An Institutionalist Vision of a Good Economy

The current crisis in global capitalism and the wide-ranging problems that have been caused by the promulgation of a regime of deregulation of goods, services, and labor markets across the globe, but especially in the United States over the past thirty years, may indeed prove to be the end of the neoliberal era. Thus it is an opportune time to reconsider how the global economy could be restructured along more equitable and progressive lines. This paper will present the institutionalist vision of just such a good economy, building on the ideas of Veblen, Ayres, Commons, and Galbraith. The institutionalist vision of a good economy is productive but also non-invidious, democratic but also pragmatic, egalitarian but also efficient. The good economy must therefore be embedded in key social institutions, and be regulated appropriately to preserve the most beneficial social and cultural institutions. The good economy must, furthermore, be a full-employment economy, with jobs available to all who are capable of making productive contributions to their society and to enable those who labor to work in decent conditions. Finally, the good economy must provision all its members with the necessary means of subsistence for them to achieve their human aims.     

The Role of Nonattenuated Rights in Positive Economics: A Critical Appraisal

This article assesses the institutionalist elements of Friedrich Hayek's neoliberal political economy by presenting his views on the entangled relations between the state and markets in capitalism. Through the analysis of Hayek's work, the article contributes to further consolidating the view that neoliberalism is an ideological project of institutional transformation which, despite some enduring myths, has an irreplaceable role for a state with many important functions in a more limited democracy. Markets, for their part, are politically contested social constructions that depend on previous non-market institutions for their existence and legitimation. This paper argues that Hayek's work corroborates this institutionalist claim.     

Collective Action and the Institutionalist Approach to Financial Regulation

Drawing on the institutionalist approach to a capitalist economy as a money economy, I regard financial regulation and supervision as a collective action problem. I argue that, given the basic characteristics of such an economy, a financial system may be considered as a public utility and financial stability as a public good. I then maintain that the provision of the latter could not rely on private market mechanisms, such as self-regulation and price-directed incentives. As capitalism develops through more financialized forms, new institutions and regulatory rules must be designed to reframe the market’s boundaries in order to consolidate systemic stability, which is a basic condition for continuous and sustainable economic relations in society. I then suggest a precautionary-principle-based macro-prudential approach to financial regulation in order to ensure a sustainable provision of finance and financial stability that is consistent with the characteristics of a money economy.     

Financialization and Vested Interests: Self-Regulation vs. Financial Stability as a Public Good

I propose an institutionalist analysis of financialization through the lens of Thorstein Veblen, built on some peculiar characteristics of money and related financial instruments in a market-based capitalist economy. Following the case of the overcapitalization of farmlands, studied by Veblen (1919), I argue that modern capitalism is a financialized society dominated by vested interests that rely on financial liberalization-led speculative overcapitalization, often leading to a perverse accumulation process and resulting in systemic catastrophes. Consequently, one of the major constituent institutions of liberal finance, market-dependent selfregulation, proves unable to deal with society-level issues like financial stability. This latter issue must be handled at a systemic level, as a public good. Therefore, specific public regulation and action mechanisms must be designed to maintain society (and dominant vested-interests) within some viability limits to ensure a smooth functioning of the economy.     

论社会分工、企业分工和企业网络分工——对分工的再认识

社会分工是人类在生产过程中形成的一种生产关系 ,它的产生和发展是由社会生产力的发展所决定的。服务业的产生可以称为第四次社会分工。社会分工形成的机制是市场 ,在当前条件下 ,政府也参与社会分工的调节。企业内部分工是社会分工的产物 ,产生于工场手工业阶段。在资本主义条件下 ,企业内部分工是资本所有者的一种生产安排。社会分工与企业内部分工存在替代关系 ,二者的替代取决于这两种分工的生产效率。企业网络分工是介于社会分工和企业分工之间的一种分工 ,适合于具有密切联系和相互依赖的企业。随着经济发展和科学技术的进步 ,社会分工、企业分工和企业网络分工将不断发展和深化     

Globalization,labor standards,and women's rights: dilemmas of collective (in)action in an interdependent world

