Search

A science, business, or law that is basing its validity on the level of p-values, t statistics and other tests of statistical significance is looking less and less relevant and more and more unethical. Here is a fact rather tough to swallow: today’s economist devotes a lot of time and energy and wit to putting a clever index of opportunity cost into his model or game; but then, like the amnesiac or weaker college freshman, he fails to see opportunity cost in statistical estimates and interpretations he makes of those very same models. Medicine, psychology, and pharmacology are similarly damaged by this fundamental error of science, keeping bad treatments and drugs on the market and good ones out. A few small changes to the style of the published research paper using statistical methods can bring large beneficial effects to more than academic research papers. It is suggested that misuse of statistical significance be added to the definition of scientific misconduct which is currently used and enforced by the National Institutes of Health, the Office of Research Integrity, the National Science Foundation and others.

This note first describes the details of an interesting incident of plagiarism where the author of a previously published paper was sent a verbatim copy of that paper for his review for possible publication in another journal. It then offers a few insights into the possible reasons underlying such blatant plagiarism attempts, and provides caveats against them.

This short paper is a Reply to ‘Medical altruism in mainstream health economics: theoretical and political paradoxes. COMMENTS’.

Social scientists, in particular sociologists, claim that the distinction between universalistic and particularistic values is relevant to explaining the social behaviour of individuals (and societies). This paper provides preliminary empirical evidence that supports the claim. It first defines a number of proxies for the degree of particularism embedded into long-celebrated dimensions of social behaviour (trust, political awareness, and associational activities). Then, it shows that the particularistic measures are positively correlated to each other and negatively correlated to some established generalist measures for all dimensions of social behaviour considered, both across and within countries and regions. Moreover, the paper relates that the various proxies for particularism share the same set of covariates (such as low education and income), which are neatly distinguishable from the determinants of the generalist measures.

This paper discusses the ways that capabilities and human development theory can guide the creation of entrepreneurship programs, utilizing a framework of human-centered design thinking. It is well known that a variety of institutional factors shape gender outcomes and gender inequality within entrepreneurship, particularly with regard to necessity versus opportunity entrepreneurship and informal versus formal sector entrepreneurship. Failure to understand the diversity of entrepreneurial activity among women, and the connection (or lack thereof) of such activity to human freedom, leads to biased entrepreneurship programs. This paper links social economic theory and practice by: (1) discussing the ways that capabilities and human development theory relate to entrepreneurship programs; (2) demonstrating that human-centered design thinking reflects the capabilities approach; and (3) showing how the design thinking framework would be used to create a gender-sensitive entrepreneurship program.

For several decades now, critical public health researchers have highlighted the deleterious effects that pursuing neoliberal policies can have on the ‘causes of the causes’ of poor health and upon growing health inequalities. This paper argues that the conceptual tools of Karl Polanyi can help lend particular insight into this issue. The specific example that this paper focuses upon is the ‘social enterprise’: a form of organisation that combines both social and business objectives. The paper explores, conceptually, whether social enterprises may have the potential to act as one component of a neo-Polanyian countermovement: helping to re-embed the economy back into society, and offering greater recognition for a more comprehensive and socially imbued concept of health. Importantly, this potential is critically examined in the context of neoliberal hegemony, where challenges to the status quo have regularly been met with assimilation, co-option and/or repression.

Drawing on early sociological analyses of how power and intergroup conflicts can affect the development of modern economies, this paper investigates how the Global Crisis has affected the stratification of the US society. The paper argues that the recent experience of the US society reflects the exacerbation of class, race and gender stratification since the 1980s. In effect, the consumerist society has reinforced the historical stratification of social identities with white men in high-paid, high-social status managerial and financial occupations at the top, and black women in low-paid, low-status service occupations at the bottom. This paper calls for a deconstruction of the neo-liberal individual into a unique combination of identities in a stratified capitalist society in order to reveal how social stratification has evolved during the Global Crisis. The paper finally concludes on the importance of heterogeneous identities in reflecting the diversity of societal and economic interests in order to address the issue of financial stability and sustainability at the corporate and societal levels.

The major premise of this paper is that social and individual well-being depends significantly on people's capacity to learn and unlearn in communication with each other. This paper builds on social economic traditions that see communication and conversation as evolutionary generative and adaptive mechanisms through which individual and social learning occurs. Drawing on educational psychology and organizational behavior scholarship, five dynamic processes of conversational learning are introduced with the contention that they can help social economists understand at a micro level more deeply and more concretely how learning happens in the give-and-take of conversation. The paper explores the role of the state, organizations, and communities in fostering individual freedom and dignity, human rights, and economic democracy and concludes that the investment of value in people and their capability for purposeful action as social economic stakeholders can be enhanced through conversation as learning.

This paper evaluates critically the validity of the competing conceptualizations of informal employment that variously read such work as a leftover of a previous mode of production, a by-product of, alternative or complement to formal employment. Until now, the common tendency has been for commentators to universally privilege one conceptualization over the others. Reporting data collected through 861 face-to-face interviews in 11 deprived and affluent urban and rural English localities, the finding is that each conceptualization is a valid portrayal of particular types of informal employment, and that only by combining and using them all is it possible to achieve a finer-grained and comprehensive understanding of the complex and diverse nature of informal employment as a whole. The paper concludes by discussing the implications for both the way in which informal employment is conceptualized as well as how it is tackled by governments.

