During prolonged economic recessions when the normal cyclical expansion of output fails to materialize, the topic of the 'cyclical behaviour of wages' has emerged as an area of debate. In 1985, the British Treasury claimed that academic studies into the cyclical behaviour of wages demonstrated that a cut in wages would increase employment. Wages in the Business Cycle contests this argument by presenting the results of original, empirical work which illustrates the absence of any systematic empirical regularity to wage movements over the business cycle. Jonathan Michie argues that the re-emergence of this debate must be seen within the context of the theory of the 'labour demand function', representing an attempt to challenge the Keynesian theoretical assumptions implicit in the bulk of applied macro economic work up to the late 1970s.

Globalisation impacts almost all aspects of our lives. Smart-phones give access to news, documents and communications instantaneously and globally. It is said that change is accelerating, and the nation state is increasingly anachronistic. This book challenges that consensus. Globalisation is as old as capitalism, as is technological change. The reduced power of national governments is due to the free-market form of globalisation created by the 1980s administrations of Thatcher and Reagan leading to the 2008-2009 global financial crisis and recession. We need to move beyond this, taxing wealth and speculation to create a new era of sustainable development, globally.

This volume offers an original perspective on the relationship between economic theory and policy. It discusses the lessons of economic theory and policy from a broad political economy perspective.

This book presents unique management perspectives from Thailand’s Healthcare Industry. It focuses on the areas of Personal Knowledge Management, Leadership Styles and Organisational Performance. The book highlights the various business challenges that organisations face in the context of globalisation, which itself has produced new opportunities and difficulties alike. In addition, it also elaborates on how even large organisations with strong histories can no longer compete unless they are willing to adapt to changing conditions. Demonstrating how transferring and encouraging knowledge within an organisation can generate approaches that promote its continuing success, the book mainly focuses on the perspective of the Resource Based View, a broadly recognised method for maintaining the competitive advantages of an organisation. It also stresses the importance of making the most use of organisational resources. The book offers a valuable reference work, not only for practitioners and academic researchers in the fields of Business & Management but also for students taking Leadership Management, Organisational Learning and Organisational Performance Appraisal courses, serving as a sourcebook for the principles of successful management.

An impressive array of expert contributors come together to provide a study of issues, such as labour market regulation and wages, that have arisen from the fact that people have come to accept longer working hours as a way of life.

This book is the culmination of several years work by a group of academics, policy-makers and other professionals looking to understand how alternative economic thinking – and indeed thinking from quite different social-scientific disciplines – could enhance the mainstream economic approach to environmental and natural-resource problems. Of the editors, Dietz comes from the mainstream economics tradition, while Michie and Oughton draw explicitly on institutional and evolutionary economics. The various authors represent a range of disciplinary backgrounds and approaches. This book draws on the strengths of each and all of these approaches to analyse environmental issues and what can be done to tackle these through corporate and public policy. The book argues that the need for an inter-disciplinary approach. Two themes which emerge repeatedly throughout the book are the need for an interdisciplinary theory of technological change, and the need for a similarly interdisciplinary approach to the study of human behaviour and how it influences both production and consumption choices. The two themes are of course related. Resolving environmental questions requires an understanding of their nature, of their causes and, to the extent that they are anthropogenic, of how to change human behaviour. These fundamental issues are the focus of the four chapters that form Part 1 of this volume. The remainder of the volume develops them in more detail. .