Class Struggle or Embedded Markets? Marx,Polanyi and the Meanings and Possibilities of Social Transformation

Marx and Polanyi both held that socialism, in one form or another, was a preferable and possible alternative to capitalism. Their ideas are seen to offer theoretical tools to understand the tensions and contradictions of capitalism, and to inform ways to overcome them. This paper discusses Polanyi's work from a Marxist perspective in order to illuminate his strengths and weaknesses. Its main focus is to discuss Polanyi's juxtaposing of commodification against exploitation, in diagnosing the problems of capitalist expansion. We suggest that by juxtaposing these two moments, Polanyi not only misses out on a crucial arena of capitalist activity (exploitation), but also undermines his own explication of processes of commodification. This has deleterious consequences for his understanding of the prevalence of poverty under capitalism. It also means that his vision of social transformation and of socialism is profoundly different, and potentially antithetical, to that of Marx. We suggest that for Polanyi's conception of de-commodification to gain greater traction it needs to be combined with Marx's analysis of exploitation and class struggle.     

On the intergenerational transmission of preferences

Recent contributions in economics have argued for a re-introduction of preference-based approaches to economic behavior and have called for an empirical investigation of preferences in order to overcome the prevalent skepticism against such explanations within the discipline. The present paper contributes to this discussion by assessing the extent, specificity, and malleability of preference transmission from parents to their children, and thus provides evidence for the clustering of preferences along family lines. Using data on eight activity choices from the British Household Panel Survey, we find strong (and positive) correlations between preferences of parents and their adult children. These correlations are found to be robust to a wide number of robustness checks but to vary considerably across activities, suggesting that parents may have more influence over some preferences than over others. Further investigations also show that this influence is surprisingly robust to a wide number of potentially intervening factors.     

“I recycle,I turn out the lights”: understanding the everyday sustainability practices of backpackers

As holidays merge more intimately with the everyday lives of an increasing number of people, questions of sustainability in tourism contexts become ever more urgent. Using the concept of everyday practices, in which sustainability is thought to emerge in the routines of people going about their day-to-day lives, this mixed-method study aimed to understand how sustainability figures in the practices, of backpackers. Findings revealed sustainability to be of minimal concern to most backpackers who nevertheless performed a range of sustainable practices but unintentionally. Environmental sustainability was practised via reduced resource consumption and waste, economic sustainability by working and spending more money overall than other tourist types, and social sustainability through demonstrating cultural respect and community participation. The main factors encouraging sustainable practices amongst backpackers were their low-budget focus and their use as a labour source by industries that require temporary and flexible workers. When backpackers were employed, each facet of sustainability became mutually reinforcing. The results of this study are in contrast to usual perceptions of tourism as a time in which norms of sustainable behaviour are suspended, as backpacking was found to provide opportunities for the performance of more sustainable practices compared to home.     

The low return distortion of the Sharpe ratio

This article formalizes the undesirable property of the Sharpe ratio that a fund with a certain poor performance can increase its Sharpe ratio in a prospective period by generating a sufficiently negative excess return. Specifically, we set out the conditions that a fund must meet to be exposed to this kind of effect. Furthermore, we provide a formal statement of the excess return value that needs to be deceeded to obtain a higher Sharpe ratio. In an empirical application, we investigate the practical relevance of this kind of distortion. We find that an economically significant number of funds listed in the CISDM hedge fund database have at least once reported a sufficiently negative return, causing an increased Sharpe ratio fund performance.     

The mean credibility formula is a bayes rule

Abstract

Recent advances in statistical decision theory and stochastic processes provide the machinery for showing that the celebrated mean credibility formula is a Bayes rule within a nonparametric context. The credibility factor is obtained as a simple function of the parameter that characterizes the prior distribution. A natural estimator of leads to a credibility formula having a form similar to the James-Stein estimator.     

The impact of job security on job satisfaction in economic contractions versus expansions

Job security, often measured using the perceived risk of job loss in the near future, is a significant determinant of job satisfaction. We posit that the impact job security has on job satisfaction is not only a function of how likely it is that a worker loses a job but also how likely it is that a worker could find another. The effect this has on worker job satisfaction then is different depending on whether perceived job loss occurs (or not) when job openings are scarce or when job openings are plentiful. We use difference-in-differences analysis of the 1997 and 2008 waves from the National Study of the Changing Workforce to show that three measures of job security increase private sector worker job satisfaction, and reduce worker incentives to quit, more when job openings are relatively scarce (during contractions) than when job openings are relatively plentiful (during expansions). We find that our results are strongest among less-educated workers.     

Why adopt social enterprise software? Impacts and benefits

This paper explores the performance impacts and benefits of the adoption of Social Enterprise Software (SES). SES forms a nested innovation, given that its adoption requires an already established infrastructure of Information and Communication Technology. To control for induced sample selection, we use a two-step estimation procedure. Based on German firm-level data our results confirm that firms which use business-to-business (B2B) e-commerce applications are more likely to adopt SES. The estimated correlations also provide weak evidence for complementarity between B2B e-commerce and SES. We show that two measures of firm performance, i.e. sales and labor productivity, are highest for firms using SES and B2B e-commerce applications in conjunction.     

Social franchising: A systematic review

Abstract

Social franchising is starting to garner more interest among researchers and practitioners as a replication approach used to help address a growing array of societal issues in both developed countries and emerging economies. While there has been a proliferation of experimentation with social franchising that is occurring on the global stage, the knowledge base remains fragmented. A comprehensive review of the empirical and practitioner literature has not been done. This article fills the void by reviewing the past decade of literature and will be of interest to governments, non-governmental organizations (NGOs), philanthropists, social impact investors, corporations devoted to social goals, and other key players who support the scaling up or replication of ventures that strive to address societal ills by creating pathways to health and prosperity.     

Morally Contentious Technology-Field Intersections: The Case of Biotechnology in the United States

Technologies can be not only contentious—overthrowing existing ways of doing things—but also morally contentious—forcing deep reflection on personal values and societal norms. This article investigates that what may impede the acceptance of a technology and/or the development of the field that supports or exploits it, the lines between which often become blurred in the face of morally contentious content. Using a unique dataset with historically important timing—the United States Biotechnology Study fielded just 9 months after the public announcement of the successful cloning of the first mammal (i.e., Dolly the sheep)—we find that microlevel factors (i.e., conservative Christianity) predict unfavorable judgments of the technology-field intersection while macrolevel representations [i.e., exposure to Science, Technology, Engineering, and Mathematics disciplines and media coverage] predict more favorable judgments.     

Globalization,technical change and the skill premium: magnification effects from human – capital investments

This paper shows that endogenous adjustments in the composition of labour supplies magnify the effects of changes in commodity prices on the measured skill premium under quite plausible conditions. These composition effects arise from decisions of individuals with heterogeneous inherent abilities about acquiring human capital. They reinforce the well-known Stolper?–?Samuelson effect on the measured skill premium in countries with a sufficiently high relative supply of skilled labour, but compensate them otherwise. As a result, the model can account for the observation of a worldwide increase in the skill premium during the last two decades.