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 Drucilla Barker, Edith Kuiper
June 06, 2003
Feminist economists have demonstrated that interrogating hierarchies based on gender, ethnicity, class and nation results in an economics that is biased and more faithful to empirical evidence than are mainstream accounts.This rigorous and comprehensive book examines many of the central ...
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By Edward Fullbrook
June 05, 2003
Economics can be pretty boring. Drier than Death Valley, the discipline is obsessed with mathematics and compounds this by arrogantly assuming its techniques can be brought to bear on the other social sciences. It wasn't going to be long, therefore, before students started complaining. The vast ...
By Geoffrey M Hodgson
December 22, 1998
Since the fall of the Berlin Wall we have been told that no alternative to Western capitalism is possible or desirable. This book challenges this view with two arguments. First, the above premise ignores the enormous variety within capitalism itself. Second, there are enormous forces of ...
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By Robert Garnett Jr.
October 20, 1999
A provocatively rethink of the questions of what, how and for whom economics is produced. Academic economists in the twentieth century have presumed to monopolise economic knowledge, seeing themselves as the only legitimate producers and consumers of this highly specialized commodity. This has ...
By Geoffrey M Hodgson
October 12, 2001
In arguably his most important book to date, Hodgson calls into question the tendency of economic method to try and explain all economic phenomena by using the same catch-all theories and dealing in universal truths. He argues that you need different theories to analyze different economic phenomena...
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By Jack Amariglio, Stephen E. Cullenberg, David F Ruccio
June 26, 2001
Only in the past twenty years have debates surrounding modernism and postmodernism begun to have an impact on economics. This new way of thinking rejects claims that science and mathematics provide the only models for the structure of economic knowledge.This ground-breaking volume brings together ...
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By Steve Fleetwood
December 22, 1998
Drawing on the fields of economic methodology and economic theory, this title opens up new forms of investigation in economics and transforms the nature of economic reasoning. The work combines contributions from authors critical of this approach with those who are concerned to clarify its full ...
By John O'Neill
June 11, 1998
Following the failure of 'really existing socialism' in Eastern Europe and Asia, the market is now generally perceived, by Left and Right, to be supreme in any rational economic system. The current debate now focuses on the proper boundaries of markets rather than the system itself. This book ...
By Tony Lawson
April 17, 1997
'No reality please. We're economists'. There is a wide spread belief that modern economics is irrelevant to the understanding of the real world. In a controversial and original study, Tony Lawson argues that the root of this irrelevance is in the failure of economists to find methods and tools ...
By Julie Nelson
December 21, 1995
This classic study extends feminist analysis to economics, but rejects setting up an economics solely for women. It is the first full length, single authored book to focus on gender bias in contemporary economics....
By Jack J Vromen
November 21, 1995
The new institutional economics offers one of the most exciting research agendas in economics today. Yet can it really explain processes of economic change? Economic Evolution explores three of the main approaches within the new institutional economics:* the new theory of the firm,* Nelson and ...
By Thomas Boylan, Paschal O'Gorman
June 30, 1995
Boylan and O'Gorman inject a fresh empiricist voice into the recent debates in economic methodology.... praise the book for its careful scholarship, its intellectual novelty and its familiarity with existing methodological literature." D. Wade Hands, University of Puget Sound, USA...