Law and Corporate Malfeasance in Neoliberal India

Critical sociolegal scholars highlight how the law favors powerful actors in handling the socioenvironmental devastation affecting marginalized populations. What receives scant attention is how the neoliberalization of the world economy has further enabled powerful capitalist firms to shape the legal path in their own favor and to the detriment of the marginalized. Union Carbide’s 1984 Bhopal catastrophe killed 25,000, injured 600,000, and left prolonged consequences. This paper advances our understanding of the political economy of law by analyzing the handling of death and devastation in Bhopal. Drawing data from 60 interviews with Bhopal victim activists and archives, it advances the argument that the law mirrors the interests of the neoliberal actors of capital. Findings suggest that the law has not only proved unable to safeguard the weakest elements of Bhopal society, but also the pursuit of legal solutions under neoliberalism is incapable of addressing the long-term harms affecting marginalized Bhopalis.

Semi-Proletarianization in a Dual Economy: The Case of China

This paper proposes a model to explain the wage increase for migrant workers in China since the mid-2000s. First, the model consists of a capitalist sector and a non-capitalist sector. Second, households are semi-proletarianized because they participate in both family farming and wage production. Third, capitalist firms determine the wage level in order to extract labor. The paper demonstrates that semi-proletarianization is one of the three stages of the long-term dynamics of a dual economy like China. In so doing, it provides an alternative to the Lewis turning point literature. JEL Classification: B51, O53, E24

Incomplete Contracts, Power and Efficiency: A Theoretical Analysis

This paper formalizes the idea that the allocation of tasks and adoption of technology in capitalist firms could be inefficient. Some previous studies have attempted this exercise, but the framework and results in this paper are different. The paper models contracts that are incomplete owing to the presence of unforeseen/indescribable contingencies, which opens up the possibility of renegotiation. Renegotiation can improve outcomes, but also leads to a hold-up problem. Given this, the equilibrium allocation is inefficient compared to other (non-hierarchical) alternatives. The extent of the inefficiency can be linked to the degree of incompleteness. This model captures insights from the literature on the microeconomic roots of inefficiency and the exercise of control and power. It also provides a concrete setting where indescribable contingencies do (and do not) matter—a much-debated issue. JEL Codes: D21, B1, B2

Responses to emotional exhaustion: do worker cooperatives matter?

Purpose The purpose of this paper is to investigate the mediating role of organizational identification in the relationship between emotional exhaustion and turnover intention. It also examines the moderating roles of worker cooperatives in the relationships of emotional exhaustion with organizational identification and turnover intention. Design/methodology/approach Surveys of worker cooperatives and capitalist firms in the Seoul metropolitan area were conducted in 2016. The hypotheses of this study were tested through multilevel moderated mediation analyses. Findings This study revealed that organizational identification partially mediated the relationship between emotional exhaustion and turnover intention. The findings of the study provided evidence that worker cooperatives alleviated the adverse relationships of emotional exhaustion with organizational identification and turnover intention. Research limitations/implications Since it was conducted with a cross-sectional data set, this study is not free from the issue of causality. However, the findings provide insights into how emotional exhaustion may be associated with organizational identification and turnover intention, and how worker cooperatives may alter these relationships. Practical implications Capitalist firms should provide their employees with more autonomy and more opportunities to participate in organizational decision-making, as in worker cooperatives, to induce their employees to hold more positive attitudes. Originality/value There is no extant research on the mechanism through which emotional exhaustion is associated with turnover intention via organizational identification, and on the moderating roles of worker cooperatives in this mechanism.

Managing Communist Enterprises: Poland, Hungary, and Czechoslovakia, 1945–1970

Business history for three generations has focused almost exclusively on capitalist firms, their managers, and their relations with markets, states, and rivals. However, enterprises on all scales also operated within communist nations “building socialism” in the wake of World War II. This article represents a first-phase exploration of business practices in three Central European states as Stalinism gave way to cycles of reform and retrenchment in the 1960s. Focusing chiefly on industrial initiatives, the study asks: How did socialist enterprises work and change across the first postwar generation, given their distinctive principles and political/economic contexts, and implicitly, what contrasts with capitalist activities are worth considering.