scholarly journals Big Questions and Big Data: The Role of Labour and Labour Relations in Recent Global Economic History

2017 ◽  
Vol 62 (1) ◽  
pp. 95-121
Author(s):  
Elise van Nederveen Meerkerk

AbstractThis article argues that global labour history (GLH) and global economic history have much to offer each other. GLH would do well to raise sweeping questions – for instance about the origins of global inequality – engage more with theory, and increasingly use quantitative methods. Instead of seeing labour and labour relations as historical phenomena to be explained, they can serve as importantexplanatory variablesin historical analyses of economic development and divergence. In turn, economic historians have much to gain from the recent insights of global labour historians. GLH offers a more inclusive and variable usage of the concept of labour, abandoning, as it does, the often narrow focus on male wage labour in the analyses of many economic historians. Moreover, GLH helps to overcome thinking in binary categories, such as “free” and “unfree” labour. Ultimately, both fields will benefit from engaging in joint debates and theories, and from collaboration in collecting and analysing “big data”.

2017 ◽  
Vol 62 (1) ◽  
pp. 123-130
Author(s):  
Karin Hofmeester ◽  
Christine Moll-Murata

AbstractIn our reply to Elise van Nederveen Meerkerk’s “Big Questions and Big Data: The Role of Labour and Labour Relations in Recent Global Economic History”, we focus on her observations on the Global Collaboratory on the History of Labour Relations. We endorse many of her suggestions to connect global labour and economic history and to regard labour relations not only as a dependent variable. In fact, as the examples from various Collab workshops and publications show, some of these ideas are already being put into practice. These examples also show that if we seriously want to combine global labour and economic history data and join the debate on the growth (or decrease) in social inequality, workers’ individual and collective agency must be taken on board. Finally, we argue that global labour and economic historians can benefit most from each other’s disciplines by truly working together in collaborative projects, developing new theories, perhaps less grand than those with which economic historians attract so much attention, but more profound.


2018 ◽  
Vol 5 (2) ◽  
pp. 205395171881184 ◽  
Author(s):  
Petter Törnberg ◽  
Anton Törnberg

This paper reviews the contemporary discussion on the epistemological and ontological effects of Big Data within social science, observing an increased focus on relationality and complexity, and a tendency to naturalize social phenomena. The epistemic limits of this emerging computational paradigm are outlined through a comparison with the discussions in the early days of digitalization, when digital technology was primarily seen through the lens of dematerialization, and as part of the larger processes of “postmodernity”. Since then, the online landscape has become increasingly centralized, and the “liquidity” of dematerialized technology has come to empower online platforms in shaping the conditions for human behavior. This contrast between the contemporary epistemological currents and the previous philosophical discussions brings to the fore contradictions within the study of digital social life: While qualitative change has become increasingly dominant, the focus has gone towards quantitative methods; while the platforms have become empowered to shape social behavior, the focus has gone from social context to naturalizing social patterns; while meaning is increasingly contested and fragmented, the role of hermeneutics has diminished; while platforms have become power hubs pursuing their interests through sophisticated data manipulation, the data they provide is increasingly trusted to hold the keys to understanding social life. These contradictions, we argue, are partially the result of a lack of philosophical discussion on the nature of social reality in the digital era; only from a firm metatheoretical perspective can we avoid forgetting the reality of the system under study as we are affected by the powerful social life of Big Data.


2018 ◽  
pp. 55-89
Author(s):  
Şevket Pamuk

This chapter looks at the role of institutions in economic development and the evolution of Ottoman institutions before the nineteenth century. It argues that while institutions are not the only things that matter, it is essential to examine their role in order to understand Turkey's experience with economic growth and human development during the last two centuries. The economics and economic history literature has been making a related and important distinction between the proximate and deeper sources of economic growth. The proximate causes refer to the contributions made by the increases in inputs, land, labor, and capital and the productivity increases. The deeper causes refer to the social, political, and economic environment as well as the historical causes that influence the rate at which inputs and productivity grow.


2019 ◽  
Vol 22 (5) ◽  
pp. 770-792
Author(s):  
Jenni Hokka ◽  
Matti Nelimarkka

In our article, we investigate the affective economy of national-populist image circulation on Facebook. This is highly relevant, since social media has been an essential area for the spread of national-populist ideology. In our research, we analyse image circulation as affective practice, combining qualitative and quantitative methods. We use computational data analysis methods to examine visual big data: image fingerprints and reverse image search engines to track down the routes of thousands of circulated images as well as make discourse-historical analysis on the images that have gained most attention among supporters. Our research demonstrates that these existing tools allow social science research to make theory-solid approaches to understand the role of image circulation in creating and sustaining national and transnational networks on social media, and show how national-populist thinking is spread through images that catalyse and mobilise affects – fear, anger and resentment – thus creating an effective affective economy.


1963 ◽  
Vol 22 (4) ◽  
pp. 387-400 ◽  
Author(s):  
E. S. Crawcour

The development of commerce and the rise of a merchant class in Tokugawa Japan have deservedly received considerable attention from both Japanese and Western scholars. In Japan that interest would seem to have been prompted by the problem of the rôle of the pre-Restoration merchant class in the development of the modern capitalist Japanese economy. The study of this problem was characterized by a long controversy in which the Tokugawa merchants were depicted as either “progressive” or “feudalistic,” depending on the historical philosophy of the participants. The argument was conducted at a high level of generality and on both sides within frameworks derived from the leading European (mainly German) schools of economic history. For some time neither side seems to have doubted the applicability of these frameworks to Japan's experience, but the controversy did eventually lead to valuable detailed studies of Tokugawa commerce and to attempts to interpret Japan's economic development in its own terms. Among the first to do this were the members of the so-called “Kyoto School” under Professor E. Honjō.


