Matt Vidal is a British-American sociologist. He is Reader in Sociology and Comparative Political Economy in the Institute for International Management, Loughborough University London.
Vidal graduated from South Dakota State University and received his PhD in Sociology from the University of Wisconsin-Madison. He has been a Postdoctoral Fellow at the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA) Institute for Research on Labor and Employment, a Research Fellow at the Weizenbaum Institute for the Networked Society, Berlin, and a visiting researcher at the Department of Management, Paris Dauphine University, Paris, and the Max Planck Institute for the Study of Societies, Cologne.
Vidal has made contributions to many areas, including sociology of work, human resource management and employment relations; [1] [2] [3] labor markets; [4] [5] institutional theory; [6] [7] [8] comparative political economy; [9] [10] and Marxist theory. [11] [12] [13]
He is author of Organizing Prosperity (Economic Policy Institute) [14] and co-editor of Comparative Political Economy of Work (Palgrave) [15] and The Oxford Handbook of Karl Marx (Oxford University Press). [16]
Capitalism is an economic system based on the private ownership of the means of production and their operation for profit. Central characteristics of capitalism include capital accumulation, competitive markets, price system, private property, property rights recognition, voluntary exchange, and wage labor. In a market economy, decision-making and investments are determined by owners of wealth, property, or ability to maneuver capital or production ability in capital and financial markets—whereas prices and the distribution of goods and services are mainly determined by competition in goods and services markets.
Environmental sociology is the study of interactions between societies and their natural environment. The field emphasizes the social factors that influence environmental resource management and cause environmental issues, the processes by which these environmental problems are socially constructed and define as social issues, and societal responses to these problems.
Marxism is a left-wing to far-left method of socioeconomic analysis that uses a materialist interpretation of historical development, better known as historical materialism, to understand class relations and social conflict and a dialectical perspective to view social transformation. It originates from the works of 19th-century German philosophers Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels. As Marxism has developed over time into various branches and schools of thought, no single, definitive Marxist theory exists.
Metabolic rift is Karl Marx's notion of the "irreparable rift in the interdependent process of social metabolism", i.e. Marx's key conception of ecological crisis tendencies under capitalism. Marx theorized a rupture in the metabolic interaction between humanity and the rest of nature emanating from capitalist agricultural production and the growing division between town and country.
John Bellamy Foster is an American professor of sociology at the University of Oregon and editor of the Monthly Review. He writes about political economy of capitalism and economic crisis, ecology and ecological crisis, and Marxist theory. He has given numerous interviews, talks, and invited lectures, as well as written invited commentary, articles, and books on the subject.
Historical institutionalism (HI) is a new institutionalist social science approach that emphasizes how timing, sequences and path dependence affect institutions, and shape social, political, economic behavior and change. Unlike functionalist theories and some rational choice approaches, historical institutionalism tends to emphasize that many outcomes are possible, small events and flukes can have large consequences, actions are hard to reverse once they take place, and that outcomes may be inefficient. A critical juncture may set in motion events that are hard to reverse, because of issues related to path dependency. Historical institutionalists tend to focus on history to understand why specific events happen.
The regulation school is a group of writers in political economy and economics whose origins can be traced to France in the early 1970s, where economic instability and stagflation were rampant in the French economy. The term régulation was coined by Frenchman Destanne de Bernis, who aimed to use the approach as a systems theory to bring Marxian economic analysis up to date. These writers are influenced by structural Marxism, the Annales School, institutionalism, Karl Polanyi's substantivist approach, and theory of Charles Bettelheim, among others, and sought to present the emergence of new economic forms in terms of tensions within existing arrangements. Since they are interested in how historically specific systems of capital accumulation are "regularized" or stabilized, their approach is called the "regulation approach" or "regulation theory". Although this approach originated in Michel Aglietta's monograph A Theory of Capitalist Regulation: The US Experience and was popularized by other Parisians such as Robert Boyer, its membership goes well beyond the so-called Parisian School, extending to the Grenoble School, the German School, the Amsterdam School, British radical geographers, the US Social Structure of Accumulation School, and the neo-Gramscian school, among others.
Communism is a left-wing sociopolitical, philosophical, and economic ideology and current within the socialist movement, whose goal is the establishment of a communist society, a socioeconomic order centered around common ownership of the means of production, distribution, and exchange that allocates products to everyone in the society. Communist society also involves the absence of private property, social classes, money, and the state. Communists often seek a voluntary state of self-governance but disagree on the means to this end. This reflects a distinction between a more libertarian approach of communization, revolutionary spontaneity, and workers' self-management, and a more vanguardist or Communist party-driven approach through the development of a constitutional socialist state followed by the withering away of the state. As one of the main ideologies on the political spectrum, communism is placed on the left-wing alongside socialism, and communist parties and movements have been described as radical left or far left.
Sylvia Theresa Walby is a British sociologist, currently Professor of Sociology, Director of the Violence and Society Centre at the City University of London. She has an Honorary Doctorate from Queen's University Belfast for distinction in sociology. She is noted for work in the fields of the domestic violence, patriarchy, gender relations in the workplace and globalisation.
Historical sociology is an interdisciplinary field of research that combines sociological and historical methods to understand the past, how societies have developed over time, and the impact this has on the present. It emphasises a mutual line of inquiry of the past and present to understand how discrete historical events fit into wider societal progress and ongoing dilemmas through complementary comparative analysis.
