinese stock
Ruoyan Zhang, Ru Chen: The regulatory effect of cooperation degree in increasing tobacco farmers’ income by mitigating production risk shocks
Jorge Felix: Tribute to Ignacy Sachs (1927-2023)
Luiz Carlos Bresser-Pereira: New steps in the construction of New Developmentalism
Hugo C. Iasco-Pereira, Fabrício J. Missio: The real exchange rate matters, but why? A new developmentalist assessment
Isaias Albertin de Moraes: The concept of Developmental State revisited
Carmen Feijó, Fernanda Feil, Linnit Pessoa: State planning and the sustainable development convention: an introduction
Pedro Lange Netto Machado, Luiz Fernando de Paula: Financialization, credit rating agencies, and “policy space”: The Brazilian experience
Mario G. Schapiro, Pedro Salomon Bezerra Mouallem, Eric Gil Dantas: PIX: explaining a state-owned Fintech
Bruno Mader: The rentier behavior of the Brazilian banks
Thalita Borges, João P. Romero, Fabrício Silveira: Abertura comercial, produtividade e emprego no Brasil
Angélica Tacuba Santos: Pemex in the context of the global oil company: investment policy and lessons learned
Amir Elalouf: The dilemma of growth: pollution and health impacts in the BRICS countries (Brazil, Russia, India, China, South Africa)
Eva Alexandri, José-Ignacio Antón, Richard Lewney: The impact of climate change mitigation policies on European labour markets
Ratbek Dzhumashev: The role of physical constraints on production
Siying Yang, Fengshuo Liu: Impact of industrial intelligence on green total factor productivity: The indispensability of the environmental system
Arianna Buratto, Lorenzo Lotti: Encouraging sustainable food consumption through nudges: An experiment with menu labels
Kangyin Dong, Yang Liu, Jianda Wang, Xiucheng Dong: Is the digital economy an effective tool for decreasing energy vulnerability? A global case
Maximilian Tallgauer, Christoph Schank: Challenging the growth-prosperity Nexus: Redefining undergraduate economics education for the Anthropocene
Sónia Almeida Neves, António Cardoso Marques, Leonardo Batista de Sá Lopes: Is environmental regulation keeping e-waste under control? Evidence from e-waste exports in the European Union
Darius Corbier, Frédéric Gonand: A hybrid electricity-economy model to assess the aggregate impacts of low-carbon transition: An application to France
Emmanuel Paroissien, Timothy K.M. Beatty, Antoine Nebout: Household food waste and the opportunity cost of time
Martin Černý, Martin Bruckner, Jan Weinzettel, Kirsten Wiebe, . Klaus Hubacek: Global employment and skill level requirements for ‘Post-Carbon Europe’
James R. Meldrum, Patricia A. Champ, Hannah Brenkert-Smith, Christopher M. Barth, ... Colleen Donovan: Rethinking cost-share programs in consideration of economic equity: A case study of wildfire risk mitigation assistance for private landowners
Srikanta Kundu, Ruma Kundu, Kul Bahadur Chettri:Asymmetric effects of democracy and macroeconomic factors on happiness under high and low per capita incomes: A threshold panel analysis
Pierre Chiaverina, Sophie Drogué, Florence Jacquet: Do Farmers Participating in Short Food Supply Chains Use Less Pesticides? Evidence from France
Shutong He, Julia Blasch, Peter John Robinson, Pieter van Beukering: Social comparison feedback in decision-making context: Environmental externality levels and psychological traits matter
Daniel Rüb: Inequality beyond income quantiles: Distributional effects of climate mitigation policies
Franziska Dorn, Simone Maxand, Thomas Kneib: The nonlinear dependence of income inequality and carbon emissions: Potentials for a sustainable future
Romain Espinosa, Nicolas Treich: Animal welfare as a public good
Gloria Amaris, Stepan Vesely, Stephane Hess, Christian A. Klöckner: Can competing demands affect pro-environmental behaviour: a study of the impact of exposure to partly related sequential experiments
A. Malo Larrea, M. Ambrosi de la Cadena, J. Collado Ruano, L. Gallardo Fierro: Transcending the nature-society dichotomy: A dialogue between the Sumak Kawsay and the epistemology of complexity
Stefan Jestl: The impact of income inequality on household indebtedness in euro area countries
Michael Cauvel: The neo-Goodwinian model reconsidered
Robert A. Blecker: How important is the real exchange rate for exports and growth?
Gabriel Porcile, José Eduardo Alatorre, Martín Cherkasky, Camila Gramkow, and João Romero: New directions in Latin American Structuralism: a three-gap model of sustainable development
Daniela Prates, Barbara Fritz, and Luiz Fernando de Paula: Frontier-market economies as a new group of the financial periphery: patterns and transmission channels of global shocks
Mark Setterfield: Post-Keynesian growth theory and the supply side: a feminist approach
Özlem Onaran and Cem Oyvat: Synthesizing feminist and post-Keynesian/Kaleckian economics for a purple–green–red transition
Sebastian Gechert: Fiscal policy: post- or New Keynesian?