2020 ◽  
Vol 16 (2) ◽  
pp. 101-111
Author(s):  
Sergey V. Kuznetsov ◽  
Nikolay M. Mezhevich ◽  
Vladimir M. Razumovsky

Introduction. At present, the understanding that the solution of economic problems facing Russia cannot be based on standard economic approaches and models. It is gradually becoming obvious that attention to the spatial and historical features of the development of the Russian economy has not only academic interest, but also quite obvious practical significance. This can be proved on historical, or more precisely, historical and economic material. In fact, the theory of logic, taken broadly, is based on this. The development of transport and versatile tool to reduce the adverse impacts of space on the eco-economy, physical space turns into economic. The lack of transport connectivity of territories devalues the space of the economy (economic space) to a physical or geographical space. The purpose of the article is to show the role of the city of Saint Petersburg in the economic space of the North-West (understood as Saint Petersburg, Saint Petersburg, Novgorod, Pskov provinces) and Russia as a whole, through the development of railway transport in a concrete historical way. Materials and Methods. The historical method is used as the main method. In Russia, the spatial analysis method is almost mandatory, and it is also applied in this article. This method has been widely used in economic history, particularly in the study of transport. At the same time, we recognize the existence of research methods and techniques that are not suitable for this work, for example, the practice of economic and demographic analysis, especially in the neo-Malthusian version. The authors involve in the analysis the works of Russian and foreign scientists on the topic of the article. Results. The article shows the role of the city of Saint Petersburg as an economic and transport center taken in historical dynamics. The role of an important but single transport center in the economic development of Russia is revealed. The thesis is proved that the optimal choice of reference points for economic development has a positive impact on the development of the economic space of the entire country. Discussion and Conclusion. The article proves that the spatial scale of Russia contributes to the fact that the financial results of economic activity can be localized at a significant distance from the place of economic activity.


2018 ◽  
Vol 4 (3) ◽  
pp. 261-281 ◽  
Author(s):  
Arthur S. Alderson ◽  
Roshan K. Pandian

We use the latest available data from the World Income Inequality Database 3.4 and the Penn World Tables 9.0 to examine some of the core issues and concerns that have animated research on global inequality. We begin by reviewing the evidence on trends in within-country inequality, drawing out some of the implications of this for our thinking about inequality and economic development. We examine between-country inequality, computing updated estimates of trends in both unweighted and population-weighted between-country inequality. The data reveal that inequality between countries increased across the latter half of the twentieth century, then turned to decline measurably thereafter. We show that this decline is robust to a range of methodological and measurement decisions identified as important in previous research. We then examine estimates of true global inequality, situating these in relation to lower- and upper-bound estimates of global inequality. We conclude by noting the critical and contested role of globalization in inequality reduction.


2003 ◽  
Vol 41 (3) ◽  
pp. 437-455 ◽  
Author(s):  
Paul Vandenberg

The second Kenya debate has prompted a close examination of the role of an ethnic business community – Indians/Asians – in the country's industrial development. While this community does own up to three-quarters of the country's medium and large-scale manufacturing firms, a narrow focus on manufacturing understates the contribution which Africans have made to the economy. A progressive rural business class is more likely to re-invest in profitable farming activities and to branch out into agro-processing, transport and trading than to undertake risky investments in urban manufacturing. As a result, historical ethnic-sectoral cleavages will tend to be reinforced. The article provides new calculations on the extent of African involvement in manufacturing, and reviews an ancillary literature which uses institutional and socio-economic analysis to understand differences in Kenya's business communities.


2021 ◽  
Vol 5 (S3) ◽  
pp. 197-207
Author(s):  
Kseniia Prykhod’ko ◽  
Olena Khil ◽  
Olena Pobirchenko ◽  
Oksana Umrykhina ◽  
Vira Kalabska

The Big Data and digital platforms in art education play an important role, especially in the field of optimizing educational intelligence, determining the results of research and learning activities, helping to optimize and improve management systems, contributing to the quality of education, image positions. This is what determined the relevance of the problems investigated in the article. The paper presents a description and analysis of the benefits of implementation and features of the use of digital platforms and Big Data in the sector of art education. The article aims to establish the components and content components of Big Data and the educational role of digital platforms used in art education, as well as identifying the attitudes of participants in the educational process on the active use of Big Data and digital platforms. The methods in the study are based on a comprehensive approach, used descriptive methods, qualitative and quantitative methods of analysis. To obtain the data the method of questioning was used, the study of literature, data collection, and analysis, formation of conclusions. 


Author(s):  
Michael Peneder ◽  
Andreas Resch

Schumpeter’s venture money examines the role of financial innovation and monetary thought throughout economic history, following the unique perspective of the leading scholar of a monetary theory of economic development. It proceeds with the analysis along three threads. The first thread is the history of money, or more precisely the continuous stream of innovations that has improved and expanded the scope of financing new ventures. The second thread is the complementary stream of ideas in the history of monetary thought. Finally, Josef Schumpeter himself, his theoretical vision and personal vita of failed financial ventures, is the third thread that ties everything together.


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