ABSTRACT
By considering the elaborated ontological foundations we are able to define institutions as social learning vehicles from an evolutionary perspective. Social learning reduces uncertainty and institutions reduce complexity of socioeconomic interactions by encapsulating knowledge in affective, habitual and cognitive modules. The economy does not evolve without social learning, i.e. the contextual transmission of knowledge in space and time. Social learning establishes a continuity of change within and between culture, society, politics and the economy. Institutions are therefore the most central entities of cultural and economic evolution and cannot be regarded as exogenously given; on the contrary institutions, change from within in an endogenous way. Furthermore institutions cannot be associated with economic markets only, since social learning does not operate merely under the profit-maximization doctrine, consider the difference of social learning in school and in firm, for instance. The essential problem for institutional economics lies in the identification of the underlying dynamic mechanisms of social learning between social structure and human agency and its effects on socioeconomic operations. This is what we would call the heuristic projection of an evolving economy, meaning in particular a specific conceptualization of this continuous change. In generic institutionalism we want to look into the semantic and synthetic procedures of institutional change which are programmed in an evolutionary, non-deterministic and bottom-up way by economic agents.