Joëlle Leclaire: Fiscal and monetary policy for difficult times: MMT solutions
Jo Michell: Macroeconomic policy at the end of the age of abundance
Adam Hanieh and Rafeef Ziadah: Misperceptions of the Border: Migration, Race, and Class Today
Matthew Dimick: Race and Reification
Lukas Egger: Reduced to Brutish Nature: On Racism and the Law of Value
Gregory Slack: Did Marx Defend Black Slavery? On Jamaica and Labour in a Black Skin
Scott Tim>Revisiting the Plantation Society: The New World Group and the Critique of Capitalism
Ajmal Waqif: Robert Wedderburn’s ‘Universal War’: Anti-Colonial Universality in the Age of Revolution
Nicholas De Genova: A Racial Theory of Labour: Racial Capitalism from Colonial Slavery to Postcolonial Migration
Jane Komori: The Canadian ‘War of the Two Sugars’: Homegrown Sugar Beets and the Racial Stratification of Labour
Alfie Hancox: The Anti-Nazi League, ‘Another White Organisation’? British Black Radicals against Racial Fascism
Articles
Stefano Costa, Stefano De Santis, Giovanni Dosi, Roberto Monducci, Angelica Sbardella ...: From organizational capabilities to corporate performances: at the roots of productivity slowdown
Original Articles
Arusyak Zakaryan, Daniel Tzabbar, Bruno Cirillo: Mind the time: failure response time, variations in the reasons for failures, and learning from failure
Philipp Mundt, Ivan Savin, Uwe Cantner, Hiroyasu Inoue, Simone Vannuccini: Peer Effects in Productivity and Differential Growth: A Global Value-Chain Perspective
Zhifeng Yin, Zhen Sun: Predicting the value of Chinese patents using patent characteristics: evidence based on a Chinese patent auction
Special Section: Organizational Routines: Between Change and Stability
Introduction
Rouslan Koumakhov, Luigi Marengo: Organizational routines: between change and stability—Introduction to the special section
Original Articles
Geoffrey M Hodgson: How stable routines can empower varied behaviors: defining routines as organizational capacities
Bryan Spencer, Carlo Salvato, Claus Rerup: Routine regulation as a source for managing conflict within alliances: an integrative framework
Kejia Zhu, Martin Schulz: Internal versus external knowledge sourcing of organizational rules: an exploratory study of CPGs in a healthcare organization
Editor's Choice: Teppo Felin, Stuart Kauffman: Disruptive evolution: harnessing functional excess, experimentation, and science as tool
Mehdi Bagherzadeh, Andrei Gurca, Rezvan Velayati: Crowdsourcing routines: the behavioral and motivational underpinnings of expert participation
Introduction
Jonathan Michie: Productivity, equity and sustainability
Research Article
Mattia Tassinari: Productivity, equity, and sustainability: A trilemma for contemporary human development?
Thanos Poulakis & Persefoni Tsaliki: Dynamic linkages between real exchange rates and real unit labour costs: evidence from 18 economies
Peng Yang & Weizeng Sun: How does digital technology facilitate the green innovation of enterprises? Evidence from China
Gonçalo Amado: Revisiting the debate on the Eurozone crisis: causes, clustering periphery and core, and the role of interest rate convergence
Myoungrok Kim & Young jo Song: Corporate excess savings: what does it have to do with M&A activities, cash holdings and debt repayments in Korea
Isaac Koomson, Abdallah Abdul-Mumuni, David Kofi Ampah & Anthony Fiifi Afful: The link between households’ durable asset accumulation and healthcare utilisation and spending
Review Article
Jonathan Michie: The failures of current capitalism: what next?
Arne Heise: A Keynesian–Minskian perspective on the transformation of industrial into financial capitalism
Domenico Delli Gatti, Severin Reissl, Enrico Turco: V for vaccines and variants
Stefano Basilico, Holger Graf: Bridging technologies in the regional knowledge space: measurement and evolution
Klemen Knez: Technology diffusion and uneven development
Kalyani Mangalika Lakmini Rathu Manannalage, Andreas Chai, Shyama Ratnasiri: Eating to live or living to eat? Exploring the link between calorie satiation, Bennett’s law, and the evolution of food preferences
Jose A. Pérez-Montiel, Andreu Sansó, Oguzhan Ozcelebi, Riccardo Pariboni: Autonomous and induced demand in the United States: a long-run perspective
Leila E. Davis, Joao Paulo A. de Souza, Gonzalo Hernandez: Listing, delisting, and financial norms: a quantile decomposition of firm balance sheets
Nadia Garbellini, Roberto Lampa: Energy shock and inflation: Re-examining the relevance of the Russian-Ukrainian conflict
Joseph Halevi: Germany, Europe and the Crisis
Roberto Lampa, Gianmarco Oro: Can the side effects of sanctions and energy inflation trigger the disintegration of the international monetary regime?