This paper advances a capabilities conception of the individual, and considers some of the problems involved in developing such a conception. It also makes claims about the nature of the capability space as a whole, frames personal development in terms of the idea of moving though the capability space, and argues that people are alike in being increasingly heterogeneous. A key problem for a capabilities conception of the individual is that some capabilities, such as belonging to social groups and having social identities, can undermine individuality. The paper discusses an example in which people can have social identities but can nonetheless be relatively independent when seen as self-organizing. Brief comments on one goal of social economic policy as being identity-promoting conclude the paper.

This paper offers an account of how individuals act as agents when we employ a narrative approach to explaining their personal identities. It applies Korsgaard's idea of a “reflective structure of consciousness” to provide foundations for a richer account of the individual economic agent, and uses this to explain and distinguish the concepts of personal identity, individual identity, and social identity. The paper argues that individuals’ personal identities may be in conflict with their socially constructed individual identities. Individuals’ social identities are represented as a link between personal identity, and individual identity. The overall framework is proposed as an alternative to the atomistic individual conception and a contribution to the socially embedded individual conception.

The insight that both ontological and epistemological perspectives are intertwined is certainly correct, but at the same time insufficient to differentiate mainstream from heterodox approaches to economic institutions. As this paper argues, it is important whether one starts from ontological or epistemological considerations first. The paper suggests that the difference can be described in terms of function versus rules and demonstrates that an intersubjective ontology for institutions requires also an intersubjective epistemology. Otherwise, ontological precepts contradict the epistemological ones with important repercussions for understanding knowledge, rationality and institutions.

This paper reports our experiences with the application of a number of alternative approaches to a study of women's economic circumstances and quality of life in a typical western city. The important work of, especially, Martha Nussbaum on the capabilities approach to evaluations of “quality of life” has highlighted pitfalls associated with the use of a narrow informational base in studies of women's lives and has emphasized the value of qualitative methods in these evaluations. However, to date, most discussions of the relevance of plural approaches to studies of women's lives have been conducted in the context of developing countries. This paper contributes a practical, current example of the relevance of such approaches to assessments of the lives of women in western countries as well. The research findings reported in the paper also cast further light on the importance of several, related themes in the literature on the capabilities approach, namely the importance of understanding how women's...

Across the social sciences, the dominant “thin” reading of monetary exchange that views it as universally market-like and motivated by monetary gain is being challenged by a “thicker” reading that seeks to unpack the complex and messy characters and logics of monetised transactions. Until now, this re-reading has occurred by studying small alternative economic spaces (e.g., car boot sales, local currency schemes) that can be easily explained away as peripheral or even superfluous to an understanding of mainstream monetised exchange. To provide a more forceful challenge, therefore, this paper interrogates a form of work often seen as an exemplar of market-like work undertaken for the purpose of monetary gain, namely the underground sector. Reporting empirical evidence that unravels the heterogeneous and embedded characters and logics underpinning this work, this paper calls for those promulgating a thicker reading to be bolder and interrogate the meanings of monetary transactions in more mainstream spaces.

This paper develops a two-tier concept of rationality which broadens the orthodox notion of instrumental rationality in economics. In the first section, I conceive the idea of “background rationality” to consist in the ability to act normally, i.e., according to social conventions appropriate to the context. Background rationality is a necessary condition for the exercise of its instrumental counterpart. Implications and applications of this for economic phenomena are investigated in Section II. The third section draws parallels between the approach to rationality developed in this paper and Thorstein Veblen's notion “habits of thought”. I argue that a viable concept of rationality must itself be subject to explanatory scrutiny and justification and not merely posited as given.

This paper argues that the on-going reforms to the UK's National Health Service initiated in the 1990s represent potentially profound institutional change to the values underpinning the process of care. The market-orientation of the reforms is highlighted, and it is asserted that the theoretical rationale for this is informed by the nascent neoclassical health economics and new institutionalist literatures, which exhibit utilitarian propensities in that both stress outcomes and at best relegate process. Drawing from the seminal contribution of Thorstein Veblen, the paper argues that market-oriented reform in the UK may induce a shift from a Hippocratic ethos to a more individualistic value system.

This paper examines a particular employment inference of recent Papal social thought, for a Western developed economy context. The Papal documents studied are Centesimus Annus (1991), Sollicitudo Rei Socialis (1987), and Laborem Exercens (1981). The first and shortest section of the paper outlines a number of principles from the encyclicals aiming to guide employment organisation and policy relevant to Western and all economies. To permit their full consideration, an illustration is given how implications affecting forms of employment organization might be drawn from just one of the principles--the right to private property ownership. Private property ownership rights are argued to be constrained in specific ways, to relate instrinsically to employment organization, and to underpin other principles emphasized in the encyclicals, such as the priority of labor over capital. A selection of recent non-official-Church Catholic Social Thought is compared with the approach here. Since the encyclicals deal with i...

This paper distinguishes between epistemological naturalism, which it supports, and ontological naturalism, which it opposes. It sketches the emergence of anti-naturalist social theory among nineteenth-century African-American intellectuals and its refinement by twentieth-century feminists. These movements challenged ontological naturalism in the social sciences by substituting social constructionist concepts of race and gender for naturalist ones. Economics awaits a similar liberation. The paper identifies four naturalist concepts—atomism, determinism and biologically determined race and gender differences—as structuring mainstream economic theory. It concludes that ontological naturalism is inconsistent with the application of the epistemology of the natural sciences to the social sciences.