This paper challenges the idea that a “social clause” to enforce global labor standards through international trade agreements serves the interests of women export workers in poor countries. Drawing on fieldwork in Bangladesh and empirical studies, the author argues that exploitative as these jobs appear to Western reformers, for many women workers in the South they represent genuine opportunities. Clearly, these women would wish to better their working conditions; yet having no social safety net, and knowing that jobs in the informal economy, their only alternative, offer far worse prospects, women cannot fight for better conditions. Moreover, global efforts to enforce labor standards through trade sanctions may lead to declining employment or to the transfer of jobs to the informal economy. Lacking measures that also address the conditions of workers in this informal economy, demands for “the social clause” will reinforce, and may exacerbate, social inequalities in the labor market.     

Social and solidarity economy and social and solidarity commons: Towards the (re)discovery of an ethic of the common good?

This research poses the ethic of the common good and the institutions of the social and solidarity economy (SSE) as the foundation of commoning practices. Specifically, it illustrates how the latter may contribute to regenerating the commons, fostering open and shared access to key productive resources and essential goods and services. The analysis focuses on social and solidarity commons (SSC), defined as all those relational practices that contribute to the accumulation and regeneration of human and social (as well as other types of) critical capital. To achieve this research goal, this study collected new and old issues debated in the academic literature concerning the geographic nature of commons and their juridical and economic treatment within socioeconomic disciplines. Then, a historical overview of the commons highlights their dynamic and multifaceted nature and illustrates how they have often been co‐owned and co‐governed according to shared rules and norms. Within this general framework, SSC are introduced, and a role for the institutions of the SSE is proposed to foster an ethic of the common good as a necessary (but not sufficient) condition for expanding and enforcing people's participation in commoning practices.     

Rethinking Money as an Institution of Capitalism and the Theory of Monetary Circulation: What Can Modern Heterodox Economists/Institutionalists Learn from Karl Polanyi?

Modern heterodox theories of money reject the neoclassical conception of money as primarily a medium to facilitate exchange. These heterodox theories of money all have as common starting point an analysis of credit-debt relations in which production is a central feature, with these economies organized along capitalistic design. The Keynesian-Marxian framework describing the process of monetary circulation, traditionally referred to as the theory of the monetary circuit (TMC), perhaps best represents this comprehensive vision. This broad TMC analytical framework is compatible with institutionalist theories of money that also point to the importance of credit-debt relations. The question, however, is whether this more unified heterodox theory of money, which describes sequentially monetary relations under capitalism, can be used to understand pre-capitalistic monetary institutions. By conceptualizing money as a means of payment rather than medium of exchange, Karl Polanyi’s analysis offers social scientists crucial insights to understanding monetary relations in all types of societies in which credit-debt relations have emerged historically.     

Property and Economic Power as Issues in Institutional Economics

In the first part of this two-part paper, I presented an "irenic" reconciliation of the three apparently contradictory definitions of "institution" within original institutional economics (OIE), employing the methodology of critical institutionalism. The critical institutionalist reconciliation of these definitions conceptualizes institutions as an emergent process by which the internal and necessary relations of social structure as collective action, mediated through agency, results in the control, expansion, and liberation of the individual action of social actors in transactions. In short, an institution is the emergent process of social structure actualized in transactions (social action). Institutions, therefore, not only have a structural existence, but also an actual existence as they are the process of the emergence of the actual (in transactions) from the structural. Institutions are multi-level processes and cannot be reduced to structures, actions, behaviors, or patterns of behaviors. In this part, I demonstrate the significance of this reconciliation in two areas. The first is its ability to further differentiate the institutional definition of economics as "the science of social provisioning" from the mainstream definition of economics as "a relationship between ends and scarce means" by decomposing the institutional definition into its productive and distributive processes. The second is its usefulness in modeling the interaction of non-economic social institutions with economic institutions at varying levels of detail. I also introduce critical institutional analysis, and use as a method, for model-building and use it to build models of communal, feudal, and industrial capitalist economies.     

SOCIAL ASSETS*

We present a model incorporating both social and economic components and analyze their interaction. The notion of a social asset, an attribute that has value only because of the social institutions governing society, is introduced. In the basic model, agents match on the basis of income and unproductive attributes. An attribute has value in some equilibrium social institutions (matching patterns), but not in others. We then show that productive attributes (such as education) can have their value increased above their inherent productive value by some social institutions, leading to the notion of the social value of an asset.     

