Schools out : Adam Smith and pre-disciplinary international political economy

In this article, I argue that invocations of Adam Smith in international political economy (IPE) often reveal the influence therein of a disciplinary ontological disaggregation of economic and non-economic rationality, which I claim is obscured by the tendency to map its complex intellectual contours in terms of competing schools. I trace the origins of the disciplinary characterisation of Smith as the founder of IPE's liberal tradition to invocations of his thought by centrally important figures in the perceived Austrian, Chicago and German historical schools of economics, and reflect upon the significance to IPE of the reiteration of this portrayal by apparent members of its so-called American and British schools. I additionally contrast these interpretations to those put forward by scholars who seek to interpret IPE and Smith's contribution to it in pre-disciplinary terms, which I claim reflects a distinct ontology to that attributed to the British school of IPE with which their work is often associated. I therefore contend that reflection upon invocations of Smith's thought in IPE problematises the longstanding tendency to map its intellectual terrain in terms of competing schools, reveals that the disciplinary ontological consensus that informs this tendency impacts upon articulations of its core concerns and suggests that a pre-disciplinary approach offers an alternative lens through which such concerns might be more effectively framed

Adam Smith’s Legacy for Ethics and Economics

This article challenges a popular understanding of the Wealth of Nations. According to this reading of Smith, self-interested, economic actors in free competition with each other unintentionally create a self-constraining system. This system, the “invisible hand” which governs market transactions, functions both to regulate these self-interests and to produce economic growth and well-being such that no one actor or group of actors can take advantage of other actors or take advantage for very long. We suggest that this is a misreading of Smith. Smith is not a laissez- faire economist. Economic exchanges occur and markets are efficient, according to Smith, precisely because we are not merely non-tuistic, and economic growth depends on what today we call the rule of law. Smith was the Professor of Moral Philosophy at Glasgow, and argues precisely against, and may not have even imagined, a separation of ethics from economics, ethics from commerce; or ethics from his idea of a viable political economy.

Negotiating Ambivalence: The Leadership of Professional Women's Networks

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What are bottom of the pyramid markets and why do they matter?

There are thousands of journal articles that concern themselves with markets at the bottom of the pyramid (BoP).1 What is there to say that hasn’t been said already? In 2002, an article published in the Harvard Business Review (Prahalad and Hammond, 2002) brought to the forefront of business and academic attention a ‘missing market’ that was claimed to be lying dormant, ignored by international and multination corporations yet worthy of attention for its potential to contribute to both economic and social prosperity. The notion of markets at the BoP is concerned with providing the ‘poor’ in developing and emergent economies with access to markets. Prahalad and Hammond (2002) champion the needs of the ‘invisible poor’ to the marketing efforts of multinational corporations. Prahalad and Hammond’s (2002) assert that the poor as ‘consumers’ constituted a sizeable market opportunity but this view has been criticised. In this essay, we explore how BoP markets might be reconceptualising to better shape interventions that relieve poverty