Stakeholder value, corporate social responsibility and sustainability: Are these, and similar, concepts sufficiently clear for fruitful research in business ethics? What is the benchmark to prove their utility? Business Ethics and the Austrian Tradition in Economics is a treatise on the fundamental questions of business ethics and addresses significant shortcomings in the field. It is the result of correlating reflections on phenomena, resulting from an intersection of ethics, economics, methodology, and political and social philosophy. Sparked by the business ethicists’ tendency to consider certain areas outside their field and accept others unquestioningly, this book provides answers in the tradition of Austrian Economics and, in particular, of Hayek and Popper. Through detailed examination and reflection, this book presents the thesis that many themes in business ethics are discussed either unduly intensely, unbalanced or rarely, measured against what business ethics as a science should deliver. It does so by offering an answer to one of the most crucial questions in business ethics, namely that of justice in moral economic actions. Bouillon develops an original definition of morally just economic action in the course of three chapters, and subsequently uses it as yardstick, from which, in chapter four, he reads which of the relevant concepts and topics in business ethics ask for restatement. As a side-product Bouillon discloses logical inconsistencies in prominent political philosophies, and the consequences of these inconsistencies for maldevelopments in business ethics. Business Ethics and the Austrian Tradition in Economics illustrates and analyses the business etchics’ peculiarities particularly within German literature, providing the reader with a focus rarely found elsewhere. This book should be of interest to economics postgraduates and researchers looking at business ethics, economic theory, and social and political philosophy.

After the ‘financial crisis’ and ‘Great Recession’, some have called for replacing standard economic theory by heterodox models based upon behavioural approaches. The Responsible Economy argues that there is nothing wrong with economic theory. Instead, the problem has been a ‘devil’s pact’ of simplistic pro-market economics combined with simplistic Keynesian monetary policy. This book revisits the fundamental theorems in economics that state the conditions for markets to achieve efficiency. It has long been known that there are limitations of markets in dealing with externalities, increasing returns to scale and monopoly. The role of information in the economy was developed in economic theory in the 1970s onwards and in a world of imperfect and asymmetric information, markets perform poorly. Managers of firms engage in short-termism, take on excessive risk and misstate their own and their firm’s performance. While finance theory makes clear that much of the activity in the financial services sector is of no economic value and represents wasteful ‘financial engineering’. In this real world, it is economically inefficient for firms to maximise shareholder value. On the macroeconomics side, monetary expansion cannot be an effective substitute for addressing real problems of infrastructure and education investment. This book maintains that markets work best if individuals and firms behave ethically and responsibly. Employment should be a long-term relationship; firms should pay living wages, produce good products at a fair price, and pay their share of taxes. Where these standards don’t hold, governments should not try to micromanage through regulation, but set up simple and straightforward policies.

This book offers a strong contribution to the growing field of institutional economics, going beyond the question of why institutions matter and examines the ways in which different types of institutions are conducive to the enhancement of competitiveness and economic development. Adopting a variety of approaches, ranging from New Institutional Economics, Public Choice, Constitutional Political Economy and Austrian Economics, to more traditional economic approaches, contributors examine the important issues of interest to development economics. This book asks whether democracy is a pre-condition for economic development, what the proper role of government is in the age of globalization and whether successful government led policies were the cause of South Korea’s economic development. As well as these key questions, the book covers the issues of whether the government should rely on the market process to encourage economic development or must they interfere, and by what criteria one can judge a proposal for policies for economic prosperity. The book tries to make a contribution by introducing a variety of perspective, some argue in favour of industrial policies while others argue for a lesser role for the government and a greater entrepreneurial freedom. Some question the wisdom of promoting democracy as a necessary condition for economic development while others argue that political liberalization is the basis of lasting competitive edge of an economy. The book should be of great interest to students and researchers in need of a multi-perspective collection covering several approaches to the issues of institutional economics and national competition.

