Understanding Of Economic Issues Research Articles

The Economics of Everyday Life in “New” Socialism

The article explores the effort by economists and economic journalists in Czechoslovakia in the 1960s to translate economic knowledge to the political language of reform communism. Czechoslovak economists aimed to cultivate public understanding of economic issues and to disseminate economic knowledge among the nonacademic public, not only through politically engaged writing in the journal Ekonomická revue, but also through research on management to change managers’ behavior, habits, and competencies. In this important communication with nonacademic recipients, experts translated their economic knowledge to the specific managerial language of advice and personal self-development. A significant part of management studies literature was concerned with capitalist economies, especially capitalist managerial praxis. It thus contributed to the social academic and journalistic genre of the 1960s that focused on exploring capitalism and the West.

Building business cred in the hood

PurposePrimary sector firms by and large operate on indigenous territories across the world. In Canada, partnerships, land rights settlements, decolonization and reconciliation efforts provide indigenous communities with the financial means and the political power to stop projects they consider contrary to their traditions. How can companies acquire legitimacy among indigenous communities? This paper aims to answer this question by examining what the economic issues are among indigenous communities, how theories and practices of sustainable and legitimacy management articulated and how some basic notions of traditional indigenous teachings could inform non-indigenous managers are and help them interact better with indigenous leaders and their communities.Design/methodology/approachThis paper was informed about indigenous knowledge by secondary and primary indigenous and business sources from North America and from other areas such as Africa, Asia, Australia and New Zealand. Information about business relations with indigenous communities and stakeholders mostly came from non-indigenous sources, including scholarly results obtained within indigenous communities.FindingsSources of incompatibility between indigenous and European/Western worldviews are described. A selection of indigenous traditional beliefs and decision-making processes are presented, based on indigenous traditions around the Great Lakes region of North America. A discussion of desirable options for both indigenous and non-indigenous decision-makers to establish business legitimacy by overcoming their misperceptions is included.Practical implicationsA better understanding of economic issues in indigenous communities, indigenous perspectives and current developments, as well as lessons from the recent decades on successes and failures at establishing business legitimacy among indigenous communities, will help government and business decision-makers, as well as students and academic scholars.Originality/valueMainly based on management legitimacy theory and Anishnaabe knowledge, this paper makes an original contribution to the understanding of Indigenous strategic thinking in North America in its interaction with business legitimacy building issues.

From Marx to Giddens via Weber and Habermas

This article investigates the political role of social theories in contemporary Iran. It focuses, specifically, on how the 1979 Revolution marks a passage in Iranian political and social thought from political radicalism informed by Marxism to reformist liberalism inspired by local readings of Weber, Habermas, and Giddens. By investigating the writings of public intellectuals and political activists involved in Iran’s reform movement, the article traces their transformation from leftist revolutionary radicals to liberal proponents of free market, democracy, and religious pluralism. It will be argued that an inadequate understanding of economic issues underlies the political failings of this movement.

Economics literacy in children: the effects of the socio-economic context

The purpose of this research is to examine students’ understanding and interest about economics. We furthermore explore the impact of students’ family and school contexts, and their individual characteristics, on their understanding of economic issues. The data is based on a questionnaire collected from 587 Portuguese children. The results show that children have limited knowledge about economic issues (58% of correct answers), with high variability in what concerns their understanding of economic issues. Nonetheless, children show interest on economic issues and on learning more about it. The empirical results reveal that home (family) contextual variables (interaction between children and parents and parents’ job) and school level variables (class level and class size) explain much of the difference in terms of knowledge about economics.

The Philosophical Foundations of Chapter 24 of TGT: Is Mankind's Destiny the Essence of Keynes's Evolutionary Vision?

It is difficult to advance a point beyond what Keynes himself commented about his own vision in General Theory of Employment, Interest and Money in 1936 (hereafter TGT) in its Chapter 24. It is also difficult to express a deeper thought than what Skidelsky wrote about Chapter 24 of TGT (cf. Skidelsky, 1997). The purpose of this article is to identify whether Chapter 24 of TGT is the gist of Keynes’ legacy, having set the foundations of macroeconomics in the previous 23 Chapters. Relevant topics included in Chapter 24 are the consequences of full employment, the fate of income distribution, the future of overall wealth, the socialization of investment, saving, expectations, the role of the State in economies, the future of financial markets and the interaction between economics and other disciplines. Indeed this Chapter displays Keynes’ genius as a social philosopher, following the tradition of Economics Possibilities for our Grandchildren (1930). In Chapter 24 he was taking a glance at his product as did Phillip II when he was observing the construction of his castle El Escorial in XVII Spain. Within his vision, is this piece of work a justification of capitalism? Keynes sees the State as both the spender and the employer of last resort, thereby proposing a new role for the government (Skidelsky, 1998). He also suggests a new role for the private sector and reconsiders the interrelation between the two sectors. He is fully optimistic about this issue, which he considers as evolutionary. In addition, Keynes blurs the distinction between economics and sociology, advancing new interdisciplinary hints in his thinking. Keynes is also concerned on the epistemological role of assumptions in order to obtain defensible conclusions. Thereafter the British economist proposes new methods. He was a neo-realist and was against the inductive method. In addition, it can be stated that TGT is grounded on new psychological laws and motivations, that is, on a new vision of humankind, especially the analyzed chapter. His topics are the bypassing of Classical Economics; the destiny of macroeconomics in both theoretical and policy terms, highlighting new roles for interest rates; savers and rentiers; and the relevance of the concepts of ideas, interests and power. In all these respects Keynes is once again far ahead of his time. Finally a debatable topic dealt with by Keynes in Chapter 24 of TGT is socialisation of investment. This is in words of Skidelsky, a shift in the balance of social power. Keynes is thus in Chapter 24 of TGT a visionary and an idealist, a reformer, and certainly a trans-generational thinker. When he talks about the passion of thriftiness and the setting of reasonable financial rewards arising from financial instruments he is advancing explications for financial crises in terms of speculation. The open conclusion is that Chapter 24 contains the gist of Keynes’ mature philosophical thinking and legacy, confirming that for him attitudes are one of the most relevant issues in life. In addition, he considers that both social and psychological elements are necessary for a thorough understanding of economic issues and their consequences, such as peace and happiness. Section 1 is an introduction. Section 2 is both a literature review and a summary of Keynes’ general philosophical insights. Section 3 is an analysis of Chapter 24 of TGT in the specific fields of Epistemology, Ethics, Ontology, and Political and Social Philosophy. Section 4 is a conclusion. References are listed at the end of the article.