论社会主义社会的劳动和劳动价值

本文探讨了社会主义社会劳动和劳动价值理论。文中指出 ,必须全面、准确地把握马克思关于价值创造的理论与方法 ;澄清传统政治经济学中一系列并不完全符合马克思原意、更脱离现实经济生活的观念 ;发展马克思主义的劳动价值理论 ,扩展价值创造和生产性劳动的领域     

Thinking Like a Trader: The Impact of Neoliberal Doctrine on Habits of Thought

Neoliberalism has come out of the financial crisis unscathed. Moreover, it has further asserted its dominance over geopolitical discourse and ideology worldwide. I contend that neoliberal supremacy in the policy arena and upon domestic and international institutions has been largely uncontested because it has penetrated all aspects of life to the extent that it now represents what Thorstein Veblen referred to as “the modern point of view.” Understanding the global power of neoliberalism requires examining not only its well-established hegemony over institutions as social constructs, but also its impact on habits of thought as mental constructs. From a Veblenian perspective, I argue that the neoliberal doctrine generates habits of thought which legitimize the transformation of a marketoriented economy into a full-fledged market society. The impact of the normalization of the neoliberal mode of behavior may, in the end, worsen the fracture between nation and state and unravel the fabric of society by justifying fully detached, emotion-free, and self-centered actions that crowd-out pro-social behaviors and challenge any social conception of the common good.     

生产劳动和非生产劳动与当代资本主义

区分生产劳动与非生产劳动,对于正确分析价值自我扩张、资本积累、资本主义经济中的各种变量、政府对收入分配的干预以及资本主义经济发展的新趋势,都具有重要意义。马克思主义政治经济学强调要区分一般生产劳动和资本生产劳动。只有在生产中所从事的劳动才是一般生产劳动;资本生产劳动是生产剩余价值的劳动。剩余价值生产标准是资本主义条件下生产劳动的绝对标准。     

关于集体经济的若干看法

“劳动力产权”的涵不应是“劳动力拥有资本产权”,而应是“摆脱了附属地位的劳动者对自己劳动力的拥有”。改革使劳动者拥有自己的劳动力,但这不是集体企业产权改革的内容,不能用“劳动力产权”论指导集体企业的产权改革。“劳动力资本”将不能兼存的两个事物扯在一起,可能根本破坏市场秩序。集体企业改革采用股份合作制形式,解决了传统集体企业产权虚置的问题,但也在企业的公有性质中加入了私有因素。这决定了改革后的集体企业可以参加市场竞争,但在内部又具有互助共济性质。集体经济难以成为市场经济下的基本经济形态,但可发挥帮助和扶持社会弱势群体,执行政府社会福利政策的长处与优点。不应认为集体经济所占比重越高越好。     

论管理的生产力属性

现代社会管理在社会生产劳动中充分体现出生产力属性。现代管理与科学技术相互渗透、相互促进,共同构成生产力要素,井决定生产力发展水平。管理是社会生产力可持续发展的重要保障。随着经济全球化和社会信息步伐加快,我国应更加重视管理在生产劳动中的地位和作用。     

Globalisation—New Demands on Public Enterprises

The globalisation of the economy and society reduces the economic policy capabilities of the state with its public enterprises considerably, but at the same time it triggers fundamental pressure on the government to compensate for the negative economic, political and social effects of the globalisation process. Using a system-theoretic framework, requirements for the public economy can be developed reaching from a social coordination function to an evolutionary-based industrial policy function of public enterprises. These functions and instrumental targets have to be implemented in a system of an internationalised public economy based on an appropriate institutional foundation. This in turn means focusing on a mixed system of public and non-profit organisations combined with market type institutions. By no means is an erosion of the public sector in the sense of radical privatisation strategies as propagated by the IMF and other prominent institutions implied. Rather a social need for public action must be considered mainly due to the public interest (Gemeinwohl). In this context, the socio-political competence of the public and nonprofit economy can be revitalised in an innovative way.     

