56 research outputs found

    Предмет и метод интерпретативной институциональной экономики

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    In this article, I renew the "dispute over methods" (Methodenstreit) taking into account contemporary achievements of the philosophy of science. The current dominant understanding of what is "scientific" in economics is derived from the classical natural science. Economists ignore the fact that at the end of the XIX century instead of this science appeared a non-classical science, and after the last third of the XX century a period of post-nonclassical science started. New Institutional Economics has been trapped in the classical paradigm by simulating not even contemporary natural science, but that existed more than a hundred years ago, which explored simple systems. Practically-oriented first institutionalists in Germany (the German Historical School headed by Gustav Schmoller) and in the USA (the American institutionalism represented by John Commons as its most important leader) dealt with complex socio-economic systems properly groped the interpretative approach appropriate for this kind of systems. This approach has recently received an increasing development, especially in relation to psychology, sociology and anthropology. I use these results for renovating the vision of the subject matter and the method of institutional economics. In this article, on the one hand, I propose to come back to the forgotten and maligned tradition of Schmoller and Commons, and on the other hand, I suggest restoring these traditions using the methodological and technical achievements of the interpretive paradigm in other social sciences. I dismiss the myth disseminated by Geoffrey Hodgson characterising the old American institutionalists in general as just data gatherers and John Commons in particular as a bad theoretician. I ascertain that Douglass North in his book Understanding the Process of Economic Change comes very close to the interpretive ontology, but does not make the appropriate epistemological conclusions. The latter supposes that any institutional analysis requires study of the texts of discourses of actors, and this study should not be oriented to confirm or to refute some a priori theoretical constructs, but to develop thick descriptions containing contextual and not universal concepts. These contextual concepts can be developed on the basis of Grounded Theory

    How to make the economics profession socially useful? (A reaction to George Soros’ lectures and INET’s activities)

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    The profession of economics does not fulfill its social function to provide people a correct understanding of economic phenomena. In other words, the institution of economics does not work properly. George Soros makes this conclusion in his lectures at the Central European University (Soros, 2010). He sponsored the creation of the Institute for New Economic Thinking (INET) with the objective to change this situation in economics. However activities of the INET are not oriented to change the institution of economics and most of participants in its activities are mainstream economists. This short paper summarizes my ideas in what way it is necessary to change the institution of economics. First, in order to make the profession of economists socially useful, it is necessary to reconsider the methodology and history of economics. At present the former leads the profession in a wrong way and the latter to a great extent justifies this wrong way. Secondly, it is necessary to reform the institution of economics. I define the notion of institution in the following way: an institution is a set of formal and informal rules, and also beliefs, that stand behind these rules, that orient the behaviour of members of a certain community. The rules of the institution of economics relate to the community of university professors and students of economics. These rules provide a framework for developing curricula and syllabi, as well as for the organization of examinations. They define the procedures and directions of economic research, and the criteria for publication of articles in academic economic journals. These rules include formal and informal rules of functioning of professional organizations of economists, such as the American Economic Association. Beliefs that underlie the rules of functioning of the community of academic economists are expressed in different answers to such questions as: What does it mean to undertake economic research? What is the purpose of economic research? What should economists study? How should they carry out the study? In what form should the results of the study be presented? What does it mean to teach economics? What kind of economics should we teach? The answers to these questions, along with formal and informal rules of behaviour based on the answers, together constitute the institutional knowledge of professional economists. Candidates for admission to the profession acquire most of this knowledge during the preparation and defense of PhD dissertations that many do in the framework of post-graduate studies. If someone becomes a member of the profession and does not have this knowledge, or refuses to follow its instructions, then sooner or later she/he will be rejected by the profession. To reform the profession of economists means to reform the institution of economics, i.e. to change their rules and beliefs. I think that the only way for economics to become a socially useful science is the transformation of economics from a kind of applied mathematics (mainstream economics) or social philosophy (heterodox economics) to something similar to social anthropology with its ethnographic method justified in the framework of the constructivist discursive methodology. The methodology that I prone can be expressed very shortly in the following way. The social-economic regularities result from the fact that people behave according to certain socially-constructed rules, and these rules are explained, justified, and kept in mind by telling themselves and others some stories. Taking this statement into consideration, we must agree with the fact that for the identification of social-economic regularities, we must explore and analyse these stories. Modern economics does not study the discourses of economic actors and thereby deprive itself of the ability to understand and predict economic phenomena. The study of discourse is not a deviation from the academic standards which are built into natural sciences, but rather an approximation to it, since almost all social interactions are mediated by language