Servaas Storm: Profit inflation is real
Giacomo Cucignatto, Nadia Garbellini, Facund Fora Alcalde: Profit-led or cost-led inflation? Propagation effects through the EU inter-industry network
Nicolò Giangrande: The consequences of the Russian-Ukrainian war on the Italian economy and the need for a ‘full and good employment’ strategy
Elisangela Luzia Araujo, Eliane de Araújo, Mateus Ramalho Ribeiro da Fonseca, Paulo Reis Mourão: External shocks and monetary policy under the inflation targeting regime (ITR): An analysis of the determinants of inflation for the period 2000-2021
Alfredo Saad-Filho: Money, Credit, and Fictitious Capital in Marx's Theory of Value
Fabien Trémeau : Critique of Value Criticism
Zhiming Long, Zhixuan Feng, Bangxi Li, Rémy Herrera: Turning One's Loss Into a Win? The US Trade War With China in Perspective
Demba Moussa Dembele: Colonial Legacy, Monetary Policy, and Resource Mobilization for Development in Africa
Juan Pablo Mateo: Surplus Production and Unequal Development in Latin America: A Comparative Study With the US From a Political Economy Perspective
Joaquín Arriola, Juan Barredo-Zuriarrain: From “Crypto-Alternatives” to a Regional Unit of Account: Monetary Proposals in Latin America for a Greater Shared Autonomy
Christian Palloix: Multinational Firms' Practices: An Attempt at a Marxist Theorization
Guido De Marco: Turnover Time and Marx’s Decomposition of Profit Adjustment in the Process of Equalization
William Paul Cockshott: Profit Rates: Their Dispersion and Long-Term Determination
Weinan Ding, Zhiming Long, Rémy Herrera: Elements for a Study of the Profit Rate: France, 1896–2019
Mauricio de Souza Sabadini, Gustavo Moura de Cavalcanti Mello: Fictitious Capital, Fictitious Profits, and Their Extreme Fetishism
Rosa Maria Marques, Paulo Nakatani: Crisis and Fictitious Capital
Ernesto Molina Molina: Money, Fictitious Capital, and Cryptocurrencies: Their Impact on the World Economy
30th Anniversary Special Feature
Danish Khan: Political economy of the ‘informal’ housing question: institutional-hybridity of the postcolonial state
Special Forum on International Regime Complexity
C. Randall Henning: International regime complexity in sovereign crisis finance: a comparison of regional architectures
Mette Eilstrup-Sangiovanni: The instability of the nuclear nonproliferation regime complex
Stephanie C. Hofmann & Patryk Pawlak: Governing cyberspace: policy boundary politics across organizations
Rie Kijima & Phillip Y. Lipscy: Competition and regime complex architecture: authority relations and differentiation in international education
C. Randall Henning & Tyler Pratt: Hierarchy and differentiation in international regime complexes: a theoretical framework for comparative research
Tyler Pratt: Value differentiation, policy change and cooperation in international regime complexes
Research Articles
Colin Chia: Flying flags: nationality, sovereignty, and airline liberalization
Sung Eun Kim & Joonseok Yang: Who votes for free trade and when? Geopolitics as the source of legislative preferences on free trade agreements
Melike Arslan: Legal diffusion as protectionism: the case of the U.S. promotion of antitrust laws
Julian Eckl & Tine Hanrieder: The political economy of consulting firms in reform processes: the case of the World Health Organization
Amy Janzwood, Kate J. Neville & Sarah J. Martin: Financing energy futures: the contested assetization of pipelines in Canada
Akitaka Matsuo, Motoshi Suzuki & Azusa Uji: Ideas for macroeconomic surveillance: a comparative text analysis of country reports by global and regional financial organizations
Bernard Hoekman & Robert Wolfe: The Geneva effect: where officials sit influences where they stand on WTO priorities*
Oleksandr Svitych: Development for whom? The case of USAID in Ukraine’s Donbas
Jennifer Bair, Stefano Ponte, Leonard Seabrooke & Duncan Wigan: Entangled chains of global value and wealth
Symposium: “Hysteresis, path dependence and history”
Amitava Krishna Dutt: Hysteresis and path dependence in economic analysis: formalizations, causes and implications
Thomas Palley: Broadening the application of hysteresis in economics: institutions, policy lock-in, psychology, identity, and ideas
Robert Calvert Jump and Engelbert Stockhammer: Revisiting the hysteresis hypothesis: an ARIMAX approach
Mark Setterfield: Will hysteresis effects afflict the US economy during the post-COVID-19 recovery?
Research Articles
Sergio Cesaratto and Eladio Febrero: Central Bank Digital Currencies: a proper reaction to private digital money?
Manuel David Cruz and Daniele Tavani: Secular stagnation: a Classical–Marxian view
Robert J. Bigg | Palgrave, 2023
This book examines the academic life of Alvin Hansen and his contribution to modern economics. Through tracing the development of his early work and pre-Keynesian ideas, the influence of Keynes and the 1937-8 recession on the direction of his work is explored, particularly in relation to his theoretical backing of the New Deal and subsequent American policy. The subsequent chapters focus on his later work on secular stagnation, savings and investment, American Keynesianism, managing the post-war mixed economy and the often overlooked contributions to global questions and wider aspects of political economy and public policy. This book aims to highlight the intellectual influence and academic value of Alvin Hansen’s work. It will be relevant to students and researchers interested in economic policy, political economy, and the history of economic thought. Robert J. Bigg holds a PhD from the University of Cambridge in the history of economic thought. His research interests include the development of monetary and macroeconomic theory and intellectual biography. Previously published works include Cambridge and the Monetary Theory of Production together with entries for The New Palgrave: A Dictionary of Economics, and The Palgrave Companion to Oxford Economics.
