Editorial: The times they are A-Changin

The famous1963 song by Bob Dylan The Times They Are A-Changing rings true in the year 2011. As in the1960s, there are young and old people on the streets demanding change to the economic system, an end of war, climate justice, women’s rights, gender equity and true democracy. The year has seen Arab revolutions, European governments toppling, faltering banking systems, and the occupation movement full of young and old spreading the message of the 99 percent fromWall Street to 900 cities around theworld

How Economics Undermines Our Relationships With Each Other and With the Planet

Economic

Future Generations: economic, legal and institutional aspects

In economics, the issue of ‘future generations’ is mainly related to the environmental problems of resource consumption and pollution and their distribution over long time horizons. This paper critically discusses fundamental concepts in economics, such as efficiency and optimality, in relation to the incorporation of future generations in present day decision-making. Cost–benefit analysis (CBA) and discounting are used as a starting point and criticized for its inherent flaws such as incommensurability of values and its tendency to hide rather than reveal underlying values which are assumed to be fixed. We then investigate alternative approaches, in which, unlike in CBA, the preferences are not assumed to be a priori but must be constructed. Thus, interest groups or individuals must sit down together and figure out what things seem to be worth. The aim is to involve all interested parties in planning for the future. Similarly, on a national and regional level, increasingly stakeholder processes, deliberative and interest group procedures are used to develop strategies and visions for resource management and conservation. A similar case can be made for institutions at the international level. The legal examples provided in this paper show that rather than only installing an institution such as the guardian for the future on the global level, more ‘democratized’ bottom up approaches might be more appropriate

Why Social Enterprises Are Asking to Be Multi-stakeholder and Deliberative: An Explanation around the Costs of Exclusion.

The study of multi-stakeholdership (and multi-stakeholder social enterprises in particular) is only at the start. Entrepreneurial choices which have emerged spontaneously, as well as the first legal frameworks approved in this direction, lack an adequate theoretical support. The debate itself is underdeveloped, as the existing understanding of organisations and their aims resist an inclusive, public interest view of enterprise. Our contribution aims at enriching the thin theoretical reflections on multi-stakeholdership, in a context where they are already established, i.e. that of social and personal services. The aim is to provide an economic justification on why the governance structure and decision-making praxis of the firm needs to account for multiple stakeholders. In particular with our analysis we want: a) to consider production and the role of firms in the context of the “public interest” which may or may not coincide with the non-profit objective; b) to ground the explanation of firm governance and processes upon the nature of production and the interconnections between demand and supply side; c) to explain that the costs associated with multi-stakeholder governance and deliberation in decision-making can increase internal efficiency and be “productive” since they lower internal costs and utilise resources that otherwise would go astray. The key insight of this work is that, differently from major interpretations, property costs should be compared with a more comprehensive range of costs, such as the social costs that emerge when the supply of social and personal services is insufficient or when the identification of aims and means is not shared amongst stakeholders. Our model highlights that when social costs derived from exclusion are high, even an enterprise with costly decisional processes, such as the multistakeholder, can be the most efficient solution amongst other possible alternatives

Online, on call: : the spread of digitally-organised just-in-time working and its implications for standard employment models

This article questions whether the dominant policy discourse, in which a normative model of standard employment is counterposed to ‘non-standard’ or ‘atypical’ employment, enables us to capture the diversity of fluid labour markets in which work is dynamically reshaped in an interaction between different kinds of employment status and work organisation. Drawing on surveys in the UK, Germany, Sweden and the Netherlands that investigate work managed via online platforms (‘crowdwork’) and associated practices, it demonstrates that crowdwork represents part of a continuum. Not only do most crowd workers combine work for online platforms with other forms of work or income generation, but also many of the ICT-related practices associated with crowdwork are widespread across the rest of the labour market where a growing number of workers are ‘logged’. Future research should not just focus on crowdworkers as a special case but on new patterns of work organisation in the regular workforce.Peer reviewe

Inequality of Income and Wealth in the Long Run: A Kaldorian Perspective

The paper examines the determinants of income and wealth inequality in a Kaldorian model where the profit share adjusts to clear the goods market and the long-run output-capital ratio is constant. The approach is radically different from both the mainstream approach that stresses properties of production function and the Kaleckian approach that emphasizes the long-run adjustment of utilization. The Kaldorian model is used to identify several developments that may have caused increasing inequality in income and wealth since the early 1980s, including the shift of the power relation in corporate firms in favor of top managerial pay, the decline in the retention rate, increasing share buybacks, rising indebtedness of lower-income households, and the stock market boom in the 1990s. In contrast to Piketty\u27s explanation, the decline in the natural rate of growth reduces inequality of income and wealth in this Kaldorian framework

A discounting framework for regulatory impact analysis

This article presents a methodology designed to facilitate the systematic comparison of alternative discounting procedures for the costs and benefits of industrial regulatory activity. A discounting framework developed by Bradford is adapted for use in the context of industry regulation. Within this framework, the choice among the various discounting procedures is reduced to a choice between assumptions about various economic and financial parameter values. As an illustration of the way in which the framework can be applied, the article includes an examination of the validity of parameter assumptions implied by the discounting approach currently used by regulatory agencies in their analyses of regulations affecting the motor vehicle industry. Several hypothetical programs are analyzed to demonstrate the broad differences in program treatment that might be expected if this current discounting approach were replaced by procedures generated within the framework from more reasonable parameter assumptions. Sensitivity of the benefit/cost calculations to uncertainty about underlying parameters is also briefly discussed.Peer Reviewedhttp://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/45445/1/11077_2004_Article_BF00149750.pd

Managing cultural diversity in collaborations: a focus on management tensions

This article explores the management of cultural diversity in public and not-for-profit collaborations spanning organizational, professional and national boundaries. Through the framing of a culture paradox, it identifies three interrelated tensions pertaining to the management of cultural diversity towards collaborative advantage. These tensions address: interactions between organizations within a collaboration; interactions between individual actors and their orientation towards the collaboration and their host organization; and the quantity and extent of cultural diversity within a collaboration. The culture paradox and its inherent management tensions provide theoretical and practical conceptualizations that are relevant to management and governance of collaboration