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In the 19th century, Virginius Island developed as a center for craft, industry, and service facilities that supported the United States Armory complex at Harpers Ferry, Virginia. The earliest phase of development in this community is represented at one tract of land that is associated with the family of engineer and entrepreneur Lewis Wernwag. Wemwag was an inventor, bridge builder, and machinist. A landscape and archaeological analysis shows the contradictions of living in a community transitioning to an industrial capitalist economy. While the landscape that Wemwag created reflects the traditional craft ethos—one that does not reinforce the separations of domestic and work life—the family's household assemblage shows that they did participate in modern consumerism and they reinforced separations around the table and between groups. An analysis of the Wemwags' property and assemblage shows how this family embraced emerging technological rationalities through material things. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article surveys the history of primitive accumulation in China, from the early 1980s to the mid 2000s. It observes that the principal means of primitive accumulation have been the transformation of state and collective enterprises into capital, the peasants’ loss of land through various forms of dispossession, and the voluntary migration of peasants from agricultural to industrial pursuits. These mix dispossession and market mechanisms in complex ways. They have involved the creation of markets; but more, the creation of workers and capital. While the processes that drive primitive accumulation have economic logics, they also have logics that derive from concerns over social welfare, over environmental management, and over ethnic struggles. Furthermore, the state has been closely involved in the entire process—as a regionally differentiated actor, directly involved in ownership, asset transformation and the control of migration. Primitive accumulation in China does not have one motive, does not simply reflect class interests, is not a particular case of a global capitalist project, but is complex and localised. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

What does the future hold for Asian business groups? This paper discusses three rival hypotheses whose predictions for the future of Asian business groups differ from the predictions of the prevailing institutional voids hypothesis. The latter is a two stage model that posits that business groups first emerge to solve market failures for affiliated firms. Subsequently government initiates the construction of a “soft market infrastructure” that plug institutional voids and so weakens the rationale for group affiliation. Groups should then unravel and dissolve. Yet, business groups remain important in Asian countries that have attained high levels of market development, which casts doubt on the institutional voids hypothesis. In this paper I review three alternative hypotheses of business group development—life cycle, state-led industrialization, and crony capitalism perspectives. A synthesis of these rival hypotheses suggests that Asian business groups are likely to persist in many possible future scenarios. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Firms entering transition markets are typically ignorant about those markets, and the markets, owing to the transition from a planned to a market economy, are typically turbulent. Consequently the entry process involves discoveries that could not have been predicted in advance. This position is supported by a longitudinal study in real-time of a Swedish firm's entry into the Russian market between 1987 and 1993. The paper distinguishes between three types of activity that form part of the entry process, namely search, routines and improvisation, and it discusses how they relate to operative and strategic discoveries made and the characteristics of the entry process. Key Results The paper offers a conceptual framework for studying the role of discovery in the process of entering turbulent foreign markets. A longitudinal case study of a Swedish firm's entry into Russia demonstrates that discoveries were important in the entry process. It shows also that strategic discoveries tend to be a result of either search or improvisation, while operative discoveries are usually made in the course of routine activities performed by the entering firm [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Creative destruction is a central element of the competitive dynamic of capitalism. This phenomenon assumes concrete form in relation to specific geographical and historical conditions. One such set of conditions is investigated here under the rubric of the creative field, i.e. the locationally-differentiated web of production activities and associated social relationships that shapes patterns of entrepreneurship and innovation in the new economy. The creative field operates at many different levels of scale, but I argue that the urban and regional scale is of special interest and significance. Accordingly, I go on to describe how the creative field functions as a site of (a) entrepreneurial behavior and new firm formation, (b) technical and organizational change, and (c) the symbolic elaboration and re-elaboration of cultural products. All of these activities are deeply structured by relations of spatial- cum-organizational proximity and separation in the system of production. The creative field, however, is far from being a fully self-organizing entity, and it is susceptible to various kinds of breakdowns and distortions. Several policy issues raised by these problems are examined. The paper ends by addressing the question as to whether industrial agglomeration is an effect of producers’ search for creative synergies, or whether such synergies are themselves simply a contingent outcome of agglomeration. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article presents a comparison between the density dependence model, which was developed in Organizational Ecology (OE) the economic-geographical notion of agglomeration economies. There is a basic resemblance, both involve some form of positive feedback between size of the industry and growth. Two driving forces are important for the temporal evolution of industries in OE: legitimation and competition. When viewed from a spatial perspective, legitimation contains the centripetal forces, and competition the centrifugal forces in spatial cluster formation. Competition as viewed by OE is a negative feedback mechanism, and therefore not compatible with positive agglomeration effects.

