Previous studies of the economics discipline

It is time now to turn away from theorising about science, and instead turn towards surveying previous social studies of economics. Economics has been studied from different perspectives and disciplinary vantage points, and this

selective review attempts to provide an overview over these approaches and their main findings. I take as my point of entry a piece of work by an economist: a humorous mock-ethnography of the primitive Econ tribe.

Econography

The Econ tribe occupies a vast territory in the far North. Their land appears bleak and dismal to the outsider, and travelling through it makes for rough sledding; but the Econ, through a long period of adaptation, have learned to wrest a living of sorts from it. They are not without some genuine and sometimes even fierce attachment to their ancestral grounds, and their young are brought up to feel contempt for the softer living in the warmer lands of their neighbours, such as the Polscis and the Sociogs. Despite a common genetical heritage, relations with these tribes are strained—the distrust and contempt that the average Econ feels for these neighbours being heartily reciprocated by the latter—and social intercourse with them is inhibited by numerous taboos. The extreme clannishness, not to say xenophobia, of the Econ makes life among them difficult and perhaps even somewhat dangerous for the outsider. This probably accounts for the fact that the Econ have so far not been systematically studied. Information about their social structure and ways of life is fragmentary and not well validated. More research on this interesting tribe is badly needed. (Leijonhufvud 1973)

This is the opening passage of Swedish-American economist Axel Leijonhufvud’s amusing and enlightening 1973 essay “Life among the Econ”. Paraphrasing nineteenth century anthropological accounts of “primitive” tribes, it provides an entertaining account of the characteristics of the epistemic “Econ tribe”.⁴³ Leijonhufvud coins the term “econography” for the study of this social group in his imaginary world. To my knowledge, no such label exists in the real world for research on the economics discipline. The social study of economics is spread among a few neighbouring disciplines, although these disciplinary appellations are themselves often blurred. There are specimens of such work in economics, economic history, science studies, history of science, and sociology. In the following, I will try to provide a brief overview of some of the most important previous work that has been done in these fields.

43 More than one of my informants at the top departments recommended this article to me, and I think this conveys a sense in which it is not only an excellent piece of academic humour, but humour that is “funny because it’s true”. Like much good humour it comments on some aspect of our world with sharp insight.

The primary field for studies of the development of the economics discipline is without doubt the history of economic thought. The institutional location of this specialisation in intellectual history has varied and been threatened in many cases.

Increasingly during the last quarter century, if not longer, the history of thought has been removed from doctoral curricula in economics and from the range of covered subfields in journals (Colander 2005; Klamer and Colander 1989). The mainstream neglect, if not active dislike, of history was aptly described by the historian Mark Blaug (2001): “No history of ideas, please, we’re economists”, noting that this neglect was strongly related to a technocratic and positivist self-understanding among the mainstream, but that, on the other hand, the history of thought had seemed to become a haven for heterodox economists of other leanings and styles of mind.

For professional historians of thought, the work has often been understood as a struggle to counter the Whiggish historiography that often results with the lack of specific training. For example, John Davis claims in a review of the oeuvre of Mark Blaug that he had to make a distinct argument for a history of thought that countered the common view at the end of the twentieth century that

entailed a particular view of the historiography of economics, specifically, a combination of two related propositions: (1) the Whig idea that science always makes progress which renders past knowledge irrelevant to current knowledge, and (2) the view that progress in economics as a science consists in analytical achievements which are by nature strongly separable from their origins and manner of development. (Davis 2013:45)

Against the first notion of rational reconstruction of steady progress, Blaug countered with the historical reconstruction and historical loss (so-called Kuhn-loss) of knowledge. Against the second notion of atomistic analytical achievements, he held up the evolutionary intellectual path dependency of economic thought: the insight “that economic knowledge at any one point in time depended crucially upon what had previously occurred along the path economists had until then pursued” (Davis 2013:46).⁴⁴

Much history of thought, Whiggish or not, could however be thought of as more or less internalist in the simple sense that its object is often primarily to chart the intellectual developments of great economists, schools of thought and research fields, or specific concepts, unrelated to the social context of economics. This may

44 Davis (2013) argues that Blaug made a turn in his position when faced with increasing Whiggishness. For Blaug (1975) himself had earlier adhered to the rational reconstruction view of Lakatos, against a Kuhnian view.

range from standard textbooks from a Swedish point of view (Kragh 2012; Pålsson Syll 2011) or more specialised volumes about a specifically Swedish history of economic thought (Sandelin 1991b), to internationally well-known works that are also sensitive to the emergence of a distinct heterodox economics (Landreth and Colander 2002).