Judy Wajcman, is the Anthony Giddens Professor of Sociology at the London School of Economics and Political Science. She is the Principal Investigator of the Women in Data Science and AI project at The Alan Turing Institute. She is also a Visiting Professor at the Oxford Internet Institute. Her scholarly interests encompass the sociology of work, science and technology studies, gender theory, and organizational analysis. Her work has been translated into French, German, Greek, Italian, Korean, Japanese, Portuguese, Russian, Chinese and Spanish. Prior to joining the LSE in 2009, she was a Professor of Sociology in the Research School of Social Sciences at the Australian National University. She was the first woman to be appointed the Norman Laski Research Fellow (1978–80) at St. John's College, Cambridge. In 1997 she was elected Fellow of the Academy of the Social Sciences in Australia.
Rachel M. McCleary is a lecturer in the Economics Department at Harvard University and a non-resident senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute.
David William Soskice, FBA is a British political economist and academic. He is currently the LSE School Professor of Political Science and Economics at the London School of Economics.
Varieties of Capitalism: The Institutional Foundations of Comparative Advantage is a 2001 book on economics, political economy, and comparative politics edited by political economists Peter A. Hall and David Soskice. The book established an influential debate among political economists about ways to categorize, qualify and analyze different ways in which economies are organized.
Democratic socialism is a left-wing political philosophy that supports political democracy and some form of a socially owned economy, with a particular emphasis on economic democracy, workplace democracy, and workers' self-management within a market socialist economy or an alternative form of a decentralised planned socialist economy. Democratic socialists argue that capitalism is inherently incompatible with the values of freedom, equality, and solidarity and that these ideals can only be achieved through the realisation of a socialist society. Although most democratic socialists seek a gradual transition to socialism, democratic socialism can support revolutionary or reformist politics to establish socialism. Democratic socialism was popularised by socialists who opposed the backsliding towards a one-party state in the Soviet Union and other nations during the 20th century.
The socialist mode of production, sometimes referred to as the communist mode of production, or simply (Marxian) socialism or communism as Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels used the terms communism and socialism interchangeably, is a specific historical phase of economic development and its corresponding set of social relations that emerge from capitalism in the schema of historical materialism within Marxist theory. The Marxist definition of socialism is that of production for use-value, therefore the law of value no longer directs economic activity. Marxist production for use is coordinated through conscious economic planning. According to Marx, distribution of products is based on the principle of "to each according to his needs"; Soviet models often distributed products based on the principle of "to each according to his contribution". The social relations of socialism are characterized by the proletariat effectively controlling the means of production, either through cooperative enterprises or by public ownership or private artisanal tools and self-management. Surplus value goes to the working class and hence society as a whole.
A socialist state, socialist republic, or socialist country, sometimes referred to as a workers' state or workers' republic, is a sovereign state constitutionally dedicated to the establishment of socialism. The term communist state is often used synonymously in the West specifically when referring to one-party socialist states governed by Marxist–Leninist communist parties, despite these countries being officially socialist states in the process of building socialism and progressing toward a communist society. These countries never describe themselves as communist nor as having implemented a communist society. Additionally, a number of countries that are multi-party capitalist states make references to socialism in their constitutions, in most cases alluding to the building of a socialist society, naming socialism, claiming to be a socialist state, or including the term people's republic or socialist republic in their country's full name, although this does not necessarily reflect the structure and development paths of these countries' political and economic systems. Currently, these countries include Algeria, Bangladesh, Guyana, India, Nepal, Nicaragua, Sri Lanka and Tanzania.
Historical materialism is the term used to describe Karl Marx's theory of history. Marx locates historical change in the rise of class societies and the way humans labor together to make their livelihoods. For Marx and his lifetime collaborator, Friedrich Engels, the ultimate cause and moving power of historical events are to be found in the economic development of society and the social and political upheavals wrought by changes to the mode of production. Historical materialism provides a challenge to the view that historical processes have come to a close and that capitalism is the end of history. Although Marx never brought together a formal or comprehensive description of historical materialism in one published work, his key ideas are woven into a variety of works from the 1840s onward. Since Marx's time, the theory has been modified and expanded. It now has many Marxist and non-Marxist variants.
The Three Worlds of Welfare Capitalism is a book on political theory written by Danish sociologist Gøsta Esping-Andersen, published in 1990. The work is Esping-Andersen's most influential and highly cited work, outlining three main types of welfare states, in which modern developed capitalist nations cluster. The work occupies seminal status in the comparative analysis of the welfare states of Western Europe and other advanced capitalist economies.
Alexander M. Hicks is a sociologist who principally studies the causes and consequences of social democracy, corporatism, the welfare state and the sociology of culture, literature and film. He is Emeritus Professor of Sociology at Emory University, where he has been since 1986 following an instructorship and assistant professorship at Northwestern University and a postdoctoral fellowship at the NORC, University of Chicago.[1] Graduate students have included Kali-Ahset Amen, Desmond King, Joya Misra, 2022-2023 President Elect of the American Sociological Association, Dan Slater and Duane Swank. He has delivered invited talks at the Juan Bosch Institute in Madrid, the Max Planck Institute in Cologne, and at universities including the University of Chicago, Columbia, Indiana University, Taiwan's National Chung Chung University, New York University, Stanford and Yale. He has been married to Nancy Ellen Traynor Hicks since 1970; they have a son, Ryan, working in New York City in the nonprofit promotion of affordable housing.
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