I am teaching my Law, Economics, and Organization class this semester. The class is for upper-level undergraduates and graduate students, so there is a good variety of backgrounds and interests among the students who enroll in it.
Since the class is a seminar, I spend about half the time teaching, with the other half spent discussing specific papers.
Last Friday, in the context of the module on relational contracts, we discussed two classic papers. The first is Greif’s (1993) paper, in which he discusses the various mechanisms used by 11th-century Jewish merchants around the Mediterranean to sustain long-distance trade. The second is Bernstein’s (1992) investigation of how diamond traders choose to “opt out” of the legal system by developing their own extra-legal institutions.
Hustle and Flow
In the spirit of both articles, I wanted to link to a somewhat dated article in Wired, a Q&A with Robert Neuwirth, who published a book titled Stealth of Nations: The Global Rise of the Informal Economy last fall. Here is an excerpt:
Corporate Social Responsibility: Marketing By Any Other Name…
Signals transmitted
Message received
Reaction making impact
Invisibly
— Rush, “Chemistry,” Signals (1982).
[This post is part of the Aid Blog Forum launched this week by J., who blogs over at Tales from the Hood. For more on the Aid Blog Forum, click here.]
J. writes:
Corporate social responsibility (CSR) is the new sexy thing in the philanthropy and humanitarian fundraising worlds. “Doing well while doing good” is the buzz phrase, and I admit — it’s got a nice, maybe even sensible ring to it. On the other hand, like many humanitarian practitioners I know, I come to the CSR conversation with a healthy dose of cynicism and skepticism. I’ve seen it be really lame a lot of the time, and I’ve seen it go really bad a few times. But the ship has also very obviously sailed. Corporate social responsibility is here to stay. It’s part of the global humanitarian context, for better and/or for worse. As humanitarian relief and development professionals we have to deal with CSR. Here’s where you come in. What do you think?