The fall of the former Soviet Union and the opening of the countries of Eastern Europe has prompted examination of why central planning failed, why capitalism with all its faults is succeeding, and what actions and institutions are necessary to move command economies toward successful, sustainable market economic systems. As they privatize State Owned Enterprises (SOE's) expectations are that the companies will function with the success experienced by western companies. Governments hope to derive tax revenue from company profits and expect companies to provide jobs. Effecting the change is, however, far greater than changing the name plate on the door. Transition success will hinge upon institutional and infrastructure changes that need to be wide-spread. The ethical quagmire is that without changes in the infrastructure of the command economy system private enterprise is doomed to fail. Governments will then be deprived of the anticipated revenue streams emanating from businesses. Governments may then not be able to fulfill the economic and social expectations of their citizens. This would be not only counter-productive for businesses and government but also confusing and bewildering to the general populous. This paper explores structural impediments in transition economies and discusses how each blocks and distorts the formation of a true market economy. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

During the post-World War II period, between 1950 and 1980, the social sciences in France were dominated by three scholars: Alain Touraine, Michel Crozier and Pierre Bourdieu. Though there were differences in how their intellects were formed and in their research orientations, they belonged to the same generation, and were commonly referred to, at times with an ironic intention, as the "holy trinity" of sociology. Bourdieu, the sociologist who would become an outspoken critic of modern industrialization and global capitalism, began his scientific work with a study about Algeria while it was still a French colony He explored the cultural requirements and the necessary conditions for self-sustaining industrial development. Bourdieu chose to study the cultural and practical conditions for self-sustaining industrial development. In contrast to this early work, Bourdieu later became an outspoken critic of industrialization and global capitalism. Seeing globalization primarily in its psychological effects, however, indicates that, after all, Bourdieu broke no new ground. Apart from individual well-being, the crucial point has more to do with established law and legal systems and the impact of complex economic interests.

The article discusses business and politics in the U.S. and Great Britain. The start of the 1980s was a period of extraordinary political transformation in the U.S. and Great Britain. In both countries, governments came to power committed to radical reductions in state social services and traditional safety nets. A central objective of the business mobilization of the late 1970s and early 1980s in both the U.S. and Great Britain was to restore company profits to levels of an earlier decade. In the name of reindustrialization and recapitalizing capitalism, government spending was targeted as the chief impediment to such prosperity. In the American case, government restraint on business decisions has also been named as a critical target. And in Britain, government failure to resist and control organized labor has been identified by business as a first priority as well. All point toward government reductions in social spending, the dismantling of programs that regulate business and the scaling down of programs that benefit labor. The formation of a classwide system of organization within the corporate community is rooted in the rise of institutional capitalism and this system is generically akin to that expected by instrumentalist analysis. But the class-wide organization has emerged alongside the far more atomized system based in managerial capitalism and expected by pluralist and structuralist analysis.

