Joint supply functions are not uncommon but nowhere are they more prevalent than in the mining industry. Assessment of the importance of marketable by-products is made more difficult by the lack of detailed information on costs. This study shows how data on output and prices may be used to...

In Britain a new generation of worker co-operatives have emerged that differ from earlier phases of co-operative development in that they have been formed primarily to create jobs in response to the high level of unemployment. All the major political parties favour co-operative development and...

The term “entropy†is now widely used in social science, although its origin is in physical science. There are three main ways in which the term may be used. The first invokes the original meaning, referring to the unidirectionality of heat flow, from hot bodies to cold ones. The...

In recent years the methodological status of the neoclassical maximisation hypothesis has been subjected to criticism from a number of different sources. These have included criticisms from the Austrian subjectivist school based on the work of Hayek and Shackle along with empirical criticisms...

The fallacy of misplaced concreteness is considered, following Whitehead, as a general difficulty in abstract conceptual thought. A connection to economic theory was made by Whitehead himself, although that was not his primary reason for investigating the fallacy. More recently Georgescu-Roegen...

This paper examines the development of machine maintenance work in eight plants in Cumbria. It assesses both the arguments from the ‘flexibility’ literature concerning multi-skilling, and the ‘labour process’ debate about the deskilling of modern manual work. The eight...