ABSTRACT
The previous chapter has both laid out the general principles underpinning the new economics imperialism and offered some specific examples in and of themselves in relation to its shifting content and impact by comparison with the old economics imperialism based on ‘as if’ perfectly working markets. This and the next chapter continue along these lines but are more intermediate, between general principle and case study. This is because the case studies that are addressed are extremely wide-ranging in content and each could more or less fill out the whole of social science – although each is also idiosyncratic in part in terms of what it does or does not include and how it evolves. Appropriately then, in Section 2 of this chapter we begin with the new institutional economics, since it has become one of the most allembracing examples of economics imperialism, with many analytical strands and applications. Its influence has also been felt across a number of disciplines (most obviously economic history, for example, as suggested in the next chapter) and is not confined to the relations between economics and sociology. The strength of presence of the new institutional economics is a consequence of the extent, within economics imperialism, to which institutions have themselves become understood as synonymous with anything that is not narrowly and directly economic. In short, the institutional is the antithesis of the market, itself narrowly conceived as supply and demand, and ranges over the formal and informal, from the state through culture to customs and habits.2