Please find a link to the book here.
by Robert Chapman | 2023, Pluto Press
Neurodiversity is on the rise. Awareness and diagnoses have exploded in recent years, but we are still missing a wider understanding of how we got here and why. Beyond simplistic narratives of normativity and difference, this groundbreaking book exposes the very myth of the 'normal' brain as a product of intensified capitalism.Exploring the rich histories of the neurodiversity and disability movements, Robert Chapman shows how the rise of capitalism created an 'empire of normality' that transformed our understanding of the body into that of a productivity machine.
Please find a link to the book here.
John Komlos | Routledge, 2019
This textbook demonstrates how misleading it can be to apply oversimplified models of perfect competition to the real world. The math works well on college blackboards but not so well on the Main Streets of America. This volume explores the realities of oligopolies, the real impact of the minimum wage, the double-edged sword of free trade, and other ways in which powerful institutions cause distortions in the mainstream models. Bringing together the work of key scholars, such as Kahneman, Minsky, and Schumpeter, this book demonstrates how we should take into account the inefficiencies that arise due to asymmetric information, mental biases, unequal distribution of wealth and power, and the manipulation of demand. This textbook offers students a valuable introductory text with insights into the workings of real markets not just imaginary ones formulated by blackboard economists.
Please find a link to the book here.
Edited by Matteo Battistini, Eleonora Cappuccilli, and Maurizio Ricciardi | 2023, Haymarketbooks
Global Marx coheres a collective assessment of Marx's account of capital's domination, through his critique of disciplinary languages, investigation of political structures and analysis of specific political spaces within the world market. His discourse appears here as global not only because global is the geography of the world market but also because Marx redefined the relationships between the spaces on which capital exerts its command. Global Marx proves that Marx's texts do not identify any global working class, nor a centre of power to be conquered, but show that – within and against the world market – there is a social movement that is irreducible to any identity or to a single space from whose perspective one can write a universal history of class struggle.
Contributors are: Luca Basso, Michele Basso, Matteo Battistini, Eleonora Cappuccilli, Michele Cento, Luca Cobbe, Isabella Consolati, Niccolò Cuppini, Roberta Ferrari, Michele Filippini, Giorgio Grappi, Maurizio Merlo, Mario Piccinini, Fabio Raimondi, Maurizio Ricciardi, Paola Rudan, and Federico Tomasello.
Please find a link to the book here.
By Herbert Gintis | 2017, Princeton University Press
In this book, acclaimed economist Herbert Gintis ranges widely across many fields—including economics, psychology, anthropology, sociology, moral philosophy, and biology—to provide a rigorous transdisciplinary explanation of some fundamental characteristics of human societies and social behavior. Because such behavior can be understood only through transdisciplinary research, Gintis argues, Individuality and Entanglement advances the effort to unify the behavioral sciences by developing a shared analytical framework—one that bridges research on gene-culture coevolution, the rational-actor model, game theory, and complexity theory. At the same time, the book persuasively demonstrates the rich possibilities of such transdisciplinary work.
Everything distinctive about human social life, Gintis argues, flows from the fact that we construct and then play social games. Indeed, society itself is a game with rules, and politics is the arena in which we affirm and change these rules. Individuality is central to our species because the rules do not change through inexorable macrosocial forces. Rather, individuals band together to change the rules. Our minds are also socially entangled, producing behavior that is socially rational, although it violates the standard rules of individually rational choice. Finally, a moral sense is essential for playing games with socially constructed rules. People generally play by the rules, are ashamed when they break the rules, and are offended when others break the rules, even in societies that lack laws, government, and jails.
Throughout the book, Gintis shows that it is only by bringing together the behavioral sciences that such basic aspects of human behavior can be understood.
Please find a link to the book here.
edited by Jean-Numa Ducange and Anthony Burlaud | 2023, Brill
Despite the collapse of Soviet-style socialism, the spectre of Marx still haunts the French imagination. This is no accident, in a country whose intellectual life and political history have long been marked by his multiple presences. This volume offers a historical and sociological insight into the way his thought has been received in the French context, from his own lifetime to the present. Analysing Marx’s place and influence in the French intellectual, political and artistic debate – across the political spectrum and even in the French-speaking colonial world – it helps us understand the uses and misuses of an œuvre of paramount importance.
Please find a link to the book here.
by Christian Fuchs | 2023, Routledge
This guide to the critical study of the media economy in society teaches students how to critically analyse the political economy of communication and the media. The book introduces a variety of methods and topics, including the political economy of communication in capitalism, media concentration, advertising, global media and transnational media corporations, class relations and working conditions in the capitalist media and communication industry, the Internet and digital media, the information society and digital capitalism, the public sphere, Public Service Media, the Public Service Internet and the political economy of media management. Each chapter features a highly accessible introduction, recommended readings and lots of practical exercises where you will apply the Political Economy approach to concrete examples and cases.
Please find a link to the book here.
by Maurice Dommanget, edited by Mitchell Abidor | Brill, 2023
The first book by the great French radical historian Maurice Dommanget (1888–1976) to be translated into English, this book is an engaging, sympathetic telling of the life and works of Sylvain Maréchal (1750–1803), an unjustly forgotten figure of the French Revolutionary era. Maréchal was not only a militant atheist and opponent of royalty, but, as the author of the Manifesto of the Equals he laid the groundwork for modern communism.
