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Economic ideas are the product of contemplation, but also of our economic lives. In the history of ideas, Gérard Debreu’s shining book of 1959, Theory of Value, represents the pinnacle of purity in contemplating economic life. Rather than contextualizing this oeuvre through his intellectual life, as is usually done, this essay describes his axiomatic analysis by contextualizing it through his economic life. What do we learn about Debreu’s axioms on consumption when thinking of his own consumption? What do we learn about his theory of value when thinking of his own values? Historiographically, this approach permits the use of a widely neglected source in the history of economics: anecdotes. Epistemologically, blending axioms and anecdotes offers a description of how axioms regulate an economic discourse. Finally, this essay offers a language for the material dimensions of economic life that are so underexposed in Debreu’s own work.

Academic inbreeding, whereby universities select their academic staff from among their own graduates, is a prevalent practice worldwide. This chapter presents a review of academic inbreeding research and discusses its relevance to leadership. The definition of academic inbreeding is examined, including its rationale and conceptualization. Then, the mechanisms through which academic inbreeding comes to be and the mechanisms that sustain the practice are presented and elaborated upon. Empirical evidence about the effects of academic inbreeding on scholarly practices is considered. Considering that the effects of academic inbreeding tend to be mostly detrimental to a university which aims to be creative, proactive, engaged with external communities, and producing knowledge with the highest levels of quality, policies to deal with this phenomenon are needed. Leadership in this context faces often difficult challenges since the curtailing of academic inbreeding is necessary but often deeply entrenched in traditions, culture and norms, habitus and power structures of the universities.

The average company in the UK loses £533 a year for each of its workers in the direct costs alone of absenteeism. Yet most companies have little or no idea how the issue affects them nor how to go about managing it to benefit the bottom line. In this extract from their new book Alastair Evans and Steve Palmer explain how to quantify the problem as a first step to controlling it.

Although the value of artificial intelligence (AI) has been acknowledged by companies, the literature shows challenges concerning AI-enabled business-to-business (B2B) marketing innovation, as well as the diversity of roles AI can play in this regard. Accordingly, this study investigates the approaches that AI can be used for enabling B2B marketing innovation.

Applying a bibliometric research method, this study systematically investigates the literature regarding AI-enabled B2B marketing. It synthesises state-of-the-art knowledge from 221 journal articles published between 1990 and 2021.

Apart from offering specific information regarding the most influential authors and most frequently cited articles, the study further categorises the use of AI for innovation in B2B marketing into five domains, identifying the main trends in the literature and suggesting directions for future research.

Through the five identified domains, practitioners can assess their current use of AI and identify their future needs in the relevant domains in order to make appropriate decisions on how to invest in AI. Thus, the research enables companies to realise their digital marketing innovation strategies through AI.

The research represents one of the first large-scale reviews of relevant literature on AI in B2B marketing by (1) obtaining and comparing the most influential works based on a series of analyses; (2) identifying five domains of research into how AI can be used for facilitating B2B marketing innovation and (3) classifying relevant articles into five different time periods in order to identify both past trends and future directions in this specific field.

This paper examines the relationship between government economic development programming and entrepreneurial activity, by examining evidence in Southern California cities. While numerous studies explore this relationship between government institutions and entrepreneurship at the level of countries and states, significant questions remain at the level of city government, and the influence of local government economic development programs on city-level entrepreneurial activity.

This paper uses regression analysis of data from all 215 Southern California cities to decompose the complex relationships between economic development programming and different types of entrepreneurial activity.

Results suggest startups are attracted to cities with higher crime rates, more diversity, and older populations, yet not those with higher levels of economic development programming. There is evidence that some types of economic development programming may influence entrepreneurship, especially for the level of minority-owned businesses.

The paper makes three important contributions to the literature. First, it is among the first to use local (city-level) entrepreneurship as an outcome variable to measure the effect of government economic development programming. Many scholars have instead chosen to look at outcomes relating to general economic growth (e.g. new jobs) rather than outcomes specific to local entrepreneurship. Second, it explores city-wide entrepreneurial activity with respect to numerous measures, such as start-ups, minority and female ownership, and self-employment. Third, it examines the potential influence of economic development programming, both on aggregate and decomposed into economic development program clusters.

Colombia has one of the highest levels of inequality in landholding in the world. This inequality has persisted in spite of numerous state-led land reform efforts, which leads to the question: why has it been so difficult to reverse unequal land distribution in Colombia? To answer this question, the chapter examines the role of the state, non-state armed groups, land inequality, land reform efforts, and a history of violence to reveal the relationship between land, inequality and violence in Colombia. This chapter explores the nature of this relationship to understand Colombia’s enduring inequality and to inform theoretical approaches to statehood and power. Rather than reducing state capacity to common Weberian binary constructions of state and statelessness, I explore how state capacity takes on different forms in different regions of Colombia – analyzing how various actors shape land inequality and violence across the territory. Using a comprehensive longitudinal panel data set of displaced persons, I use a negative binomial regression model to demonstrate how land reform, land inequality, and a history of violence have directly affected current displacement of citizens. I argue that several constellations of powerful social actors have at various points converged to control land, through non-state armed groups, to exert a local form of logistical control outside the scope of the federal state, deeply affecting the dynamics violence across different territories. These groups have subsequently engaged in a land grabbing process that has resulted in a reverse form of land reform – leading to persisting inequality in Colombia.