Economics of Convention and the History of Economies. Towards a Transdisciplinary Approach in Economic History (original) (raw)
Related papers
2012
»Die économie des conventions-transdisziplinäre Diskussionen und Perspektiven. Einleitung in den HSR-Focus«. The économie des conventions (economics of convention, EC) has developed in the last three decades in France as an approach for economic history, economic sociology and pragmatic institutionalism. For some years now the international reception and recognition has started. The introduction to the HSR Focus frames the collected contributions. Therein the ongoing discussion about the application of EC in transdisciplinary historical analysis is presented. A focal point for the current debate has been a workshop in February 10th 2012 (at Humboldt University Berlin). The workshop is initially presented. Then the contributions of this focus are introduced. The contributions forward the discussion but they also present new work on conceptual and methodological issues of EC. The impact of materialities, the importance of power and critique, the role of cognition for the pragmatic institutionalism and the analysis of quantification and the difference between the notions of institution and conventions are elaborated. At the end the specificities of the German reception of EC are sketched. All in all, the focus is more than a presentation of ongoing discussion: it offers insights into new transdisciplinary perspectives.
A Presentation of the French " Économie Des Conventions " . Application to Labour Issues
2009
The " economics of conventions " is a collective and multisided program of research in economics (with cognate developments in other social sciences) which is going on in France since more than ten years. The two seminal collective books (in French) are: Robert Salais and the special issue " L'économie des conventions " of the Revue économique, March 1989, vol. Robert Salais and Laurent Thévenot. Of course there has been many more recent developments (mostly in French; see the short list of Anglo-Saxon references at the end of the paper). The economics of convention now begins to be internationally known. I must say that there are some (in my view prejudicial) confusions. Our program of research has almost nothing to share with evolutionary games that some people like Peyton try to label as " economics of convention " in the Anglo-Saxon literature. Primacy must be acknowledged to the French school.
in Oleinik, Anton (ed.) The Institutional Economics of Russia’s Transformations, Aldershot (UK), Ashgate., 2005
The Economy of Conventions [EC] programme incorporates, in a new perspective, three issues that have been dissociated by a century and a half of economic thinking: the characterization of the agent and his/her reasons for acting; the modalities of the coordination of actions; and the role of values and common goods (for former discussions of the programme, see , Orléan, 1994, Salais, Thévenot, 1986. Standard theory was built on strict compartmentalization between the two issues of rationality and coordination that were axiomatized separately, the former by decision-making theory and the latter by general equilibrium theory (Favereau, 1997). These two issues were in turn isolated from the third, which concerns value judgments and normative considerations. In contrast, the frameworks of analysis that we have constructed propose an articulation between these three issues. If we agree that the coordination of human actions is problematical and not the result of laws of nature or constraints, we can understand that human rationality is above all interpretative and not only or immediately calculative. The agent first has to apply conventional frameworks to understand others" situations and actions before he/she can coordinate him/herself. This understanding is not only cognitive but also evaluative, with the form of evaluation determining the importance of what the agent grasps and takes into account. This is where we recognize the role, in coordination, of collective values and common goods that cannot be reduced to individual preferences but provide the framework for the most legitimate coordination conventions. This is also where language plays a part as a key component of institutions. EC aims for an integration that concerns the economic, social and political sciences equally. In this way, they should be brought closer together, rather than each one expanding separately at the expense of the others.
Journal of Economic Issues, 2005
This paper explores some interconnections between the "original," or "old," institutional economics (OIE hereafter) and the French economics of conventions (EC hereafter), with the aim of promoting a mutually beneficial cooperation between them. 1 Since its inception, 2 the EC has acquired a certain prominence in France, where it is one of the main approaches that develop an alternative to neoclassical economics, particularly regarding the study of institutions. The conventionalist approach is still not very well known in economic circles outside French-speaking countries, but its contributions are very interesting and deserve greater attention. 3 At a general level of discussion, one can identify some important points in common between the OIE and the EC. Both approaches emphasize the role of institutions and conventions as nonmarket factors that promote order and coordination in economic life. In part because of this, they see economics as a social science and are very open to contributions from other disciplines. Indeed, it is hard to think of other approaches in economics that are closer to several other social sciences. Some original institutionalists and conventionalists even go beyond interdisciplinarity and defend the unification of all social sciences. Also shared is the view that institutions and conventions have a mental dimension and a behavioral one. Another common characteristic is the emphasis on values and on normative evaluation. This paper compares the OIE and the EC at a more specific level, regarding two theoretical issues related to the conceptualization of institutions in the OIE and conventions in the EC: cognition and valuation. It also considers the temporality of the 465
The Economics of Convention: From the Practice of Economics to the Economics of Practice
Historical Social Research, 2019
»Die Economics of convention: Von der Praxis der Ökonomie zur Ökonomie der Praktiken«. There would not have been an economics of convention (EC) without the use of the word "convention" in chapter 12 of the "The General Theory of Employment, Interest, and Money" (1936) by Keynes, and without the book "Convention. A Philosophical Study" (1969), by the philosopher and mathematician David Lewis. But representatives of EC reinterpret the usual reading of those two texts. They extract from the first one the idea of a convention as regulating a professional community (the financial one and the academic one in economics). As for the second one, they privilege the final revision of Lewis' initial game-theoretic definition, which puts non-observable "beliefs" on a par with observable "actions." The coherence between both elements can only be produced by the emergence of a "(social) practice." Therefore a very different practice of economics is promoted by EC (for instance reunifying coordination and reproduction). Following Foucault who studied states as a practice (through the notion of "governmentality"), we study business firms as a practice. Because of the gap between the legal person (corporation whose members are the shareholders) and the economic organization (with all its stake-holders), the firm as a practice needs to be regulated by a convention, in order to make the inequality not unbearable for workers. Otherwise the working of the firm as a dispositive of collective creation would be blocked. We conclude that conventions, practices, and dispositives belong to the same analytical space.
Perspectives of Economics of Convention on Markets, Organizations, and Law: An Introduction
Historical Social Research, 2019
»Perspektiven der Economie des conventions auf Märkte, Organisationen und Recht. Eine Einleitung«. The article introduces the French approach of economics of convention (in short EC), presents some of its core concepts-as quality conventions-and introduces some of its perspectives on markets, organizations, and law. EC is characterized as a pragmatist institutionalism, which has conceptions of human agency, rationality, market, organization, state, and institution that make EC distinct from other established institutional approaches. EC continues structuralist perspectives and shows a growing interest in the social theory of Michel Foucault, who worked on power, dispositive, and discourse. This article sketches also some newer developments of EC's research on markets, organizations, and law and offers an introductory frame for the other contributions of the HSR Special Issue. One focus of this special issue is to present contributions of members of the second and third generation of EC (as mostly formed at the University of Paris X-Nanterre) but also of an international group of scholars in the field, who apply EC to the analysis of markets, organizations and law.
The Economy Of Conventions Originality And Similarities With Neoinstitutionalism
Montenegrin Journal of Economics, 2012
This paper represents an effort to explain the originality of a consensus theory, its similarities and differences with neo-institutional theory. The author discusses the interrelations between the terms convention and institute, trying to determine the overlapping and disciplinary boundaries of the economy of conventions and neo-institutional economic theory. We start from the hypothesis that the above mentioned directions are sufficiently different in terms of form and meaning, but they also have some essential similarities and many mutual points, primarily in terms of a concept.
2013
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