Good in a crisis: the ontological institutionalism of social constructivism

This paper seeks to recover and establish the distinct (and distinctly) institutionalist social ontology that underpins social constructivism as an approach to political economic analysis. It views social constructivism as a profoundly normative mode of political inquiry which seeks to discern, interrogate and elucidate the contingency of social, political and economic change – restoring politics (broadly understood) to processes and practices typically seen to be inevitable, necessary and non-negotiable. More controversially, perhaps, it also sees social constructivism, after both Berger and Luckmann and Searle, as ontologically institutionalist. Social constructivism, it is argued, has its origins in the attempt to establish the ontological distinctiveness of institutions as ‘social’ (as distinct from natural or ‘brute’) facts. This leads it to a distinct understanding of the relationship between actors and the environment (both natural and social) in which they find themselves and to its characteristic emphasis on the ideational mediation of that relationship. That in turn leads it to a particular type of analytic purchase on political economic realities, reflected in its distinctive emphasis on interpretive ambiguity, the social construction of political and economic imperatives and on disequilibrium. The argument is illustrated and developed further through an elucidation of the implications of such a social constructivism for the analysis of the period of crisis through which we now acknowledge ourselves to be living.     

职业分层、中产阶级与收入分配

社会职业不仅反映着人们在社会、经济生活中所处的分工角色,它也带来了人们在收入水平和社会经济地位方面的差距和不同,在各种职业背后存在着以生产条件的占有关系为依据的社会生产关系。社会不可能通过消除普通生产劳动行业和职业,让人们都进入"中等收入"职业。因此,要缩小社会收入分配领域的巨大差距,必须改变现有的分配结构,在初次分配领域,即物质生产领域,进行分配制度的改革,增加普通劳动者的收入,使普通劳动者能够通过勤奋劳动达到"中等收入"水平,这才是在社会主义制度下"扩大中等收入者群体"的正确途径。所谓"人力资本"的收益不过是在雇佣劳动制度的生产方式下,部分人能以物质生产乃至资本主义竞争所必需的知识为条件,进入社会生产关系中具有一定社会经济地位的职业,在这种职业上他们利用社会生产关系所赋予的对生产与竞争能力的控制,从社会剩余产品中占有一定份额。因此,"人力资本"所有者的收入并不是所谓"人力资本"的创造,而是由社会生产关系所决定的收入分配形式。     

An Unfortunate Alignment of Heterodoxy,Nationalism, and Authoritarianism in Putin’s Russia

I address the urgent need to deal with the deliberate misuse of heterodox criticism of neoliberal policies in modern Russia. State-funded propaganda has been using distorted institutionalism to rationalize both authoritarianism and nationalism as a left-wing response to global neoliberalism and as a welcome manifestation of civilizational plurality. To help western heterodox-institutionalists offer an informed critique of what Vladimir Putin’s apologists have made of some heterodox ideas, I discuss the particularities of the history of Russian post-Soviet economic thought, and explain who these apologists are and what their training is. I also clarify how, in post-socialist Russia, it has become possible to successfully misappropriate the institutionalist emphases on the significance of culture and history in socio-economic development, and on the active role of the state in a market economy for narrow ideological purposes. In my conclusion, I emphasize strongly that traditional institutionalism is not compatible with oppression and authoritarianism.     

Social Control of Corporate Power: Comment

Economic activity takes place within an institutional framework. The economy, like society, represents a complex of institutions, ranging from the smallest, such as the family, to the largest and most comprehensive, the state (Chavance 2009). Institutional economics offers a broad perspective that brings forward the concept of gender, since gender is a fundamental organizing principle of institutions (Jacobsen 2003). A focus on social provisioning, typical for both feminist as well as institutional economists, leads to a broader understanding of economic activity. This broader approach includes activities like caring and care labor that cannot be entirely understood in terms of individual choices. In this paper, I explore the relationships between care and the economy from the perspective of neoclassical, institutional, and feminist economic theory. Economic theories are a basis for public policies that have a major impact on people’s lives. I argue that changing the dominating economic perspective into feminist-institutional one would improve the situation of care providers, who would, in turn, contribute to the development of society and the economy.