Economics as Social Theory
About the Book Series
Social Theory is experiencing something of a revival within economics. Critical analyses of the particular nature of the subject matter of social studies and of the types of method, categories and modes of explanation that can legitimately be endorsed for the scientific study of social objects, are re-emerging. Economists are again addressing such issues as the relationship between agency and structure, between economy and the rest of society, and between the enquirer and the object of enquiry. There is a renewed interest in elaborating basic categories such as causation, competition, culture, discrimination, evolution, money, need, order, organization, power probability, process, rationality, technology, time, truth, uncertainty, value etc.
The objective for this series is to facilitate this revival further. In contemporary economics the label โtheoryโ has been appropriated by a group that confines itself to largely asocial, ahistorical, mathematical โmodellingโ. Economics as Social Theory thus reclaims the โTheoryโ label, offering a platform for alternative rigorous, but broader and more critical conceptions of theorizing.
Intersubjectivity in Economics: Agents and Structures
1st Edition
Edited
By Edward Fullbrook
December 07, 2001
Traditional economics treats the defining subjective properties of economic agents (tastes, preferences, demands, goals and perceptions) as if they are determined independently of individual and collective relations with other agents. This collection of essays reflects the increasingly common view ...
How Economics Forgot History: The Problem of Historical Specificity in Social Science
1st Edition
By Geoffrey M Hodgson
October 12, 2001
In arguably his most important book to date, Hodgson calls into question the tendency of economic method to try and explain all economic phenomena by using the same catch-all theories and dealing in universal truths. He argues that you need different theories to analyze different economic phenomena...
The Values of Economics: An Aristotelian Perspective
1st Edition
By Irene van Staveren
July 10, 2001
In his Ethics, Aristotle argued that human beings try to further a variety of values by balancing them, stating that people try to find a middle road between excess and deficiency. The author develops and applies this idea to the values of economics, arguing that in the economy; freedom, justice ...
Post-Modernism, Economics and Knowledge
1st Edition
Edited
By Jack Amariglio, Stephen E. Cullenberg, David F Ruccio
June 26, 2001
Only in the past twenty years have debates surrounding modernism and postmodernism begun to have an impact on economics. This new way of thinking rejects claims that science and mathematics provide the only models for the structure of economic knowledge.This ground-breaking volume brings together ...
What do Economists Know?: New Economics of Knowledge
1st Edition
Edited
By Robert F Garnett Jr
October 20, 1999
A provocatively rethink of the questions of what, how and for whom economics is produced. Academic economists in the twentieth century have presumed to monopolise economic knowledge, seeing themselves as the only legitimate producers and consumers of this highly specialized commodity. This has ...
The New Economic Criticism: Studies at the interface of literature and economics
1st Edition
Edited
By Martha Woodmansee, Mark Osteen
May 05, 1999
This collection brings together twenty-seven essays by influential literary and cultural historians, as well as representatives of the vanguard of postmodernist economics. Contributors include: Jean-Joseph Goux, Marc Shell. This is a pathbreaking work which develops a new form of economic analysis....
Critical Realism in Economics: Development and Debate
1st Edition
Edited
By Steve Fleetwood
December 22, 1998
Drawing on the fields of economic methodology and economic theory, this title opens up new forms of investigation in economics and transforms the nature of economic reasoning. The work combines contributions from authors critical of this approach with those who are concerned to clarify its full ...
Economics and Utopia: Why the Learning Economy is Not the End of History
1st Edition
By Geoffrey M Hodgson
December 22, 1998
Since the fall of the Berlin Wall we have been told that no alternative to Western capitalism is possible or desirable. This book challenges this view with two arguments. First, the above premise ignores the enormous variety within capitalism itself. Second, there are enormous forces of ...
The Market: Ethics, Knowledge and Politics
1st Edition
By John O'Neill
June 11, 1998
Following the failure of 'really existing socialism' in Eastern Europe and Asia, the market is now generally perceived, by Left and Right, to be supreme in any rational economic system. The current debate now focuses on the proper boundaries of markets rather than the system itself. This book ...
Economics and Reality
1st Edition
By Tony Lawson
April 17, 1997
'No reality please. We're economists'. There is a wide spread belief that modern economics is irrelevant to the understanding of the real world. In a controversial and original study, Tony Lawson argues that the root of this irrelevance is in the failure of economists to find methods and tools ...
Feminism, Objectivity and Economics
1st Edition
By Julie Nelson
December 21, 1995
This classic study extends feminist analysis to economics, but rejects setting up an economics solely for women. It is the first full length, single authored book to focus on gender bias in contemporary economics....
Economic Evolution: An Inquiry into the Foundations of the New Institutional Economics
1st Edition
By Jack J Vromen
November 21, 1995
The new institutional economics offers one of the most exciting research agendas in economics today. Yet can it really explain processes of economic change? Economic Evolution explores three of the main approaches within the new institutional economics:* the new theory of the firm,* Nelson and ...