Mitchell Langbert

• Doctor of Philosophy
• Professor (Associate) at Brooklyn College

Mitchell Langbert, My Life Without Liberty. Mitchell Langbert is an associate professor of business at the Koppelman School of Business, Brooklyn College-CUNY. His journey to libertarianism began when he listened to Reuben Ship’s The Investigator, a recorded radio broadcast that satirized Senator Joseph McCarthy and the Army-McCarthy hearings. In r...

This is a study of 12,372 professors in 116 colleges that are the four top US News-ranked colleges in each of 30 states that collect political registration data. We devised the sample to highlight variation in registration arising from individual, college-level, and state-level characteristics. We find an overall Democratic-to-Republican registrati...

s include: "Entrepreneurship, Uncertainty, and Judgment: A Model for Understanding the Uncertainty Borne by Entrepreneurs," by Per Bylund "The Perceived Phantom Opportunity: Bridging the Gap between Perception and Actualization," by Michael Caston, Nicole Flink, Lee Grumbles, and Clint Purtell "Should Libertarians Reject the Title Transfer Theory o...

The original version of this article unfortunately contained a mistake in the image of Figure 1.

This article outlines the evolution of the relationship between the emergence of large-scale finance and industry in the American Gilded Age and Progressive eras and the shaping and funding of universities by foundations linked to the emerging industries. Scientism has been a means of gaining and maintaining legitimacy and research funding. Statist...

In the previous issue of this journal (September 2016) we published “Faculty Voter Registration in Economics, History, Journalism, Law, and Psychology” (Langbert, Quain, and Klein 2016), which focuses on the ratio of registered Democrats to registered Republicans among faculty at 40 top universities. Sean T. Stevens, in preparing a blog post (Steve...

We investigate the voter registration of faculty at 40 leading U.S. universities in the fields of Economics, History, Journalism/Communications, Law, and Psychology. We looked up 7,243 professors and found 3,623 to be registered Democratic and 314 Republican, for an overall D:R ratio of 11.5:1. The D:R ratios for the five fields were: Economics 4.5...

Bruce Kaufman’s response to my piece “The Left Orientation of Industrial Relations” is kindly and colorful, but it riffs quite wide of my purpose. Contrary to the impression Kaufman gives, I was not trying to explain the causes of defective thinking in the field of industrial relations; I was not positing a “Truth Gap,” as he calls it, much less tr...

I show that the field known as industrial relations (IR) leans overwhelmingly to the political left. I investigate the voter registration and political contributions of IR researchers, showing overwhelming Democratic Party favor. I construct a data set of participants in the IR field, which contains 920 U.S.-based person-roles (deriving from 709 ac...

In the piece I argue that Gross's theory about why academics tend to be social democrats is riddled with statistical errors and historical inaccuracy. The piece has been published in Academic Questions, 29:1.

This paper contrasts an alternative, competency-based model of business ethics in light of the failure of deontological ethical models to produce ethical conduct in industry. The model is based on Aristotle's virtue-ethics.

This study examines the determinants of the salaries of private college and university presidents. OLS estimates suggest that institutional size, performance and prestige are linked to presidents’ compensation. Pay is for performance. Externally recruited presidents are paid more than those promoted from inside, which tends to confirm the relations...

U.S. business schools' commitment to positive social science has led to their excluding ethics from the core curriculum. In place of ethics, management scholars have adopted either nihilism or, more frequently, a subliminal virtue ethics. The nihilistic approach has influenced some executives, contributing to the business world's moral malaise. The...

Purpose This case study aims to illustrate the interaction of organizational culture, human resource (HR) policy and firm performance. It contrasts the cultures of two science‐driven organizations – the Navy's nuclear submarine force and Merck, the large pharmaceutical firm – and traces the reaction of one individual to two organizations – the Unit...

This article is about the pay of university presidents. It asks whether trustees have', developed financial incentives to encourage university presidents to minimize tuition and enhance the quality of education. 1 find the reverse, that the incentives that university trustees have developed encourage presidents to increase spending and revenue per...

