Heterodox Economics Newsletter
Editor: Frederic S. Lee, University of Missouri-Kansas City, E-mail:
Book Review Editor: Fadhel Kaboub,
Assisted by Ergun Meric, University of Missouri-Kansas City
Newsletter 86
From the Editor
A few weeks ago there was a workshop at the University of Bremen on “Assessing Economic Research in a European Context”. The workshop seemed to be quite successful. It was attended by twenty-one participants who listened to ten papers. One of the interesting facts that emerged is that as a group heterodox economists cite mainstream economists more than they cite each other—a truly bizarre state of affairs. Some of the outcomes that came out of the workshop included developing better metrics for ranking journals and departments, better dissemination of heterodox papers, promoting more intra-communication (in terms of citations) among heterodox economists and their journals, increasing activities that promote pluralism in economics, and developing a website that would house ranking studies and lists and data bases. The papers given at the workshop are in the process of being revised, but a number of them will be given at conferences over the next few months and eventually published in the American Journal of Economics and Sociology. For a complete report on the workshop, click here.
Fred Lee
Call for Papers
The 14th Annual Conference of the European Society for the History of Economic Thought (ESHET) will be held at the Amsterdam School of Economics, University of Amsterdam, Amsterdam, The Netherlands.
The conference will take place 25-28 March 2010.
As at past ESHET conferences, proposals for papers or sessions on all aspects of the history of economic thought are welcome.
The special theme of the conference is:
The Practices of Economists in the Past and Today
Economists are practitioners, but the nature and history of their practices is not well understood. Practices include writing tracts to convince the Crown of the benefits of trade, carrying out surveys to tax and manage new colonies, taking part in debating societies to criticize government politics, travelling through the country to report on conditions, designing statistical classification schemes to frame the economy, and modelling economic problems from the armchair. Practices depend on institutional settings and technologies, which are themselves shaped by their outcomes.
Were the theories and practices of the Physiocrats dependent on Quesnay’s role as physician to Madame de Pompadour? Was Keynes’s practice as an economist not just the result of his involvement in the worlds of administration and art but also of the emergence of the telephone as a new technology of communication? To what extent did the interdisciplinary setting of the RAND corporation influence the change in economics after the war? Is the idea of an economic experiment in Glasgow University in the 18th century comparable to the experimental way of life in postwar mass education?
Possible topics with examples of influences on practices include:
· the role of visualisation (the Phillips machine, simulations, graphs,
barometers)
· the role of new technologies and instruments (computers, fMRI-scans, paper money, joint ventures, z-tree)
· the role of disciplines (economics and psychology, economics and sociology, economics and medicine)
· the role of sites (statistical institutes, the Political Economy Club, the economic laboratory, the Central Bank, Chestnut Street, Lancashire, rural Russia, Oxbridge, RAND)
· the role of audience (adviser to the King, journalist, academic)
Professor Charles Plott, Edward S. Harkness Professor of Economics and Political Science at the California Institute of Technology, and Karin Knorr Cetina, Visiting Professor of Anthropology and Sociology at University of Chicago have kindly agreed to give keynote lectures.
For proposals for papers and sessions on all topics in the history of economics an abstract of up to 400 words for a paper and up to 600 words for a session should be submitted by November 15, 2009. To submit an abstract, register at the conference website
(et.net/conference/2010) and follow the instructions. A selection of papers from the conference will appear in a future issue of the European Journal for the History of Economic Thought.
ESHET Young Scholars Seminar
ESHET invites young scholars (i.e. those who are working on or have just completed a PhD, regardless of their age) to submit their work to the Young Scholars Seminar to be held on the occasion of the ESHET Conference.
Four submissions will be selected: ESHET will cover board, accommodation and registration fees plus travel expenses up to €300. The authors of the selected papers will have 30 minutes each to present the paper and a senior scholar, appointed by the ESHET Council, will discuss it. Papers may be on any topic relevant to the history of economics, and are not restricted to the conference theme. ESHET encourages young scholars to participate in the conference. A one-year ESHET membership is offered to all young scholars who submit a paper. Candidates should e-mail a paper no longer than 9000 words to Professors Ragip Ege and Tiziano Raffaelli ( and ), by 10 January 2010. The results of the selection process will be communicated to the candidates by 15 February 2010. Papers that have not been selected will be considered for presentation at other conference sessions.
