Schumacher, E.F. (1973). Small Is Beautiful: A Study of Economics as if People Mattered. London: Blond & Briggs.
Schumacher’s foundational text on appropriate scale, intermediate technology, and an economics measured by the flourishing of people and places rather than aggregate throughput. A field ancestor whose work predates the bioregional economics label but whose ideas run through the discipline’s later contributions. Practitioners entering the field encounter Schumacher through the door of scale: the argument that the right size for a productive enterprise is the size at which it can be governed by its stewards, and not the size at which its efficiency is maximized.