Guy Oakes

The sales process and the paradoxes of trust

This essay explores a major ethical variable in personal sales: trust. By analyzing data drawn from life insurance sales, the essay supports the thesis that the role of the agent and the exigencies of personal sales create certain antinomies of trust that compromise the sales process. As a result, trust occupies a problematic and apparently paradoxical position in the sales process. On the one hand, success in personal sales is held to depend upon trust. On the other hand, because the techniques required to form trust in personal sales nullify the conditions under which trust is possible, these instruments of trust formation are self-defeating.

Max Weber on Value Rationality and Value Spheres Critical Remarks

This essay considers a question that Weber scholarship seems to have left untouched: is Weber’s concept of value rationality coherent? In making the case that it is not, I begin with the premise that value rationality is a product of processes of value rationalization that operate in value spheres. Because of self-destructive defects that undermine Weber’s analysis of these processes, his account of value rationality is invalidated as well. I conclude with some skeptical observations on his distinction between value rationality and instrumental rationality.

The limits of concept formation in natural science : a logical introduction to the historical sciences

Discrete, finely divided, tack-free, pourable elastomer particles are prepared from a filler-containing organic solvent-elastomer suspension containing the elastomer dissolved in a volatile inert organic solvent and a solid, finely divided elastomer filler, by flash evaporation of the organic solvent to form discrete finely divided, tack-free elastomer particles.

Assessing Microcredit in Bangladesh: A Critique of the Concept of Empowerment

Assessing microcredit programs by testing their contribution to the empowerment of borrowers has been widely advocated and explored in the literature on women and development. There is considerable debate on whether microcredit empowers or disempowers women, and there are attempts to reconcile conflicting conclusions based on heterogeneous samples or data sets and grounded in a variety of methodologies. Although there is little agreement on the relation between microcredit and empowerment and no consensus on the meaning of the idea of empowerment itself, students of gender and development seem to be at one in regarding empowerment as a logically unproblematic concept. We argue that the idea of empowerment employed in this literature is vulnerable to a number of logical criticisms and cannot serve as a sound basis for determining the value of microcredit to borrowers. Our research suggests that in assessing the impact of microcredit, it is essential to consider generational and inter-generational differences it makes in the lives of borrowers and their families. Results of ethnographic work conducted in January 2008 on long-term borrowers of the Grameen Bank inform the exposition of the arguments.

The Theory Arsenal: The Cambridge Circus and the Origins of the Keynesian Revolution

In the winter of 1934–35, when John Maynard Keynes was beginning to circulate proofs of The General Theory of Employment, Interest, and Money, he indulged in a playful exchange of letters with George Bernard Shaw devoted mainly to the merits of Karl Marx as an economist. At the end of his letter of January 1, 1935, Keyness observations took a more serious turn, documenting fundamental changes in his theoretical ambitions following the publication of his Treatise on Money in 1930: “To understand my state of mind, however, you have to know that I believe myself to be writing a book on economic theory which will largely revolutionize—not, I suppose, at once but in the course of the next ten years—the way the world thinks about economic problems†(Keynes 1973a, p. 492).

THE EDITOR AS SCIENTIFIC REVOLUTIONARY: KEYNES, THE ECONOMIC JOURNAL, AND THE PIGOU AFFAIR, 1936–1938

Thus spake Edwin Cannan, professor of economics at the London School of Economics (LSE) and member of the Council of the Royal Economic Society, publisher of The Economic Journal (EJ). From 1911 to 1945, Keynes was editor of the EJ, arguably the most prestigious journal in British economics. At the time of Cannans remark in February 1934, when the early drafts of The General Theory of Employment, Interest, and Money were taking shape and Keynes had assumed leadership of a movement to reconceptualize economic theory, he not only had ideas of his own but an uncommonly robust sense of their importance. Although Keyness conception of the ultimate purpose of economic theory remained true to the Marshallian tradition in which he was trained— forging scientific tools to improve the lot of humankind—his immediate objective was less pacific: the destruction of classical economics (Keynes 1935, p. 36). In his metaphor, classicism was a citadel fortified by an invincible superstructure constructed over generations by economists of great theoretical power and ingenuity, from David Ricardo and John Stuart Mill to Alfred Marshall and his own contemporary, Arthur Cecil Pigou. Because the citadel was vulnerable only in its “fundamental groundwork,†an assault would succeed only by undermining this foundation (Keynes 1973a, p. 533).

