market-economics

I really like this book. There are around 10 intro marketing textbooks, and they're almost all either (co-)authored by Kotler, or shameless rip-offs of his books.

Hats of to Roger Best for coming up with a book that's truly different. The approach is refreshingly down-to-earth, almost nerdy, including a lot of frameworks for financial or qualitative analysis that would be useful to any marketing manager in his or her daily life. Although it can be used as an introductory marketing textbook, you'll find a lot of material here that you don't find in Kotler and Kotler-clones, so I also recommend it to people who've had an intro marketing course, and who want to move beyond the basics. Likewise, this would be a great book for practicing marketing managers who've been out in the field a couple of years, and want to brush up on the basics, without wading through the usual definitions and useless frameworks in other intro textbooks.

The entire book is in black and white, lacking the usual fancy graphics, and it is only about half the length of other textbooks. I actually find that refreshing, and it is an extension the substance-over-hype approach behind this book.

We recommend this book to clients of ours who serve on Boards of health care systems. McCracken provides an excellent overview of what is going on in health care delivery today, using up-to-date examples.

The author takes many of the current models of strategic thinking and shows how each model applies or does not apply in a health care environment. She lists the warning signs that something is wrong with the strategic planning---very helpful.

McCracken is well suited to author a book like this.

She has had marketing/strategy roles with urban health care teaching health care systems as well as more rural community hospitals. She thus understands both worlds.

Larry Stybel The Board of Directors' Resource Center

A masterpiece in marketing technology. It has been very difficult capturing the best insights and rolling out the best ideas in today's technology management. To lead in any industry, you need to have a larger and broader information of the markets that you are in. But it is also critical to take a careful look on industries that are driven by technologies. Tough customers and intense competition--this book reckons it all.

This book ranks highly among those which seek to provide an intellectual basis for post Reagan/Thatcher/Berlin Wall politics. O'Neill's objective is to elucidate the operation of 'international functional units of planning' that are capable of using global resources in 'an ecologically rational way'; and he sets out 'to defend non-market associations' and 'to puncture the intellectual case for the market economy'. His inspiration is 'Otto Neurath's strong form of associational socialism', which is his guide to a 'non-market associational order'.

O'Neill's subject - the market - comprises 'social and institutional arrangements through which goods are regularly produced for, distributed by and subject to contractual forms of exchange in which money and property rights over goods are transferred between agents'. By the precepts of Austrian school politics, the market (i) is an amoral, arational, non-economic, non-teleological institution which offers no judgement of the end-states that it fosters and (ii) affords a framework for the peaceful co-existence of individuals with diverse goals. These precepts support an ethos of benign neutrality which rivals the perfectionist account of political and social institutions.

Rival paradigms of political theory point to different values in negative liberty; it is a prerequisite for either (i) neutrality: with an accommodation of different perceptions of the good, or (ii) perfectionism: with an inducement to character building. However, the author identifies three (not two) issues: (i) 'the powers and dispositions of character' needed to become an autonomous person; (ii) the freedom from coercion needed to exercise that autonomy; and (iii) the material means needed to effect action. He argues that the blurring of the first two issues has obscured the positive component in Hayek's endorsement of liberty.

O'Neill laments 'the rejection of the enlightenment project of a rationally ordered social life' and points to an Austrian paradox: to assert that autonomy is good, is to invite rational debate over the conception of the good, which surrenders the virtue of neutrality. O'Neill believes that 'the most effective defence of market institutions would not be to appeal to institutional neutrality between conceptions of the good but rather to develop a perfectionist liberal economics according to which the free market is a necessary condition for that good.' Yet, (as O'Neill concedes) Hayek does not propagate a purely contractarian version of liberalism. The perfectionism in Hayek is especially evident in respect of such desirable traits as 'independence and self-reliance, individual initiative and local responsibility'. For Hayek the key issue is the nature of the 'Great Society', where individuals can find 'the best conditions for achieving their aims'.

O'Neill finds the best welfare defences of the market in classical economics: 'material conditions of well-being, the social and cultural conditions for the development of human excellences ... autonomous choice and the possibility of cultural accomplishment, and conditions that foster proper social relationships'. These constituted the vision before the paradigm shift from substantive accounts of welfare to preference satisfaction. Any concern with the content of well-being was then abandoned. Thereafter there was either the (neo-classical) calculus of pleasure and pain or the (Austrian) remit of allowing individuals the best prospect for achieving personal goals. Aristotle was reversed: an item is desirable because of an individual's beliefs about it, not because it is objectively good. However, O'Neill's account is blemished by his conflation of neo-classical constrained optimisation (whose unlikely assumptions deter many students) with Hayek's social theories of sequential causation and co-ordination. In consequence much of his purported criticism of Hayek flies wide of the mark.

O'Neill presents the market as having encroached too far upon non-market associations: at best, the market creates a tension between welfare gains - although he finds 'little relation between growth in economic welfare and growth in reported 'satisfaction'' - and contractual relations that are incompatible with non-market associations; the market corrodes conditions of human well-being: the commitments of personal relationships; social bonds and loyalties; social identity and the narrative order of human life; the norms of recognition that are vital to the internal order of the sciences, arts and crafts; skills and social esteem; and the public nature of the sciences and arts. (In like fashion, might not gravity be indicted for causing backache?) At the very least markets need boundaries, 'so that non-market associations and relations can flourish'. O'Neill questions the perceived values of the market: liberal neutrality (chapter 2); welfare (chapters 3 and 4); autonomy and freedom (chapters 5, 6 and 7); 'the forms of recognition it is taken to foster' (chapter 8); those values which emerged from the socialist calculation debate (chapters 9, 10 and 11); and those drawn from public choice theory (chapter 12).

