This paper attempts to present the basic features that would define a model of behavior suited to an institutional and post-Keynesian approach. To facilitate explanation, human behavior is divided into three phases: motivation, cognition and reasoning and decision-making. Motivation appears as a process directed toward the satisfaction of a complex structure of various needs and wants. The role of emotions and the social and cognitive aspects of motivation are recognized. Moreover, it is also recognized that human beings have limited cognitive and rational capacities, and it is accepted that they are potentially creative. Partly as a consequence of that, cognition becomes a social act and knowledge of reality is subject to fundamental uncertainty. Finally, human rationality (or intelligence) is associated with a search for good solutions, and it includes elements of procedural rationality, creativity and emotional rationality. The role of habits and institutions in all these phases is stressed.

Financialization is one of the most relevant processes embedded in the functioning and evolution of the contemporary capitalist model and presents differential characteristics in the peripheral economies of the world-system. In turn, land grabbing is also one of the most relevant phenomena taking place in the field of farmland and land use, with particular significance also within the Global South. After presenting an in-depth analysis of both phenomena for Latin America, we specifically study the case of the two Latin American countries (Argentina and Brazil) where land grabbing has a greater qualitative and quantitative importance. In our article, we analyze the main interrelationships between both processes and show how financialization has played a fundamental role (together with the policies designed and the de-regulations implemented by respective states, and the participation of other domestic actors) in the land grabbing process in both countries.

Post Keynesian and institutional economics have traditionally maintained a critical stance toward the orthodox model of labor supply, questioning many of its underlying assumptions. Nevertheless, this critical view has not led to the formulation of an alternative conception of labor supply that is sufficiently coherent and structured to be generally accepted within these branches of the literature. Accordingly, the purpose of this study is to contribute to the construction of such an alternative. To do so, the article starts by analyzing the relationship between the reasons that lead to individuals offering their labor and what that activity can bring to human beings in return. Secondly, the authors present an alternative concept of what workers contribute at work. They then analyze how the decision-making process regarding the labor supply actually takes place. Finally, the article concludes by briefly presenting certain additional points, in particular how differentiation is an inherent feature of the labor supply.

The aim of this paper is to offer a theoretical framework for the analysis of labour demand alternative to the neoclassical one, taking as its starting point the conception of the firm that derives from the capabilities or competence-based theories of the organization. After briefly reviewing the essential elements of this approach to the firm, we tackle a range of diverse aspects, such as the link between labour demand decisions and the firm’s strategic planning and its determinants, the characterisation of labour demand as a demand for productive competencies, the consequences that these competencies are embedded in human beings or the relative independence between labour demand decision-making and the process of wage-setting. In general terms, this conception of labour demand allows us to incorporate many of the main peculiarities of labour and the demand for it from a number of different areas of heterodox economics (particularly, from institutional and post-Keynesian economics) and it fits in with the conventional literature on internal labour markets and labour market segmentation.