This paper tries to present the overall socioeconomic thoughts of Mahatma Gandhi as an origin of alternative development. The first section of the paper provides Gandhi's criticism of modern civilization, that of economics and that of Marxist socialism and communism. The second section analyzes his ideas for a "post-modern" construction of India, where his views on Swadeshi (self-reliance), his theory of trusteeship (theory of class and distribution) and his images of an ideal village economy are examined. The paper, referring to the works of E. F. Schumacher and the Other Economic Summit as well, concludes that Gandhian style of development theories have persistently furnished a critique of "modern" ways of thinking and presented alternative visions of socioeconomic development.

The relationships between religion and economics are both complex and controversial. In this paper is explored one method for organizing those relationships. Four categories are examined which help identify possible options: economics separate from religion economics; in service of religion; religion in service of economics; and religion in union with economics. The paper begins with a definition of what is included under the headings of religion and economics. Next, each of the four categories is described and discussed. Conclusions close the paper.

This paper argues that Adam Smith is a/the "founding father figure" of modern social/political economy as well as economics. Smith wrote extensively and insightfully on the subject of power , and thereby class and stratafication in society. This paper explicates four main types of power relations in Smith's analysis, notably drawing on the Wealth of Nations : wealth power, monopoly power, employer power, and political power. Smith's focus on power helps to differentiate his broader vision and rich discourse from that of many contemporary neoclassical writers and sharpens our appreciation for his contributions to social and political economy.

Increased research attention is now being given to understanding patterns of racial and ethnic economic inequality across countries (see Nesiah 1997; Darity 1998; Darity and Nembhard 2000; Darity and Deshpande 2000). Among the major general findings that have emerged from these recent comparative inquiries are the following: 1 Countries with a lower general level of income inequality do not necessarily display lower levels of intergroup inequality 2 Intergroup disparity is persistent and significant in countries at all levels of development, whether development is measured narrowly by per capita income or more broadly by a more encompassing index of well-being, like the Human Development Index. 3 Greater gender equity is not generally associated with lower levels of intergroup equality. 4 Higher rates of economic growth do not invariably close economic gaps between racial and ethnic groups nor does lower economic growth inevitably widen the gap. 5 Intergroup division at sufficiently high levels of tension to produce civil war conditions or genocidal violence obviously is inimical with economic development, but the mere fact of intergroup economic inequality is not. 6 In all countries where statistical investigations have been undertaken to assess the presence of discrimination in employment markets, substantial evidence of discriminatory losses in earnings and occupational status consistently are detected against a subaltern group. These results are complemented by the findings of direct tests of employment discrimination conducted via audit studies. 7 Cross-national evidence does not indicate that employment discrimination necessarily declines overtime, even in strongly market-oriented economies. 8 Adoption and implementation of remedies for intergroup disparity, such as affirmation action programs have not proven sufficient to close the gap anywhere, but, there is good evidence to suggest that the gaps would be even wider in the absence of such programs. One phase of the comparative inquiry involves construction of and examination of cross-section, cross-country macro-level data at the international level on a variety of country characteristics and on group economic differences within each country. A second phase of the comparative inquiry involves development of increasingly detailed and accurate accounts of intergroup disparity for each country. The six papers that comprise this symposium in The Review of Social Economy contribute directly to the second phase of the comparative inquiry. Two of the papers deepen our knowledge of the empirical gaps between groups and the extent of estimated employment discrimination in Brazil and in Canada. Peggy Lovell's contribution on Brazil consolidates the puncturing of the still popular myth, the myth of "racial democracy", that Brazil is a country where inequality is solely a matter of social class and not race. France Twine's (1998) superb ethnographic study, Racism in a Racial Democracy, provides an effective qualitative demolition of the myth, while Lovell's work provides the detailed quantitative dimension. Lovell demonstrates sustained and significant disparities persist between Afro-Brazilians, both blacks and browns, and Euro-Brazilians or whites. She also demonstrates that employment discrimination is an important factor depressing the earnings and occupational attainment of both black and brown Brazilians and examines the spatial aspects of disparity and discrimination. In an earlier coauthored study, Morton Stelcner (Stelcner and Kyriazis 1995) examined earnings inequality, by race and ethnicity in Canada, using the 1981 Canadian census. The current essay comprehensively reviews the existing literature on intergroup disparity in Canada based upon a variety of surveys and updates the findings from Stelcner-Kyriazis by utilising the 1991 census. A striking result is the persistence across both censuses of employment discrimination against blacks in Canada. …

