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Conference
Association for Heterodox Economics Annual Conference 2013- Economy and Organisation

The conference will be held on 4-6 July 2013 at the Centre for Socio-Economic Research (Cf SER), London Metropolitan University.

In more than ten years the AHE has established a reputation as a major international forum for the discussion of alternatives to mainstream economics, and for the interdisciplinary and pluralistic nature of its discussions. It also plays an on-going role in strengthening the community of heterodox economists, and in the development of heterodox economic theories on various topics through the dissemination of ideas and arguments.

Presentation

For 2013 the AHE Conference theme is Economy and Organisation.  The world economy could be characterised as suffering from a number of sometimes extreme imbalances. At the heart of many of these has been the nature and conduct of organisations. There have been a number of gross corporate scandals that have suggested organisations have taken on internal cultures in which wider responsibilities or concerns are not recognised. These may be related to financial misappropriations, to communities, or to the environment. While individuals must necessarily be involved there appear to be specific organisational cultures at work suggesting something more serious than ‘rogue’ traders or agents. There are issues to be considered such as how organisations understand their purposes, how this understanding is formed, as well as how governance both treats and is treated by them. All these problems suggest an imbalance of interests from which follow detrimental effects. Such imbalances could be argued as also being at the heart of the global financial crisis. Most obviously there was the immediate behaviour of organisations. Less obviously, but now apparent, was a pre-condition of the crisis lying in widening inequalities of both incomes and wealth holdings. These inequalities show a longer term and wider problem than just finance itself. Executive pay has risen such that differentials between CEOs and staff have reached extraordinary levels.

To what extent can economics contribute to an understanding of these issues? In shaping how we understand the relation of the individual to wider problems mainstream economics has assumed a particular kind of atomistic individual that necessarily poses an uneasy relation to the social. It may be that this has not just been a theoretical issue but a practical one, with serious consequences. Mainstream economics has delivered a particular understanding of the split between ownership and control in which managers are considered to be opportunist agents so that organisations are then taken to be a mass of contracts. One of the themes of the Conference that we would like people to explore is the extent to which this is a serious failure in grasping the significance and nature of organisation.

This Conference asks people to explore whether heterodox (or pluralistic) oriented perspectives in economics can deliver more optimistic and far reaching views of organisation and its social and cultural context . For example, how might we learn from those who have brought out the significance of intrinsic motivation? We ask for people to explore whether economics can learn from actual organisational practices around the world, including examples of mutualism. It may be that the problems faced result simply from a spread of markets, or market based solutions to areas where such solutions are inappropriate. We welcome critical evaluation of such issues and indeed of the mainstream conception of free markets, set against heterodox alternatives.

The conference invites submissions for single papers, panels and sessions of relevance to the overarching conference theme or address topics or issues of importance to heterodox economics from standpoints which differ from, or critically examine, mainstream economics.

Related Conference Themes

  1. The Limits of Mainstream Economics: Lessons from Organization Theory and Management Theory. Can an understanding of the purposes of organisations, perhaps how they can make distinctive contributions to economy, and their ethical underpinnings, challenge current economic analysis?
  2. The Economics of Culture and the Creative Industries, including the measurement of intangibles, the function of culture in urban planning, labour relations in the creative workforce, and the relation between creativity, innovation, and organization.
  3. Market Governance: Cartels, Big Business, State Regulations, and Competition Law. Does market and/or firm competition exist and regulate economic activity in any meaningful way; or, is economic activity regulated by the visible hand outside the market?
  4. Heterodox Labour Economics. This theme will explore discrimination, work-time and pay, in the context of capitalism. The relationship between the labour market and the household sector will also be examined.
  5. Academic Publishing and the Barriers to Heterodox Economics. This theme will explore issues of open access, peer review, journal publication and plagiarism. This section will debate how we define these practices and their linkage to our broader task of ethics in economics, as well as who benefits and who loses from the intellectual exchange of ideas.

Please send ideas or abstracts to email address: [email protected]

Deadlines

  1. Deadline for additional conference theme proposals: 5 December 2012
  2. Notification on conference theme proposals: 19 December 2012
  3. Submission of abstracts for all papers: 31 January 2013
  4. Decisions on abstracts communicated to authors: 14 February 2013
  5. Deadline for submission of refereed papers: 8 May 2013
  6. Decisions on refereed papers: 24 May 2013
  7. Deadline for submission of non-refereed papers and final versions of refereed papers: 10 June 2013
  8. Deadline for registration: 10 June 2013

Note:

  1.  Abstracts should be no more than 400 words. Papers should usually be 4000-10000 words. Refereeing of papers is optional, is double-blind, and authors will receive comments from two referees. Papers which are not accepted for the refereed stream will be put forward for the non-refereed stream.
  2. Authors submitting papers to the Conference do so on the understanding that they will provide an electronic version of the paper for upload on the AHE website by the deadline prior to the Conference. These papers will generally be published (in PDF format) on the public part of the website. In exceptional circumstances the Conference Programme Committee may place non-refereed papers on the members-only part of the website, if requested by the author and reasonable justification is given. Copyright of all AHE Conference papers is retained by the author(s).

Further details on the submission process will be available on the Conference webpage, which is part of the AHE website. Details of previous AHE conferences are also listed there. Please consult the website regularly for Conference updates.

Organization

Association for Heterodox Economics

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