Concerns over affordability and accountability have tended to direct focus away from the central aims of liberal learning, such as preparing minds for free inquiry and inculcating the habits of mind, practical skills, and values necessary for effective participation in civil society. The contributors to this volume seek to understand better what it is that can be done on a day-to-day basis within institutions of liberal learning that shape the habits and practices of civil society. The central argument of this volume is that institutions of liberal learning are critical to a developing and flourishing civil society. It is within these "civil society incubators" that the habits of open discourse are practiced and honed; that a collaborative (often contentious) commitment to truth seeking serves as the rules that govern our work together; that the rules of personal and widespread social cooperation are established, practiced, and refined. Many have made this argument as it relates to community based learning, and we explore that theme here as well. But acquiring and practicing the habits of civil society recur within and throughout the college context-in the classrooms, in college governance structures, in professional associations, in collaborative research, in the residence halls, and on the playing field. To put it another way, when they are at their best, institutions of liberal learning are contexts in which students learn how to live in a free society and learn the art of self-governance.

With the ever-increasing clamour for graduating students to be "job ready," there has been a drift towards an emphasis on the vocational aspects of higher education and the original aims and intentions of liberal learning are in danger of being forgotten. At its core, a liberal education is intended to imbue students with the habits of mind, practical skills and values necessary for effective participation in civil society but it has become too easy to claim that these ideals are less important than a narrower focus on preparing those students for the world of work.

This book argues that institutions of liberal learning should be cultivating the art of self-governance and that by practicing what they teach those institutions are better preparing their students for both the workplace and an active role in civil society. The interdisciplinary team of contributors draw on the work of Elinor Ostrom and others to consider the role of self-governance at the level of communities and, by extension, institutions. They explore the management of common pool resources including campus facilities, financial resources, the curriculum, and institutional reputation. It is argued that the institutions most explicitly committed to liberal learning are those which tend to have the most robust formal and informal rules of civic engagement and therefore enable this level of self-governance. Drawing on economic theory, institutional analysis, education studies and more, the book explores what institutions explicitly committed to liberal learning can do on a day-to-day basis to provide the intellectual, creative and physical space in which better self-governance can be both practiced and taught.

Chalmlee-Wright argues that international aid programmes have often been unsuccessful because they are imported. The economics of the Austrian School provide a far stronger theoretical framework which can introduce cultural analysis into questions of economic development and other market processes.

In August 2005 the nation watched as Hurricane Katrina pummelled the Gulf Coast. Residents did not just suffer the personal costs of a home that had been severely damaged or destroyed; frequently they also lost their entire neighbourhood and the social systems that under normal circumstances made their lives "work". Katrina raised the questions of whether and how communities could solve the complex social coordination problems catastrophic disaster poses, and what inhibits them from doing so? Professor Chamlee-Wright investigates not only the nature of post-disaster recovery, but the nature of the social order itself - how societies are able to achieve a level of complex social coordination that far exceeds our ability to design. By deploying the tools of both political economy and cultural economy, the book contributes to the bourgeoning literature on the social, political and economic impact of Hurricane Katrina. Through a selection of case studies, the author argues that post-disaster resilience depends crucially upon the discovery that unfolds within commercial and civil society. The book will be of particular interest to postgraduate students and researchers in economics, sociology and anthropology as well as disaster specialists.

In August 2005 the nation watched as Hurricane Katrina pummelled the Gulf Coast. Residents did not just suffer the personal costs of a home that had been severely damaged or destroyed; frequently they also lost their entire neighbourhood and the social systems that under normal circumstances made their lives "work." Katrina raised the questions of whether and how communities could solve the complex social coordination problems catastrophic disaster poses, and what inhibits them from doing so?

Professor Chamlee-Wright investigates not only the nature of post-disaster recovery, but the nature of the social order itself - how societies are able to achieve a level of complex social coordination that far exceeds our ability to design. By deploying the tools of both political economy and cultural economy, the book contributes to the bourgeoning literature on the social, political and economic impact of Hurricane Katrina.

Through a selection of case studies, the author argues that post-disaster resilience depends crucially upon the discovery that unfolds within commercial and civil society. The book will be of particular interest to postgraduate students and researchers in economics, sociology and anthropology as well as disaster specialists.

What is the animating 'spirit' behind what may appear to be the coldly calculating world of markets and business enterprise? Though often mathematically modelled in dry terms, markets can be looked at instead as meaningful domains of human activity. To economists, markets have been seen as nothing but objective 'forces' or allocation 'mechanisms'. This book, however, argues that they can be seen as involving the human spirit, personal expression and moral commitments. It presents the view that markets are not so much things that need to be measured as meanings that need to be narrated and interpreted. The aim of this book is to introduce two scholarly fields to one another, economics and cultural studies, in order to pose the question: how does culture matter to the economy? When we look at the economy as a legitimate domain of culture, it transforms our understanding of the nature of business life. By viewing markets as an integral part of our culture, filled with the drama of human creativity, we might begin to better appreciate their role in the world.

