We shed light on the paradox of the relationship between civic participation (measured by a composite indicator of Sustainable Economy Awareness and Lifestyles (SEAL)) and life satisfaction by showing that, even though the former significantly contributes to the latter, it is practiced by few. We find a reason why by showing with principal component analysis and instrumental variable approaches that 'stimulus goods' (goods whose enjoyment requires previous effort and investment) are among the main factors associated with SEAL. The civic participation path to life satisfaction is uphill since stimulus goods require previous investment to be enjoyed. Our policy implication is that experiences that can trigger investment in stimulus goods are crucial to creating the virtuous circle of civic participation, enjoyment of stimulus goods and life satisfaction, with positive effects not only on individual life but also on the health of democracy and the achievement of sustainable development goals.
The #MeToo movement sparked changes in the social structures of workplaces and in legislation. In this paper, we use American Time Use Survey data from 2003 to 2023 alongside Google Trends and state legislative data to examine how #MeToo affected workers' daily minutes spent socializing with bosses, coworkers, and clients and whether state laws restricting nondisclosure agreements (NDAs) related to workplace harassment or discrimination shaped these patterns. We find that in the aftermath of #MeToo, men spent more time in these work-related social interactions, while women show no comparable increase and, if anything, a small decline. This pattern is consistent with increased gender segregation in workplace social-capital building activities. Using staggered difference-in-differences, we show that NDA restrictions did not change women's social time in a consistent way, suggesting the legislation did not have the same gendered effects on social capital accumulation.
We examine how ownership and governance structures shape incentives, power relations, and strategic interaction in gig economy platforms. Using an institutional game-theoretic framework, we employ stylised games as a comparative heuristic to show how alternative governance arrangements stabilise different classes of outcomes, rather than serving as predictions under universal rationality assumptions. Investor-owned platforms tend to stabilise power-skewed, low-compensation outcomes that are individually rational given unilateral rule-setting authority, yet collectively inferior in terms of effort, service quality, and worker well-being. Repeated interaction can sustain conditional cooperation, but such outcomes remain institutionally fragile in fragmented, algorithmically managed labour markets. By contrast, cooperative and participatory platforms reshape the strategic environment by endogenising rule-setting, surplus allocation, and monitoring, while more democratically oriented investor-owned firms may provide a lower-risk avenue for gig workers for participation and equitable outcomes. The analysis contributes to debates on platform governance, economic democracy, and digital labour.
This article examines the persistence of values in mutual societies. Drawing on qualitative research, it makes two contributions. The first is theoretical: using the economics of conventions framework, it conceptualizes the values specific to the social economy organizations. These values are thus shared collective representations, the result of power struggles between actors, which evolve within the framework of the development of neoliberal health policies. The second is empirical, showing that mutual societies, while constrained by their institutional environment when attempting to put their values into practice, also participate in the legitimization and diffusion of neoliberal policies within the healthcare system. Indeed, mutualist actors legitimize the development of a private and individualized health insurance market and participate in the private regulation of the French healthcare system.
Financial cooperatives (FinCoops) are member-owned organizations; however, formal ownership status does not necessarily ensure that members develop a sense of ownership or actively engage in their ownership roles. This study empirically examines the relationships between members' formal ownership rights - namely control rights, surplus-sharing rights, access to information, and service quality - psychological ownership, and active ownership behavior. Data were collected from 1004 members across 12 FinCoops in the Democratic Republic of Congo. Using structural equation modeling, the findings indicate that perceived control, surplus-sharing, and service quality positively influence members' psychological ownership. In turn, psychological ownership significantly and positively affects active ownership behavior. The article concludes by discussing the practical implications of these findings for cooperative governance and directions for future research.
The concept of development is usually applied to the global South. Yet the capitalist, growth-based socioeconomic paradigm of 'developed' countries is both ecologically destructive and socially unjust. Can we formulate alternative - emancipatory and sustainable - visions of progress? In this article, I apply the concept of development exclusively to the global North - even if out of an explicit concern for global social-ecological justice - offering a radical reading of Amartya Sen's capability approach. Emphasizing justice, real freedom and human flourishment, the capability approach potentially constitutes a valuable framework for theorizing emancipatory social-ecological transformations. However, dominant interpretations of this approach often consider capitalist growth positively - albeit as a means for capability-expansion. I propose a post-growth/post-capitalist interpretation of the capability approach, which - through the politicization of individual and collective aspirations - calls for the subordination of the economy to democratically defined social-ecological needs. In this understanding, the capability to care for people and planet becomes central.
This paper examines poverty through the lens of what households aspire to own. Using panel data from the Consumer Pyramids Household Survey between 2014 and 2022, the study constructs an aspiration index and a realization index. The analysis reveals that aspirations are strongly influenced by income, education, gender composition, and occupational structure. The realization of those aspirations is, however, uneven and shaped by persistent disadvantages. Scheduled Caste and Scheduled Tribe households are more likely to remain aspirationally constrained. The results are robust across fixed effects models and remain consistent when using Principal Component Analysis-based indices. A Mundlak adjustment further confirms the role of structural and household-level variables. The study highlights the value of moving beyond standard measures of deprivation to examine the gap between what households wish to achieve and what they are able to realize. This gap reflects a different layer of poverty that is both psychological and structural.
Within political philosophy, money has widely been characterized as conferring a negative form of liberty, because it renders the motivational forces behind the preferences of agents both invisible and irrelevant. During the course of this paper, I distinguish between descriptive and normative versions of this claim, and argue that both dismiss fundamental aspects of the practices that constitute modern money. The central thesis of this paper is that money does not, as the normative claim suggests, make nonpublic beliefs dispensable to achieve social stability. Rather, it relocates them from the past into the future.