Developing A Framework

On Friday afternoon, 12 June 1903, William Hewins met Joseph Chamberlain for the first time in the latter’s private room in the British House of Commons to discuss the burning fiscal issue of the time: tariff reform. Chamberlain — committed imperialist, anti-Little Englander, and self-anointed leader of the reform movement — was Colonial Secretary in the Conservative cabinet of Balfour. Hewins was the founding director of LSE, a conservative imperialist and critic of free trade, and a member of the international community of historical economists. The tariff reform controversy of 1903–6 was the most contentious British political dispute in the decade before the Great War. It split the Establishment, inflamed the public, created a disastrous rift in the Conservative Party, and ended in a Liberal landslide victory in the general election of 1906, beginning the long Liberal ascendancy that set the foundations of the British welfare state. Although this may seem improbable in the extreme, the genesis of Pigou’s research programme for economics, first set out in Wealth and Welfare, is linked to the controversy and Chamberlain’s collaboration with Hewins.1

Joan Robinson's “Secret Document” A Passage from the Autobigraphy of an Analytical Economist

The Modern Archives, Kings College, Cambridge University contain a carbon copy of a three-page single spaced manuscript with the title “A Passage From The Autobiography of an Analytical Economist†(RFK/16/2/134–139, hereinafter “Autobiography†). Joan Robinsons initials are typed at the end of the document, which is dated October 1932.In October 1932, Heffer, the Cambridge University student bookstore, published Joan Robinsons methodological pamphlet, Economics is a Serious Subject, and she delivered the manuscript of The Economics of Imperfect Competition to Macmillan (Joan Robinson to Richard Kahn, October 30, 1932, RFK/13/90/1/19). The Autobiography was apparently drafted shortly after these two projects were completed. The typescript in Modern Archives, which seems to be the only extant copy, was not made until some months later. In a letter of March 2, 1933, Kahn suggested adding “a long section to your secret document if you can do so without spoiling it,†regretting that he had not asked her for a copy (RFK/13/90/1/162–67). She replied somewhat mysteriously, alluding to a superstitious reluctance to having it typed but admitting that eventually it would have to be done (March 23, 1933, RFK/13/90/1/205–208). Since the carbon copy refers to page 275 of her book, the Autobiography was not typed until she had seen the final set of page proofs, and perhaps not until the book had appeared.

Value Theory and the Foundations of the Cultural Sciences. Remarks on Rickert

In the early 1880s, a series of disputes arose in German academia over the aims, subject matter, and methods of the social sciences. Although the Methodenstreit — the controversy over methods — began as a debate between historicists in German economics and marginal utility theorists in Vienna, by the eve of World War I, these disputes embraced philosophy, historiography, and sociology. The result was a crisis in the social sciences. Because of the privileged status enjoyed by the partisans in the debate, German university professors who were regarded as the stewards of the fundamental values of western civilization, it was translated into a crisis of modern culture.

Rickert's Value Theory and the Foundations of Weber's Methodology

The general area of this essay is an issue left unexplored by the tradition of commentary on Rickerts philosophy and Webers methodology: the question of the relationship between Rickerts value theory and the validity of Webers methodological positions. Within this area, the essay focuses on the question of the relationship between Rickerts analysis of the problem of the objectivity of values and Webers conception of the objectivity of the cultural sciences. The thesis defended is that a solution to Webers problem of the objectivity of the cultural sciences depends upon Rickerts doctrine of the objectivity of values. In this sense, Rickerts position on the objectivity of values is essential to the validity of Webers methodology.