    Two disputes of methods, three constructivisms, and three liberalisms

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    The paper proposes to reconsider radically the methodology and history of economics, whether present day mainstream or heterodox versions of it. The profession of economists must definitely abandon Cartesian dualism and adopt Vygotskian constructivism. In fact constructivist economics already existed in the past and was cognitively very successful and socially very useful. It was the economics of Gustav Schmoller’s historico-ethical school and the institutionalist economics of John R. Commons, traditions of which are totally ignored by the contemporary community of economists. The former tradition was based on Dilthey’s hermeneutics and the latter on Peirce’s pragmatism. It is worth to underline that hermeneutics and pragmatism are both predecessors of Vygotskian constructivism. During the last two decades a lot was written by economists on pragmatist, constructivist and discursive approaches to the methodology and history of economics, but those who wrote on these topics viewed them from the dualistic point of view. My paper is an appeal to economists to reconsider Methodenstreit. The dispute of methods between Schmoller and Menger can be considered as a repetition of a similar dispute taking place more than two hundred years earlier between Robert Boyle and Thomas Hobbes. Schmoller-Menger dispute started soon after the beginning of the institutionalisation of experimentally-oriented economics which happened with the creation in 1873 of the Verein für Sozialpolitik. Boyle-Hobbes dispute started in 1660, when the Royal Society of London had been founded, the cradle of the institution of science. Schmoller was one of the creators of the Verein and Boyle was one of the founders of the Royal Society. The activities of both societies were similar in several respects: they represented efforts to collect data, working out of detailed reports and collective evaluation of obtained results. For Hobbes, as for Menger, the model of ‘science’ was geometry. Boyle and Schmoller privileged collecting and analysing data. Boyle did win the dispute, Schmoller did loose. It happened because of different attitudes of powerful groups in societies towards natural scientific experimental research and experimental social research. They were interested in the former and they saw much more danger than benefit for them in the latter. On the contrary they were interested in abstract theoretical constructions justifying the market vision of society and laissez-faire. This kind of constructions corresponded to deeply enrooted scholastic traditions of European universities to teach theology and linked with it philosophy. In the framework of these traditions mathematics was considered as a summit of the scientific approach. On the one hand the adoption of constructivism by economists would turn their discipline into a science functionally close to natural sciences. On the other hand the Vygotskian constructivism, as a social and political philosophy, once accepted by economists, may lead them to become preachers of the communitarian liberalism with its emphasis on social responsibility, deliberative democracy, and discourse ethics

    La campagne russe face à l'accession du pays à l'OMC : analyse institutionnelle

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    Russian agrarian reform failure is a direct result of ignoring the nature of agrarian institutions inherited from Soviet times and the application of a liberal neo-classical approach in the law making process. The most important problem which presents impediments to agrarian reform is the role of collective farms as the mechanisms of survival for rural communities. Agrarian reform legislation provided rural dwellers with a very powerful tool for the resistance to any institutional change. The authors of land reform legislation estimated that the most important thing is the right of owners of land and asset shares to buy and sell them. According to them, the inclusion of this right into legislation is sufficient to start a process of creation of viable agricultural enterprises on the land of former collective and state farms, with the subsequent concentration of land and other assets in the hands of the most efficient farmers. The reformers did not pay any attention to the institution of subsistence household farms. The research presented in this paper is made in the framework of the pragmatic institutional economics. The first two sections of this paper are devoted to methodology and techniques of institutional analysis

    Vers une autre science économique (et donc une autre institution de cette science)

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    Permanent readers of this journal have certainly noticed that the title of this article has a great similarity with the title of the issue No. 30 of the Revue du MAUSS. At first glance, the title of this issue “Toward another economic science (and thus toward another world)” may seem odd. Indeed, if the word "economic" is replaced in this title by the words "physical" ("chemical" or "biological"), we get a very strange statement: another type of physics (chemistry or biology) gives us another world in which we are supposed to live, that is to say, the physical properties of materials become different, chemical reactions occur differently, and biological properties of organisms are transformed. But if for natural sciences, this sentence does not make sense, it has a deep meaning for economics. The constructivist institutionalism gives us the key to understand this meaning. Following this institutionalism, economics provides society with the elements for the socio-economic-political discourse, and it is itself part of this discourse, which in turn significantly influence institutional change. This feature of economics creates a temptation for economists to go directly to the discourse (mainly what should be) without devoting enough attention to the study of reality (what is). The fact that economists do not resist this temptation has serious consequences: despite their good intentions, the proposed solutions elaborated without knowledge of the details of reality either do not give the expected results or often cause negative unexpected consequences. The 20th century gives plenty of evidence of this kind. According to social constructivism, "institutionalization occurs whenever there is a reciprocal typification of habitualized actions by types of actors. Put it differently, any such typification is an institution" [Berger and Luckmann, 1991, p. 72]. It is not enough to define institutions just as rules, but according to social constructivism, we consider them as rules when they become habits. The constructivist institutionalism sees the source of social regularities in these habits, and in this way it requires to study institutions as the foreground of the economy rather than its background. This type of study requires close ("ethnographic") observation made in the past by the German ethico-historical school (Gustav Schmoller) and the Wisconsin institutional school (John Commons). Heterodox economists (post-Keynesians, Marxists, regulationists, conventionalists, socio-economists) who see institutions as the background of the economy, practice remote observations and do not exercise the collection of detailed information about the rules and beliefs that support them contained in the discourses of actors. From this point of view, we can consider that the orthodox and most of the heterodox currents belong to the same paradigm that does not provide an understanding of economic reality and which does not make us capable to foresee the arrival of such phenomena as the current crisis and to explain their mechanisms. The few who have managed to do so did their research in the framework of another paradigm, that of constructivist institutionalism, perhaps without knowing it. The transition of the community of economists to this paradigm requires a radical institutional reform of the profession. The constructivist institutionalism also gives us some suggestions on how to run this reform