Please find a link to the book here.
by Victor Strazzeri | 2023, Haymarket Books
The Young Max Weber and German Social Democracy examines the formative years of the classic social thinker once called the 'bourgeois Marx,' specifically focusing on his relationship to the foremost working-class organization of his time. Offering groundbreaking insights, Victor Strazzeri argues that Weber's early engagement with the standpoint of the rural worker — not his later study of the ethics of ascetic Protestant entrepreneurs — first convinced him of the central role of culture in human agency. The crisis of liberalism in a rapidly modernising, conflict-ridden Imperial Germany embarking on colonial expansion is cast as the decisive setting for the genesis of Weberian social thought, with the rising labour movement, in turn, serving as the young Weber's little-known yet crucial interlocutor.
Please find a link to the book here.
by Roger E. Backhouse | 2023, Penguin Books
The definitive guide to the history of economic thought, fully revised twenty years after first publication. Roger Backhouse's definitive guide takes the story of economic thinking from the ancient world to the present day, with a brand-new chapter on the twenty-first century and updates throughout to reflect the latest scholarship. Covering topics including globalisation, inequality, financial crises and the environment, Backhouse brings his breadth of expertise and a contemporary lens to this original and insightful exploration of economics, revealing how we got to where we are today.
Please find a link to the book here.
Edited by David Primrose, Rodney Loeppky, and Robin Chang, Routledge, 2024
This handbook provides a comprehensive and critical overview of the gamut of contemporary issues around health and healthcare from a political economy perspective. Its contributions present a unique challenge to prevailing economic accounts of health and healthcare, which narrowly focus on individual behaviour and market processes. Instead, the capacity of the human body to reach its full potential, and the ability of society to prevent disease and cure illness, are demonstrated to be shaped by a broader array of political economic processes. The material conditions in which societies produce, distribute, exchange, consume, and reproduce – and the operation of power relations therein – influence all elements of human health: from food consumption and workplace safety, to inequality, healthcare and housing, and even the biophysical conditions in which humans live. The volume explores these concerns across five sections. First, it introduces and critically engages with a variety of established and cutting-edge theoretical perspectives in political economy to conceptualise health and healthcare – from neoclassical and behavioural economics, to Marxist and feminist approaches. The next two sections extend these insights to evaluate the neoliberalisation of health and healthcare over the past forty years, highlighting their individualisation and commodification by the capitalist state and powerful corporations. The fourth section examines the diverse manifestation of these dynamics across a range of geographical contexts. The volume concludes with a section devoted to outlining more progressive health and healthcare arrangements, which transcend the limitations of both neoliberalism and capitalism. This volume will be an indispensable reference work for students and scholars of political economy, health policy and politics, health economics, health geography, the sociology of health, and other health-related disciplines.
Please find a link to the book here.
Christopher J. Arthur | Haymarket Books, 2023
What is money? What is capital? Christopher J. Arthur brilliantly tackles these fundamental questions at a deep philosophical level in The Spectre of Capital. He argues that the modern world is ruled by an unseen force, the spectre of capital. This insight is rooted in a strikingly original combination of the ideas of Marx and Hegel. Arthur here presents the most sophisticated argument to date for the 'homology thesis,' spelling out how the order of Hegel's logical categories, and that of the social forms assessed by Marx in Capital, share the same architectonic. The systematic-dialectical presentation of this thesis shows how capital becomes a self-sustaining power.
Series: Part of the Historical Materialism series
Please find a link to the book here.
By Stefan Kipfer | 2023, Haymarket Books
What do struggles over pipelines in Canada, housing estates in France, and shantytowns in Martinique have in common? In Urban Revolutions, Stefan Kipfer shows how these struggles force us to understand the (neo-)colonial aspects of capitalist urbanization in a comparatively and historically nuanced fashion. In so doing, he demonstrates that urban research can offer a rich, if uneven, terrain upon which to develop the relationship between Marxist and anti-colonial intellectual traditions. After a detailed dialogue between Henri Lefebvre and Frantz Fanon, Kipfer engages creole literature in the French Antilles, Indigenous radicalism in North America and political anti-racism in mainland France.
Please find a link to the book here.
Economic POlicies for the Global bifurcation (EPOG-JM) is an International Joint Master Degree in economics. It offers a world-class integrated Master's programme on the (socio-technical, socioeconomic and socioecological) transition processes with a pluralist approach and interdisciplinary perspectives.
The main objective of the programme is to give birth to a new generation of international experts, able to define and assess economic policies and evolve within different political, social and regional contexts. Towards this objective, the EPOG-JM Master’s programme goes beyond the reach of standard economic theory to include various heterodox/institutionnalist political economy approaches
The full partners (degree awarding institutions) include a wide set of prestigous institutions:
It also involves more than 30 (academic and non-academic) associated partners in Europe and the world.
Scholarships
The very best students from all over the world will be eligible for scholarships. More details here.
When to apply?
Note that two recommendation letters are needed to apply and have to be provided by the deadline. The course for the new cohort will start in September 2024. More information is available on the official website.
Application Deadline: 22 January 2024 (13:00 Paris time)
Job Title: Funded PhD scholarships
The Centre on Labour, Sustainability and Global Production (CLaSP) at Queen Mary University of London invites applications for doctoral programmes in the School of Business and Management starting in September 2024. In exceptional cases, a January 2025 start may also be possible.
