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In this review article, I take three themes from Lynne Chester and Tae-Hee Jo's edited collection Heterodox Economics: Legacy and Prospects. The first is Geoff Hodgson's critique which I summarise thus: heterodox economics lacks consensus, coordination, and organizational coherence because it lacks a definition of heterodoxy. The second and third themes are pluralism and interdisciplinarity. But pluralism has a shortcoming: even a sophisticated structured pluralism would remain within the disciplinary boundary of (heterodox) economics and, therefore, lack valuable insights found in other social science disciplines. Whilst interdisciplinarity appears to offer a solution, it too has a shortcoming: it connects disciplines, whilst leaving the boundaries between them in place. Moreover, the majority of heterodox economists know that economic phenomena are not separate from, but are entangled with, myriad social phenomena, and if so, investigation might require going beyond interdisciplinarity, perhaps to transdisciplinarity. The conclusion draws all these strands together, to consider their implications for the future prospect of heterodox economics. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Whilst terms like 'law of the tendency', 'tendency law' and 'tendential law' appear in Marxist political economy, they are unclear. This paper identifies the main conceptions of laws and tendencies and disambiguates them. Part 1 differentiates between law as (i) event regularity; (ii) event regularity/tendency; and (iii) tendency. Part 2 focuses on (ii) identifying five interpretations: tendency as a trend, cyclical variation, stochastically specified law, counterfactual event and a deliberately imprecise concept. Part 3 introduces tendency as the (transfactual) way of acting of a thing with properties. Part 4 explains why this conception of tendency is impossible to mathematise. Keywords Tendency, law, regularity law, tendential law, ontology, aetiology, critical realism, Introduction It is well known that Marx conceives of laws in terms of tendencies. In discussing the tendency for profit rates to equalise, for example, he suggests that this equalisation [...]

While socialists hardly need reminding that employers often mistreat their workers, we tend to overlook situations in which workers mistreat other workers. This tendency is exacerbated by discourses that urge us to act as consumers, and to treat cheap commodities as 'bargains' rather than, for example, as the result of someone else's poor working conditions. This paper uses arguments from political and moral economy to illustrate some of the ways in which workers, in their alter egos as consumers, are causally implicated in the poor pay and conditions of other workers, and uses Marx's notion of commodity fetishism to explain why we tend to overlook this., Introduction 'In all buying, consider first, what condition of existence you cause in the production of what you buy; secondly, whether the sum you have paid is just to the [...]

There are currently two main accounts of labour markets: the mainstream labour market (MLM) account, which avoids serious analysis of social structures; and a rather unsystematic socioeconomic account, which recognises that labour markets are embedded in social structures, but remains ambiguous vis-a-vis the nature of this embedding. Augmenting the latter with a critical-realist approach serves to reduce that ambiguity, and allows us to break completely with the idea that there are phenomena called 'labour markets' that are embedded in other phenomena called 'social structures'--and to move, instead, towards the realisation that labour markets just are, or are exhausted by, the very social structures that constitute them., Introduction Labour markets are central to the neoliberal agenda. Hardly a week passes without a government minister or a leading industrialist urging us towards ever greater labour-market flexibility. Tony Blair, [...]

Ashgate, Aldershot, 2002. pp 245 + ix ISBN : 0-7546-1779-3 (hbk) 42.50 £ Rejecting the fashionable notions that capitalism is no longer based upon labouring but upon consuming, and that [...]

Rules (i.e. formal rules) are injunctions, constituted by social phenomena. They are learned, mutually understood, located in artefacts and govern agents' actions. When rules are broken, formal sanctions occur. They are cognised and followed consciously. When rules are followed directly, they govern agents' actions. Rules always exist separately from the agents in a rule-circle. Whilst the term unofficial or informal rules is widely used, I consider this to be a mistake: informal rules are not real, the term reifies them. Norms are injunctions are constituted by socio-cognitive phenomena. They are learned, mutually understood and located as memories of past actions, in agents' cognitive systems. They govern agents' actions. Norms are cognised and followed with varying degrees of (un)consciousness. They are always internal to agents, located in their cognitive systems. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The paper argues that it is a mistake to define habit as behaviour or action; as a regular conjunction of actions; as a stock; as a form of automaticity (although habit is acquired and activated automatically); as a tendency, propensity or disposition (even though habit acts tendentially); as a mechanism; and as a process (even though habit is acquired and activated via several processes). A taxonomic definition is provided wherein habit is a cognitive representation of a cue-action response. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper uses critical realism to reflect upon the issue of theory in Marx's Labour Theory of Value (LTV). Like any theory, the LTV is rooted in a mode of theorisation. Rooting the LTV in an inappropriate (deductivist) mode of theorisation encourages the formulation of (quantitative) versions of the LTV that (a) have severe problems and (b) lack explanatory power. Conversely, rooting the LTV in an appropriate (causal-explanatory) mode encourages the formulation of (qualitative) versions of the LTV that (a) lack such problems and (b) have explanatory power.

Paul Feldman and Corinna Lotz, with Gerry Gold and Phil Sharpe: A World To Win: A Rough Guide to a Future Without Global Capitalism Lupus Books, 2004, 392 pp. ISBN [...]

The critical realist (CR) conception of open and closed (O&C) systems is not about systems: it is about (ir)regularities in the flux of events and states of affairs. It has recently been criticised on the grounds that critical realists (CRs) should take on board ideas about the general nature of systems; recognise that genuinely open social systems would be impossible; avoid polarities or dualisms where either there are event regularities and open systems, or there are no event regularities and closed systems and accept partial regularities and partially open systems; and understand that orthodox economics is not based upon event regularities, laws or Humean empiricism. The objective of this paper is to 'take stock' of these recent criticisms. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Meta-analysis has proved increasingly popular in management and organization studies as a way of combining existing empirical quantitative research to generate a statistical estimate of how strongly variables are associated. Whilst a number of studies identify technical, procedural and practical limitations of meta-analyses, none have yet tackled the meta-theoretical flaws in this approach. We deploy critical realist meta-theory to argue that the individual quantitative studies, upon which meta-analysis relies, lack explanatory power because they are rooted in quasi-empiricist meta-theory. This problem, we argue, is carried over in meta-analyses. We then propose a ‘critical realist synthesis’ as a potential alternative to the use of meta-analysis in organization studies and social science more widely. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]