    Approche institutionnelle de l'analyse de la transition (le cas de l'agriculture du Nord-Kazakhstan)

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    The causes of the failure of the neoclassical approach to the economic transition in the countries formerly belonging to the Soviet Union are analyzed at a general level and then in the specific case of agriculture in North Kazakhstan. Three dimensions of Soviet-type economic institutions (legislation, organizations and culture) enter into the general analysis. Among the basic notions that are cursorily presented, attention is drawn to the economic culture. A description of the characteristics of Soviet agricultural institutions (state-owned land, collective farms, state farms, individual plots and local authorities in rural areas) completes this analysis at the general level. These theoretical patterns then serve to analyze the first two phases (stabilization and introduction of the market) in the neoclassical transition strategy as applied to farming in North Kazakhstan. In this area, the institutions inherited from the Soviet era continue to survive, sometimes under a slightly disguised form. They account for both the non-completion of a real transition and the gradual decline in farming. In these conditions, the third phase (structural corrections) of the transition under the neoclassical paradigm cannot be envisioned. Alternative proposals based on an institutional approach are presented

    Two disputes of methods, three constructivisms, and three liberalisms

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    The paper proposes to reconsider radically the methodology and history of economics, whether present day mainstream or heterodox versions of it. The profession of economists must definitely abandon Cartesian dualism and adopt Vygotskian constructivism. In fact constructivist economics already existed in the past and was cognitively very successful and socially very useful. It was the economics of Gustav Schmoller’s historico-ethical school and the institutionalist economics of John R. Commons, traditions of which are totally ignored by the contemporary community of economists. The former tradition was based on Dilthey’s hermeneutics and the latter on Peirce’s pragmatism. It is worth to underline that hermeneutics and pragmatism are both predecessors of Vygotskian constructivism. During the last two decades a lot was written by economists on pragmatist, constructivist and discursive approaches to the methodology and history of economics, but those who wrote on these topics viewed them from the dualistic point of view. My paper is an appeal to economists to reconsider Methodenstreit. The dispute of methods between Schmoller and Menger can be considered as a repetition of a similar dispute taking place more than two hundred years earlier between Robert Boyle and Thomas Hobbes. Schmoller-Menger dispute started soon after the beginning of the institutionalisation of experimentally-oriented economics which happened with the creation in 1873 of the Verein für Sozialpolitik. Boyle-Hobbes dispute started in 1660, when the Royal Society of London had been founded, the cradle of the institution of science. Schmoller was one of the creators of the Verein and Boyle was one of the founders of the Royal Society. The activities of both societies were similar in several respects: they represented efforts to collect data, working out of detailed reports and collective evaluation of obtained results. For Hobbes, as for Menger, the model of ‘science’ was geometry. Boyle and Schmoller privileged collecting and analysing data. Boyle did win the dispute, Schmoller did loose. It happened because of different attitudes of powerful groups in societies towards natural scientific experimental research and experimental social research. They were interested in the former and they saw much more danger than benefit for them in the latter. On the contrary they were interested in abstract theoretical constructions justifying the market vision of society and laissez-faire. This kind of constructions corresponded to deeply enrooted scholastic traditions of European universities to teach theology and linked with it philosophy. In the framework of these traditions mathematics was considered as a summit of the scientific approach. On the one hand the adoption of constructivism by economists would turn their discipline into a science functionally close to natural sciences. On the other hand the Vygotskian constructivism, as a social and political philosophy, once accepted by economists, may lead them to become preachers of the communitarian liberalism with its emphasis on social responsibility, deliberative democracy, and discourse ethics

    L’agriculture de subsistance et les exploitations agricoles commerciales en Russie : la coexistence pacifique ou la guerre ?

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    In the process of creating new enterprises on the basis of former collective farms, including those managed by large vertically integrated companies ("agroholdings"), it is necessary to separate its functions of social support (community dimension) and its functions of commodity production (commercial dimension). Some of these new businesses must deal exclusively with support of the villagers, and others may be turned exclusively to the commercial activity. This separation is absolutely crucial, because these two functions are in conflict with each other and the support of the rural population is not really the job of "agroholdings.

    Structures sociales en Russie, cellules et réseaux

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    Russian companies heirs of Soviet enterprises are not Western-style companies, a significant difference is that they represent the basic structures of social life in the USSR : cells. The Soviet cellular system itself has deep roots in the history of Russia. The principal social structure of pre-revolutionary Russia was the rural community. In the late 1950s, Soviet society began to move away from the classic model. Cells gradually lose their exclusive role in the functioning of society. New structures begin to appear: networks. In this paper, I try to analyze the evolution of these two basic social structures in Russia to explain the realities of changes in this country, including trends to its criminalization
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