Suchergebnisse

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 share-holders) 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.

Abstract
The book Cambridge Economics in the Post-Keynesian Era: The Eclipse of Heterodox Traditions, by Ashwani Saith, explains how various approaches to the study of economics at Cambridge, UK, were replaced by mainstream economics, as practiced in leading North American universities. This article reviews the book, while also connecting the narrative provided in the book to central questions regarding the Cambridge economic tradition, and the various approaches that constitute it. The differences between the type of applied economics developed at Cambridge and in contemporary mainstream economics are also discussed. To do so, a distinction between Marshallian realism and Walrasian formalism is made here. Albeit this distinction is not emphasised in Saith's book, it helps to supplement and understand the persuasive and important narrative provided by Saith.

The contribution examines concepts and the methodology of Michel Foucault from the standpoint of the French institutionalist approach of economics of convention (in short EC). EC is briefly introduced. Then, it is argued that Foucault should be regarded as an "ally" for EC, because his theory shares main positions with EC, but Foucault also provides concepts and methodological strategies, which could improve EC's capabilities to analyze practices and strategies of convention-based processes as critique, justification and the social construction of qualities and worth. Some representatives of EC have already adopted Foucaultian concepts. Foucault also pioneered the analysis in domains, highly relevant for EC, as in the field of law and neoliberalism, but these works are not well recognized so far. Moreover, Foucault began the study of individual's strategies of self-conduct and self-formation, which EC approached later on as well. The article claims that it is especially Foucault's notions of episteme and power as well as Foucaultian discourse analysis, which offer innovative theoretical and methodological perspectives for EC.

Over the last five years, the field of economics has undergone a reconsideration of its role in society. With the exception of a select few (Rajan, 2005), most economists were blindsided by the housing crash in 2007 and subsequent financial meltdown. This has prompted both a rethinking of econoimc thought on the institutional and legislative curriculum, and the undergraduate economics curriculum, which has been led by Wendy Carlin at University College London and Diane Coyle of Enlightenment Economics. Additionally, students have begun to take important roles in the debate. In April, the student-run Post-Crash Economics Society (PCES) at the University of Manchester published a report titled Economics, Education and Unlearning, which provided a critique of economics education in the UK and at Manchester in particular. However, as the report points out, "the problems ... are certainly not limited to Manchester and are in fact international in scale". While the report has its commendable strides, it falls short on two crucial aspects: the suggestion that economics cannot be a scientific discipline and the driving recommendation of the report for a move towards "pluralism" in the discipline. This essay will focus on these two issues and argue that they are fundamentally misguided.