ABSTRACT
The discipline of economics has entered a period of exploration, self-reflection and restructuring. Behavioral and experimental economists have begun to question the bedrock assumptions of rationality and autonomous individual action. To critics of the mainstream, such as me, a serious internal review and assessment of the dominant school of thought is long overdue. The recent behavioral turn in neoclassical economics has yet to be reconciled to the foundations of rational choice microeconomic theory (Kahneman 1994; 2003). The task may well be impossible if the current regime of neoclassical economists refuse to plan for their own obsolescence. For many years economics has been immune to advances in the sociological and ethnographic study of scientific practice – science studies – and still continues to cling to a model of science rooted in nineteenth-century physics. The problem is that physics has moved beyond its nineteenth-century theorems and laws, whereas economics appears trapped in the amber of nineteenth-century metaphors and discursive practices (Mirowski 1998: 358). Yet there now appears to be a loosening of the rules governing what counts as economic analysis. Complexity theories that allow the economy to be depicted as a dynamic, evolutionary, interdependent system present both a challenge and an opportunity to re-draw the borders of economics (Davis 2006). A growing appreciation for the feedback between institutions, norms, custom and individual behavior has moved the concerns of institutional and social economists onto the agenda of neoclassical economists dissatisfied with the explanatory power of methodological individualism defined narrowly in terms of an atomistic hedonist at the microeconomic level and a representative agent at the macro level (Kirman 1992; Davis 2003; Hodgson 2007a; 2007b).
