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It is never too early to start practising continuous improvement. An American primary school teacher has taken this to heart and, with help from Dr. Deming, is encouraging her students to employ these principles at an early age — at the tender age of seven to be exact!

Discusses the use of total quality management within schools and reflects on the progress it has made in both the United Kingdom and the USA. Argues that the development of a total quality programme must be seen as a long‐term strategy. Cites a case example of a school that successfully implemented a total quality programme.

The purpose of this study is to investigate whether a unified understanding of materiality is possible, given that conceptual pluralism represents a key characteristic of materiality approaches in sustainability reporting.

This paper systematically reviews and examines materiality conceptualizations in sustainability disclosure research and practice, utilizing Gallie’s (1956) analytical framework of essentially contested concepts. The framework enables the separation of conceptual confusion from essential contestation. Whereas reaching conceptual consensus is possible in the former, the hurdles to conceptual agreement are insurmountable in the latter.

This paper reveals that the prevailing lack of consensus surrounding materiality is grounded in its essential contestation, not in conceptual confusion. This robustly supports the projection of conceptual plurality as materiality’s most probable future.

Building on the materiality concept’s essentially contested nature, this paper calls for future research that explicitly embraces the concept’s plural character and more interdisciplinary research.

As a unified understanding of materiality is unlikely to evolve, standard-setters should provide a clear definition of the underlying materiality concept, offer specific guidance on materiality assessment and issue joint documents that detail the similarities, differences and interconnections between their respective materiality frameworks.

Projecting plurality as materiality’s most probable future underscores the importance of users of sustainability reports understanding the materiality concept applied by the reporting entity and the respective consequences for identifying material sustainability issues.

From this paper’s novel insight that materiality is an essentially contested concept, this paper derives two overarching future research directions and offers a broad set of exemplary research questions.

Nobody concerned with political economy can neglect the history of economic doctrines. Structural changes in the economy and society influence economic thinking and, conversely, innovative thought structures and attitudes have almost always forced economic institutions and modes of behaviour to adjust. We learn from the history of economic doctrines how a particular theory emerged and whether, and in which environment, it could take root. We can see how a school evolves out of a common methodological perception and similar techniques of analysis, and how it has to establish itself. The interaction between unresolved problems on the one hand, and the search for better solutions or explanations on the other, leads to a change in paradigma and to the formation of new lines of reasoning. As long as the real world is subject to progress and change scientific search for explanation must out of necessity continue.

In the development of the science of economics, two periods of major importance can be distinguished — the middle of the eighteenth century and the last 30 years of the nineteenth century. In the former period, the heyday of the Enlightenment, it was recognised that the domain of production, distribution and market exchange should be studied as an important aspect of the social order. In that short period the foundations were laid for a more or less autonomous science of economics. It took about a century, however, to establish economics as a separate science with its own institutions: its own departments in the universities, its own language, its own journals, its own congresses, its own standards to distinguish the initiates from the laymen. That tour de force was accomplished in the last three decades of the nineteenth century. It was the introduction of marginalism that gave economics its special modern flavour. Carl Menger can justly be seen as one of the founding fathers of economics in its twentieth‐century garb.

Hazel Kyrk’s contribution is the most advanced formulation of the economics of consumption as a social phenomenon, an approach to the analysis of consumption that, originated from Veblen’s theory, was developed in the US in the early 20th century. This approach was part of a wider stream of empirical analyses of consumption expenditure that had begun more than a century earlier.

Along with elements that can be traced back to the neoclassical tradition, in Keynes’ analysis of consumption, we find original elements. The dependence of consumption expenditure on the level of income, which is essential for asserting the principle of effective demand, can also be found in a long tradition of empirical studies. In qualifying this relationship, Keynes uses theoretical elements echoing key insights of the economics of consumption as a social phenomenon. There is no documentary evidence that Kyrk or the economics of the social relevance of consumption came to Keynes’ attention. It is possible, however, to develop reasonable speculative considerations to argue a link between Keynes’ elaboration and both the empirical literature on the determinants of consumption and the economics of consumption as a social phenomenon.

This paper is an initial attempt to discuss the American institutionalist movement as it changed and developed after 1945. Institutionalism in the inter-war period was a relatively coherent movement held together by a set of general methodological, theoretical, and ideological commitments (Rutherford, 2011). Although institutionalism always had its critics, it came under increased attack in the 1940s, and faced challenges from Keynesian economics, a revived neoclassicism, econometrics, and from new methodological approaches derived from various versions of positivism. The institutionalist response to these criticisms, and particularly the criticism that institutionalism “lacked theory,” is to be found in a variety of attempts to redefine institutionalism in new theoretical or methodological terms. Perhaps the most important of these is to be found in Clarence Ayres’ The Theory of Economic Progress (1944), although there were many others. These developments were accompanied by a significant amount of debate, disagreement, and uncertainty over future directions. Some of this is reflected in the early history of The Association for Evolutionary Economics.

Investigates the anti‐liquor store campaign in Los Angeles, California, USA, against Korean immigrants led by African Americans and Latino Americans. Shows that inner city areas in Los Angeles are not as deeply segregated as portrayed. Demonstrates how a coalition of immigrants/minorities were able to disrupt and change the way the liquour industry had impacted on their communities.

This chapter aims to critically access the Tier 1 (Investor) visa’s effect on the conceptualisation of the British Migration system. The scheme offers an exclusive route to temporary residency in the UK in return for a £2 million investment in Britain. It is contended that the government have consistently underestimated the continual detrimental effects of offering such a scheme due to their overarching pursuit for economic gain. As such, the scheme has imparted social disadvantage, highlighting the prevalence of inequality and the existence of a hierarchy of desired migrants. Furthermore, it is asserted that the investor scheme is facilitating threats to the public’s safety, exemplified in the recent Salisbury Novichok attacks. However fundamentally, this chapter will seek to illustrate that the Tier 1 (Investor) visa has commodified the UK’s migration system, bestowing investors with a ‘golden ticket’ and in turn disregarding the needs of the UK’s citizens.