The “Political Economy of Corporations & Markets” curriculum offers modules on several key questions: how economic innovation occurs (i.e., what are the social conditions for innovation) and how production processes change over time; to whom do the benefits of innovation go; and how decision-making is structured, in terms of how power is exercised and what the policies and jurisprudence are that govern corporate action.

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📖 Check out our Shared Zotero Library: Literature is organized by Module and Topic in the publicly-available Zotero Library.

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• Goal of the Political Economy of Corporations & Markets Curriculum: to share a modular curriculum on the political economy of corporations that can be taught at a wide range of institutions. The focus is on graduate training in economics, though companion materials can be adapted for upper-level undergraduate courses.
• Why we developed this curriculum: Moving beyond neoliberalism requires recognizing corporations as social institutions and re-shaping the rules of corporate governance and finance. Economics departments do not teach the theory of corporations as innovative enterprises today—the neoliberal theory of the corporation pretends that enriching shareholders is the most efficient use of corporate resources. Even economics programs outside the mainstream stay away from the “black box” of the corporation. Along with reforming corporate law and policy, training in economics must change to reflect the actual processes at work with respect to corporations and markets. Neoliberal economists have promoted a theory of shareholder primacy in research and graduate training on the corporation that does not recognize the process of innovation and the societal harms from concentrated corporate power.
• If you plan to teach a course using these materials, let us know! Email Lenore Palladino at [email protected] for guidance on the materials we’ve developed and to share your suggestions and approach to teaching.

Resources for Building Your Curriculum

Curriculum Resources are organized into Modules, each of which contains Topics. Each Topic can be part of multiple modules.

• We provide sample Learning Goals for each Topic; feel free to duplicate this database and create your own additional Modules, Topics, and Learning Goals.
• There is far more material here than can be taught in a one-semester course. We are providing all of this material so that faculty can build their own courses.
• There is overlap in the recommended literature, as many articles and books fit within different topics and modules. In Zotero, many articles, books, and other kinds of material are in a range of topics.

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📌 TIP: To open the page for a specific topic, hover your mouse over the title, and then click ‘open’

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Complete Set of Modules & Topics

Suggested Sequences (TK)

Thanks to the PE of Corporations Curriculum Working Group ⬇️