The intellectual legacy of Jaroslav Vanek: how the twain met

Abstract

PurposeThis essay is a tribute to Jaroslav Vanek who spent 32 years at Cornell University where he founded the Program on Participation and Labor-Managed Systems (PPLMS) in 1970, which became the home for economic research on these issues in the US. It is a brief intellectual history of a multi-dimensional scholar.Design/methodology/approachVanek's seminal work in the American Economic Review in 1969 marked the culmination of a decade of work on labor management inspired by his brother Jan's work on Yugoslavia, considered then to be a worker-managed economic system. In two rapidly following tomes, Vanek laid out the landscape for the development of a new subfield in economics by providing precursors to many of the results to follow. In that previous decade, Vanek produced papers in traditional economic theory, e.g. international trade and economic growth.FindingsVanek's mindset persists in the interplay between the emerging theory of labor-managed firms and traditional economic literature that takes seriously the role of organizational form. This essay develops that cross-pollination and seeks to identify the remaining questions and issues for future work that the economics profession owes to Jaroslav Vanek.Originality/valueConnection of strands of literature in the economic theory with the literature on labor-managed firms and worker-managed economies tracing the evolution of the latter to the work of Jaroslav Vanek.