ABSTRACT
The generic rule-based approach offers a prototype synthesis for the previously elaborated generic heuristics. We may identify the Veblen-Bourdieu heuristic frontier within the core between cognitive, habitual and social generic rules, reconsidering Table 10.1. This institutional module articulates the cultural dispositional system as cumulatively evolving in durable social structures, allowing for different cognitive modes for economic operations. With reference to Table 10.2 this module works primarily on the affective order in relation to first order constitutive and second order operational rules, but it also delivers insights on the second order mechanism rules. Veblen's institutionalism highlights the mechanisms of the great transformational processes and not just of social reproduction. He followed the Darwinian trajectory and elaborated on the cultural evolution with regard to cumulative causation. Thereby Veblen emphasized the mechanisms between the instinct of workmanship and habit, transitioning the consumption patterns of a whole society. Bourdieu's sociogenesis regarding the co-evolution of habitus and the field delves also into all three orders of rules, since it projects a heuristic device where evolutionary change is initialized when specific habitus enter different fields, leading to a dissonant clash of the social sense. Boyer (2008) exemplified this issue with a reconsideration of Bourdieu's theory in the régulation school, where institutions are at the core of scientific investigation. He argues that it is the desynchronization of habitus and the field leading to evolutionary transition and endogenous crisis. Otherwise we may also speak of a Hayek-Schumpeter institutional module, because their evolutionary systems of thought necessitate each other in complementary ways. Schumpeter heuristics work especially on the cognitive subject rules and the innovative potential for technical object rules, as technical objects carry the novel idea within them. Hayek heuristics narrate an excellent story about the genesis of generic rules in the affective order in general. The spontaneity of this order with regard to the cognitive domain of a single carrier highlights the potentials of a moral community (Hodgson 2012), indicating the evolution of social object rules. We can also speak of a Veblen-Schumpeter institutional module as exemplified in the following.
Veblen analyzed this process on the basis of his concept of circular and cumulative causation. Schumpeter criticized Veblen's work on the grounds that it was non-theoretical and sociological. But there is a deeper reason for this, rooted in his view of causality. Unlike Veblen, he outlines a linear causality principle: ‘We speak of cause and effect only in the case of an irreversible causal relationship…. In contrast, we do not speak of cause and effect in those instances where we have a reciprocal relationship between two facts. We consider as a cause of an economic phenomenon only its explanatory principle (Erklärungsprinzip), that is to say, that aspect that allows us to comprehend the nature (Wesen) of the cause.’ (Schumpeter 1912/1926)
(Dopfer 2012, p. 149)