Creative Learning and Policy Ideas: The Global Rise of Green Growth

Ideas play an important role in policy change. Theories of policy change, including rational and bounded learning, bracket what needs to be explained: the creation of new ideas. We develop a theory of creative learning in international organizations (IOs). It posits that IO officials respond to new problems and state practices by creating novel concepts and policy ideas. New ideas help officials to manage multiple pressures in their organization’s strategic situation. They enable officials to mediate principal demands while seeking to mobilize client states. We theorize three modes of creative learning that generate new ideas: conceptual combination, translation, and repurposing. Empirically, we explain a major change in global environmental policy: the rise of green growth ideas among major IOs, including the OECD, the UN, and the World Bank. Green growth ideas include new arguments drawn from Keynesian and Schumpeterian economics, which claim that environmental policies can drive economic growth. We show how these ideas were a creative response to the problem of climate change and emerging state interventions in support of clean energy. Our theory of creative learning applies beyond IOs to domestic politics and takes on added significance in times of transformative change that challenge the scripts of policymaking.

The Schumpeterian shock at General Motors in the 1920’s

Purpose The purpose of this paper is to examine the link between Joseph Schumpeter’s economics and the rise of General Motors (GM). Design/methodology/approach The paper uses regression analysis and time series analysis of market synchronization. Findings There is a strong link between GM rise to dominance of the domestic automobile industry and nuanced features of Schumpeterian economics. Research limitations/implications The paper furthers the examination of the role of information economics on marketing channel performance. Practical implications Information helps in production decisions by synchronizing production with consumer demand. Social implications Economic efficiency enhances the human welfare for better forecasting, lower inventories and greater profits. Originality/value This topic has been explored before but methodology used in this paper is innovative. The paper uses Granger causality.

Global Crisis, Innovation and Change Management: Towards a New Systemic Perception of the Current Globalization Restructuring

The “crisis of capitalism” is not, of course, an unprecedented discourse in the evolution of economics and the investigation of economic realities. In Neo-Schumpeterian economics crises constitute necessary evolutionary steps, intrinsically linked with breaking ‘moments’ and change. However, what makes the current crisis clearly different, and to a large extent subversive, is its ever increasing complexity and evolutionary-dialectic substance. The mixing of cooperation and competition, on an organizational and macro-economic level, reproduces on a global scale the need for a reconsideration of basic economic mechanisms. It tends to undermine and rapidly destroy the mechanistic relations and structures of all kinds and dimensions that have managed to provide profitability and effectiveness over the recent years. In this context, the search for strategic innovation, constant organizational renewal and the diffusion of production oriented at high technological expertise, seem to progressively become the critical synthetic components for building a new development model at all levels and for all agents of action.This paper focuses on the introduction of a three tier question which could be put forward as follows. First we ask what is the current global restructuring crisis and what would be a new growth model that would lead us to the exit of it on a global scale. Second we address the issue of what kind of innovation mechanisms does such a new model of interspatial restructuring and development require. Finally we analyse why is this new innovative direction—both in global terms and in individual socioeconomic systems—a prerequisite for building new types of effective change management mechanisms.The starting point of our approach is the position that any fragmented approach in the individual aspects of the triangle of global crisis, innovation, and change management, is now analytically misguided and practically powerless. Only an effort to systemically understand the phenomenon, in its constant and dialectic structure, is now an adequate condition for outlining the future developmental path of globalization at all levels of action.

How banks and other financial institutions think

Conventional diagnoses of the 2007/8 Global Financial Crisis see it as “abnormal”, and then resort to explanations in terms of “irrational exuberance”, “animal spirits”, “herding behaviour” and so on. The prescription – “better regulation” – then follows automatically, as it has done after every such crisis, all the way back to tulipmania 400 years ago. But if there are different “seasons of risk”, and if financial sector actors are able to latch onto different risk-handling strategies, each appropriate to one of those seasons and inappropriate to the others, then we have a very different explanation: one in which, in contrast to both neoclassical and behavioural economics, rationality is no longer singular. This “anthropological” hypothesis has its roots in Mary Douglas’s book “How Institutions Think”, and the paper shows how it is well supported by historical evidence, agent-based modelling, and fieldwork among both financial sector firms and their regulators, as well as by parallels from ecology, organisation theory and evolutionary (i.e. Schumpeterian) economics.

Agent-based computational models– a formal heuristic for institutionalist pattern modelling?

I investigate the consistency of agent-based computational models with the institutionalist research program as outlined by Myrdal, Wilber and Harrison, Hodgson and others. In particular, I discuss whether such models can be a useful heuristic for ‘pattern modelling’: Can they provide a holistic, systemic and evolutionary perspective on the economy? How can agency be conceptualised within ABMs? Building on these issues, I discuss potentials and challenges of the application of ABM in institutionalist research. This discussion also relates to recent methodological advances in neo-Schumpeterian economics. I explain how institutionalists can benefit from these and suggest areas for joint research under the methodological umbrella of ABM.