Contents:
1. Introduction
I. The Spirit of Enterprise II. The Study of Both Markets and Culture III. Civil Society and Cultural Studies IV. The Development, Representation, and Morality of Business
2. What is Culture and Why Does it Matter?
I. Culture as Context: from the Arts to Morality II. Culture and Economy in the Modernist Epoch III. The Evolution of the Field of Cultural Studies IV. Shifting the Site of 'Politics'
3. But is Cultural Studies Compatible with Economics?
I. On Different Worlds? II. The Universality of Economics, the Diversity of Economic Culture III. Individualism, Communalism and Rights IV. Ethnocentrism and Markets V. Popular Culture and Markets
4. How Does Culture Influence Economic Development?
I. Which Culture Prospers? Comparative Cultural Advantage
a. The meaning of economic development b.Cultural nationalism c. Values conducive to economic development d. Checklist ethnography e. Comparative cultural advantage
II. For Example, Different Kinds of Entrepreneurship
a. Entrepreneurship in its context b. Culture versus rationality? c. Cultural fit d. Cultural studies and public policy
5. The Culture Industry's Representation of Business
I. The Image of Business in Popular Culture II. The Construction of Meaning
a. Reading the texts of popular culture b. resistance and susceptibility in the creation of meaning c. Popular culture and the state
III. A New Cultural Reading of Business
6. The Market Order and the Moral Order
I. Unintended Consequences and the Ethics of Business
a. The invisible hand and the minimalist argument b. Socialism, social responsibility and the traditional defense of market morality c. A renewed challenge to business
II. The Minmalist Defense of the Market
a. The morality of obedience to stockholders b. From stockholders to stakeholders
III. Markets and the Construction of Meaning
a. Room for moral choices b. Resistant readings in the market context c. Doesn't business just co-opt progressive clauses?
7. Conclusion

One of the principal reasons why international aid programmes have often been unsuccessful is that imported solutions are not based upon the indigenous institutions in developing countries. This text argues that the economics of the Austrian school provide a far stronger theoretical framework which can introduce cultural analysis into questions of economic development and other market processes. It draws on extensive ethnographic field research as well as a critique of mainstream neoclassical analysis in a detailed case study of women in Ghana.

In 2005 Hurricane Katrina posed an unprecedented set of challenges to formal and informal systems of disaster response and recovery. Informed by the Virginia School of Political Economy, the contributors to this volume critically examine the public policy environment that led to both successes and failures in the post-Katrina disaster response and long-term recovery. Building from this perspective, this volume lends critical insight into the nature of the social coordination problems disasters present, the potential for public policy to play a positive role, and the inherent limitations policymakers face in overcoming the myriad challenges that are a product of catastrophic disaster. Soon after Hurricane Katrina wreaked its havoc, the Mercatus Center at George Mason University launched the Gulf Coast Recovery Project. The project assembled a team of researchers to examine the capacity within political, economic, and civic life to foster robust response and recovery. Building off of both quantitative and qualitative analysis, the contributors to this volume seek to understand the recovery process from the ground up; from the perspective of first-responders, residents, business-owners, non-profit directors, musicians, teachers and school administrators, and how ordinary citizens respond to the formal and informal rules of the post-disaster policy context. Personal, political and poignant, The Political Economy of Hurricane Katrina and Community Rebound will appeal to economists interested in the political economy of disaster and disaster recovery, disaster specialists, and general readers interested in the challenges those affected by Hurricane Katrina have faced and are facing and their prospects for recovering from the 2005 disaster.

This volume explores, both in theory and in practice, what "social coordination" is and how public policies can help or hinder the processes of social coordination. In particular, these chapters examine the institutional incentives that motivate public policy decisions and their implementation to achieve specific individual and social goals. Some chapters in this volume are more theoretical, applying insights from the Austrian, Virginia, and Bloomington schools of political economy to public policy issues. Other chapters are more practical, exploring the broader implications of these theories to real-world public policy puzzles. Authored by individuals from a variety of disciplines with diverse interests in public policy, this work includes discussions of topics such as environmental policy, housing policy, and education policy, among others. A unifying theme across the chapters is that policymakers often advise one-size-fits-all solutions to complicated public policy questions but ignore the multitude of incentives faced by the "players of the game" and the subsequent development of diverse forms of social coordination. Social coordination is often left out public policy analysis but is crucial to the success of informal and formal institutional arrangements. The chapters aim to disentangle these issues of social coordination in public policy in theory and practice.