ABSTRACT
The word institutionalism recalls a movement in economic thought that was active from a little before World War I until it was largely drowned by discussion of the depression, or perhaps boom and depression, and especially by the literature of the Keynesian revolution. It included three or four main branches, one of which was statistical economics—the obvious connotation of empiricism, and quite remote from any ordinary meaning of institution. The appropriate starting point for economists in a job analysis seems to me to be the notion of economy or economizing—making resources or means go as far as possible—following one Oxford Dictionary definition. However, the whole theory of individual economic behavior is introductory—a preliminary to economics as a social science, which deals with economic organization. The treatment of institutionalism, distinguished from quantitative empiricism, raises vast and difficult problems.
