Purpose This study aims to explore new quality productive forces represent categorical innovation and a terminological revolution in the Marxist political economy. Productive forces constitute the material productive capacity realized by factors of production under specific relations of production and should not be confused with the productiveness of labor or factor capabilities. Design/methodology/approach The category of productive forces in political economy reflects the material and technological attributes of production while embodying socio-historical characteristics. The development of productive forces encompasses both qualitative and quantitative transformation. The essence of qualitative transformation in productive forces lies in bringing about fundamental changes in the modes of production (the modes of labor) through variations in factors and their combinations, thereby promoting and accelerating the formation of new relations of production and ways of life. Findings The technological history has demonstrated that new general-purpose technologies and leading sectors are significant manifestations of qualitative transformation in productive forces. Orginality/value The smooth development of new quality productive forces relies on “creative destruction” to achieve “orderly retreat” through “creative transformation.”

Firm births are key drivers of employment growth, productivity gains, and “creative destruction.” We show that setup costs create sizable financial constraints for new firms. When firms face high setup costs, they can only be established by leveraging up and lengthening debt maturity. We empirically confirm these predictions in a large sample of young French firms. Leverage is higher and debt maturity is longer in industries with high setup costs. Last, we show that following an exogenous shock that reduces banks’ supply of long-term loans, there is relatively lower firm creation in manufacturing industries with high setup costs. This paper was accepted by Bo Becker, finance. Funding: This work was supported by Observatoire du financement des entreprises par le marché (OFEM) (NA) and Agence Nationale de la Recherche [Grant F-STAR ANR-17-CE26-0007-01]. Supplemental Material: The online appendix and data files are available at https://doi.org/10.1287/mnsc.2023.03846 .

Introduction . This article explores the linguistic representation of emotional despair in Sylvia Plath’s literary works. Its objective is to identify and systematize the linguistic and narrative strategies employed to convey this state in Plath’s prose and poetry, examining their connection to the poetics of psychological realism and modernist aesthetics. The novelty of the study lies in its comprehensive analysis of linguo-creative techniques used to express despair, encompassing both Plath’s poetic and prose output. Methodology and sources . The research employs an integrated methodological approach, combining linguistic-stylistic analysis, contextual analysis, and psycholinguistic perspectives. The primary source material comprises key texts exemplifying the evolution of Plath’s style and the centrality of despair: the novel The Bell Jar (1963), the short story collection Johnny Panic and the Bible of Dreams (1977), and the poetry collection The Collected Poems (1981). This selection is based on the texts' significance for exploring the theme across different genres, including autobiographical and experimental works. Results and discussion . The study reveals that despair in Plath’s writing is conveyed primarily indirectly through the “creative destruction” of language – manifesting in shocking imagery, syntactic shifts, and complex symbols. Direct lexical naming is rare. Prose enacts a “poetics of disintegration”: it unfolds crisis linearly (in the novel) or fragmentarily (in stories) through metaphors of identity dissolution, syntactic fragmentation, and motifs of depersonalization. Poetry is characterized by concentrated, polysemantic symbols with shocking impact, the defamiliarization of commonplace images to reveal cruelty/inevitability, and distinctive syntax. Genre specificity is pronounced: prose constructs an extended space of psychological suffering, while poetry condenses despair into an intense “explosion” of imagery. Conclusion . The research confirms that Plath’s linguistic creativity serves as a strategy to overcome the impossibility of directly naming existential despair. Her language becomes an instrument for embodying psychological trauma and liminal states of consciousness. The specificity of genre resources – the narrative expanse of prose and the concentrated imagery of poetry – proves crucial for achieving the author's primary creative aim: conveying the “inexpressible” with unparalleled force. The identified strategies reflect not only the author's profound personal crisis but also the existential anxieties of her era, situating Plath's work within the tradition of modernist confessional literature and underscoring its unique power in representing extreme human experiences.

