On March 14, our dear colleague and friend Stan Metcalfe passed away. An outstanding researcher and great personality has left us – his pathbreaking insights into restless capitalism will prevail. We are deeply saddened and would like to express our heartfelt condolences to Stan’s family.
Stan Metcalfe was the Stanley Jevons Professor of Political Economy (Emeritus) at the University of Manchester and held an honorary position in the Alliance Manchester Business School. Before that held academic appointments at the Universities of Liverpool and Manchester as well as numerous visiting positions all over the world. In 2018 he has made an Honorary Doctor of the University of Gothenburg Business School. He served in numerous positions related to public policy in the UK, including membership of the Monopolies and Mergers Commission and the Advisory Committee on Science and Technology.
Among others Stan was the past President of the International J.A. Schumpeter Society. He invited Schumpeter scholars from all over the world to Manchester in 2000, the Schumpeter Millennium Conference, a marvellous event, we all recall at the site of the first industrial revolution. His passion for the first industrial revolution went as far as reconstructing a steam engine with his own hands, whose ingenuity he admired.
Stan has written extensively in the fields of international economics, macroeconomics and, more recently, the economic study of innovation and its sources and consequences. In this later field he has published many research papers as well as the book Evolutionary Economics and Creative Destruction. His curiosity was also directed towards the more empirical aspects of innovation studies. Among the many subjects he explored were at least two: the place and role of universities and research in a knowledge economy, and the very particular dynamics of innovation in health. In any case, his thoughts were rooted in a deep knowledge of the great economists who spoke in his ear: Schumpeter, but also Marshall, Marx, Polanyi, Harrod, Kaldor, Hayek, Shackle and many others.
Economic dynamics in heterogeneous economic structures and outside equilibrium was “his” research interest at least since the end of the 1980ies. After an initial study on the diffusion of innovation in the Lancashire textile industry in 1970, his primary interest in the 1970s was in foreign trade theory. His interest in innovation and technological change returned in the mid-1980s. He contributed reflections on the mechanisms of development, the dynamics of competition and the role of technological diversity in these processes, as well as in-depth technological studies on automatic transmission systems, electronic summation metering and installation equipment: fuses for semiconductor devices. The broad concept of selective competition combined with innovative activities he saw at the core of the dynamics of capitalism – restlessly new ideas, combinations and business models are brought up that in selective competition strive for legitimacy and returns. Hence, economic evolution is just made up by the complexity and mechanisms of newness and selection leading to a process of creative destruction – and this in rather restless way. Such insights and concepts, so much shaped and convincingly disseminated by Stan, will survive and be the basis for further developments, refinements, and presumably considerable rewriting whenever necessary.
Beyond his academic contributions, Stan was always enthusiast and supportive with junior colleagues and curious about new ideas and open to suggestions, discussions and debates. Our community has lost a great contributor to the progress of our understanding of complex and ‘restless’ societies.
Strasbourg and Jena, March 19, 2025
| Patrick Llerena President International J.A. Schumpeter Society | Uwe Cantner Secretary General International J.A. Schumpeter Society |