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.

It seems to be quite fashionable for economists to be
interested in institutions nowadays. At least, there is a growing
interest among economists in the economic effects of institutions
(reflected most obviously in the award of the 1991 Nobel Prize to Ronald
Coase). And quite a few books on the economics of institutions have been
coming out recently.! Sociologists are not impressed, of course.
Institutions are and always have been central to much sociological
theory. But for economists, an interest in institutions has in the past
been off the mainstream. One reason may be that it is difficult to reach
agreement on what institutions really represent, because there are so
many ways and levels at which one can consider them. One definition is
that "institutions are the humanly devised constraints that structure
political, economic and social interaction" [North (1991)]. "Humanly
devised" might seem too purposive for some tastes. Others refer to
"rules of a society or of organisations that facilitate co-ordination
among people by helping them form expectations which each person can
reasonably hold in dealing with others" (Ruttan and Hayami); or
"complexes of norms of behaviour that persist over time, by serving
collectively valued purposes" (Uphoff) [both cited in Nabli and Nugent
(l989a), p. 7].