PhD supervisors at CLaSP have interdisciplinary research expertise in a wide range of areas including Business, Development Studies, International Political Economy, Critical Management Studies, Economic Geography and Political Ecology, and regional expertise in the Global South (particularly Latin America, sub-Saharan Africa, South Asia and the Middle East), Europe and the UK.
We offer funded PhD scholarships for home and international students through the ESRC’s LISS DTP, as well as several QMUL studentships. The Centre offers a collegial environment for PhD research and supports its existing cohort of PhD students towards academic and other professional development needs.
We particularly welcome students wishing to pursue research on the following (or related) themes:
It is recommended that you contact a potential CLaSP supervisor directly, and relatively soon as the deadlines for college funding are in late January. For more information on applying, see here.
Application Deadline: 1 March 2024
The URPE newsletter is restarting and will be published in March, 2024. Submissions are welcome by members, activists, and related organizations. The due date for the March issue is January 30, 2024.
URPE Mission Statement for Newsletter
The objective of the URPE newsletter is to provide a more accessible and informal venue to discuss current issues in political economy, as well as matters relating to URPE. The newsletter would be provided as a service to members, for information, updates on political issues and actions, resources, and potential organizational efforts with partners. The newsletter would be distributed to the member listserv on a regular basis. We would invite contributions from individual members, students and faculty, as well as activists from progressive organizations. The content would be edited for accuracy, civil discourse and responsible sources, avoiding polemics. Particular topics of interest include state and local struggles regarding voting rights, abortion, academic freedom, free speech vs. censorship, public taxes and expenditures at all levels, the labor movement, as well as national and international issues regarding race, class, gender, ethnicity, climate change, military conflicts, and geopolitical transformations. We would prioritize diversity in topics and contributors and would be open to alternative radical perspectives, while encouraging respectful and informed debate.
The last newsletter issue was 2019.
The role of the newsletter co-editors is to receive and to curate contributions from members regarding accuracy, civility, relevance to current issues and concerns of the membership. The editors may also contribute content to the newsletter. Two members of the steering committee will coordinate with the editors, and provide consultation as needed.
The newsletter renewal includes the following:
How to apply
Please identify author with every submission, with a brief bio, and indicate type of submission:
Typical length of essays is 2000 – 3000 words, in concise, civil language.
Submissions are to submitted to the official website to be curated by co-editors Marianne Hill and Max Sawicky. The coordinators of the newsletter with the URPE steering committee are Ann E. Davis and Smita Ramnarain.
Submission Deadline: 30 January 2024
Turkish Political Economy Database, from the 1800s to date
By Altug Yalcintas (Ankara University), Ozgur Kizilyurt (Bakircay University), and Kardelen Kaya Erman (independent researcher)
Project Description: https://osf.io/ay7u6/
Data Visualizations and Tabulations: https://sites.google.com/view/trpolecon/about
"Turkish Political Economy Database, from the 1800s to date" is a digital humanities project that focuses on the works of political economy writers in Turkey from the 1800s to the present day. The project relies on digital methods (online and offline) for record keeping. The goal of the project is to understand how political economy writers interpreted events in their writings and to explore the evolution of their narratives in the past 200 years. We also aim to recover the networks among digital objects (such as scholars and institutions) by organizing their metadata in small and large databases.
We are currently training ChatGPT with the information in our databases. You can now ask questions to OpenAI's artificial intelligence, AI Historian, about our work in major languages.
Please note that starting a conversation requires a subscription to ChatGPT Plus. If you don't have one, no worries. Here is a conversation that we recently had with ChatGPT as an example.
AI Historian is a fascinating tool! We hope you find it useful and fun, too.
The following account is based on ethnographic research that Adrian Wilson, Irene Nduta, and Somo Abdi conducted in Kayole Soweto, Nairobi, in 2022.
Access to water in Nairobi is horribly unequal. The World Bank, Nairobi Water Company, and development economists exploited this unjust context to treat poor Kenyans like guinea pigs.
In August 2020, people all over the development world startedtalking about water in Nairobi. There was a lot of anger, and some calls for sending people to the guillotine. The reason: the publication of results from a development randomized controlled trial (RCT), run by two American development economists, working together with the World Bank. In order to compel property owners in Kayole-Soweto—a relatively poor neighborhood in eastern Nairobi—to pay their water bills, this experiment disconnected the water supply at randomly selected low-income rental properties.
There’s no doubt that water is a problem in Nairobi. As Elizabeth Wamuchiru tells us, the water system in the city has a built-in spatial inequality inherited from the British colonial era. Visitors to the city can readily see the differences between the cool, leafy, green neighborhoods of Kilimani and Lavington—segregated white neighborhoods under colonialism, now home to rich Kenyans, foreigners, and NGOs—and the gray and dusty tin-roof neighborhoods of Mathare, Kibera, Mukuru, and Kayole, home to the lower-income Kenyans excluded from Nairobi’s prosperity.