In chapters 9, 10, 11 the focus switches to defences of the market which emanate from Austrian economics. The issue of economic calculation under socialism led to the watershed of Hayek's 'Economics and knowledge' in 1937. O'Neill argues for two (not one) debates in the 1920s and 1930s: between von Mises and Neurath (on the necessity for commensurability through market valuations) and between Hayek and Lange (on epistemological realities).

There would seem to be few ills that non-market associations cannot put right, and these include the political opportunism exposed by public choice theorists. O'Neill points to the paradox that '[i]f one took seriously what they are saying in their theories, one could not take seriously their acts of saying them'; in other words, what is the hidden motivation of public choice theorists? Although public choice theory says 'something right' in its critique of state benevolence, the author believes it is too narrow in its view of self-interest, which should be taken in the particular institutional context. Associational socialism again takes its cue: non-market institutions can re-orient an individual's self-interest.

Whereas many Austrians would accept as paramount 'the question of what associations best develop the goods of human life', they would be sceptical of O'Neill's utopian 'vision of a non-market associational order' as an alternative to the market economy.

Marketing and Social Construction is not an easy book. The writing is sometimes very funny and engaging but also sometimes complex and long winded. However, if you've any interest in business education and/or social science then it is a must read. Hackley subverts all the usual literary and intellectual conventions of the marketing/business/management book genre. The result is a very appealing read for students, researchers and academics in these fields particularly if they have a critical inclination. Its refreshing and wide in scope, and offers hundreds of useful references for researchers in marketing, organisation and management studies. Its also useful for researchers and students studying psychology or other social sciences. Not to everyone's taste but I loved it: all other marketing books are exposed as populist and cliche-ridden in comparison. It is indispensible for anyone doing a PhD in these fields because it explains what social constructionism means. Frankly I can't imagine any executives having the inclination to read such an iconoclastic and critical book about management theory but if they did they would learn something about how management ideas become popular through university and publishing politics. A very personal point of view, crammed with insights.

Power is an important aspect of virtually any social relationship, as most people would certainly acknowledge. Unfortunately, economic theory tends to ignore the importance of power. Eric A. Schutz has done us a great service by showing how power impacts fundamental aspects of the economic world. His readable account of how power is a factor in different aspects of the economy deserves to make a major impact upon ecomic thinking. This is a book that merits a wide audience. I highly recommend it!

This book contains an exhaustive volume of data and statistics about Mexico and its states that you simply can't find ANYWHERE else.

I use it in my law/consulting firm in Monterrey on a daily basis.

I have looked for other publications, and nothing exists like this book, put out by the American Chamber of Commerce.

My only worry is that if enough people find out about this, I might be out of a job!

This book is very easy reading, with a lot of pictures and charts, and doesn't bore you with pages upon pages on text. It traces the history of the DJIA, showing what was happening in the world when the Dow hit certain benchmarks, and provides a "Readers Digest" version of market trends, biographical profiles, and cycles in the Dow. A great coffee table book.

This little book is an excellent introductory text to the changing economic policies applied in Britain in the 1980s and which exemplified the changing policies which came to be applied throughout the world.

Two of the authors, Brian Snowdon and Peter Wynarczyk, developed some of the ideas contained herein in more advanced texts also available through Amazon.

Markets, Intervention and Planning is set in the context of the decline of economic liberalism being supplanted by the Keynesian revolution which itself was overwhelmed by the monetarist counter-revolution. The authors, all members of the economics faculty of Newcastle Polytechnic (now the University of Northumbria at Newcastle) offer differing approaches to the central problem of the extent to which government should be involved in the economy. Writing this review in 2002, one cannot help but ask the further question of how does one define government and it's limits but I digress.

There is a considerable degree of variety in this book, described as a reader not a textbook, variety of perspective, variety of rigour, a variety of styles but for me the variety itself is one of the strengths of the book and it's attractions. Economics is a discipline which is hard to pin down. There are many competing schools of thought and no right answers yet despite it's pretence at being a science. This book should alert people to the fact that there are considerable differences within the subject and those differences should be valued.

Some highlights of the book for me are the two chapters by Roper and Snowdon for their succint and balanced overview and incisive concluding remarks, the Snowdon chapter on the changing fortunes of macroeconomics and Wynarczyk's considered exploration of the feasibilty of a pure market system. There are many good points to this book and all the authors are to be commended for their clarity of thought and comprehensible exposition.

There are very few economics departments who could work together in such a fashion to produce a volume of such a high standard as this. It seems however, that there were no others produced by this particular group.

This book is a useful starting point for anyone interested in tracing developments in economic policy in the UK during the 1980s. Whilst it is not necessarily a rigorous text, it certainly points up many of the issues and raises many questions which the serious student can pursue elsewhere.

Professor Zahariadis' study of privatization in Britain and France allows students of comparative politics to understand the impetus the drives countries to privatize their resources....it was very informative, but may be confusing to those who know nothing about the subject. Professor Zahariadis' writing style is perfect in terms of the subject matter; it is neither too complex nor too simple.