ABSTRACT
The institutional-heterodox 1 tradition of analyzing labor market processes and outcomes is long and rich, pre-dating by a long margin current mainstream labor economics. A single chapter cannot attempt to do justice to the extensive contributions of heterodox economists over many centuries on core labor issues such as wage outcomes, bargaining and unions, and the reproduction of labor. Interested readers can access numerous volumes of work on institutional and other heterodox perspectives on labor processes and outcomes, including several that have been published in recent decades (see, for example, Kaufman 1993, 2004; Champlin & Knoedler 2004; Blyton et al. 2008). The ambitions of this chapter are, thus, relatively constrained; limited to providing a review of some relatively recent developments in institutional economics that are potentially relevant to the future direction of this important field of study.