Maps and Politics

Reviewed by: Maps and Politics* Josef W. Konvitz (bio) Maps and Politics. By Jeremy Black. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1998. Pp. 188; illustrations, maps, notes/references, index. $35. This book should be of interest to historians of technology for its treatment of objectivity and ideology as factors shaping the content of maps. Maps are artifacts produced within the limits of several technologies, ranging from geodesy to printing. How they are produced, and by whom, are not questions of concern to Jeremy Black, whose attention is instead focused on the thorny problem of the map as a representation of reality in space. The [End Page 650] interpretation or understanding of maps involves graphic communication, which in many respects differs significantly from written exposition. Maps are most often freestanding, without background material that permits the identification of methodological or interpretive bias. Because most map users are not really trained in visual or graphic communication, they may not be aware of how easily maps can deceive, distort, or misrepresent. Black’s book has the merit of exploring the nature of modern maps from this perspective in relation to political ideas and uses. This necessarily involves a discussion of how objective information can be differentiated from the subjective within the confines of the same map or map genre. Written for the nonspecialist, Maps and Politics begins with an overview of the debate among historians of cartography concerning the reliability of maps and their use to support existing power structures. Black handles the issues concisely and clearly, indicating his own intermediary position, which accepts the fact that the mapping conventions of western Europe in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries have become the dominant modes for describing space worldwide. (Given the bibliographic character of the notes, the first chapter can be read as freestanding introduction to this debate). The question of minority and Third World views of space and of maps does not disappear at this point, however; the presumed limitations of Eurocentricity in maps remains a subtheme in subsequent chapters covering projections and boundaries, social and economic thematic mapping, and international relations and war. Throughout, Black makes valuable observations that will sharpen the ability of any generalist to think critically and more questioningly about what can and cannot be mapped. By raising questions about subjectivity and objectivity in relation to maps and politics, Black tries to relate concerns for social and contextual analysis more closely to the traditional themes of politics. In so doing, however, he tells us more about how maps were used to expand the hegemonic power of nation-states than about principles or ideas of politics. The spatial implications of different political ideologies, their relationship to principles of social order and cultural identity, and their cartographic expression are subjects too vast, and too much in need of separate study, to find their full articulation in this book. The importance of this issue for Black (and for this reviewer) lies in an effort to take politics more seriously. The primacy of politics in human thought and action needed no explanation in the ancien regime and in the nineteenth century. Politics, meaning the ends as well as the means of social and economic life, split conservatives from liberals over the degree to which social structure limited the possibility of progressive reform, and thus the degree to which social change would be a positive or negative consequence of politics. Social and economic thinking have advanced greatly in the twentieth century, in part to help control and direct the trends and events that weakened democracy and contributed to the rise of fascism and to the appeal [End Page 651] of communism. It is also the case that cynicism about politics has intensified in recent years. Whatever the reasons, political issues are no longer as important as they once were, the social agenda in intellectual circles having pushed much else aside. (The understanding of economic issues by humanists and the public still has a long way to go.) Those who assume that the world is socially constructed may reach the conclusion that political ideas have only a limited capacity to convey truth. But, to paraphrase Kranzberg’s law, politics is not neutral. Because things are often...

Comparing the economic views of American and South Korean teenagers

Drawing directly upon responses to an economics questionnaire, this study offers a comparative perspective on how 125 American and 106 South Korean teenagers understand, view, and interact with their national economies. The study primarily focuses on responses to three questions. Should teenagers work for their parents without pay? What possessions do teenagers consider of most value? What do the terms "rich" and "poor" mean to teenagers? Analysis of the responses revealed that teenagers in both countries have a complex understanding of economic issues and hold a wide range of opinions on the concept of economic wealth and personal economic responsibility. Significantly, the study suggests that popular perceptions depicting teenagers as singularly materialistic may be misguided. The study also explores the extent to which cultural traits impact how teenagers view and interact with their economies.