This paper combines Schumpeter’s creative destruction concept with Harvey’s urban capital circulation theory to investigate the influence of political-economic structures and crisis settings on the development cycles of urban tourism destinations. Using Beirut, Lebanon as a case study, the analysis shows how Beirut’s post-civil war trajectory triggered waves of creative destruction, driven by real estate, tourism, and creative industries, that unfolded in sub-waves across Beirut’s neighbourhoods, reshaping the urban tourism landscape. The relocation of tourism hubs acted as spatial fixes fuelled by cycles of post-crisis capital influx and by tensions between creativity and destruction by overaccumulation. Despite variations in the sources and motivations behind capital injections, their impact on the urban destination’s social and spatial fabric collectively led to creative destruction. The analysis reveals the path-dependent and temporally sensitive nature of urban tourism development patterns, which in the case of Beirut was structurally entangled with broader capital dynamics. Tourism plays a dual role as both a mechanism for advancing capital interests and a source of disruption within capitalist urban transformation processes.

ABSTRACTSustainability transitions in agri‐food systems are required to address climate change, biodiversity loss, and social inequities. In the West African cocoa sector, supply chain sustainability initiatives (SSIs) have emerged as key environmental governance tools to address these challenges and promote agroforestry. Agroforestry is a climate adaptation strategy that supports both nature and the livelihoods of smallholder farmers, yet its adoption remains limited. This study combines the Multi‐Level Perspective (MLP) and the Creative Destruction (CD) frameworks to qualitatively assess how the interventions of SSIs influence the scaling up of agroforestry adoption in Côte d'Ivoire and Ghana. Through policy mapping, 101 semi‐structured interviews and focus groups with governments, private companies, non‐governmental organizations (NGOs), and cocoa farmers, we found that most interventions (~93%) support agroforestry as a niche innovation, relying on extension services and short‐term incentives. Only 7% of the interventions pursue regime‐level changes, such as land and tree tenure reforms, which remain limited due to institutional and informal barriers. Additionally, SSIs have not significantly changed policy network structures, and smallholder farmers remain excluded from governance processes. Based on these findings, we recommend that scaling up agroforestry adoption requires regime‐destabilization interventions, including the integration and strengthening of land and tree tenure reforms, as well as the simplification of tree registration procedures. Furthermore, greater efforts are needed to ensure the inclusion of smallholders within policy networks, as their participation remains limited.

ABSTRACT Forces of creative destruction have led to the decline of the traditional retail role within urban centers. To maintain retail within urban centers it is crucial to directly address the underlying structural oversupply of property. Conceptualized as a social entrepreneurial process, this case study of Stockton-on-Tees town center (North-East England) illustrates the consolidation of two struggling shopping centers into one successful center. This consolidation has provided a sounder basis upon which the remainder of the town center can build. This opportunity emerged from a shift in thinking from growth to consolidation and from brand name attraction to the retention of preexisting businesses. A social entrepreneurial form of municipalization has been used to deliver retail consolidation, where the local authority purchased private sector specialist skills on a contract for service basis, thereby avoiding the need for partnership. In the context of an emerging literature on new municipalism, this paper explores municipal statecraft through a social entrepreneurial lens, providing a new conceptual and practical perspective on municipal involvement in the regeneration of struggling places.

Abstract Sustainable entrepreneurship is receiving growing scholarly attention as it shifts from traditional profit-maximizing models to holistic approaches that integrate economic, social, and environmental objectives. This paradigm responds to global challenges such as climate change, resource scarcity, and social inequality by promoting value creation beyond financial outcomes. This study presents a systematic review of 95 peer-reviewed articles published between 2015 and 2023, retrieved from academic databases including Web of Science and Scopus, using predefined keywords and rigorous inclusion criteria. The analysis identifies key theoretical and practical contributions to the field, emphasizing frameworks such as the Triple Bottom Line, Creative Destruction, and the Capabilities Approach. Findings highlight the critical role of stakeholder engagement, ethical governance, digitalization, and educational infrastructure in shaping sustainable entrepreneurial practices. Moreover, the study explores the primary drivers of sustainable entrepreneurship and their societal and environmental impacts, including inclusive innovation, ecological preservation, and capacity building. By synthesizing current literature, this review offers valuable insights for scholars, policymakers, and practitioners seeking to foster sustainability-driven entrepreneurship and address complex development challenges.

