Paul Adler was Program Chair for the 2013 meeting of the Academy of Management in Orlando, Florida, in August. In this capacity, he organized the “All-Academy Theme” component of the meeting program, helped by a committee of Tom Kochan (MIT), Jerry Davis (U. Michigan), Carrie Leana (U. Pittsburgh), and Stella Nkomo (U. Pretoria). The theme was “Capitalism in Question.” The essay below is an edi...

Intellectual temper of social and economic studies of our time are profoundly influenced by modern development of physical sciences and that of logical, mathematical and statistical analysis. In sorting out enlightening intellectual insights from occasionally muddled reasons of classical theories, intelligence of our time has nurtured a mental attitude in favor of precise, quantitative and piec...

Under capitalism there is a potential for increasing socioeconomic complexity and greater specialization of skills. One implication is that there is a potential for increasing inequalities of wealth, income, and power on both a national and international scale. What follows is an updated, broad-brush account of possible future developments in a knowledge-intensive capitalist economy. They can t...

Traders Versus the State: Anthropological Approaches to Unofficial Economics is at once both a frustrating book to read and a fascinating book to review. One might suppose from its title that the book deals with conflict between officials on the one hand and those engaged in tradingor merchandising on the other. And one might suppose from reading the subtitle that the book focuses on the activi...

Rob Albritton’s Let Them Eat Junk: How Capitalism Creates Hunger and Obesity (2009), published by Arbeiter Ring Press in Canada, and Pluto Press in the UK, offers a welcome and urgently needed analysis of “how the profit fixation of capital has led us deeply into a dangerously unsustainable system of food provision, a system that totally fails when it comes to distributive justice and to human ...

Capitalism is often defined as an economic system where private actors are allowed to own and control the use of property in accord with their own interests, and where the invisible hand of the pricing mechanism coordinates supply and demand in markets in a way that is automatically in the best interests of society. Government, in this perspective, is often described as responsible for peace, j...

My personal observations of the conditions in and behaviors emitted by citizens in several socialist states and their capitalistic neighbors are first described and compared. I then discuss the applicability of behavioral theory to individual behavior in all environments and how those principles can be applied to an understanding of the emergence of capitalistic relationships. I suggest that be...

Business historians know that public policy--the mix of law, public administration, and politics--has had an important impact on the development of the American business system. The scholarly issue, of course, is how important, and in what ways in particular. Business and economic historians have produced a rich literature on the place public policy had in building a transportation infrastructu...