Using a paradigmatic framework, this paper examines the ideas of John M. Perkins, a visionary of central city neighborhood renewal in the community development tradition and a co-founder of the Christian Community Development Association. Perkins' model of redevelopment is qualitatively different than those offered to date because of its emphasis on the parish church, long-term relationships, the relocation of leaders to the community, the reconciliation of people across race and class and a redistribution predicated on a prior relocation and reconciliation. Keywords: Community development, John Perkins, urban poverty, church In chapter one of Principles of Economics we find Alfred Marshall's judgment that "the two great forming agencies of the world's history have been the religious and the economic" (1920: 1). Max Stackhouse, a Princeton University ethicist, also accords economics and religion prominent roles in shaping society. In paraphrasing Pope John Paul II, in Centesimus Annus, Stackhouse writes that: The two key forces likely to have the most direct bearing on the future are corporations and religion. Corporations are the instrument of economic productivity for the foreseeable future, and religion is the bearer of those decisive values by which we guide our production, distribution, and consumption of whatever wealth is generated. (1996: 40) The United States began its modem response to poverty during the Great Depression. Starting with Title IV of the path breaking Social Security Act (1935), which created Aid to Dependent Children (changed to Aid to Families with Dependent Children in 1962), we have seen the evolution of a welfare system. [1] Although welfare programs contribute to the alleviation of poverty, we must be clear that they were not necessarily designed to end poverty. [2] The Civil Rights Movement and the attendant legal rulings, such as Brown v. Board of Education in 1954, the Civil Rights Act of 1964, and the Fair Housing Act of 1968, also contributed to a decline in the incidence of poverty. Additionally there have been a number of private and/or public sector site-specific programs emphasizing urban renewal. These include, Gray Areas, Mobilization for Youth, Model Cities, Enterprise/ Opportunity Zones, and community-based organizations, inclusive of community development corporations, many of which were products of the War on P overty (Halpern 1995). Despite these efforts William Julius Wilson claims there is a "'new urban poverty' [characterized by] segregated neighborhoods in which a substantial majority of individual adults are either unemployed or have dropped out of the labor force altogether" (1996:19). This reality garners the attention of the politician and social scientist alike, each searching for answers to a seemingly convoluted problem. The apparent intractability may well call for new perspectives. The purpose of this paper is to examine the ideas of John M. Perkins as they pertain to the "new urban poverty". In the late 1940s he left the racial oppression of Mississippi for the opportunities of California, but returned to address the injustices of his people. Perkins became a visionary of central city neighborhood renewal in the community development tradition and a co-founder of the Christian Community Development Association. His life corroborates Marshall's and Stackhouse's observation regarding the primacy of religious and economic thought and institutions in molding society. The presentation and assessment of Perkins' model contributes to the public policy debate on efforts to improve the well-being of many residing in impoverished urban communities. The model is qualitatively different than those offered to date because of its emphasis on a parish church, long-term relationships, the relocation of leaders to the community, the reconciliation of people across race and class, and a redistribution predicated on a prior relocation and reconciliation. …

Social theory explicitly committed to elaborating the nature of social being and/or how we access social reality is experiencing something of a revival in economics.(1) The papers collected below can all be counted as contributing to this trend. In fact they all in some way connect with a specific social theory project of the sort in question, one that has been systematized within economics as critical realism.(2) Under this head, numerous results, arguments, conjectures, and critiques have been produced in recent years,(3) and the papers included below aim to take some of these specific developments further.(4) My own object in this introduction is merely to facilitate the contributions which follow: to outline something of their context and to sketch certain basic ideas and results they treat as "given," that are taken as sufficiently well grounded (if of course always corrigible) premises. UNDERLABORING Within economics critical realism has taken the role of underlaborer for a more fruitful approach to scientific explanation (Lawson, Peacock and Pratten 1996). In this it has been both critically explanatory (of the existing situation in economics) and in varying degrees developmentally constructive (in elaborating an alternative perspective). In the following paragraphs, as in the ordering of the papers included below, the move is from the (more) critical to the (more) constructive moment. One basic object of critical realism in economics has been to identify the basic nature and error of mainstream economics. Most critics of the mainstream project have, in attempting to characterize it, isolated particular substantive claims, such as theories of rationality, or of equilibrium. It has been the contention of critical realism, in contrast, that it is at the level of method that its essence lies. In fact the insight that it is not substantive theory that defines the project is clear enough once we recognize that, despite the mainstream project being widely regarded as persisting, specific substantive theories come and go, often with some rapidity. Even the cherished conceptions of rationality and of equilibrium have been dispensed with in recent contributions regarded as central to the mainstream (see Lawson 1997: chapter 8). Yet through all its transformations and apparent metamorphoses the essential method of mainstream economics has been found to remain constant. It is this, then, that must be taken as the most central and defining feature of the mainstream project.(5) DEDUCTIVISM The method of the mainstream project which, according to critical realist analysis, is both its essence and its error is, briefly put, closed system modeling. This is an error in that the social world appears to be quintessentially open and not susceptible to scientifically interesting local closures. By a closed system here I simply mean situations in which regularities of the form "whenever event (or state of affairs) x then event (or state of affairs) y" occur. Methods of analysis, including modes of explanation, which are formulated on the presupposition that elaborating regularities of this form or structure are at least necessary in science(6) can be labeled deductivist. It is deductivism so interpreted that, it has been shown elsewhere (Lawson 1997), characterizes mainstream economics and which, in an open social system, is the essential error of modern economics. Now it does not follow that because deductivism is a mistake, science and explanation are thereby impossible. Rather the latter need to be more adequately conceptualized. An important observation here is that event regularities of the sort presupposed in deductivism actually occur only under rather specific conditions. In fact outside astronomy event regularities of interest in science usually occur only in conditions of experimental control. Once this is recognized it is easily seen that any conception which ties science to activities involving the elaboration of event regularities serves systematically to fence off science from most of the goings on in the world. …

The paper discusses the ontological aspect of naturalism by recasting the debate between reductionist and functionalist views of organization. Crude naturalism advocates the reduction of organizational goals to the presumed preconstituted preferences of its members, while antinaturalism maintains that the organization has an individuality to the extent that the behavior of members is a function of organizational goals. The paper argues that both camps ignore complexity. The idea of complexity highlights the context-sensitivity of the action of agents. The idea promises to supersede the simplistic reductionism/functionalism dichotomy and, hence, to embrace naturalism without falling into reductionism.