Small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) form the backbone of Malaysia’s economy but continue to face high failure rates due to market volatility, resource limitations, and technological disruptions. The COVID-19 crisis further intensified these challenges, exposing structural weaknesses that threaten both performance and survival. While Entrepreneurial Orientation (EO) has long been recognised as a key driver of business success, the effectiveness of its dimensions: innovativeness, proactiveness, and risk-taking, in ensuring post-crisis sustainability remains underexplored from a Schumpeterian perspective. This study investigates the relationship between EO dimensions and firm performance among Malaysian SMEs, focusing on how entrepreneurial behaviour contributes to competitiveness in the aftermath of crisis. Using data analysed through IBM SPSS and AMOS, the results reveal that only risk-taking shows a significant negative effect on firm performance, whereas innovativeness and proactiveness are not significant predictors. These findings suggest that excessive or unmanaged risk may weaken firm resilience in volatile environments, while innovation and proactive strategies may require longer time horizons to yield benefits. By framing the analysis within Schumpeter’s theory of innovation and creative destruction, this study provides empirical insights into how SMEs can transition from crisis to competitiveness. It highlights the importance of balanced entrepreneurial behaviour, where calculated risk-taking, continuous learning, and adaptive strategies are essential for long-term sustainability in uncertain economic conditions.

As the Draghi report shows, Europe needs to undergo a fundamental transformation in order to escape its ‘mid-technology trap’. Mainstream economic theory offers little guidance on how to achieve this. A critical review of neoclassical growth theory shows that in these models, growth and innovation are gradual, risk-free processes driven by individual agents, providing no rationale for the active involvement of entrepreneurs, bankers, or the government. Consequently, traditional supply-side policies advocate a strategy in which the government is perceived as the problem rather than the solution. This paper presents a New Schumpeterian Growth Theory (NSGT) based on Josef Schumpeter’s key insights. Key elements of the NSGT include the crucial importance of the financial sector as a financier of growth, the element of risk and uncertainty in the innovation process, the disruptive nature of innovation and growth, and the impact of growth on inflation. While Schumpeter ascribed a key role to ‘the banker’ in selecting promising innovation projects, the experience of many Asian countries shows that the state can also fulfil this function successfully. For Europe, this implies that the way out of the mid-technology trap is not to reduce the role of the state, but rather to increase it through a comprehensive industrial policy strategy.

This article develops an analytic framework composed of six narrative forms through which disruptive economic change is interpreted and legitimized. Drawing on two eventful contexts—economic recovery from the Covid-19 pandemic and ongoing climate transformations—I identify six narrative forms: redistribution, creative destruction, individual resilience, moral economy, decline for all, and growth for all. Each narrative constructs legitimacy through distinct temporal logics, visions of the state, and constructions of the social order. The analysis integrates insights from economic sociology, political sociology, and eventful theory to trace how narratives stabilize (in)equality and justify varying degrees of state intervention. The narrative forms all relate in different ways to crisis egalitarianism, the idea that disruption affects everyone equally; this interpretive tendency can legitimize postcrisis inequalities as natural or deserved. By treating narratives as eventful meaning-making devices, the framework advances a sociological understanding of legitimacy as a temporal construct.

Despite the fact that development institutions are quite widespread, management practice lacks generally accepted methods for their assessment. The article aims to compare the performance of several acting and reorganized institutions to ascertain whether their reconfiguration is optimal. Methodologically, the study rests on Schumpeterian growth theory, structural change theory, and new institutionalism. The indicators characterizing the performance of the development institutions in the Russian Far East were obtained from the Unified Interdepartmental Information and Statistical System for 2000–2022. The data sets were transformed using the principal component analysis; the difference-in-differences method was applied to assess the outcome produced by the development institutions. Out of five development institutions under review, three of them revealed a statistically significant negative impact on the dynamics of relevant indicators of the Far Eastern Federal District, while two of them showed an insignificant effect. Granting development institutions a clear legal status will allow integrating them into the unified system of public authority of the Russian Federation and shaping a policy on their formation, functioning and performance evaluation with national priorities taken into account. A development institution is perceived as a macroeconomic agent since its activities are not aimed at implementing a specific project, but at the socio-economic development of a region or an industry. Hence, it is reasonable to assess them using macroeconomic indices. Institutions exerting no significant effect on the development of the territory (industry) over several years are subject to reorganization.

