A Brief History of the Conference
We started our series of conferences with the title “Adam Smith in Our Day”, intending to organize a conference approaching Adam Smith, regarded as the founder of political economy, from the perspective of his works on both political economy and theory of ethics as well as with reference to his prominence and significance in our time. The papers presented in the conference expressed a leftist criticism of classical political economy due to the influence of the emerging global economic crisis. Indeed, the same crisis determined the topic of the following two conferences: “(Economic) Crisis and Development” and “Labour Markets and Employment”. The aim of the former was to analyze the global economic crisis not only through its financial dimension but also from the perspective of all its economic and non-economic aspects with a historical approach on the basis of changing economic policies; while the latter aimed to discuss the relationship between job markets and employment in general, as well as the surge in unemployment caused by the crisis, in particular, as they relate to the changes in economic policies. In 2012 and 2013 conferences, the focus was on the specific characteristics of globalization. Our fourth conference entitled “Flexibility” was organized with a view to analyzing flexibility, a notion which constitutes one of the basic trends of globalization, within a broad context ranging from labour relations to private life and personality traits. The papers presented in this particular conference made it clear that the notion of “flexibility” was predominantly studied in the academia in terms of its negative consequences in labour relations. Our fifth conference “The Reason of the Age” aimed to understand the mentality of the age, directing criticism against the rightist mentality, which advocates a “market / business” approach not only in the economic field but also in political and social fields. The sixth conference series attempted to explain and account for the socio-economic circumstances that have given way to the rise of today’s social movements and different aspects associated with this process in the title “New Socioeconomic Perspectives, Social Movements, Actors”. In 2016, the main theme of 7th conference is defined as “State, Economic Policy, Taxation, & Development”.