The economic status of children in single mother families should be a topic of great concern to U.S. policymakers. In a recent paper, Irwin Garfinkel and Sara McLanahan report that "[m]ore than half of the current generation of children will live with a single mother before reaching age eighteen, and many of these children will spend their entire childhood with a single mother" (Garfinkel and McLanahan, 1992, p. 1). This is particularly significant because children living with a single mother are likely to experience high levels of economic insecurity. Census data indicate that about half of these children live in families with incomes below the federal poverty level (Garfinkel and McLanahan, 1992, p. 2). In addition, international data indicate that the relative status of single mother families is far worse in the U.S. than in other Western industrialized nations.(1) Recent comparative analyses of poverty and social policy suggest that the U.S. income support system is an important factor in the relatively high levels of economic insecurity among single mother families in the United States.(2) The U.S. income support system has important structural features that distinguish it from the income support systems of other industrial nations. Perhaps the most important feature is the distinction between "social insurance" and "public assistance" income transfer programs. Social insurance programs are designed primarily to protect workers and their families from loss of income due to retirement, illness, disability, or unemployment. They are tied to previous employment and earnings, and the benefits are typically viewed as earned income. They generally have minimum or national levels set by the federal government. Public assistance programs, on the other hand, are designed to raise the income and/or consumption levels of the poor. One must pass a means-test to qualify for the benefits, which tend to be much lower than those provided by social insurance transfers and often vary significantly from state to state (Burtless, 1986, pp. 19-21; Garfinkel and Haveman, 1982, pp. 2-3). Although the term income support is used to include both types of programs, Americans "make a sharp conceptual and evaluative distinction" between public assistance and social insurance programs (Skocpol, 1988, p. 296). Social insurance and public assistance programs provide benefits of different degrees of adequacy and coverage to different groups in society. This distinction has led some authors to describe the U.S. income support system as part of a "dual" or "two-tiered welfare state" with, "a top layer of increasingly generous, politically legitimated social insurance programs and a bottom layer of politically vulnerable programs aimed at the poor" (Weir, Orloff, and Skocpol, 1988, p. 287). Previous writers have used the model of the dual welfare state to examine the status of poor women and single mother families.(3) In these earlier analyses, the emphasis was on how families headed by women have been treated differently than families headed by men in the dual welfare state. Our paper focuses more specifically on the population of single mother families and the policy distinctions that have been made within this population. We expand the concept of the dual welfare state and use it to empirically examine programs that aid children in different types of single mother families. Our paper adds to the existing literature by combining and reanalyzing many of the separate strands of thought contained in earlier works and by examining issues that have not been fully addressed in the dual welfare state literature.(4) The first section of the paper reexamines the historical evolution of the dual welfare state in the U.S. It argues that income support programs were shaped by the combined interactions of the work ethic, racial politics, and traditional gender ideology, as well as the transactions of the key players involved in the passage of the Social Security Act and its amendments. …

It is the goal of this paper to discuss the connections between social economic and feminism and in the process to make a constructive contribution to the future development of social economics by explicating the challenges feminism poses for social economics. In this context it is important to emphasize that neither social economics nor feminism is considered here to be homogenous theories, but that there are different strands in each. This paper will, therefore, start in the first two sections by providing brief summaries of the broad commonalities between the different strands of each - i.e., the themes that account for one being considered feminist and the other social economics. In part three the similarities between social economic thinking and feminist thinking will be discussed. The last part is devoted to discussion of feminist challenges to social economics. Common Themes in Social Economics In discussing the evolution of social economics in America, Bill Waters emphasizes two phases in the history of social economics. The first phase can b identified as the orthodox phase spanning the period 1941-1965. This phase was dominated by Thomas F. Divine who accepted orthodoxy's positive versus normativ dichotomy in the definition of economics. According to Waters, Divine saw economics as consisting of a theoretical part, which deals with positive and thus ethically neutral inquiry, and a second part that concerns economic policy and thus action rather than theory. It was only in this second non-theoretical policy dimension that economics deals with ethical issues (Waters, 1990). The second phase of the evolution of social economics started around 1965, and it was in this stage that social economics and its journal the Review of Social Economy opened up to a plurality of perspectives. Waters identifies several reasons for this change in direction, the first of which is particularly relevant for feminist concerns: First, as the new editor in 1965 I expressed interest in two approaches: the theory of social economics--inquiry into "the very principles that shape the economic"--and social architecture--"the strategy of reform and efficacy of plans for the best system" (Waters, 1965, p. 115). Both of these are inimical t mainstream economists: the first because practitioners of science do not find i necessary to investigate the basic principles of their paradigm, the second, social architecture, because while economic scientists describe, analyze, and apply their discipline they are not involved, qua scientists, in the strategy o reforming the science. Here was a not-so-subtle commitment to the Review to (1) a reconstructive (solidarist) approach and (2) a sociopolitical inquiry (Waters 1990, p. 98). Waters identifies five different strands of social economics that became predominant in the second phase--solidarist, institutionalist, neo-Marxist, neo-Kantian (or deontological), and resources economics (Waters, 1990, p. 99). Despite their differences, they share several commonalities that make it possible to consider them social economics--to publish in the same journal and to carry on a constructive, though at times heated, conversation. Waters claims that what "helped to make the ideologically diverse pieces compatible was a common, personally humanistic base." For instance, the institutionalist "and neo-Marxist articles in the Review tended to be more humanistic than their deterministic counterparts published elsewhere" (Waters, 1990, p. 99). William Dugger points to three specific commonalities between the different strands of social economics, namely, their value directedness, their ameliorative nature, and their holistic perspective (Dugger, forthcoming 1994). According to Dugger, all social economists reject the normative/positive distinction of orthodox theory and are value-directed in the sense that they se it as their responsibility to make explicit the values that have helped "them choose what problems to investigate and what solutions to advocate. …