Human resource master's programs lack a consistent identify. No course is required in more than 59.2% of programs, and the two most commonly offered courses are not the courses that managers favor. Part of the variability is from competition among four paradigms. Both HR scholars and HR managers favor greater emphasis on business and change managem...

This case study chronicles the entrepreneurial and real estate investment activities of a recent Ph.D. graduate in business administration. The protagonist learns that clear focus is necessary for entrepreneurial success and that trust does not mix with entrepreneurship and negotiation. Ethics are sometimes problematic for entrepreneurs.

Perhaps the chair was concerned that I had been insufficiently responsive, insufficiently therapeutic, and not customer targeted. Remember, not a single racist word was uttered by anyone in the class. The sole issue was a single word in Alinsky’s book. But, like other elaborate ideologies, political correctness is easily misinterpreted and transmut...

Individuals interested in leadership can learn much from the Nesi’im (presidents) that headed the Sanhedrin. These leaders faced incredible adversity: Hellenists, Sadducees, Greeks, Romans, the destruction of the Temple, religious persecution, and exile. Yet, they still managed to keep the Jewish people together. The article claims that these indiv...

Human resource management’s challenge is to improve the balance among three competing quality targets: equity, flexibility, and alignment. Management of these targets has improved through four historical periods: the pre-industrial, paternalist, bureaucratic, and high performance. There always have been trade-offs among the three quality targets, b...

Human resource management’s challenge is to improve the balance among three competing quality targets: equity, flexibility and alignment. Management of these targets has improved through four historical periods: the pre-industrial, paternalist, bureaucratic and high performance. There always have been tradeoffs among the three quality targets, but...

The author suggests that although the Form 5500 annual report may help to reduce legal violations, it may do so in an unnecessarily expensive way that serves the economic interests of some professional groups. In particular, his investigation suggests that the CPA audit provides questionable benefits and amounts to a special interest group's extrac...

Executive Summary The World Wide Web and the rise of the global economy are rapidly changing the way business is conducted. Organizations that hope to prosper need special leaders, leaders that are more than just accomplished administrators and managers. They need leaders that have some charisma and possess the ability to inspire followers to subor...

his article examines whether Masters of Business Administration (MBA) programs adequately prepare human resource professionals. It also compares managers' and professors' evaluations of the competencies HR managers will need in the twenty-first century. It finds that both managers and professors view interpersonal and problem-solving competencies a...

This article presents a loss minimization or continuous improvement model for human resource management (HRM). Minimization of losses arising from the interaction of two critical human resource (HR) quality targets, commitment and equity, requires ‘profound knowledge’ of social processes and the development of HR systems. The history of HR can be i...

A sample of large employee-benefit plan sponsors revealed that while respondents each paid plan consultants about $769,000 per year to help them comply with the Employee Retirement Income Security Act of 1974 (ERISA), more than half did not comply with selected provisions of the law. Across the sample, differential levels of spending on compliance...

ERISA’s equitable remedies limit employees’ access to the courts. The law fails to protect workers with short tenure and low wages, for example female workers, because trial costs often exceed damages. In single-employer plans, unions improve access, but in multiemployer plans they do not. The reason is that in single-employer plans unions bargain...

This article suggests that ERISA, although motivated by legitimate public protest including a book by Ralph Nader, was formed through public choice and the brokerage of coalitions. Among the special interests that negotiated for special dispensation were corporate employers, the banking community, the investment banking community, the insurance lob...

Rates of adoption of health promotion programs among New York State's Taft-Hartley plans are lower than among 64 large firms and a national sample of worksites with at least 50 employees. Statistically significant differences in adoption rates are found between Taft-Hartley plans and large firms, but the differences are not attributable to plan siz...

Thesis (Ph. D.)--Columbia University, 1991. Includes bibliographical references (leaves 194-209). Microfilm. "92-9850."

[Excerpt] What if a small but definable subset of the employee population were responsible for a major share of corporate crime and ethical breaches? If so, then developing policies that target them would improve the firm’s performance, not to mention its ethical climate. In this article I claim that psychopathic employees constitute such a subset,...