Two terms of the tripartite title 'class, democracy and modernity,' need no further qualifications, they are self-explanatory. But the third does. By modernity is meant the period in which capitalism, industrialization and democracy appear simultaneously, reacting to, reinforcing, complementing and checking each other. Democracy is used in a value-free manner, in other words, not counterposed to liberalism. It involves simply the following conceptual constituents: publicly recognized political pluralism, formally free citizenry and the trend towards an increasing political equality. It is stated simply, without historical analyses of any kind, the fact of the more or less simultaneous emergence and later symbiosis, of democracy, capitalist organization of socio-economic life and industrialization. This symbiosis is not either historically necessary or historically contingent. Both descriptions would mean setting diverse factors into the homogenizing framework of a philosophy of history which is deliberately intended to avoid.

Presents a class analysis of capitalist industrialism in Peru as of September 1985. Efficacy of capitalist development and bourgeois reformism for amelioration of material deprivation and the denial of human rights; Dimensions of Peruvian industrialism; Determination of material bases of class formation; Interpretation of politics in Peru since 1980 derived from the dialectic of class power.

In the early stages of Western industrialization, innovation was the domain of individuals who devoted their entrepreneurial talents to the development of a new product or process, typically setting up a new firm in order to take the innovation to the market. Today, commercial R&D is almost exclusively carried out by corporate laboratories affiliated with manufacturing firms. The corporate R&D lab, however, did not exist in its modern form until the late nineteenth century. The history of Western industrialization, thus, suggests that a fundamental change in the structure of incentives, and consequently in the nature and the organization of the R&D process, occurred around the turn of the century. Three questions arise. What is the nature of this change? What economic forces caused it? What are its implications? To answer these questions, I construct a model where this change is endogenous to the evolution of the economy toward industrial maturity. The change in the locus of innovation—from R&D undertaken by intventor-entrepreneurs, to R&D undertaken within established firms in close proximity to the production line—results from the interaction of market structure and technological change. This interaction captures the essence of the evolution of the capitalist engine of growth and provides an economic explanation of a “stylized fact” that has received no attention in the theoretical literature. The endogenous market structure generates dynamic feedbacks that shape the growth path of the economy and determine the structural change it undergoes, including the endogenous formation of corporate R&D labs. The evolution of market rivalry explains when and how established firms become the major locus of R&D activity. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The purpose of this paper is to bring attention to Sismondi's forgotten ethical critique of laissez-faire capitalism. It is a forgotten critique because Sismondi has to a large extent been neglected in the literature. He has been too quickly labelled an 'economic romanticist'. It is ethical because Sismondi questioned what he called chrematistics, which to him was becoming the chief end of economics. Chrematistics is the science of the increase of wealth conceived of abstractly and not in relation to man or society. This was opposed to the provisioning principle which Sismondi saw as the key principle of economics. To Sismondi the object of economics is man not wealth. His critique of laissez-faire capitalism was from this perspective. This led Sismondi to propose state containment of capitalism so that the well-being of the whole community was attained. This proposal is an alternative to Marx's complete liquidation of capitalism. Sismondi's ethical critique is important not only from the polar of view of the history of political economy but also for an insight into what values and principles should be given priority in our economic systems today. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article highlights the importance of future orientation in international business courses citing an example. The example is used to illustrate the point which would focus on the question of dominance among two forces, nationalism and internationalism. The author states that his preference for futurology is to examine basic trends in the world, identify forces in opposition, and come to a conclusion as to who would win or what would happen. The obtained conclusion is then used as a basis for discussing how marketing, management or financial policy could be modified to meet the future in the best possible way. Trends and forces that were operating in the past ten to twenty years during the periods of transition to industrialization, the period of rise of industrialization and the signs of new transition are discussed. It is stated that the dominant conclusion arrived is that people are converging toward a single system as of 1977. It is essentially socialistic with left and right wing factions and the motive force would still be capitalism led by multinational corporations.

In this article the author discusses the significance of the study of Michael Webber regarding primitive accumulation and the rise of capitalism in modern China in comparison to the British industrial development. He supports that primitive accumulation happened in China only after the country's social transformation to modernization. He comments that the British primitive accumulation seems childlike compared to Webber's adoption of the standard Marxian definition of primitive accumulation for the Chinese.