Historians have become increasingly aware of the difficulty and inaccuracy of assigning the economic and social structures of modern societies to specific categories. In fact, at any given point a single group may incorporate economic arrangements ranging from the relative simplicity of barter to the complexities of international trade and finance. The village may well remain the primary social...

This paper analyzes the conditions that lead to the political power position of business by developing a signaling model of corporate lobbying in democratic capitalist societies. Abandoning the traditional dichotomy of structural economic determinants versus business’ political action, the model predicts under which conditions elected political decisionmakers modify their policy pledges to acco...

Abstract This chapter traces the relationship between the emergence of the current growth paradigm and the development of capitalism. It argues that economic growth is a fairly recent phenomenon which is inherently linked to the emergence of capitalism in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. It argues that economic growth in capitalism is inevitable, since this economic system is oriented ...

The KMG growth dynamics in Chiarella and Flaschel (2000) assume that wages, prices and quantities adjust sluggishly to disequilibria in labor and goods markets. This paper modifies the KMG model by introducing Steindlian features of capital accumulation and income distribution. The resulting KMGS(teindl) model replaces the neoclassical mediumand long-run features of the original KMG model by a ...

Over recent decades, cities have been radically transformed by information and communication technologies (ICTs) that modify people’s daily lives by reorganising mobility, infrastructure systems and physical spaces. However, in addition to the role that technology plays in the development of the infrastructure in our cities, it is also being used ‘as a means of control’. This view of technology...

Over the past decade, a large number of developing countries have made the transition from authoritarian rule to democracy. The rebirth of civil societies, the achievement of new freedoms and liberties have all been celebrated with due enthusiasm. But now that the euphoria of these transitions has passed, we are beginning to pose the sobering question of what difference democracy makes to devel...

World-system dynamics are re-conceptualized as inter-societal systems with some de-emphasis on the notions of core, periphery, and semi-periphery. This tri-part division has been useful in forcing sociology to rethink macrolevel sociological analysis and in establishing the importance of considering inter-societal systems as a fundamental unit of human social organization, but this Weberian-lik...

Introduction Mark Bray Comparative research is vital to the development of all social science disciplines. Indeed, many scholars have argued that the making of comparisons is the only method by which explanations of social behaviour and the development of theory occur. For example, the author of one comparative study of economic development in 'settler' societies argued: Only one analytical met...

COLONIALISM WAS THE FIRST STAGE in the experience of Western modernity for most Aboriginal peoples of the world. Colonial discourses were part of an expanding capitalist and imperialist world system that generated profits for an elite group of Westerners who orchestrated the resettlement of alien territories through ever more complex systems of state administration and industrial production. Eu...