John Maynard Keynes expected that around the year 2030 people would only work 15 hours a week. In the mid-1960s, Jean Fourastié still anticipated the introduction of the 30-hour week in the year 2000, when productivity would continue to grow at an established pace. Productivity growth slowed down somewhat in the 1970s and 1980s, but rebounded in the 1990s with the spread of new information and communication technologies. The knowledge economy, however, did not bring about a jobless future or a world without work, as some scholars had predicted. With few exceptions, work hours of full-time employees have hardly fallen in the advanced capitalist countries in the last three decades, while in a number of countries they have actually increased since the 1980s. This book takes the persistence of long work hours as starting point to investigate the relationship between capitalism and work time. It does so by discussing major theoretical schools and their explanations for the length and distribution of work hours, as well as tracing major changes in production and reproduction systems, and analyzing their consequences for work hours. Furthermore, this volume explores the struggle for shorter work hours, starting from the introduction of the ten-hour work day in the nineteenth century to the introduction of the 35-hour week in France and Germany at the end of the twentieth century. However, the book also shows how neoliberalism has eroded collective work time regulations and resulted in an increase and polarization of work hours since the 1980s. Finally, the book argues that shorter work hours not only means more free time for workers, but also reduces inequality and improves human and ecological sustainability.

This book constitutes an up-to-date treatment of Russia’s economic development and economic policies since 2000, when Vladimir Putin became the President of Russia. After the slow decline and sudden collapse of the Soviet Union, Russia embarked upon a multi-faceted change. This included transition from central management to a market economy, from one-party rule to democracy, from multi-national empire to nation state, and from relative autarchy to opening up to the European and global communities. This book concentrates on economic change, exploring how in spite of steep production decline, widening welfare differentials and increasing social uncertainty, the 1990s also created many of the institutional and policy preconditions for a functioning market economy.

In 2008 the capitalist world was swept by the severest crisis since the Great Depression of the 1930s. Mainstream economics neither anticipated nor could account for this disastrous financial crisis, which required massive state intervention throughout the capitalist world. Karl Marx did anticipate this type of financial collapse, arguing that it was derivative from the ‘fetishism of commodities’ inherent in the capitalist mode of production. This book substantiates the foregoing claim by a journey from Marx’s analysis of commodities to the capitalist crisis of the twenty-first century. The book demonstrates that Marx's framework (1) demonstrates that capitalism is but one historical form of class society among many; (2) explains the transition from pre-capitalist to capitalist society; (3) reveals the concrete operation of a capitalist economy; and (4) shows why others would explain the capitalist economy in alternative theoretical frameworks. The central element in his framework from which all else derives is ‘the theory of value’. This book is not an exercise in the history of thought. It is an attempt to analyze the nature of contemporary capitalist society. While Marx’s analysis of capitalism has implications for political action, these need not lead one to embrace revolution in place of reform, though it can and has provided the analytical foundation for both. Marx’s analysis of capitalism is a coherent whole, and meaningful insights cannot be obtained by extracting elements from it. Weeks starts out by looking at the nature of capitalism and an analysis circulation, money and credit unfold from the theory of value. The nature and inherent necessity of competition are demonstrated in chapter eight. A consequence of competition, expressed in the movement of capital, is technical change, the contradictory impact of which is explained in chapter nine. This is brought together with the other elements of value theory (money, credit and competition) in chapter ten, where economic crises are treated in detail. The final chapter applies the theory of crisis to the extreme financial disturbances of the 2000s. This book should be of interest to students and researchers of economics, politics and sociology.

