Towards a social ontology of market systems

Academic analyses of market systems are deeply divided. While economists tend to neglect the personal and sociological factors that shape the behaviour of market actors, sociologists tend to discount the possibility of a systematic analysis of the consequences of market interactions. Economists thus end up with unrealistic models of markets, and sociologists end up unable to explain the economic impact of markets. This paper outlines a project that aims to produce an analysis of markets that is both sociologically realistic and capable of explaining economic effects. The project will construct a realistic ontological analysis of market systems, developed using a critical realist methodology. Market systems, it will argue, are social structures that depend ontologically upon both human individuals and a number of normative institutions. These institutions tend to produce coordinated interactions between market actors, and these interactions underpin mechanisms that endow market systems with emergent causal powers. Different types of interactions underpin different market mechanisms, including mechanisms like those theorised by mainstream economists, but also others that they tend to neglect, and an adequate understanding of real-world markets depends on analysing these multiple mechanisms and how they interact. This will be a theoretical project in economic sociology, drawing on existing empirical work without conducting new empirical research. It will be focussed primarily on contemporary product markets in advanced capitalist economies, while selected historical and alternative contemporary models will be considered more briefly to illustrate both the historical specificity of the dominant contemporary model and the possibility of alternative types of market system

Reading the story of law and embeddedness through a community lens: A Polanyi-meets-Cotterrell economic sociology of law?

In this article I propose that the role of law in Karl Polanyi’s concept of the “always embedded economy”1 can be enriched by the application of the “lens of community”2developed by Roger Cotterrell.3I begin with Polanyi’s suggestion that economic action and interaction are always “embedded” in wider social life. Reading through the lens of community, we can be more specific: any actor is at once engaged, to different degrees (from fleeting to stable), in multiple types (whether focusing on instrumental, traditional, affective and/or belief-based action) of social life. I then explore a second, implicit, cornerstone of Polanyi’s argument: that analytical and normative approaches to economy may become disembedded from wider social life. Reading through the lens of community we can again be more specific: in the transformation to a market society, the analytical and normative approaches that are central to economic actions and interactions are confused with, and privileged over, those that are central to non-economic actions and interactions. This confusion and privileging can have what we might call a performative effect on action and interaction. Finally, I explore Polanyi’s story of law as a facilitator both of disembedding movements and of re-embedding counter- movements. The application of a law-and-community lens suggests some additional details of that storyline and that there are additional plotlines to be pursued. The practical potential of this Polanyi-meets-Cotterrell economic sociology of law is briefly illustrated with references to two twenty-first-century cautionary tales: the World Bank’s investment climate programme and the 2008 financial crisis

Evolutionary Game Theory

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Why Philosophers Shouldn’t Do Semantics

The linguistic turn provided philosophers with a range of reasons for engaging in careful investigation into the nature and structure of language. However, the linguistic turn is dead. The arguments for it have been abandoned. This raises the question: why should philosophers take an interest in the minutiae of natural language semantics? I’ll argue that there isn’t much of a reason - philosophy of language has lost its way. Then I provide a suggestion for how it can find its way again

The Transatlantic Divergence in Legal Thought: American Law and Economics vs. German Doctrinalism, The

Law and economics has become an integral part of U.S. legal scholarship and the law school curriculum. Ever since the legal realist movement, scholars mostly view the law from an external perspective. It may be surprising to many in the United States that European legal scholarship has been largely resistant to this development. Law is typically viewed from the inside, that is as an autonomous discipline independent from the other social sciences. Most legal scholarship is doctrinal, meaning that legal scholars employ interpretative methods in order to systematically expose the law and to find out what the law is, frequently even before it is tackled by a court. U.S.-style legal scholarship is often considered very alien, and law and economics in particular often meets outright rejection. In this paper, we attempt to explain this divergence in the academic legal discourse using the reception of law and economics in legal scholarship in German-speaking countries as a case in point. However, we suspect that our approach can be generalized to other parts of Europe because of common roots and similar historical factors that can be identified in many parts of Europe. We propose a two-pronged explanation for why law and economics play an insignificant role in German-speaking countries while the United States has become a stronghold for it. We proceed as follows: Section II describes the rejection of the economic analysis of law in German-speaking countries and gives an overview on explanations that we found in the existing literature. Section III outlines our own hypothesis. Section IV traces the development in the United States, based on the existing literature. It starts with the classical legal thought of the late 19th century and subsequently surveys legal realism and the early development of law and economics since the 1960s. Section V describes the development of legal theory in German-speaking countries. As both legal realism and the Free Law School have pointed out, a doctrinal approach to law is equally prone to exploitation to achieve certain political ends. The current state of the discussion on legal philosophy is relevant to us insofar as it influences the ordinary legal discourse, in particular the predominant forms of legal scholarship. Section VI summarizes the above discussion

Is nudging really extra-legal?

Some of the scholarly literature on nudges seems to assume, without giving it much further thought, that nudges represent a non-legal or extra-legal form of regulation. Others routinely assume nudges to be legal, i.e. capable of being authorized and implemented in accordance with the law. Perhaps the term ‘law’ is used in different senses in these two contexts. But the issue may run deeper. The question about the (extra-)legal character of nudges is not simply whether certain regulatory interventions can be implemented legally in country X or Y. Rather, it is whether nudges represent a genuinely distinct mode of governance, with a corresponding distinct normativity. In this paper I take a closer look at what makes a mode or technique of governance legal and query whether nudges can meet these criteria. This I shall do with reference to some of the abstract, and sometimes perhaps obscure, conceptual debates on the nature of law and the tasks of jurisprudence. Within the confines of this paper, I do not provide a fully-fledged theory of the nature of law. But in order to spell out the possible, and plausible, answers to the question in the title, I discuss some representative jurisprudential ideas and debates as to what kind of governance mechanism law is, drawing attention to the tension between instrumental and non-instrumental views of law and spelling out some conceptual consequences regarding nudges

READING HAN FEI AS SOCIAL SCIENTIST : A CASE-STUDY IN HISTORICAL CORRESPONDENCE

Han Fei was one of the main proponents of Legalism in Qin-era China. Although his works are mostly read from a historic perspective, the aim of this paper is to advance an interpretation of Han Fei as a social scientist. The social sciences are the fields of academic scholarship that study society and its institutions as a consequence of human behavior. Methodologically, social sciences combine abstract approaches in model-building with empiric investigations, seeking to prove the functioning of the models. In a third step, social sciences also aim at providing policy advice. Han Fei can be read as operating similarly. First, he builds a model of the nature of men, the state, and its interconnections, and then he uses history as empiric ground to prove his models. Again, after studying society as a raw fact, Han Fei develops models on how to deal with society. This article examines the social scientific inclinations of Han Fei by re-reading Chapter 49 of his book and applying an analysis in historical correspondence. This article serves as a case-study in this new type of analysis that can prove fruitful for the advancement of comparative philosophy