21st Century Economics: A Synthesis of Progressive Economic Thought

• DOI: http://doi.org/10.1111/1467-8594.00136
• Date: 01 June 2002
• Author: Kenneth B. Taylor,William E. Halal
• Published date: 01 June 2002

21st Century Economics: A

Synthesis of Progressive Economic

Thought

WILLIAM E. HALAL AND KENNETH B. TAYLOR

It is increasingly clear that economic life will be different on this

side of the millennium. Communism has collapsed, a tech-

nological revolution is under way, entirely new industries are

being born, corporations are changing constantly, government is

being reinvented, and the world is unifying into a global market-

place.

These profound changes emanate mainly from an historic

transition to a knowledge-based world, which is creating some

new system of political economy that is still largely undef‌ined.

While some aspects of the emerging system are quite clear, others

are likely to surprise us. After all, the Information Revolution really

is a revolution, as unsettling and as promising as the Industrial

Revolution was 200 years ago.

This article presents results of a study designed to improve our

understanding of today’s avalanche of economic change. The

authors assembled 21 leading economists and scholars from

related disciplines to provide 18 analyses of trends shaping

economic systems. The papers and aff‌iliations of these contribu-

tors are listed in Box 1.

Our research method was qualitative: f‌irst we def‌ined the scope

of the study to include topics of critical interest in economics today.

This selection was guided by topics appearing in the literature, and

William E. Halal is a Professor of Management at George Washington University in Washington,

D.C.

Kenneth B. Taylor is an Assistant Professor of Economics at Villanova University in Villanova,

Pennsylvania. They are the editors of 21st Century Economics (St. Martin’s Press, 1999).

Ó2002 Center for Business Ethics at Bentley College. Published by Blackwell Publishing, Inc.

350 Main Street, Malden, MA 02148, USA, and 108 Cowley Road, Oxford, OX4 1JF, UK.

Business and Society Review 107:2 255–274

conf‌irmed by examining our coverage with other scholars. We then

searched for prominent authorities in each topic and invited the

best to participate. Most of the contributors are preeminent in their

f‌ields, and care was taken to ensure that nations around the world

were represented as well as various scholarly perspectives. The

authors were given precise guidelines to follow in developing their

papers, and each paper was analyzed to identify the author’s

position along three major dimensions. These data form the entries

in the matrix of Table 1, which was used to guide our analysis and

conclusions.

BOX 1

Contributors

‘‘Foreword,’’ Robert Solow, Nobel Laureate and Professor Emeritus, MIT

‘‘Transformations: The Forces of Capitalist Change,’’ Ernest Sternberg,

SUNY

‘‘Globalization: An Economic-Geographic Perspective,’’ Peter Dicken, Uni-

versity of Manchester, England

‘‘Mastering the Knowledge Revolution,’’ William E. Halal, George Washing-

ton University

‘‘Regional Motors of the Global Economy,’’ Allen J. Scott, University of

California, Los Angeles

‘‘Voluntary Simplicity,’’ Amitai Etzioni, George Washington University

‘‘Enterprise in the Information Age,’’ Sten A. Thore, Instituto Superior

Tecnico, Lisbon

‘‘Cellular-Network Organizations,’’ Raymond Miles, University of California,

Charles C. Snow, Pennsylvania State University, John A. Matthews, University

of South Wales, and Grant Miles, University of North Texas

‘‘The Internal Market Economy,’’ Russel L. Ackoff, Professor Emeritus,

University of Pennsylvania

‘‘The Economics of Clean Business,’’ Paul Ekins, Keele University, England

‘‘Case Study of Lufthansa,’’ Mark Lehrer, University of Rhode Island

‘‘Toward a 21

st

Century Economic Paradigm,’’ James Angresano, Albertson

College of Idaho

‘‘Neoclassical Hegemony in Transition Economies,’’ Robert J. McIntyre, UN

University, Finland

‘‘Japan Faces the 21

st

Century,’’ Koji Taira, University of Illinois, Cham-

paign

‘‘Social Enterprises and Civil Democracy in Sweden,’’ Victor Pestoff, Baltic

Sea University, Sweden

‘‘Healing the Economy the Humanistic Way,’’ Mark A. Lutz, University of

Maine

‘‘The Quest for Universal Capitalism,’’ Kenneth B. Taylor, Villanova

University

‘‘A Community-Oriented Economy,’’ Severyn T. Bruyn, Boston College

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