The Challenge of Segmented Labor Market Theories to Orthodox Theory: A Survey

Wang and Swanson (2008) have provided a critique of the current state of the research and theory of national human resource development (NHRD). In this article, the authors provide a critique based on the following issues: insistence on a single paradigm of truth or reality, theory development methodology, the bounding process, the definitional process, scope of NHRD efforts, and reliance on economics (and only development economics).

A Response to Wang and Swanson's Article on National HRD and Theory Development

This paper proposes a new model of wage determination and wage inequality. In this model, wage-setters set workers' wages; they do so either directly, as when individuals vote in a salary committee, or indirectly, as when political parties, via the myriad of social, economic, fiscal, and other policies, generate wages. The recommendations made by wage-setters (or arising from their policies) form a distribution, and all the wage-setter-specific distributions are combined into a single final wage distribution. There may be any number of wage-setters; some wage-setters count more than others; and the wage-setters may differ among themselves on both the wage distribution and the amounts recommended for particular workers. We use probability theory to derive initial results, including both distribution-independent and distribution-specific results. Fortuitously, elements of the model correspond to basic democratic principles. Thus, the model yields implications for the effects of democracy on wage inequality. These include: (1) The effects of the number of wage-setters and their power depend on the configuration of agreements and disagreements; (2) Independence of mind reduces wage inequality, and dissent does so even more; (3) When leaders of democratic nations seek to forge an economic consensus, they are unwittingly inducing greater economic inequality; (4) Arguments for independent thinking will be more vigorous in small societies than in large societies; (5) Given a fixed distributional form for wages and two political parties which either ignore or oppose each other's distributional ideas, the closer the party split to 50-50, the lower the wage inequality; and (6) Under certain conditions the wage distribution within wage-setting context will be normal, but the normality will be obscured, as cross-context mixtures will display a wide variety of shapes.

A New Model of Wage Determination and Wage Inequality

In The General Theory, John Maynard Keynes lumped together the marginalist and neoclassical economics of the late nineteenth and twentieth centuries and the more narrowly defined “classical” econom...

https://www.cambridge.org/core/services/aop-cambridge-core/content/view/S105383720000969X

Efficiency wages and classical wage theory

Among the first challenges facing every scientist is the need to choose a framework capable of serving as the methodological and theoretical foundation of his/her research. In economics, neoclassical theory is unquestionably the paradigm most often chosen. This is not surprising, for the price-theoretic approach has come not merely to dominate all economic subfields; it is a perspective being applied with increasing frequency "to every nook and cranny of life" [Miller 1962, p. 65].1 This particular author strongly believes the words of Edwin E. Witte: "Every ... economist should interest himself in practical economic problems" [Witte 1957, p. 14]. While this remark is safe, even in the most orthodox circles, the author also believes Michael J. Piore was quite correct in suggesting that the enterprise of neoclassical economics

Newman Arnold Tolles

Papers

Origins of Modern Wage Theories