Suchergebnisse

John Rae is best known for his contribution to capital theory, particularly to Austrian capital theory. J. A. Schumpeter's (1954) assessment is typical in the literature: "two cornerstones of [Böhm-Bawerk]'s structure–one of them also a cornerstone of [Nassau] Senior's–are in fact there" (Schumpeter, 1954, pp. 468-69). Although this seems to have been the standard perception (see also Dorfman, 1995, p. 21), there is growing appreciation that Rae had a theory of economic development, rather than only a theory of capital. As Klaus Hennings put it: "Rae ascribes to inventions a more important role for economic progress … than capital accumulation" (Hennings, 1987, p. 40). Spengler (1959) saw Rae's contribution as "his recognition of the importance of the role of technical knowledge and invention in economic development" (ibid., 1959, p. 406; see Deans and Deans, 1972; Birchler, 1980). Syed Ahmad (1996a, 1996b) and Anthony Brewer (1990, 1991, 1996) agree on the central role of innovation in the economics of Rae.

Our focus is the differences between monist and pluralist epistemologies. We want to illustrate how the adoption of a pluralist epistemology can reshape our theorizing about firms, organizations and their management. We can then build theories that are inherently dynamic and treat firms and organizations as the processes of creating the values which markets distribute. But to do this we must move beyond today's positivist monist conventions to a kind of epistemological pluralism that some might describe as postmodern. Given this shift we can then address the kinds of dynamic non-equilibrium systems that are proving of increasing interest to social and economic systems theorists. Our conclusion is that useful knowledge-based theories of the firm are less theories of objective entities `out there' than sets of contextualized heuristics guiding managers' intervention in their organizations as quasi-autonomous systems.

This paper uses the concept of knowledge communities to account for the relatively low impact of spatial perspectives on welfare policy (marginalization in the economic sphere; limited uptake in the social sphere). However, recent developments in the social sciences include a growing recognition of relationships between discourse, knowledge and power. Central to this work is a recognition of the territorialized nature of knowledge. These developments suggest that social policy has the potential to be reconfigured in a much more geographically sensitive manner.

This book is concerned with dynamic relations between international division of labor, division of consumption and determination of prices structure within a perfectly competitive framework in global economy. Our analytical framework examines the issues related to trade which are raised in the traditional trade theories. It also provides insights into the issues related to interdependence between knowledge creation and utilization and international trade examined by the new trade theory. The comparative advantage of our theory is that in providing rich insights into the complex of international trade it only uses a few concepts and simplified functional forms and accepts few assumptions about behavior of consumers, producers and institutional structures

Social Science has been marked by certain controversies: whether an initial theory is needed; what is theory; what method should be used in the research, induction or deduction; what is the nature and validity of the laws arrived at. These and other basic problems are dealt with.