Democratic capitalism has become the popular paradigm in the modern world, and it is spreading further through globalization. It is a model based on growth, expansion and constant innovation. However, it is accompanied by social problems which may worsen despite overall gains in wealth. In this paper, we suggest that democratic capitalist societies may benefit from the application of what has b...

Technologies for human benefit, such as information systems and information technology, have a key role to play in the realization of quality of life for all citizenry by modern societies. New forms of IS and IT can be developed and used creatively to improve education, health, social equity, environmental conditions, social and environmental sustainability, government and not-for-profit servic...

The continuing debate on the relevance and imposition of `Western theories' for explaining educational policy in the Third World is fascinating on a rhetorical level but lacking in the actual `testing' of such theories in a crossnational context. Responding to the general debate, and to a particular paper by Hans Weiler included in this issue of the Oxford Review of Education, on curriculum ref...

Home baking is very popular in the UK: in 2007 sales of home baking products totalled £457m and in 2010, the estimated revenue from home baking was £576m (Mintel, 2010). Why is home baking so popular? The emergence of the phenomenon seems to be due to a number of factors. Campbell (2005) suggests that in late modern capitalist societies we have seen the gradual development of craft consumption ...

Time-consuming and costly religious rituals pose a puzzle for economists committed to rational choice theories of human behavior. We propose that religious rituals promote in-group trust and cooperation that help to overcome collective-action problems. To test this hypothesis we design field experiments to measure the in-group cooperative behavior of members of religious and secular Israeli kib...

“Social disciplining” is the name that has been given to attempts by the authorities throughout early modern Europe to regulate people’s private lives. In explicit contrast to “social control,” the informal mechanisms by which people have always sought to put pressure on one another in traditional societies, “social disciplining” was a set of formal, legislative strategies through which the eme...

Democratic capitalism has become the popular paradigm in the modern world, and it is spreading further through globalization. It is a model based on growth, expansion and constant innovation. However, it is accompanied by social problems which may worsen despite overall gains in wealth. In this paper, we suggest that democratic capitalist societies may benefit from the application of what has b...

Since the meltdown of the global financial system in 2008 triggered by the sub-prime mortgage bubble in the United States, there is an emerging consensus, even among economists, that there is a need for new economic thinking2 (See Stiglitz, 2010 & Kaletsky, 2010). The economic thinking that has prevailed in postwar capitalist societies is based on the neo-classical – Keynesian synthesis, hereaf...

The capitalist and socialist societies of the 20 century assigned firms different roles within their economic systems. Enterprises transforming themselves from socialist to market economies thus face fundamental organizational restructuring. Many former state-owned firms in the transitional economies of Central and Eastern Europe failed, so far, at this task. Firms pursued primarily defensive d...

It is well known that capitalist development depends on free wage labor and previously accumulated capital, as Marx (1967/1867, p. 166) claimed “the owner of money must meet in the market with the free labourer”. This claim, of course, implicitly assumes sufficient supply relatively affordable food for the proletariat in the capitalist sector, as both industrialization and urbanization greatly ...