Twenty years after Poverty and Famines elaborated the entitlement approach as an innovative and holistic approach to famine analysis, debates about some of its fundamental assertions remain unresolved. This paper examines four limitations acknowledged by Sen himself: starvation by choice, disease-driven rather than starvation-driven mortality, ambiguities in entitlement speciŽ cation and extra-...

Throughout the 1990s we witnessed the spread of the concept of social capital in many of the social sciences and in particular in socio-economics. Its theorisation is due to sociologists who aimed at correcting methodological individualism due to its poor understanding of the collective and interactive nature of society. Here we argue that, despite the adoption of methodological individualism, ...

This paper brings together two sets of writing under development, but with common themes of rejection of concepts of unity, coherence and singularity that characterize modernity. However, they also reject the notions of fragmented individualism and nihilism that are seen in much postmodern thinking. In our search for ways of facilitating generation of meaning within and for those thinking/actin...

Watson (2003: 168) claims that ‘although increasing academic attention is being paid to business ethics, the ways in which ethical consideration come into activities and decisions of organizational managers have been examined in a very limited way’. This article contributes by suggesting an interesting way to study moral managerial decisions is studying these decisions in their discursive conte...

Individuals’ privacy concerns can inhibit their online purchasing behavior. This paper investigates the moderating role of espoused individualism and uncertainty avoidance in the effect of external persuasion cues (e.g., privacy policy statements and third-party assurance seals) on attitude toward a website. This study hypothesizes that individuals scoring high on individualism or uncertainty a...

Agent-Based Modeling can contribute to the understanding of international trade processes. Models for the effects of culture and cultural differences on agent behavior are required for realistic agent-based simulation of international trade. This paper makes a step toward modeling of culture in agents. The focus is one of the five dimensions of culture according to Hofstede: individualism versu...

Classical bourgeois political theory articulated the political revolution that established possessive individualism as the basis of legitimate government and the foundation of civil society. In this respect, it inaugurated the systematic investigation of the objective rules governing subjective human existence. The work of Thomas Hobbes and of John Locke, like classical political economy and mo...

In traditional economics the decision-making process for individuals currently has effectively no role for ethics, as individuals are self-interested. The key concepts in economics which determine the role of ethics in the decision-making process are utility, rationality and methodological individualism and hence how these can be and are formulated and combined determines different roles for et...

In an essay published in 1973 James Doull defined the organization of contemporary society in terms of two principles, “an unlimited technical and economic expansion” and “the utopian confidence that men can live together in unity of purpose.” His purpose was to demonstrate the continuing validity of the tripartite Hegelian analysis of the modern state against subsequent criticism. He located t...

New institutionalism is an approach to the study of social events that is becoming increasingly popular. Different lines of new institutional research can be distinguished. In one line of research it is argued that the social sciences should transcend reductionist modes of explanation, in particular the methodological individualism exemplified by the theory of rational choice. In this view, red...