Challenging the universality of the Anthropocene Epoch, this article argues for a new conceptualization of the planetary situation focused on the landscape complexities of the Holocene/Anthropocene boundary event . I ground this perspective with a historical and ethnographic tour of Lake Somerset, a water-filled phosphate pit in Central Florida that has become habitat for a colony of endangered wood storks. Displaced from their native Everglades, these storks utilize the lake's spoil-pile islands for their rookery. I argue that Lake Somerset, and the Holocene/Anthropocene transition generally, become legible by attending to processes of creative niche destruction: capital-generating disturbances that irreversibly alter the biophysical structure of space. At Lake Somerset, phosphate mining has locally eradicated the Holocene ecologies that came before and replaced them with pits and piles of mutilated soil that recolonize with invasive plants. The diasporic wood storks exemplify what I call a Holocene fragment–– a long-established ecological form that survives in the ruins of the Anthropocene. Utilizing tools of natural history observation, ethnography, and environmental history, I argue that multispecies researchers are uniquely positioned to track the Holocene/Anthropocene transition across the earth's surface––a critical practice for understanding shifting patterns of life and livability in this time of radical change.

ABSTRACT Economics explains human prosperity as arising predominantly from a process of creative destruction: Successions of innovators create new wealth by conceiving and developing new higher productivity technologies that destroy, partially or completely, the wealth built by their predecessor technologies. Because higher productivity is, by definition, the production of more or more valued outputs from less or less costly inputs, creative destruction increases wealth over the long run. Economic models, in hopeful emulation of the natural sciences, are built from quantifiable probabilities and outcomes. However, new technologies are new creations of human minds, previously unconceived, let alone assigned probability distributions over well-defined outcomes. Economics must be more ambitious. Economics seeks to explain not merely decision-making in an expanding space of conceivable probabilities and outcomes, but decision making that causes that expansion. Behavioral economics reveals that humans rarely think in terms of quantitative probabilities and outcomes, but typically use narrative decision-making. Confronted with a problem, humans formulate a response by recalling and recombining narratives – actual or learned memories of problems, responses and outcomes, each triad with an emotional weight. New narratives arising as recombinations of existing narratives, and economically selected for higher productivity, potentially explains combinatorial economic growth.

Abstract The concept of a normal price has a long history in economics. Marshall prominently uses the concept in his analysis of price determination. He also claims equivalence between his concept of long-period normal price and the concept of natural price in classical economics. Schumpeter equates Marshall’s normal price to his own concept of a theoretical norm for price. Use of the language of normality continues in post-Keynesian price theory with normal-cost pricing. Also, the concept of normal price is used in the modern evolutionary analysis of creative destruction. This paper reviews the history of the natural and normal price in the price theory of classical economists, Marshall, Schumpeter, post-Keynesian economists, and modern evolutionary economists. Discussion then focusses on the changes over time in what is considered normal, what remains as common elements across the concepts used by the identified economists or groups of economists, and the absence of a normal-price concept in neoclassical theory of general equilibrium.

This article examines the diverse engagements with Haussmannization in the multi-authored Paris-guide par les principaux écrivains et artistes de la France , published for the 1867 Exposition. An illustrated collection of chapters examining different topics related to Paris, Paris-guide was touted by its editors as both an ‘encyclopédie vivante’ and a ‘guide familier, pratique du promeneur dans Paris’; it was meant to inform visitors about the new city which, itself, served as a type of attraction for the Exposition. Whereas previous scholarship has tended to focus on individual essays from this collection, this article studies the multiple, at times conflicting, interpretations of Paris’s major urban reconstruction throughout the body of Paris-guide . A number of authors submit adulatory or ambivalent entries on Paris’s new features, while others both subtly and overtly lament Haussmann’s creative destruction and its impact on the urban experience. Through analysis of the organization of this work and of the studies of Haussmannization found within, this article shows how Paris-guide reveals the complex reactions of Parisians to their new city and also that a structural analogy can be made between the multifaceted narrative at play in this massive edition and the 1867 Exposition universelle, both emblems of the late Second Empire.

