Institution Specific Value

In this thought-provoking book, Udo Pesch examines how values articulated by society are incorporated into institutions and technologies in order to overcome what they consider to be a lack of democratic control over their progress.

Property: Values and Institutions, by Hanoch Dagan, offers an original understanding of property, different from the dominant voices in the field, yet loyal to the practice of property. It rejects the misleading dominant binarism in which property is either one monistic form, structured around Blackstone's (in)famous formula of sole and despotic dominion, or a formless bundle of rights. Instead, it conceptualizes property as an umbrella for a set of institutions bearing a mutual family resemblance. It resists the prevailing tendency to discuss property through the prism of only one particular value, notably efficiency. Dagan argues that property can, and should, serve a pluralistic set of liberal values. These property values include not only autonomy and utility, which are emphasized by many contemporary scholars, but also labor, personhood, community, and distributive justice. Dagan claims that property law, at least at its best, tailors different configurations of entitlements to different property institutions, with each such institution designed to match the specific balance between property values best suited to its characteristic social setting. Dagan develops this theoretical account and applies it to key doctrinal contexts. In particular, he analyzes the normative underpinnings of the doctrines regulating the interactions between landowners and governments (both eminent domain and regulatory takings doctrines) and those regulating the governance of property owned by multiple owners (such as co-ownership, marital property, and the law of common interest communities).

Institutions are man-made entities and their workings, as well as the changes they may undergo, is fundamentally imbued in language and communication. In analysing the role of socio-cultural values, this book argues that communication and language is inseparable from both the economy and a meaningful understanding of insitutions.

Energy policies that promote new technologies and energy sources are policies for the future. They influence the shape of emergent technological systems, and also condition our social, political and economic lives. Solar Energy, Technology Policy, and Institutional Values demonstrates the difficulties of deliberating such properties by providing a historical case study that analyses US renewable energy policy from the end of World War II through the energy crisis of the 1970s. The book illuminates the ways beliefs and values come to dominate official problem frames and get entrenched in institutions. In doing so it also explains why advocates of renewable energy have often faced ideological opposition, and why policy makers fail to take them seriously.

This is a revised and expanded version of the much praised short book Universities: The Recovery of An Idea. It contains chapters on the history of universities; the value of university education; the nature of research; the management and funding of universities plus additional essays on such subjects as human nature and the study of the humanities, interdisciplinary versus multidisciplinary study, information systems and the concept of a library, the prospects for e-learning, reforming universities, intellectual integrity and the realities of funding, and spiritual values and the knowledge economy.

With a strong policy focus, the contributors synthesise the scientific approaches to PES, valuation, trade-offs, equity and the institutional requirements to operationalize a credible concept of economic value. The book also addresses the behavioral fo