Keynes and Marx, Duncan and Me

This paper was originally prepared for the New School celebration of Duncan Foley’s career. It attempts to place his work in the context of the evolution of economics as a discipline and of the MIT Economics Department in the last forty years, and in particular the place of Marx and Keynes as catalytic thinkers in that process

Flexible Bureaucracies in Labor Market Regulation

URL is to book. Chapter listed in TOCThis paper compares and contrasts the U.S. and French systems of labor market regulation. The U.S. system is specialized: Regulating authority is dispersed among a host of different agencies each with a relatively narrow jurisdiction, and as a result with responsibility for a very limited domain. Authority is further divided between the federal and the state governments. The French system is a unified or general system: A single agency is responsible for the enforcement of the whole labor code. As a result, the French system is a street-level bureaucracy in which considerable power and authority rests with the line agents, the work inspectors themselves. The structure of the system (quite paradoxically in the light of the centralization generally attributed to the French state) gives the inspectors virtually complete autonomy in the geographic area to which they are assigned. As a result, and contrary to the contrast generally drawn between civil law and common law countries, at least in the literature of economics, the French system is considerably more flexible and able to adjust to variations in economic and social conditions across the territory but also over time than is the U.S. system. The contrast is of broader importance because the French system was adopted by Spain (and Italy) and from there spread to Latin America, where the issue of labor standards enforcement has become central to bilateral trade treaties with the United States. The paper goes on to discuss the various managerial issues posed by the two systems and the problems of reconciling their contrasting dynamics in a unified global trading regime

A long term perspective on immigration and the crisis

En este artículo se analizan los cambios en la estructura del mercado laboral y sus implicaciones para la migración. Se exponen diferentes elementos que deben ser tenidos en cuenta al estudiar las migraciones actuales y los mercados de trabajo, en concreto la flexibilidad y cualificación de los inmigrantes para realizar determinados trabajos en las sociedades de acogida, así como la fuerza laboral nativa que compite por puestos de trabajo que hace años no eran atractivos para ella. La del mercado laboral, las políticas públicas, las fuentes de financiación, el acceso a la mejora en las condiciones de trabajo y de participación social, además de la fuerza laboral femenina y los movimientos migratorios transnacionales de personas altamente cualificadas formadas en países desarrollados, impactan directamente en un contexto de crisis económica.Changes in the structure of the work market and their implications for migration are analyzed in this article. Together with these starting factors, they are exposed the different elements that should be taken into account when studying the current migration and labor markets, particularly the flexibility and qualification of immigrants to perform certain jobs in their host societies, as well as the native workforce, who are now competing for those jobs that years ago were not attractive for them. The flexibility of work market, public policies, funding sources, the access to improvements in working conditions and social participation, in addition to the female working force and transnational migration movements of highly qualified people previously trained in developed countries, have a direct impact on a context of economic crisis.- Grupo de investigación Antropología y Filosofía (SEJ-126). Universidad de Granada. - Área de Antropología Social. Universidad de Jaén. - Laborarorio de Antropología Social y Cultural (HUM-472). Universidad de Almería. - Departamento de Filosofía II. Universidad de Granada

Convergence in industrial relations? : the case of France and the United States

July, 198

Bringing 'place' back in: regional clusters, project governance, and new product outcomes

We examine new product outcomes in the context of regional clusters. Based on past research on marketing relationships, clusters, and social networks, we propose that the overall configuration of a cluster helps promote particular governance practices among its members. These practices have distinct value-creating properties, and when they are brought to bear on a specific new product development project within a cluster, they promote performance outcomes like product novelty and speed to market. Ultimately, these performance effects are reinforced by the configuration of the cluster itself. In general, we propose that new product outcomes follow from complex interactions between a cluster's macro-level configuration and its micro-level governance processes. More broadly, our framework points to the importance of geographical variables and to the role of “place” in marketing decision-making