Today’s water system reflects this history of inequality. Nairobi’s water is harnessed from a combination of surface and groundwater sources; however, the city’s groundwater is naturally salty and very high in fluoride. Piped water systems, provided to upper- and middle-income housing estates, do not exist in the vast bulk of the city’s poorer neighborhoods, where people must instead buy water from vendors—often salty water pumped from boreholes, or siphoned off from city pipes through rickety connections that are frequently contaminated with sewage. In the richer neighborhoods, Nairobi Water Company, a public utility, sells relatively clean piped surface water for a fraction of the price paid by poorer Nairobians—a disparity that research has shown to often be the case in other cities in the global South. As the Mathare Social Justice Centre puts it, in poorer neighborhoods such as Kayole-Soweto, “water provision costs more, is less safe, and is less consistent than in other richer parts of the city.”
Nairobi’s waterscape has remained opaque to its planners and administrators as well as its residents—both the elite that occupy the planned leafy suburbs of the city, and the urban underclass that lives on the fringes in a perennial survival mode. And while the city has witnessed major developments to improve access and quality of water, some approaches have only ended up reinforcing the economic inequalities in Nairobi’s waterscape. Such developments have often entailed technologies that are inappropriate for the context, “cut and paste” approaches to solving global South problems, and, in many cases, financing models that are covertly anti-poor.
The World Bank’s water project in Kayole-Soweto was a great example of these problems. Between 2016 and 2018, the World Bank and Nairobi Water Company implemented a project to build piped water and sewage connections in Kayole-Soweto among several other lower-income neighborhoods in Nairobi.
The project design was driven by the kind of “neoliberalism lite” that characterizes the Millenium Development Goals-era World Bank. The project’s water connections would be paid for only in part by World Bank grants. The rest of the cost would be borne by users, who would take out loans of $315 USD per connection, payable over five years at an interest rate of 19%. Each property would get a single connection, with a water tap and a flushing toilet. Under a program called Jisomee Mita (“read your own meter”), water meters would be digital, and billing payment can be made digitally via mobile phone. The project was framed as a “magic bullet” that not only embraced the supposed advantages of digitized systems, but also provided a financial model purportedly tailored to the needs of the poor of Kayole-Soweto.
As people in Kayole-Soweto told us, the project was plagued with problems right from the onset (some of these problems are even described in the World Bank’s own 2019 project evaluation). The water supply pipes were supposed to be buried several meters under the streets, but instead were scarcely buried below the surface of Soweto’s dirt roads, often allowing sewage to leak into the pipes. The sewage piping, which World Bank officials told community members would be eight inches in diameter, was instead four inches, thus resulting in constant blockages. No one was sure why implementation wasn’t done to the standard promised, but corruption was widely suspected.
And, people told us, when trying to pay back their water connection loans, they found Nairobi Water Company’s billing and payment systems to be opaque at best and criminal at worst. One man told us: “I went and paid, but after paying it… I followed up on that payment, and… I was told that I haven’t paid this money. And I went back [and] I paid for it again. And that’s how I lost [Ksh] 4,900” (about $42 USD). Receipts are nonexistent; statements are nonexistent; people pay, and their money often simply disappears.
And while continuing to largely meet demand in the wealthier neighborhoods, Nairobi Water Company has resorted to what it calls “micro-rationing” in Kayole-Soweto. Water is typically only piped in one day per week, for a few hours at a time. People will hurry to fill jerrycans of water for the week during these few hours—and if they’re at work when the water comes, then they’re out of luck. Often, Nairobi Water Company will pipe in salty borehole water instead of the clean water that residents were promised they’d receive. And, for many customers, water has stopped flowing entirely, for weeks, months, or even years at a time, with no explanation. But even in such cases, Nairobi Water Company still insists that people make payments on their water connection loans—paying down their debt for a connection that provides them with no water. “Unalipia hewa,” one man told us—“you pay for air.”
The RCT: adding insult to injury
In 2018, two American development economists, Paul Gertler and Sebastian Galiani, started a randomized controlled trial (RCT) aimed at “improving revenue collection efficiency” on the debt that property owners owed on these water connection loans in Kayole-Soweto. Their argument: the problem with water supply in Kayole-Soweto isn’t any of the problems that we described above. The problem is simply that property owners aren’t paying their water bills, thus undermining Nairobi Water Company’s revenue and preventing them from supplying water. (Our finding was the exact reverse: many people stopped making payments on their connection loans out of frustration at water that flowed only a few hours one day per week, if at all.)
In order to test a punitive method for fixing this problem, these two economists turned to an RCT. The RCT, a popular method in development economics for the last two decades, is used to test a development intervention by (1) randomly dividing people into “treatment” and “control” groups; (2) giving some “treatment” to the first group, while withholding it from the second; and (3) measuring the difference in outcomes. While pioneers of the method were rewarded with the Nobel Prize in Economics in 2019, critics are wary of the idea of development economists experimenting on the poor.
In this case, the economists, working with Nairobi Water Company and the World Bank, identified customers who were behind on their water connection loan payments, divided these randomly into treatment and control groups, and disconnected the water at treatment properties, but not at control properties. They found that disconnecting people’s water had a large positive impact on repayment rates (as one person put it during the Twitter controversy: “uh, duh?”). This is rigorous proof, they argue, that water disconnections can help improve a water utility’s revenue enforcement. The authors of this experiment don’t mention the myriad problems with Nairobi Water Company or with Nairobi’s water system more generally.
