Understanding consumption requires looking at the systems by which goods and services are provided – not just how they are produced but the historically evolved structures, power relations and cultures within which they are located. The Systems of Provision approach provides an interdisciplinary framework for unpacking these complex issues. This book provides a comprehensive account of the Systems of Provision approach, setting out core concepts and theoretical origins alongside numerous case studies. The book combines fresh understandings of everyday consumption using examples from food, housing, and water, with implications for society’s major challenges, including inequality, climate change, and prospects for capitalism. Readers do not require prior knowledge across the subject matter covered but the text remains significant for accomplished researchers and policymakers, especially those interested in the messy real world realities underpinning who gets what, how, and why across public and private provision in global, national, and historical contexts.

This Research Handbook advances entrepreneurship theory in new ways by integrating and contributing to contemporary theories of practice. Leading theorists and entrepreneurship experts, who are part of the growing Entrepreneurship as Practice (EaP) research community, expertly propose methodologies, theories and empirical insights into the constitution and consequences of entrepreneuring practices.

In Marx Matters noted scholars explore the way a Marxian political economy addresses contemporary social problems, demonstrating the relevance of Marx today and outlining how his work can frame progressive programs for social change.

This open access book seeks to understand why we consume as we do, how consumption changes, and why we keep consuming more and more, despite the visible damage we are doing to the planet. The chapters cover both the stubbornness of unsustainable consumption patterns in affluent societies and the drivers of rapidly increasing consumption in emerging economies. They focus on consumption patterns with the largest environmental footprints, including energy, housing, and mobility and engage in sophisticated ways with the theoretical frontiers of the field of consumption research, in particular on the ‘practice turn’ that has come to dominate the field in recent decades. This book maps out what we know about consumption, questions what we take for granted, and points us in new directions for better understanding—and changing—unsustainable consumption patterns.

Degrowth has emerged as one of the most exciting, and contested, fields of research into the drivers of global heating, ecological collapse, and economic injustice. The perspective is both a critique of existing growth-based models of development, which it argues have put humanity on a collision course with non-negotiable ecological limits, and a vision for a brighter future in which humans and non-humans alike can flourish. By putting an end to growth-seeking economic development and boundless energetic and material throughputs, degrowth’s proponents suggest we can build an economy that meets the material needs of people and planet for generations to come. This handbook’s contributions signal the importance of degrowth across multiple disciplines and practices. Along the way, they grapple with some of the most critical questions, ideological assumptions, policies, and social struggles of our time. The handbook approaches degrowth as a loosely knit and developing set of interdisciplinary propositions about what it might take to achieve a world of human and non-human flourishing. Contributors explore, challenge, and critique degrowth’s propositions and its prospects of shaping scholarly agendas, policy frameworks, and social movements. Essays consider degrowth from a variety of empirical and theoretical vantages, including urban design, architecture, political economy, political ecology, critical geography, and political theory. This integrative approach, at once critical and constructive, aims to preserve for readers the sense of possibility that has drawn people to degrowth scholarship thus far.

In Economics Imperialism and Interdisciplinarity: The Watershed and After, Ben Fine selects and adds to his key articles tracking economics imperialism through three phases, focusing on the last decade of the third phase – anything goes as with freakonomics. Each article is accompanied by a preamble setting the context in which it appeared, with a new overall introduction and literature survey drawing out the overall significance for contemporary scholarship. Ranging over mainstream and heterodox economics, the disputes between them, the relationship between economics and other disciplines, and authors such as Lazear, Stiglitz and Akerlof, the accelerating presence of economics imperialism is documented alongside its perverse, critical neglect. The volume is imperative for those engaging in political economy across the social sciences.

Volume 41 of Research in Economic Anthropology explores a wide range of topics of interest to economic anthropology including the roles of money in social ties between people, and moral concerns regarding these and other roles and uses of money in society.