This study explores the impact of Self-Help Groups (SHGs) on capability development among tribal women in Dahod district, Gujarat. It uses the capability approach to examine how microfinance expands substantive freedoms - such as agency, autonomy, and valued functioning like education and reduced dependency - beyond mere income increases. A mixed-methods analysis of primary data from 360 respondents (180 SHG members and 180 matched non-members) reveals substantial gains for the majority of participants in economic agency, skills, resource access, and moderate improvements in social participation and decision-making. These outcomes highlight SHGs' role in enhancing women's confidence, networks, and practical abilities to convert resources into meaningful achievements. Persistent barriers include caste discrimination, patriarchal norms, geographic isolation, and limited financial literacy. However, constrain broader transformation, indicating that complementary support in education, healthcare, and infrastructure is essential to deepen capability expansion in marginalized tribal contexts. By shifting the analytical focus from income metrics to capability expansion, this research offers a more nuanced understanding of how microfinance initiatives can potentially address gender inequalities. The findings suggest that future interventions would benefit from designing programs that explicitly target multiple dimensions of women's empowerment rather than treating economic advancement as the sole indicator of success.
Deliberative democratic theory has defended workplace democratization to render business decision-making more politically legitimate and of better epistemic quality. By disestablishing top-down hierarchical management in favor of a rational exchange of arguments over the common good of the firm, deliberative democrats hope to include rank-and-file workers in business decision-making. However, the actual implementation of workplace democracy involves much more conflict and non-deliberative tactics of opposition. Especially the division between managers and workers persistently troubles democratic workplaces. I argue that implementing workplace democracy via consensus-oriented procedures risks encouraging 'deliberative domination', a condition where privileged workers use their organizational and social privileges to consistently overrule others. To avoid deliberative domination, we must pursue agonistic workplace democracy. The latter envisions workplace democracy as a struggle between opposing stakeholders over company strategy. Rather than requiring democratic workplaces to pursue a rational consensus among stakeholders, workplace democracy must facilitate power-sharing between fundamentally disagreeing stakeholders.
The aim of this paper is to analyze the effects of compliance with the social norms of assistance and solidarity during social events on the time management of day laborers in Burkina Faso using cross-sectional data collected from 140-day laborers in Ouagadougou's industrial zones. We used a recursive system of equations, a fractional probit and a general linear model. Estimates were made using the conditional mixed process (CMP) proposed by Roodman (2011). The results show that: (i) workers in companies with relatively high wages have a lower degree of compliance with social norms than those with low wages; (ii) an increase in the degree of submission to social norms has a negative impact on the working time of the day laborer. This result suggests the need for a formal flexible social protocol for optimal participation in economic activities and manifestations of solidarity with in our societies.
Despite scientific consensus on the need for net-zero greenhouse gas emissions by 2050, economists disagree on the best pathway. Among heterodox authors, there is debate over whether achieving net zero emissions requires negative or zero growth, as argued by degrowth advocates, or positive growth, as claimed by post-Keynesian green growth supporters. To address this, we develop a simple Keynesian supermultiplier model of the global economy where emissions depend on production capital and absorption on natural capital, formally demonstrating that net zero constrains global growth. We show this 'balance-of-emissions constraint' is shaped by policy-dependent parameters such as public spending on natural capital, investment in low-emission technology, and tax rates. We model various pathways and find that an interventionist policy mix achieves net zero faster than even the most technologically optimistic laissez-faire scenario.
The goal of this article is to assess how network heterogeneity relates to the use of consumer credit. We propose a theoretical framework that underscores three interrelated mechanisms based on social comparison and comparison groups, through which the socio-economic heterogeneity of interpersonal networks could amplify consumption and indebtedness patterns: emulation, competition, and belonging assertion. Socio-economic network heterogeneity is gauged using the 'position generator' - a well-established survey instrument in social capital literature, prompting respondents to indicate whether they have social contacts across various occupations or classes. The results derived from our regression analyses indicate that a higher level of socio-economic heterogeneity within one's network is positively associated with the likelihood of possessing consumer credit, whether sourced from department stores or banks. Additionally, we found that network heterogeneity influences the acquisition of consumer credit to a similar degree for individuals from different socio-economic backgrounds in terms of education, social class, and income.
Disadvantaged social groups in the US suffered disproportionately in the covid pandemic and the Great Recession, worsening high levels of inequality associated with their post-1980 declining intergenerational income mobility. For black Americans, this reflects the long history of racial discrimination beginning with slavery. Reparations paid to descendants of enslaved individuals to eliminate the black-white wealth gap is a step toward addressing this history. A further needed step is to build predominantly black communities' human and social capital through public investments in community health care centers (CHCs) and historically black colleges and universities (HBCUs). There is considerable evidence that investments in early childhood education positively affect later school performance, income and earnings, higher education, crime, and other well-being outcomes. CHCs and HBCUs promote early childhood education. This paper argues that compensation is due to both individuals and their communities, and reparations payments should be accompanied by public investments in those communities.
Research on tipping norms in beauty salons is limited to behavioral economics. This study examines tipping by analyzing both extensive and intensive margins among 1,361 participants using a cross-sectional survey methodology. Findings reveal that clients' willingness and ability to tip are influenced by service quality, the desire to maintain a social image, expected returns from repeat customers, and demographic factors such as religion, education, and income. Additionally, external shocks, particularly the COVID-19 pandemic, significantly impact tipping behavior. Variables like monthly income, client gender, job loss due to the pandemic, and religious beliefs notably affect the amount clients tip. These factors not only shape the financial capacity to tip but also influence the social dynamics and expectations surrounding gratuity in beauty salons, highlighting the interplay between economic conditions and individual behaviors in the context of tipping.
