The Past and Future of Evolutionary Economics : Some Reflections Based on New Bibliometric Evidence

This document is the Accepted Manuscript version of the following article: Geoffrey M. Hodgson, and Juha-Antti Lamberg, ‘The past and future of evolutionary economics: some reflections based on new bibliometric evidence’, Evolutionary and Institutional Economics Review, first online 20 June 2016. The final publication is available at Springer via doi: http://dx.doi.org/10.1007/s40844-016-0044-3 © Japan Association for Evolutionary Economics 2016The modern wave of ‘evolutionary economics’ was launched with the classic study by Richard Nelson and Sidney Winter (1982). This paper reports a broad bibliometric analysis of ‘evolutionary’ research in the disciplines of management, business, economics, and sociology over 25 years from 1986 to 2010. It confirms that Nelson and Winter (1982) is an enduring nodal reference point for this broad field. The bibliometric evidence suggests that ‘evolutionary economics’ has benefitted from the rise of business schools and other interdisciplinary institutions, which have provided a home for evolutionary terminology, but it has failed to nurture a strong unifying core narrative or theory, which in turn could provide superior answers to important questions. This bibliometric evidence also shows that no strong cluster of general theoretical research immediately around Nelson and Winter (1982) has subsequently emerged. It identifies developmental problems in a partly successful but fragmented field. Future research in ‘evolutionary economics’ needs a more integrated research community with shared conceptual narratives and common research questions, to promote conversation and synergy between diverse clusters of research.Peer reviewedFinal Accepted Versio

Snudging cheapskates and magnificent profusion : the conceptual baggage of ‘mean’ and ‘generous’

The way people behave with money communicates a great deal about their character. In this chapter, we examine the ‘conceptual baggage’ (McConnell-Ginet, Language, 84(3), 497–527, 2008) for synonyms of ‘mean’ and ‘generous’. Drawing data from The Historical Thesaurus, we show that generosity is connected to positive assessments across a range of fields, including appearance, morality and space, while meanness is similarly widely disparaged. Drawing out the ideological connections between the lexical items and their cultural baggage, we argue that ‘wealth’ operates as a synonym for goodness, while ‘poverty’ functions as a synonym of badness. In order to challenge this, we suggest that attention be paid to ‘relative generosity’ and demonstrate how results from data analysis can be used to critically assess the prevailing economic orthodoxy