Scientific committee:
Annie Cot (University of Paris 1), John Davis (University of Amsterdam), Harro Maas (University of Amsterdam), Tiziano Raffaeli (University of
Pisa)
Local organizing committee: John Davis (University of Amsterdam), Harro Maas (University of Amsterdam), Tiago Mata (University of Amsterdam)
Call For Papers - The Erasmus Journal for Philosophy and Economics (EJPE)
EJPE is a peer-reviewed academic journal publishing research which improves our understanding of the methodology, history and inter-disciplinary relations of economics. EJPE is supported by the Erasmus Department of Philosophy and the Erasmus Institute for Philosophy and Economics (EIPE) and is an open access journal.
EJPE aspires to:
· publish high quality and interesting
contributions to the field of philosophy and economics.
· provide a forum for inter-disciplinary content and approaches that is particularly friendly to Young Scholars (graduate students and recent PhD graduates), supported by an efficient and constructive peer review process.
Call For Papers
Research domains
(1) Methodology of economics
Issues falling within the analytical philosophy of science tradition including the methodological analysis and appraisal of the concepts, theories and techniques of economics, both mainstream and heterodox. Contributions on methodological issues in evolutionary and institutional economics are particularly welcome.
(2) History of economic thought
Issues in the historical development of the ideas, theories, and methods of economics.
(3) Inter-disciplinary issues relating economics to other fields Issues arising from non-traditional sources of critique and investigation of economics, or the use of economics to investigate other fields, including for example, ethics; sociology; political philosophy; continental philosophy; literature. Such contributions will show a clear connection to economic issues and involve conceptual rather than purely theoretical or empirical analysis.
Content sought
Academic articles (with abstract; 4000-8000 words; [exceptional papers may be longer by arrangement])
Book reviews of significant recently published works crossing philosophy and economics (1000-2000 words)
Summaries of recently completed PhD theses in philosophy and economics (500-1000 words)
Deadline: October 1st
Sample Issue (Autumn 2008): Available online at
The EJPE Editors
<mailto:>
CALL FOR PAPERS
Work Matters:
28 th Annual International Labour Process Conference
Rutgers University, March 15-17, 2010
Heterodox economists, I would like to call your attention both to the upcoming International Labour Process Conference (ILPC), crossing the Atlantic to the United States for a change, and to the conference stream on “Are bad jobs inevitable?”, in which I am involved. If you are not familiar with ILPC, it is interdisciplinary (primarily sociological, but definitely hospitable to economists as well), and involves a lot of European researchers. Chris Tilly
The Conference:
The Annual International Labour Process Conference is a leading conference on work and employment. It brings together academics and policy makers from the sociology of work and employment, labour studies, business and management, human resource management, industrial relations, organization studies and a range of other disciplines. With exciting new streams and issues, the 2010 event provides a great opportunity for diverse groups of labour-oriented workplace researchers from different continents to communicate and collaborate. Selections of conference papers are published in edited books, with twenty now published. It is intended that a selection of papers from the bad jobs stream will be published in a journal special edition. Abstracts for the stream should be between 350-500 words and can be either theoretical and/or empirical. Abstract contents should enable the referees to determine what issue, development or problem is being investigated, how it is investigated, what the findings are and what contribution is being made to understanding in the field.
In addition to general papers the 2010 Conference will have the following special streams:
* Accounting, the financial crisis and the labour process: Tony
Tinker, Baruch College, City University of New York, US; Aida Sy, Manhattan College, US.
* Alternative Work Organisations: Maurizio Atzeni, Loughborough
University, UK; Dario Azzelleni, Johann Wolfgang Goethe University, Germany ; Immanuel Ness , Brooklyn College CUNY, US
* Are bad jobs inevitable? Chris Warhurst, University of
Strathclyde, UK; Patricia Findlay, University of Edinburgh UK; Francoise Carre, University of Massachusetts Boston, USA; Chris Tilly, UCLA, USA.
* Representations and Realities of Women's Work: Juliette Summers
Stirling University, UK; Doris Ruth Eikhof, Stirling University, UK; Marian Baird University of Sydney, AU; Eileen Appelbaum, Rutgers University, US.
* Skill Creation Systems and the Restructuring of the Global
Economy: David Finegold, Rutgers University, US.
* The economy of feelings: emotional labour, 'soft' skills and
emotional intelligence at work: Sharon C. Bolton, Strathclyde University Business School, UK; Irena Grugulis, Bradford School of Management. UK; Steve Vincent, Leeds University Business School, UK; Robin Leidner, University of Pennsylvania; US.
