Social theory is experiencing something of a
revival within economics. Critical analyses of the particular
nature of the subject matter of social studies and the types of
method, categories and modes of explanation that can legitimately
be endorsed for the scientific study of social objects are re-emerging.
…There is renewed interest in elaborating basic categories such
as causation, competition, culture, discrimination, evolution,
money, need, order, organisation, power, probability, process,
rationality, technology, time, truth, uncertainty, and value etc…..
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 theorising
Introduction
by series editor, Tony Lawson, to Hodgson (1999)
In recent decades, heterodox economists and economic
sociologists have become increasingly bound together by their
common unease concerning the underpinning assumptions of 'formal'
neo-classical economics, and by their common pursuit of alternative
theoretical lenses through which to study substantive, real, economic
worlds. This has required a wholesale re-visiting of foundational
concepts which have been the prime objects of theoretical attention
by mainstream economists for centuries - a list which of course
includes the study of 'competition' and 'markets'. In fact, and
quite self-evidently, the 'alternatives' which these rebels have
offered differ markedly, school by school, and scholar by scholar,
such that apart from some common ground pertaining to the perceived
deficiencies of formal economic models, their proposed replacements
have given rise to heated and contested debate, spanning epistemology,
theory and method.
The collections of Richard Swedberg are a prime
source through which to explore how Economic Sociology has tackled
the study of markets and competition. Swedberg traces the development
of intellectual thought via various historical perspectives and
through the writing of asserted 'forefathers' of the subject (Swedberg
ed 1994, 1996). Particularly, I sketch out and compare the theoretical
and normative positions taken by Max Weber and Karl Polanyi (Section
2). In Section 3, I turn to contemporary writing and review some
of the most salient contributions made from within the still-emergent
'New Economic Sociology' (NES) and from the broad church
of 'institutionalism' on competition and markets. It could be
argued that whilst both have made significant in-roads into the
task of producing a large and growing counter-balancing literature
to that which pertains in mainstream economics, partialities render
both perspectives whilst certainly interesting, and possibly 'necessary',
most certainly not 'sufficient' in their attempts to provide whole
or complete explanations of substantive economic worlds. That
is, we suggest that 'something of interest' lies in the hole which
has opened up between, on the one hand socio-structural/socio-signed
perspectives which have emerged to dominate NES; and on the other,
institutionalist perspectives around which discontented
heterodox economists seem to have rallied (for which we take as
our entry point the writing of Geoffrey Hodgson). I suggest that
this 'something of interest' requires that balancing theoretical
attention be paid to explicating and explaining not only the structures
of economic worlds, held, correctly in our view, to be subsumed
within social worlds, but importantly to put forward credible
frameworks to supplement these structuralist-institutionalist
perspectives by paying due and balancing theoretical and empirical
attention to the relational arrangements, dynamics, temporalities,
scale, flows and transformatory processes which
contribute, both as cause and effect, to explanations of political
economy.
Attention to flows and transformatory process, was,
of course a hallmark of Karl Polanyi's writing and I
return to his work repeatedly in this paper. Something of a maverick,
Polanyi's scholarship defies attempts at disciplinary labelling.
Interestingly, though, over the last fifteen years , we witness
a renewed interest in his insights by contemporary scholars. This
raises at least three questions : quoted by whom? Why? And why
now?. These questions are addressed specifically (Section 4).
programme, which, though inspired by Polanyi's notion of Instituted
Economic Process (IEP), situates this firmly within the task
of providing a balanced, more critical and less selective evaluation
of Polanyi's work than we believe has occurred to date. We further
suggest extending Polanyi's valuable start-point to incorporate
new insights concerning how to conceptualise the multiple production-consumption
interfaces which are important constituent structural elements
of the organisation and execution of exchange (within which, as
Polanyi insisted, market exchange provides only one of many alternative
variants). And we equally note that any attempt to work within
a neo-Polanyian agenda must recognise at the outset that
Polanyi's own commitment to real, substantive worlds would, arguably,
mandate contemporary researchers to draw attention to the differences
in economic governance and forms of social regulation which distinguish
contemporary organisation and relations of political economy from
those which were ontologically available to Polanyi himself.
Paradoxically, we find a paucity of explicit reference
to competition in either NES or 'new' institutionalist writing.
Further, whilst much recent attention has been paid to a search
for alternative conceptualisations of markets to challenge the
demand-supply-equilibrium model which underpins neo-classical
economics, it could be argued that this writing itself struggles
with a version of market myopia which blocks a necessary precursor
in the understanding of markets, being a theory of exchange,
particularly relevant since attention to non-market forms of exchange
very much underpinned Polany's own analytical framework (North
1996). Further, whilst Weber described competition between classes
of economic agent in his historico-empirical work, for example,
and Polanyi's anthropological studies infer much of interest and
value about competitive dynamics at play in different trade, exchange,
money, and allocation regimes, which undoubtedly informed his
notion of Instituted Economic Process , we do not find an explicit
theory of competition here either. Such an explicit treatment
must play a role in articulating a Neo-Polanyian framing
of Instituted Economic Process . Here we offer a small in-road
into that project. We propose testing the notion of underlying
competition, being competition as socio-political process which
takes place out-with the arena of exchange itself, but which nevertheless
impacts on and influences, in important ways, the very construction,
refraction, organisation, mediation, regulation, reproduction,
normalised maintenance, and geographies of processes of exchange.
Importantly this may equally manifest in examples of non-market,
as market, mediated exchange.
The paper concludes by recapping the main contours
of the case for a Neo-Polanyian approach and research agenda within
which to situate a more innovative and comprehensive study of
competition and markets then we believe has been proposed to date
(Section 5).
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