This volume brings together papers inspired by the work of Duncan Foley, an extraordinarily productive economist who has made seminal contributions to a wide variety of areas. Foley’s work cannot be easily classified, but one thread that runs through it is a critical examination (along both ethical and analytical lines) of conventional neoclassical economic theory, particularly involving general equilibrium theories of value and money. Foley was a pioneer of complexity economics as well, which adopts approaches to these questions drawn from natural sciences, so the collection therefore has an interdisciplinary quality that will interest a wide variety of readers. Some of the chapters are intellectual biographies that contextualize and identify Foley’s contributions to Keynesian macroeconomics, Marxian value theory, and complexity theory in economics. The topics covered include the economics of complexity; the ethics of general equilibrium theory; the economics of climate change; applications of Keynesian, Marxian and Ricardian political economy; and money and financial crises. The collection should be useful to scholars who work in various economic traditions critical of the currently dominant free-market approach, but it also speaks to scholars of critical theory in various disciplines beyond economics such as the mathematicians, physicists, and other natural scientists who are interested in understanding the complexity of social processes using their analytical frameworks. This book should also appeal to graduate students in economics who are working in these traditions, as well as scholars (including current graduate students in orthodox programs) who are dissatisfied with the current state of economic theory and would like to satisfy their intellectual curiosity by sampling the contributions of critical theorists.

The capability approach has developed significantly since Amartya Sen was awarded the Nobel Prize in Economics in 1998. It is now recognised as being highly beneficial in the analysis of poverty and inequality, but also in the redefinition of policies aimed at improving the well-being of individuals. The approach has been applied within numerous sectors, from health and education to sustainable development, but beyond the obvious interest that it represents for the classical economics tradition, it has also encountered certain limitations. While acknowledging the undeniable progress that the approach has made in renewing the thinking on the development and well-being of a population, this book takes a critical stance. It focuses particularly on the approach’s inadequacy vis-à-vis the continental phenomenological tradition and draws conclusions about the economic analysis of development. In a more specific sense, it highlights the fact that the approach is too bound by standard economic logic, which has prevented it from taking account of a key ‘person’ dimension — namely, the ability of an individual to assume responsibility. As a result, this book advocates the notion that if the approach is used carelessly in relation to development policies, it can cause a number of pernicious effects, some of which may lead to disastrous consequences. Due to its multidisciplinary nature, this book will be of interest to those working in the fields of economics, philosophy, development studies and sociology.

The financial crisis – originated in 2008 in the United States – had a dramatic impact on the world economy. The European Union was immediately involved, but its reaction to the crisis was clearly inadequate. The misgovernment of the European economy not only put at risk the European Monetary Union, but it also caused further hindrances to the recovery of the global economy. The global financial turmoil shook deep-rooted beliefs. The doctrine of international neo-liberalism is more and more criticized. Nevertheless, the critics of neo-liberalism focus their attention on the relationship between the state and the market, as if the nation states, with their international organisations, have enough power for an effective global governance of the world economy. The model of European supranational integration, though seriously imperfect, can suggest some new way out from the crisis – even at the world level – based on a new relationship between the supranational government of the Union and the market. In this book, several academic disciplines are involved: international economics, international political economy, international law, international relations, political theory and democratic theory. Adopting such a multidisciplinary theoretical perspective, the volume tries to answer the following question: Is a more supranational Europe able to provide a better government of the EMU? Does this reform involve more European democracy?

The plethora of literature produced over the past decade in response to the perceived failure of the human rights project to deliver results for billions of people living in ‘adverse’ environments has usually focused on international legal standards and mechanisms, with little regard for the root structural realities that constrain their implementation. Hence, a text that primarily focuses on the major challenge of realisation of human rights in the context of diverse realities is urgently needed. This book, then, provides an analytical as well as inspirational text on human rights from a contextual perspective; it offers a reconceptualisation of human rights as not merely legal resources, but political tools as well. After an introduction that familiarizes the reader with some of the key concepts used throughout, the book is divided into six chapters. The first two combine a critique of the overly legal use of human rights with a reconceptualisation of their potential as powerful tools outside of the legal context. The next two chapters examine the nature of the structural challenges that face realisation, both on the global and on the local level. The last two chapters analyse two major areas of the human rights deficit: the structural non-implementation of the rights of the poor and the failing protection of non-dominant collectivities. Finally, a concluding chapter elaborates on the main findings and insights gained. The book combines rigorous juridical study with a focus on political-economic analysis of rights in context. Hence, it aims at an interdisciplinary treatment of human rights as opposed to current texts that have a tendency to be monodisciplinary. The book should be of interest to students of human rights, political economy, law and conflict studies, as well as those who work or research in these areas.