This paper investes testable restrictions on the time-series behavior of consumption and asset returns implied by a representative agent model with the spirit of capitalism in which intertemporal preference is represented by a utility function that generalizes conventional, time-additive, expected utility. In the recursive structure of preference, we examines the implication for consumption, po...

Economies are strange beasts; in the idiom of The Market, they are said to perform, to be bullish or bearlike. Although few living in the twenty-first century conceive of the market in true animistic terms, the power, the prevalence, the fundamentality of market capitalism within our society imbue it with a vitality that is conducive to animistic tropes. Economies are foundational: humans canno...

Introduction Despite pervasive debates around globalisation, the effect of international organisation and of foreign governments on labour relations has received little attention in industrial relations and in labour process theory: the former has long focussed on national institutions, while the latter has focussed on the company level or on capitalism in general. The drastic reforms passed in...

Sustainability has become a key issue in managing natural resources together with growing concerns for capitalism, environmental and resource problems. We hypothesize that the ongoing modernization of competitive societies, which we refer to as "capitalism," affects human nature for utilizing common pool resources, thus compromising sustainability. To test this hypothesis, we design and impleme...

The term " network " has become a dominant trope in studies of contemporary capitalism, used to explain what distinguishes advanced capitalism from its industrial predecessors (DiMaggio 2002). Capitalist workplaces are alleged to be more egalitarian with more lateral and fewer hierarchical ties than their more bureaucratic ancestors. Companies are said to collaborate to a greater degree, their ...

In this paper I intend to contrast the ‘falling rate of profit’ crisis theories of the 1970s with the ‘underconsumptionism’ of the orthodox Marxist tradition. The central argument is that in rejecting traditional underconsumptionist theories of crisis contemporary Marxism has thrown the baby out with the bathwater, with unfortunate theoretical and political consequences. A more adequate critiqu...

The transition to sustainability will be difficult. Environmental sustainability entails living within the Earth’s limits, yet the majority of scientific studies indicate a condition of overshoot. For mainstream economists sustainability means perpetuating economic growth. Consequently, environmental and economic sustainability are incompatible in the present institutional context. This paper s...

This paper discusses Buddhist economics as a potential future for capitalism. In the 1970s, EF Schumacher proposed a form of Buddhist economics aimed at smallness, simplicity and non-violence. The major contribution of the present paper is to revise and update Schumacher’s and others’ work on Buddhist economics, first because of the changing spirit of capitalism from heavy to light capitalism a...