The term "economic ideology" usually brings to mind distinctions between "free market" capitalism and Marxism. In this paper, the term "ideology" is used in a slightly different way. The dictionary definition of "ideology" includes "Manner or content of thinking characteristic of an individual or class" (Webster's 1961). What are some of the elements of the "manner or content of thinking" that characterize economists? In particular, what are the pictures of human nature we carry around in our heads, and how do we use these in putting together something we consider to be "good" economics? Of course, one of the interesting things about ideologies is that, while one can always point out the flaws of another's, one is always reluctant to believe that one has one, oneself: "They are ideologues; I am simply right." The aspects of the belief systems of economists that are examined here are so basic that to most practitioners they seem only "natural." This paper questions assumptions that have often been thought to be unquestionable, that have been thought to be at the very foundation of economic science. The first section explains why gender is an important issue in the discussion of ideology. The next section applies a feminist critique to the ideology of mainstream North-American economics. The last section, perhaps of special interest to readers of this journal, applies a feminist critique to one example of social economics, Mark A. Lutz and Kenneth Lux's Humanistic Economics: The New Challenge. I. Ideologies and Gender What comes to mind when one suggests a discussion of "gender and economics"? To many people, this suggests a focus on women's roles in the economy. The phrase may also conjure up the issue of the role which women have played, however small, as members of the economics profession. Feminist scholars suggest, however, that the role of gender in the academic disciplines may go far beyond whether or not women are included as the subjects of studies or in the group doing the studying. There is also the question of whether the assumptions used in doing studies, their methods and conclusions, are based in ideologies that are particularly tied to on furthering of male interests. The so-called "New Home Economics," for example, while bringing to the fore many issues historically of special concern to women, has been accused of simply formalizing and reinforcing outdated assumptions about male and female roles (see Ferber and Nelson, 1993b). If one accepts the notion that economics has, at least in the past, demonstrated a neglect of "women's issues" and anti-feminist biases, there are several alternatives one might think of for reforming the profession. One may be simply to increase the number of women in the profession, on the assumption that greater representation will correct the problems. Another alternative may be to encourage feminist researchers to work within the accepted confines of the discipline, but with greater sensitivity to the role of unexamined assumptions about proper roles for men and women in determining policy conclusions. If economics were to take its clues from other disciplines, it might consider the notions of "gynocentric" (woman-centered) science or feminist "postmodernist" approaches which have been discussed there. The so-called woman-centered approach rejects all of what it perceives as male-centered science, including norms of objectivity and analytical inquiry, in favor of completely distinct assumptions and methods, while the postmodernist approach, in its more high-brow forms, uses techniques of literary criticism to "deconstruct" traditional understandings (see Ferber and Nelson, 1993b).(1) But yet another alternative remains, which does not require the assertion that women "think differently" or the overthrow of all traditional understandings, but only an investigation into how we have come to understand economics and gender in particular ways. This is an approach which considers both economics and gender to be socially constructed. …

Dawson, L. "Self Affirmation, Freedom and Rationality: Theoretically Elaborating 'Active' Conversions," Journal for the Scientific Study of Religion, 29, 2, 1990, pp. 141-63. Downton, J.V. Rebel Leadership: Commitment and Charisma in the Revolutionary Process, New York, Free Press, 1973. Dugger, W.M. "Social Economics: One Perspective," Review of Social Economy, December, 1977. Etzioni, A. "Dual Leadership on Complex Organizations," American Sociological Review, 30, 1965, pp. 688-98. An important project for Social Economics is to explain phenomena which are unintelligible within the framework of economic theory built up from the neoclassical first principles of economic rationality. Leadership represents an example of this type of phenomenon. Despite the fact that leadership has received considerable attention from other disciplines and has been found by researchers such as Avolio and Bass (1987) and Yukl and Von Fleet (1982) to make a significant contribution to worker productivity and organizational performance, this phenomenon has received scant attention from economists. An exception in this regard is Casson (1991), who demonstrates how leadership can reduce the transactions costs of pairwise trading encounters and may therefore be a significant factor in pushing back the "social limits to growth" described by Hirsch (1977). The purpose of this paper is somewhat different. Its aim is to construct a theory of leadership on theoretical foundations laid by economists such as Hirschman (1982), Scitovsky (1976) and Boulding (1956, 1989), all of whom have rejected "economic man" as a limited and artificial construct and have tried to incorporate other dimensions of rationality into their analysis of individual and group behavior. It is thereby hoped that the theory which is developed will complement rather than compete with the extensive literature on this topic in philosophy, psychology, sociology, management, politics and anthropology. This literature has generated a wide range of definitions of leadership. It is, therefore, necessary to now examine those definitions which will be relevant to the theory of leadership presented in this paper. I. Definitions of Leadership Writers on leadership typically point to the wide range of definitions of this phenomenon and proceed to examine a sample of them. However, as Bryman points out, the problem is that there is no consensually agreed one. Nevertheless, this writer does suggest that there is a fair degree of concordance concerning the nature of leadership in the literature which focuses on the study of leadership in organizations. He proposes that "the common elements in these definitions imply that leadership involves a social influence process in which a person steers members of a group towards a goal" (Bryman, 1986, p. 2). As an influence process leadership integrates the purposes of leaders and followers into a symbiotic mutually interdependent relationship. It, therefore, constitutes the type of integrative relationship which Boulding (1989) distinguished from threat and exchange as a category of social relationship and source of power. This paper will use the concept of a quest to describe the common pursuit which binds both leaders and followers together in this type of integrative relationship. It is characteristic of leaders that they invite followers to join them on a particular quest. The appeal of a quest often lies in the significance of the contribution it can make both to a follower's own life and to the communities within which this life is imbedded. However, as MacIntyre has argued, this contribution may only become apparent during the course of the quest although "without some at least partly determinate conception of the final telos, there could not be any beginning to the quest" (1981, p. 219). Although leaders and followers are bound together by a common quest, the leader is distinct from his(1) followers in that he "takes the initiative in making the leader-led connection" (Burns, 1978, p. …