Regional conditions that smoothen the process of creative destruction and reduce adjustment costs are key transformative features. The aim of this article is therefore to first assess the regional presence of low- and high-demand occupations, and second, to assess the likelihood that workers in low-demand occupations will make productive changes to high-demand occupations in their region. Using matched employer-employee data on Sweden for the period 2015–2019, we calculate the regional relatedness density for all occupations and then assess whether this ‘regional opportunity space’ provides labour market channels for workers to move from low- to high-demand occupations in the region. Our findings reveal stark regional differences in matching between low- and high-demand occupations that transcend the regional functional hierarchy. Subsequent logit regressions support the notion that regions with a high density of related high-demand occupations provide labour market channels that increase the likelihood of productive change among exposed workers. The influence of these structural regional features outweighs that of the mere presence of high-demand occupations as well as both the size and diversity of the labour market.

Abstract Previous literature presents conflicting views on the impact of climate risk on firm innovation. One perspective argues that climate risk increases cash holdings, reducing resources available for innovation. Conversely, another suggests that climate risk fosters creative destruction, creating new opportunities for innovation. This study reconciles these views by focusing on innovation efficiency, tested using 31,315 observations from 4,530 Chinese A-share listed companies over 2007–2022. Leveraging text analysis and machine learning to develop a climate risk indicator, we find that climate risk significantly enhances innovation efficiency by encouraging firms to better utilize existing resources. This effect is more pronounced in non-state-owned and lower-performing firms. Additionally, we examine the moderating roles of organizational resilience and within-firm pay gaps. Results show that organizational resilience strengthens innovation efficiency under climate risk, while large pay gaps undermine it. These findings not only benefit Chinese firms but also offer valuable insights for businesses in emerging economies navigating climate change.

Patent policy, invention and innovation in the theory of Schumpeterian growth

Introduction: This article aims to explain the philosophical, ideological and methodological differences and similarities in the analyses of modern capitalism by Karl Marx and Joseph Alois Schumpeter. This study is important in terms of showing that two economists and thinkers who are known as opponents and substitutes for each other actually complement each other at many points. Method: The research compares the differences and complementary points of the two thinkers in terms of philosophical foundation, ideological perspective and method used, based on the expressions in the works of Karl Marx and Joseph Alois Schumpeter. The article discusses the methodological foundations and historical basis of the crisis perceptions of these two thinkers; it also questions the validity of these approaches in the context of today's digital economy and technological transformations. In this respect, the method of the article is descriptive comparison. Results or Findings: Marx views capitalism as crisis-prone and historically limited; Schumpeter sees it as self-renewing through creative destruction. Both adopt dynamic disequilibrium frameworks from differing ideological standpoints. Discussion or Conclusion: There are similarities as well as differences in the analysis of both thinkers. In terms of similarities, both thinkers say that the crises of capitalism stem from its own nature, while Marx argues that the process will lead to the final crisis of capitalism, Schumpeter puts forward the view that crises will lead to capitalism renewing itself. The conclusion reached by the article is as follows: As a result, capitalism can have a structure that, on the one hand, produces its own crises, and on the other hand, feeds on these crises.

This study proposes a new concept that explains a source of technological change: The invasive behaviour of general purpose technologies that breaks into scientific and technological ecosystems with accelerated diffusion of new products and processes that destroy the usage value of all units previously used. This study highlights the dynamics of the invasive destruction of new path-breaking technologies in driving innovative activity. Invasive technologies conquer the scientific, technological, and business spaces of alternative technologies by introducing manifold radical innovations that support technological, economic, and social change. The proposed theoretical framework is verified empirically in new technologies of neural network architectures, comparing transformer technology (a deep learning architecture having unsupervised and semi-supervised algorithms that create new contents and mimic human ability, supporting Generative Artificial Intelligence) to Long Short-Term Memory (LSTM) and Recurrent Neural Networks (RNNs). Statistical evidence here, based on patent analyses, reveals that the exponential growth rate of transformer technology over a period of five years (2020–2024) is 45.91% more than double compared to the alternative technologies of LSTM (21.17%) and RNN (18.15%). Moreover, the proposed invasive rate in technological space shows that is very high for transformer technology at the level of 2.2%, whereas for LSTM it is 1.39% and for RNN it is 1.22% over 2020–2024, respectively. Invasive behaviour of drastic technologies is a new approach that can explain one of the major causes of global technological change and this scientific examination here significantly contributes to our understanding of the current dynamics in technological evolution of the Artificial Intelligence technology having high industrial impacts on the progress of human society.