Janet T. Knoedler

Market Structure, Industrial Research, and Consumers of Innovation: Forging Backward Linkages to Research in the Turn-of-the-Century U.S. Steel Industry

Although the U.S. steel industrys concentrated market structure and well-established production technology curbed active research by most steel firms, between 1880 and 1910 vertical research arrangements between steel producers and steel consumers, notably the Pennsylvania Railroad, became a key factor in promoting both increased innovation in basic steel products and increased innovative effort by steel producers, albeit slowly and gradually. Thus, research into steel was initiated not by steel producers but by steel consumers, who established in-house industrial research laboratories and interfirm cooperative research arrangements as a means to solve their technical problems with steel products. They also began to work toward creating an institution—the American Society for Testing Materials—that would allow for effective interaction with other consuming firms and, eventually, with producing firms to exchange information and build consensus.

American Prosperity and the “Race to the Bottom:” Why Won’t the Media Ask the Right Questions?

Abstract: Media coverage of income inequality and the economic plight of the middle class fails to analyze the long-term effects of growing inequality and to consider possible solutions. The article examines the literature on media coverage of income inequality and the middle class, and then examines how three competing models, the neoclassical economic model, the propaganda model, and the institutionalist model, explain the inadequate coverage of the effects and solutions.

Thorstein Veblen and the revival of free market capitalism

With the restoration of laissez faire as the governing principle of contemporary economic ideology and policy making, Thorstein Veblen’s insights are once again timely. This book revisits his legacy, featuring original essays by renowned Veblen scholars.

The Media, the News, and Democracy: Revisiting the Dewey-Lippman Debate

As an institution, the news media enjoy a special status derived from the First Amendment to the U.S. Constitution and from the societal expectation that in a democracy a free press is necessary to protect the public interest. As a capitalist enterprise, however, the news media are subject to the same pressures from pecuniary interests as any other private business (Veblen 1988; Croteau and Hoynes 2001). While meeting their dual responsibilities to the public interest and to their private shareholders has always been a difficult balancing act, the rise of large media conglomerates and the resulting concentration of ownership in the media industry have greatly tipped the scale toward the pecuniary and away from the public interest role (Champlin and Knoedler 2002). In this paper, we will examine this triumph of pecuniary interests through the lens of a famous 1920s debate between journalist Walter Lippman and philosopher John Dewey, in which they deliberated not whether, but how, the media should protect the public interest. We then examine news coverage of three recent issues that demonstrate different aspects of the public interest role of the media: (1) the recent proposed changes in media ownership rules; (2) the 2000 Presidential election; and (3) the question of weapons of mass destruction in Iraq. We will conclude by discussing possible solutions to the threat to democracy posed by the conglomerate commercialization of the news and the decline of the public interest function.

An Institutionalist Vision of a Good Economy

The current crisis in global capitalism and the wide-ranging problems that have been caused by the promulgation of a regime of deregulation of goods, services, and labor markets across the globe, but especially in the United States over the past thirty years, may indeed prove to be the end of the neoliberal era. Thus it is an opportune time to reconsider how the global economy could be restructured along more equitable and progressive lines. This paper will present the institutionalist vision of just such a good economy, building on the ideas of Veblen, Ayres, Commons, and Galbraith. The institutionalist vision of a good economy is productive but also non-invidious, democratic but also pragmatic, egalitarian but also efficient. The good economy must therefore be embedded in key social institutions, and be regulated appropriately to preserve the most beneficial social and cultural institutions. The good economy must, furthermore, be a full-employment economy, with jobs available to all who are capable of making productive contributions to their society and to enable those who labor to work in decent conditions. Finally, the good economy must provision all its members with the necessary means of subsistence for them to achieve their human aims.

Universal Health Care and the Economics of Responsibility

Abstract: In the American health care system the cost of health insurance is underwritten by all three sectors of the economy: 1) households; 2) employers; and 3) government. However, while costs are shared, responsibility is not. The retreat of private firms and government from assuming a substantial share of the burden of health care costs is based on the presumption that health care is an individual’s responsibility, while the contributions of government and the private sector are basically optional - a matter of benevolence rather than responsibility. The outcome of the current debates over health care reform will depend on this issue of responsibility. Who should pay for health care? Is it a collective responsibility or an individual one? In this paper, we explore the economics of responsibility as it applies to health care. In the institutionalist framework, any reallocation of costs must be driven by an underlying philosophy of shared responsibility.

Contingent Labor and Higher Education

ABSTRACT Over the past 30 years, the profession of college professor in the US has been changing from a high-status occupation, where faculty have extensive control over their job responsibilities, to a low-status contingent job in the peripheral labor market. This change mirrors the drift toward nonstandard employment in other sectors of the economy. Contingent and part-time faculty have grown at 10 times the rate of growth for tenure-track faculty, leading to a fundamental transformation in the nature of the professoriate. We review data related to these changes as well as the conventional explanations for this transformation. We conclude that the current system of academic labor is best understood within the core–periphery model of nonstandard employment. We conclude with some brief prospects for the future of the academic labor market and higher education.

Going to College on My iPhone

Abstract: Thorstein Veblen argued, in The Higher Learning in America, that universities were at risk of being captured by the same pecuniary aims as business enterprise. His argument remains relevant today, given that many observers claim that higher education is headed for fundamental transformation. These changes are occurring in response to a number of challenges facing higher education in the United States — financial, demographic, and cultural, aiming both to reform what is seen by many as a system resistant to change and accountability, and to take advantage of new technologies seen as improving accessibility and convenience for its consumers, the students. I briefly review Veblen’s argument by using its general contours as a lens for the major disruptions occurring in higher education today, and specifically the rise of for-profit universities, the expansion of online learning and massive open-online courses (MOOCs), and the growing movement to unbundle the educational experience.

The Great Disruption: Human Nature and the Reconstitution of Social Order

ties among the four models of employment system and the institutional environments, models of skill and job flexibility, and models of corporate governance that dominate different national contexts. However, his focus on the micro-level of analysis minimizes the important interrelationships among pressures from product markets, financial markets, technology, public policy and regulation, and the strategic approaches taken by the firm in resolving those pressures. Marsden also overlooks the impact of these approaches and their outcomes on the environment to which the firm must ultimately respond again. For example, firms exist to serve their product markets, and they develop strategic approaches in response to pressure from changes in those markets. In this process, the employment system plays an important role because of its influence on production costs and on the quantity and quality of output. Changes in employment systems are often a result of responses to pressures originating in the firms external environment that must be resolved internally if the firm is to remain competitive. Through their firm level outcomes and diffusion within the broader productive system, a firms employment system approach also has the potential to influence not only work system standards but also competitive conditions in the external environment. Marsdens theory of employment systems would be considerably strengthened if the firms employment system were more dynamically integrated into the broader social, political, and economic system of which it is a part, highlighting the important interrelationships and feedback effects that serve to shape and reshape the system at various levels (i.e., work system, firm, industry, national economy, and global economy) as it evolves over time.