I. Introduction God's proclamation in the holy Koran is crystal clear: "Men have authority over women because Allah has made one superior to the other," (Koran, verse 34, sura 4). Woven widely and deeply into the fabric of Islamic jurisprudence and culture, this will of God has canonized patriarchy and produced and legalized gender inequality; subordination; and exploitation in bedrooms, households, mosques, markets, courts, and governments. Approximately 500 million Muslim women live under Islamic jurisprudence embodied to various degrees in secular law. The constitutions of Muslim countries can be classified according to the degree to which they embody Islamic jurisprudence and range from the extremes of the fundamentalist laws of Saudi Arabia and Iran's radical Islamic constitution to Turkey's neutral secularist and Albania's socialist constitutions (Shepard, 1987). There is no room here to explain why societies differ in the degree to which they embody Islamic jurisprudence. I will argue that despite this wide variation in the practice of Islamic jurisprudence, the convergence of Islam and socialism in theory appear imponderable. Islam has coexisted with slavery, feudalism, and capitalism. And perhaps it will do so in practice with certain forms of socialism too, compromising some of its precepts and long-held traditions. However, due to recent developments in the socialist world, the tendency towards convergence is weakening or reversing in practice. In this paper class and extra-class exploitations are used to define gender exploitation in general and Islamic gender exploitation (IGE) in particular. In terms of jurisprudence, Islamic gender separatism is similar to that of the racial apartheid of the Republic of South Africa since it mandates discrimination and prohibits equal rights. There even exists a physical correspondence; women are restricted to the chador (veil) as blacks are restricted to certain geographical regions. Such laws do change the concrete social conditions and thus economic and other forms of gender relationships. By limiting opportunities and choices, a discriminative law increases the rate of exploitation beyond the level caused by socio-economic conditions. Thus, the rate will be higher for Muslim women than for those living under less gender-biased laws and comparable conditions. Gender policy in Iran is examined to show that even a radical or liberal interpretation of Islam fails to prevent the extra exploitation arising from Islamic production and reproduction precepts. The gender-biased Islamic inheritance, matrimonial, and criminal laws -- revealed in the holy book or proclaimed by the prophet -- are eternal in the eyes of the fundamentalist. Various types of exploitations are defined and linked to Islamic jurisprudence at conceptual and aggregate levels since individuals' human conditions are intractable. The main objective of a number of movements in the world today is the (re)establishment of Islamic rule -- combining spiritual and political authorities as in ancient times. From a contemporary perspective, this is a bad omen for women. The regime in Iran, claiming to be both revolutionary and Islamic, is selected as the case study because it is a vanguard. I shall use Islamic sources, literature on Muslim women (e.g., Moghadam, 1988; Ferdows, 1983; Tabari and Yeganeh, 1982; Higgins, 1985; Nashat 1983), gender inequality studies (e.g., Berch, 1984; Gottlieb, 1984; Sen, 1984; Himmelweit, 1984; MacKinnon, 1983; Kessler-Harris, 1986; Folbre, 1987; Tong, 1988; Folbre and Hartman, 1989; Fraad et al., 1989), and general theory of exploitation (Roemer, 1982) as background for this work. The application of Roemer's general theory of exploitation in analysis of Islamic exploitation is new and revealing. The case study also points out the contradictions inherent in synthesizing faith and socialism such as those existing in liberation theologies. The study of legitimizations of male (or female) dominance in other religions and their exploitative implications is beyond the scope of this paper. …

I. Introduction Over the past three decades, economic analysis has made substantial inroads into the area of legal decision making.(1) The march has not been without its detractors, both within the realm of mainstream legal theory (see Dworkin, 1985 and Michelman, 1978) and from the left-liberal side of the ideological spectrum, especially the Critical Legal Studies (CLS) school (see Kelman, 1987; Kennedy, 1985; Unger, 1983). There have also been some questioning voices within the economics sphere, and especially among institutionalists (see Samuels, 1989; Schmid, 1987; Mercuro, 1989; Liebhafsky, 1987; Medema, 1989; Samuels and Schmid, 1981). Yet, aside from the fact that there is some overlap between the institutionalist school and social economics, little work has been done in formulating an approach to law and economics from an explicit social economics perspective.(2) This paper attempts to lay some groundwork for accomplishing exactly this objective. However, it does so with two qualifications. First, social economics is many things to many people. Nowhere is this more apparent than in the excellent collection on social economics edited by Mark Lutz (1990). The social economics umbrella stretches over, among others, Catholic solidarists, institutionalists, Marxists, humanistic economists, Kantian deontological ethicists, and neoclassical economists. The common element that seems to bind the members of these groups who would label themselves social economists is "a profound interest in values and the process of valuation in order to more fully understand both economic behavior and the possibilities of improving the economic system" (Lutz, 1990, p. ix). Coupled with this is a strong sense of the importance of ethical values, variously defined, in judging economic outcomes. Given the pluralistic nature of social economics, it is probably impossible to design an approach to law and economics that will command universal assent among social economists. In light of this, it should be recognized that this paper is not intended to be the beginnings of the social law and economics, but rather the beginning of a social law and economics. The hope is that this article will stimulate others to analyze these issues from their own perspective within social economics. The second qualification to be made here is that this paper is not intended to be a comprehensive analysis of law and economics. Since the scope of law and economics is virtually as wide as the law itself, one cannot hope to treat all relevant issues within a single paper. Although the neoclassical approach to law and economics does present a fairly common over-arching paradigm, there are some idosyncracies across subfields. This paper will focus primarily on the general themes of neoclassical law and economics and suggest how these themes might be dealt with from the perspective of a social law and economics. Thus, while it is hoped that this paper will have a good deal to say about doing law and economics, it is in no way claimed that the ideas contained herein constitute a comprehensive approach to the field of law and economics. II. Neoclassical Law and Economics A. History The neoclassical school of law and economics dates itself to the work of Ronald H. Coase (1960) and Guido Calabresi (1961) in the early 1960s. This movement, along with the CLS (see Kelman, 1987; Kennedy, 1985; Unger, 1983), Law and Society (see the Law and Society Review), and literary theory (see White, 1987, 1990; Levinson and Mailloux, 1988) movements have evolved over the last three decades as descendants of the Legal Realist attack on law in the early Twentieth Century. The Legal Realists rejected the claim of mainstream legal scholars that law is an autonomous discipline able to resolve matters on its own terms without input from outsiders. Rather, they said, one needs to look outside of the law to justify legal outcomes. These modern movements have attempted to fill these gaps by incorporating economic theory, Marxism, critical theory, sociology, anthropology, feminist theory, and literary criticism into the analysis of law. …

