ABSTRACT
Since the early 1990s, feminist institutional economics (FIE) has articulated a distinct approach within the umbrella of feminist economics. FIE emerged from explicit recognition of connections between original institutional economics (OIE) and the new wave of feminist economic theorizing. This chapter describes five articulated areas where feminist institutional economists have built upon OIE by integrating insights from gender theory and this social provisioning framework. The first three areas covered are the importance of institutions and culture in shaping gendered economic outcomes and gendered social practices; the multiplicity of human motivations beyond individual self-interest and the malleability of human nature—including gender norms—across cultures, and the broad definition of economies as systems for social provisioning, with market transactions as a subset of the range of economic practices. They also include the emphasis on evolutionary change in hegemonic and subordinate gender relations sparked by group conflict and driven by human agency and the methodological commitment to empiricism over deductive reasoning, reflecting anti-Cartesian epistemologies.