* Worker Power and the Labour Process, Past and Present: Dorothy Sue
Cobble, Rutgers University, US; Peter Winn, Tufts University, US.
ILPC 20108 Conference Organizers:
Paul Adler, University of Southern California, US.
Eileen Appelbaum, Rutgers University, US.
Dan Clawson, University of Massachusetts, US.
Adrienne Eaton, Rutgers University, US.
David Finegold, Rutgers University, US.
Mary Gatta, Rutgers University, US.
Ruth Milkman, University of California, Los Angeles, US
For questions about the conference please contact:
Please submit to www.ilpc.org.uk by October 31, 2009
SPECIAL INTEREST STREAM: Are bad jobs inevitable?
Despite or perhaps because of the recession, job quality has again become an issue. Until recently, government and academic interest has focussed on good jobs with high skill and high pay. However, evidence suggests a polarisation across the developed economies with good jobs and bad jobs. The latter are typically characterised by low skill, pay and prospects. They are often inadequately protected by collective bargaining and employment law. Often these jobs involve vulnerable workers, many of whom are female or racial/ethnic minorities, with low or no qualifications are often part-time and work in the retail, hospitality, health and social care sectors.
Labour process analysis has long sought to explore and explain why bad jobs exist and has implicitly been concerned about improving such jobs. The aim of this stream is to generate discussion between different perspectives on bad jobs, including the labour process tradition, the low-wage work research agenda, and analyses of tradeoffs between quality and quantity of jobs. We ambitiously seek to attract papers from sociology, economics, industrial relations and related disciplines as well as from practitioners looking at:
· Defining and measuring bad jobs
· How to explain variation and change in job quality across sectors and countries
· Generating better understanding of the practices and policies that might make bad jobs more bearable
· Generating better understanding of the levers and obstacles to workers exiting bad jobs into better jobs
· Exploring the policies and strategies for making bad jobs better
· Identifying any gaps in the evidence base and so future research agendas
Papers can be conceptual, empirical and/or policy-focused.
Stream Organisers:
· Chris Warhurst, University of Strathclyde, UK.
Email:
· Patricia Findlay, University of Edinburgh UK.
Email:
· Fran?oise Carré, University of Massachusetts Boston, USA.
Email:
· Chris Tilly, UCLA, USA.
Email:
CALL FOR PAPERS
Work Matters:
28th Annual International Labour Process Conference Rutgers University, March, 15-17, 2010
SPECIAL INTEREST STREAM: Representations and Realities of Women's Work
Women's working lives have been subject to significant changes in the 20th century, raising expectations for greater equality in 21st century workplaces and labour processes. Today, men and women are supposed to be equal in the workplace. In both legislation and rhetoric, equality of treatment and opportunity feature dominantly. Nevertheless, there are still clearly gender-related dimensions to how women's work is perceived, represented and undertaken. Therefore, this special stream seeks to investigate the representations and realities of women's work in the 21st century.
* Representations: Women's work is talked about and portrayed, described and
discussed in various ways, both in research as well as in the media, society and general public discourse. The images of women's work constructed and championed by such discourses act as powerful reference points for individual women (e.g. when making career choices or self-evaluating their work-life situation), for organisations and businesses (e.g. when designing workplaces, employment relationships or career paths) and for society at large (e.g. when choosing which issues and activities are considered legitimate and worth public attention, effort and resources).
* Realities: Women's education, work, career trajectories and broader
work-life choices remain influenced by gender-specific constraints and facilitators; including notions of traditional versus new female occupations, educational and professional socialisation, gender-specific lifestyles and career trajectories. These constraints and facilitators result in specific realities of women's work in low-pay, low status jobs as well as different, but nonetheless specific, realities and constraints for highly educated and professional women. Another key factor is job content, which, for instance in health care, hospitality, and child care, has specific ethnicity and class implications and creates the peculiar phenomenon of low status/high discretion jobs,
The stream calls for papers that address the above issues from novel/innovative theoretical and empirical perspectives, and particularly encourages work that examines the juxtaposition between the images and realities of women's work and how women negotiate this at work and at home. In doing so, papers will critically analyse how women's work is perceived, represented and undertaken.
The stream convene/ors welcome papers from interdisciplinary perspectives.