I. Introduction Contemporary neoclassical economic thought has been characterised by an "imperialist" tendency to broaden the field of economic modelling to encompass social practices conventionally thought to be outside the traditional domain of economics. This presents social economics with the challenge of formulating alternatives to an approach which seems invariably to draw from practitioners that it is reductionistic. This paper examines the relevance for social economics of Alisdair MacIntyre's conception of a practice as it is presented in his acclaimed book After Virtue (MacIntyre, 1985). Section II outlines the MacIntyrean notion of a practice. Section III then examines the extent to which the MacIntyrean scheme can buttress the basic philosophical foundations of social economics. Section IV then examines the relevance of this scheme to practices in crisis. Section V applies these arguments to a practice in which all economists participate -- that of economic discourse. The main arguments of the paper are then presented in Section VI by way of conclusion. II. The MacIntyrean Concept of a Practice In After Virtue Alisdair MacIntyre has vigorously criticized the Enlightenment and its influence on contemporary ethics and has called for a return to the Aristotelian tradition in moral philosophy. A key feature of the latter tradition is a teleological scheme within which there is a fundamental contrast between "man-as-he-happens-to-be" and "man-as-he-could-be-if-he-realized-his-essential-nature." MacIntyre argues that there is a basic structure to the moral scheme which Aristotle analysed in the Nicomachean Ethics which was not essentially changed when it was placed within a framework of theistic beliefs during the Middle Ages: We have a threefold scheme in which human-nature-as-it-happens-to-be (human nature in its untutored state) is initially discrepant and discordant with the precepts of ethics and needs to be transformed by the instruction of practical reason and experience into human-nature-as-it-could-be-if-it-realised-its-telos. Each of the three elements of the scheme -- the conception of untutored human nature, the conception of the precepts of rational ethics and the conception of human-nature-as-it-could-be-if-it-realised-its-telos--requires reference to the other two if its status and function are to be intelligible (1985, p. 53). MacIntyre then examines Kierkegaard, Kant, Diderot, Hume and Adam Smith as contributors to the Enlightenment project of providing a rational justification for mortality in which "all reject any teleological view of human nature, any view of men as having an essence which defines his true end" (1985, p. 54). According to MacIntyre this project had to fail because it attempted to justify moral injunctions derived from Europe's ancient Greek and Christian heritage while at the same time depriving them of the teleological context within which they were intelligible. The consequences of this failure is that there is no rational way of securing moral agreement when rival arguments logically proceed from rival premises where "each premise employs some quite different normative or evaluative concept from the others" (1985, p. 8). There is, therefore, widespread implicit acceptance of emotivism, described by MacIntyre as "the doctrine that all evaluative judgments and more specifically all moral judgments are nothing but expressions of preference, expressions of attitude or feeling, insofar as they are moral or evaluative in character" (1985, pp. 11-12). The doctrine of emotivism provides a rationale for the positivist, value-free focus of neoclassical economics and presents a challenge to social economics which according to Stikkers "views normative issues as at least equally important for economics as empirical ones: economics is as much a branch of ethics as it is a social science" (1987, p. …

Do rationality and morality stand in opposition to one another? Can a person act rationally in a moral cause, and is it possible to act morally without doing just that? One's answer to these questions may vary with one's conception of morality, and also with one's conception of rationality. This paper argues that, while our conventional views of rationality are not very helpful in answering these questions, a different (and new) conception of rationality offers the possibility of an answer which is not sensitive to some large issues in moral theory. The proposed new view of rationality is discussed with its context in the first major section of the paper, while the second begins with an expository review of some concepts from moral philosophy which have application in a study of rationality, and then confronts the role of values in economics.

Social institutions that seek to realize justice must foster the moral disposition to act on the norms of justice. In order to spell out this claim, the paper turns to Hegel’s idea of Sittlichkeit ...

This paper explores the presence and consideration of economics in sociology, specifically its classical version. It identifies certain original and independent economic theories, concepts and appr...

On contemporary standard accounts exploitation is of man by man: One individual exploits another through a particular transaction. This paper offers a departure from the individualist transactional...