Managerial economics

About: Managerial economics is a research topic. Over the lifetime, 1524 publications have been published within this topic receiving 83965 citations.

The mythologies of environmental economics

Abstract: This paper offers a polemic on the policy implications for leisure and tourism of the shortcomings of contemporary approaches to environmental economics. The paper argues that the market construct of neoclassical economics is flawed by its inability to address situations in which markets do not operate and that this flaw is exacerbated by repeated attempts to overcome the problems through inappropriate technical fixes. To illustrate the argument, seven ‘myths’ of environmental economics are identified, which highlight the flaws and examine some of the implications for policy in areas such as common property. The paper suggests that a new approach to environmental economics is required, founded on principles that are not bounded by ideas of exchange. Informed by the advances made in ecological economics, the paper considers the potential of associative economics, as set out by Rudolf Steiner in his lectures of 1922, when he identified that the assumptions of neoclassical economics would not lend themselves...

Developing Managerial Work. A system and work-flow approach

Abstract: Companies focus change and development in order to improve their competitiveness. In manufacturing companies a shift in focus from production to product development has been recognized. During the last decade, many companies in automotive industry have utilized mergers and acquisitions, as a means to create competitive advantages by enabling synergies. In the auto industry, as well as in the telecom industry, some companies have just grown. This has lead to an increased organizational complexity. Organizational change, together with complexity, make the managerial task challenging and critical, and thus also an issue for development. In research, management activity has been approached within the concept of managerial work, and also within the concept of leadership. Managerial work studies have been focused on organizing discrete activities into categories, made up from basic managerial functions (e.g. planning, organizing, commanding, coordinating, controlling), which goes all the way back to Fayol (1916), and on characterizing different types of managerial jobs. Managerial work is generally characterized as hectic, varied, fragmented, reactive and disorderly, and closely related to context and hierarchy, and individual aspects dominate the choice and proportion of activities. This characteristic of managerial work has been found to be relatively stable over the decades. However, management and managerial work have proven to be difficult to define and understand both in theory and in practice. Due to a lack of a firm theoretical base, advice on good management and managerial work is mostly of a tentative kind. Consequently, there is an ongoing debate about the relevance gap in management science, from a practical perspective. Based on the research on the managerial work situation in product development, it is argued here that change and development of managerial work – as such – need to be focused, when organizational change and complexity are taken into account. But due to the lack of integrative perspectives and approaches it is difficult to define what to develop, and also how to develop managerial work. In order to deal with development of managerial work in product development, this thesis argues that approaches with work-flow and system orientation are relevant to consider, especially within a context characterized by change and complexity. A work-flow and system-based approach represents a more integrative perspective of managerial work, and thus represents an alternative to the dominant fragmented and individually related approaches. Together with frameworks for collective learning and design, a work-flow and system approach has the potential to facilitate development. It is also proposed that collaborative research approaches can contribute to both scientific and practical relevance in managerial work development.

Competition in Innovation

Abstract: This judicious selection of recent essays demonstrates the applicability of the fundamental principles of neo-Schumpeterian economics, namely, innovation and uncertainty. The authors demonstrate how neo-Schumpeterian economics is developing into a comprehensive economic theory encompassing industry, the public sector and financial markets.

The prospects of economics

Abstract: In the development course of economics,the appearance of the different schools is often due to the difference of economic analytical perspectives or methods.The evolution of economics in a large part relies on the social moral norms,and no immoral economics ever exists in the development of modern economics.A promising prospect of economics does not in the main lie in the inborn gift of the economists themselves,but in the good labor division and cooperation between economics and other disciplines,in the reasonable employment of mathematical tools and avoiding of traditional defects in the pursuit oftrend and popularity.

The Problem of Knowledge in Economics

Abstract: While a graduate student at Rice University, my study carrell was located adjacent to the economics section in the library. Occasionally, I would wander through the aisles looking for reading material, and one day I came upon copies of the Southern Economic Journal. Little did I know that a few years later, at the University of North Carolina, would begin my affiliation with the Journal which would last thirty years, twenty-eight of which I have served as Managing Editor. During that period roughly 14,000 manuscript submissions have passed over my desk, approximately 2,600 articles and communications have been published, together with about 3,000 book reviews, in 113 issues. Many changes have occurred during those 30 years, both external and internal to our discipline. The rapidity of change in our cultural, social, political, and economic institutions during that period is, perhaps, unprecedented in our history. Thirty years ago, we were in the grips of both a cold war and a Vietnam war, the civil rights movement was in full swing, and the babyboom generation was beginning to make its presence felt at colleges and universities. All of these would have profound effects on our institutions which continue through the present.' Thirty years ago the profession was less specialized, less fragmented, than today, and communication among economists in different fields was more common. The newly emerging specialized fields were Soviet Economics and Economic Development, reflecting the concerns of the times. Econometrics was beginning to become a standard part of graduate training, and mathematical economics maintained its distinction, until later, when practically all specialized fields became mathematized. Computational costs and data limitations constrained empirical research, but the IBM 360 mainframe was available to those of us who had a working knowledge of Fortran which facilitated the construction of our own data sets, file maintenance and statistical programs whenever useful "canned" programs were absent. We were all programmers then, in varying degrees. Later, expansion of national government policy from general and indirect macro stabilization policies towards more direct intervention at the micro level spawned a host of new fields of specialization, which became known as "applied" fields, such as regional and urban economics, health economics, environmental economics, population economics, energy economics, as well