Now, let’s unpack this a bit. This experiment would have been ethically dubious in a context in which water service was working perfectly. This experiment is that much more ethically bankrupt in a context in which the water system is as woefully dysfunctional as it is in Kayole-Soweto. Just to give one example of the ethical acrobatics in the economists’ publication describing this project: research guidelines in the US, where both of these development economists hold professorships, dictate that research subjects are supposed to consent to participation in any research, let alone an experiment. The authors tell us that tenants whose water was disconnected had in effect pre-consented to disconnection by the fact of having signed a contract to get the water connection loan in which it is written that your water will be disconnected if you fail to pay. This very “thin” understanding of consent ignores the question of obtaining consent to participate in the experiment—and it also doesn’t apply to the tenants living at these properties, who never signed any such contract, and who also lost their water.
We told several property owners whose water was shut off during the experiment that the economists who ran this experiment said in their publication that the experiment didn’t cause any harm to these research subjects. (It’s important to note that most of these property owners aren’t rich—most of the property owners we talked to live in a slightly nicer unit alongside their tenants.) Matthew, a property owner we interviewed, told us how, when his property’s water was disconnected, several people living at his property—a disabled woman, as well his own 95-year-old grandmother—were forced into the indignity of defecating in basins, which his wife would dump in the Ngong River. Another property owner, Kelvin, told us simply, “We don’t have water and water is life. So, how can you say it doesn’t harm anyone, how, how?”
What can we learn from this?
Water in Nairobi is horribly unequal. Into this unjust context came, first, the World Bank, with a neoliberal project plan emphasizing “cost-sharing,” and with a naive and misplaced trust in the ability of Nairobi Water Company to carry out this project fairly; and, second, two development economists, who were willing to treat poor Sowetans like guinea pigs, and who simply took Nairobi Water Company at their word when the company said that the only problem with water in Kayole-Soweto was that people weren’t paying their bills. Were these just scare tactics to squeeze residents into paying for a service they deemed unreliable? Was this a question of the ugly side of a capitalist market model that is insensitive to the plight of the poor and continues to disinherit them of their right to the city?
The World Bank has, since 2000, stepped back from the stringent structural adjustment plans that the Bank imposed on one African nation after another in the 1980s and 1990s. They now tend to focus their energies on projects like this one, often implemented together with African governments, and often focused on enhancing state capacity to fill its citizens’ basic needs. But the neoliberal ideology, while toned down, is still there: the Bank’s insistence that users pay a large share of the water connection cost, via a private bank loan, is characteristic of this new and more subtle neoliberalism.
In relation to experimentation, and development RCTs, there’s something scary about the degree of power that Western academics can exercise over poor people in places like Kayole-Soweto. To be clear, we aren’t saying that this experiment is typical of development RCTs. In our research, we found this water disconnection RCT to be a very extreme example; most RCTs are conducted with fairly or even very good ethical practices. What this experiment shows, though, is that if a foreign researcher wants to carry out an unethical RCT in a place like Kenya, they can. Existing ethical safeguards are obviously not working.
In finding a way forward for the World Bank’s water project in Kayole-Soweto, we must defer to the demands of the Sowetans we met and interviewed. Repeatedly, they told us that they were very willing to pay for water—if that water service worked, and worked consistently. They told us that they wanted the World Bank to return to the community, to hold meetings with community members, and, with their input, to rebuild the water and sewage infrastructure in Kayole-Soweto to a proper standard. We believe that the World Bank owes this to the people of Kayole-Soweto.
As for the economists and others running RCTs in Kenya, the existing system of ethical safeguards clearly failed the people of Kayole-Soweto. We will set aside the argument that experiments conducted by global North researchers on poor people in the global South should not happen at all. The fallout from this experiment has led to suggestions for reforms to the research approval, funding, and publication processes, in order to ensure that ethical principles are actually followed. Echoing these suggestions, we would encourage actors in this research space to introduce mechanisms to ensure that safeguards are not optional but rather mandatory. And we believe that there should be an ethical mandate of genuine “equipoise” in development RCTs: researchers should be genuinely uncertain whether the “treatment” or the “control” is better for the research subjects. (In the experiment in Kayole-Soweto, that was obviously not the case.)
Finally, the Nairobi County government is currently debating a bill that could privatize Nairobi Water Company. We believe that privatization is not the solution for water in Nairobi. In the Kenyan health care system, for example, we have consistently learned that privatization does not serve the poor. Past examples of water privatization—in Cochabamba, Bolivia, in the late 1990s and, closer to home, in Dar es Salaam in the 2000s—ended in complete failure. We strongly believe that reform and democratized governance—not privatization—of Nairobi Water Company should be part of the way forward. And in the context of the ongoing crisis over the escalating cost of living, we believe strongly that a privatized water company will be that much less likely to ensure that water is affordable (if not free) for even the poorest Nairobians. Water justice, as enshrined in Kenya’s 2010 constitution, must be made a reality for poor people living in precarious urban neighborhoods like Kayole-Soweto. We echo the words of Mathare Social Justice Center: “maji ni uhai, maji ni haki”—water is life, water is a right.
Adrian Wilson is a PhD candidate in anthropology at the University of California at Berkeley.
Faith Kasina is a community activist with the Kayole Community Justice Centre.
Irene Nduta is a community activist with the Kayole Community Justice Centre.
Jethron Ayumbah Akallah is a lecturer in the Department of History and Archaeology at Maseno University.