Social Theory is experiencing something of a revival within economics. Critical analyses of the particular nature of the subject matter of social studies and of the types of method, categories and modes of explanation that can legitimately be endorsed for the scientific study of social objects, are re-emerging. Economists are again addressing such issues as the relationship between agency and structure, between economy and the rest of society, and between the enquirer and the object of enquiry. There is a renewed interest in elaborating basic categories such as causation, competition, culture, discrimination, evolution, money, need, order, organization, power probability, process, rationality, technology, time, truth, uncertainty, value etc.
The objective for this series is to facilitate this revival further. In contemporary economics the label “theory” has been appropriated by a group that confines itself to largely asocial, ahistorical, mathematical “modelling”. Economics as Social Theory thus reclaims the “Theory” label, offering a platform for alternative rigorous, but broader and more critical conceptions of theorizing.
By Alexander X. Douglas
November 10, 2015
I owe you a dinner invitation, you owe ten years on your mortgage, and the government owes billions. We speak confidently about these cases of debt, but is that concept clear in its meaning? This book aims to clarify the concept of debt so we can find better answers to important moral and ...
Edited
By Patrick O'Sullivan, Nigel Allington, Mark Esposito
April 21, 2015
Since 2008, the financial sector has been the subject of extensive criticism. Much of this criticism has focused on the morality of the actors involved in the crisis and its extended aftermath. This book analyses the key moral and political philosophical issues of the crisis and relates them to the...
By Tony Lawson
April 13, 2015
What do modern academic economists do? What currently is mainstream economics? What is neoclassical economics? And how about heterodox economics? How do the central concerns of modern economists, whatever their associations or allegiances, relate to those traditionally taken up in the discipline? ...
By Cihan Bilginsoy
January 23, 2015
"Once-in-a-lifetime" financial crises have been a recurrent part of life in the last three decades. It is no longer possible to dismiss or ignore them as aberrations in an otherwise well-functioning system. Nor are they peculiar to recent times. Going back in history, asset price bubbles and ...
Edited
By Robert Garnett Jr., Paul Lewis, Lenore T. Ealy
December 22, 2014
Since the end of the Cold War, the human face of economics has gained renewed visibility and generated new conversations among economists and other social theorists. The monistic, mechanical "economic systems" that characterized the capitalism vs. socialism debates of the mid-twentieth century have...
Edited
By Stephen Pratten
October 07, 2014
Economists increasingly recognise that engagement with social ontology – the study of the basic subject matter and constitution of social reality - can facilitate more relevant analysis. This growing recognition amongst economists of the importance of social ontology is due very considerably to the...
By Harro Maas
February 20, 2014
Ever since the inception of economics over two hundred years ago, the tools at the discipline’s disposal have grown more and more more sophisticated. This book provides a historical introduction to the methodology of economics through the eyes of economists. The story begins with John ...
By Adam Fforde
December 18, 2013
Important parts of development practice, especially in key institutions such as the World Bank, are dominated by economists. In contrast, Development Studies is largely based upon multidisciplinary work in which anthropologists, human geographers, sociologists, and others play important roles. ...
By Mark Peacock
April 19, 2013
This book provides a theoretical and historical examination of the evolution of money. It is distinct from the majority of ‘economic’ approaches, for it does not see money as an outgrowth of market exchange via barter. Instead, the social, political, legal and religious origins of money are ...
By Nuno Ornelas Martins
October 24, 2013
The marginalist revolution of the late nineteenth century consolidated what Karl Marx and Piero Sraffa called ‘vulgar economy’, bringing with it an emphasis on a scarcity theory that replaced the classical surplus theory. However, the classical political economy of Adam Smith and David Ricardo has ...
By S. Charusheela, Eiman O. Zein-Elabdin
December 18, 2003
In the last half century, economics has taken over from anthropology the role of drawing the powerful conceptual worldviews that organize knowledge and inform policy in both domestic and international contexts. Until now however, the colonial roots of economic theory have remained relatively ...
By Irene van Staveren
July 10, 2001
In his Ethics, Aristotle argued that human beings try to further a variety of values by balancing them, stating that people try to find a middle road between excess and deficiency. The author develops and applies this idea to the values of economics, arguing that in the economy; freedom, justice ...