This paper is concerned with agri-environmental policy in Germany and focuses in particular on soil and water conservation. At first it discusses to what extent agriculture contributes to erosion and the pollution of surface waters and groundwater with nutrients and pesticides. Whereas erosion...

Agafonow's article locates the role of social enterprises in devolving value through output maximizing behavior. This short paper embeds Agafonow's argument in the societal and institutional context by building upon Luhmann's social systems theory. According to Luhmann, the functional system of...

Building on the transaction cost theory of the for-profit firm, the article argues that the transaction cost-economizing role of the nonprofit firm has two distinct dimensions. One of them consists of reducing the cost of searching for, processing, and communicating information and the other...

Social capital is defined as the shared knowledge, trust, and culture, embodied in the structural forms of networks and other stable inter-agent relationships. Social capital has been shown to be more difficult to build than economic capital, and to have greater beneficial effects for community...