Some history of economic thought is more sociological in orientation, often influenced by science studies. For example, Coats and others have studied the professionalisation of economics and the increasing influence of economists in government in international perspective (Coats 1981). Coats early on emphasised the need for historians of economic thought to understand the sociology of economics, an insight driven both by his experience of the socially grounded difference between the history of American and British economic thought, and his encounter with Kuhn (Coats 1993:4). However, he turns against the perceived relativism of the strong programme’s symmetry thesis and finds that it underemphasises the central role of rationally grounded epistemic judgement in science. Drawing instead on the work of Richard Whitley, he argues that the history of thought should take sociology seriously, and understand economic science as a collective and ongoing process, focusing on the rise, development, and interaction between schools of thought and their survival capacity. Coats points to an important task in moving outside the conventional history of thought to study also the important role of “the significance and influence of the perennial dissenting tradition within and on the fringes of the professional establishment”

(Coats 1992:26). In this respect he argues that Whitley goes too far in emphasising the control of the disciplinary elite and the coherence of the theoretical disciplinary core.

Other historians of economic thought have also attempted to write more social and contextual intellectual histories. Roger Backhouse has for example emphasised that writing the history of economics should also be done against the backdrop of economic and institutional history (Backhouse 2002, 1994a;

Backhouse and Fontaine 2010). He has been central in the field of economic methodology, the subfield that applies philosophy and, more recently also social study of, science, to economics and epistemic and ontological questions arising in economics. In his landmark 1994 volume, Backhouse (1994b:2) claims that the subfield has recently grown, and part of the impetus is both the general and overarching influence of Kuhn’s Structure, but also the issues increasingly raised by heterodox economists like the Austrians, post-Keynesians and Institutionalists:

“For many economists associated with these schools’ methodology provided a way to criticize orthodox economics. Some of this heterodox work addressed issues

related to those discussed above, raising questions concerning, for example, the nature of explanations in economics”.

Backhouse claims that until the 1990s, the methodology of economics was dominated by the early work of Mark Blaug. This popularised a Popperian outlook among economists, although Blaug himself turned increasingly away from his early rationalist Popperian-Lakatos framework, as noted above (Davis 2013). Backhouse, by contrast, introduced a range of other approaches, like McCloskey’s (1983) rhetoric of economics approach, that employed the analysis of rhetoric from literature to study economic discourse. The book also includes a more up-to-date account of science studies, and played an important role in sparking interest in scientific realism among economic methodologists, primarily through the work of Uskali Mäki and Tony Lawson (Fullbrook 2009; Hodge 2008).

Work on heterodox economics and pluralism

With the increasing use of the label “heterodox economics” since the late 1990s, Backhouse and others with a science studies sensitivity working in the history of economic thought have emphasised the need to acknowledge, conceptualise and study heterodox economics. For example, Backhouse, David Colander, John B.

Davis, Tony Lawson, Frederic Lee and others were all involved in the debates around the question of defining and understanding heterodox economics and the mainstream-heterodoxy divide, which was covered in chapter 2 (Backhouse 2000, 2004; Colander 2000; Colander et al. 2004; Davis 2006, 2008; Lawson 2006, 2012, 2013; Lee 2009).

A closely related strand of work deals with the question of pluralism in economics and, later, its relation to heterodox economics. From a historical perspective, Morgan and Rutherford (1998) and Yonay (1994) have studied the actual pluralism of US economics in the interwar period, which will be discussed in chapter 5. Calls for pluralism in economics first emerged among different heterodox economists, although without much interaction, in the 1970s, but the current discussion on pluralism took a new and more integrative turn starting with the well-circulated “Plea for a Pluralistic and Rigorous Economics” in the American Economic Review in 1992, by a range of well-known economists, followed by a call for pluralism by doctoral students at Cambridge in 2001 (Garnett 2011; Hodgson, Mäki, and McCloskey 1992; Sent 2003).

More recent work in this vein discusses pluralism as a concept and strategy in relation to heterodox economics, where Dobusch and Kapeller (2012) for example make a distinction between three varieties of pluralism, drawing on what they call

a post-Kuhnian view of paradigms. Selfish pluralism among some heterodox economists amounts to a rhetorical vehicle for promoting one’s preferred heterodox approach in the face of perceived monolithic orthodoxy. Second, disinterested pluralism is a live-and-let-live approach that allows for multiple paradigms or schools of thought to coexist without significant interaction. This, they note, is a common situation in many social sciences today. Their preferred variety is interested pluralism, which strives to found a new meta-paradigm of pluralism, which strives for interaction and refinement across schools of thought and particular traditions, and views pluralism and interaction across difference as a potentially scientifically productive stance. In the case of heterodox economics, this would mean constructive dialogue and search for complementarities as well as relative merits of different traditions of thought.

In a similar vein, Garnett argues, as one of many participants in the ongoing debate on pluralism in economics, against the conception proposed by Frederic Lee. Garnett (2011) claims that Lee views pluralism as just tolerance, and that his view of the mainstream-heterodoxy divide is too black and white, inspired by a Cold War logic of dividing all territory between friend and foe. This, in Garnett’s view, entails that heterodox economists should only request their freedom to exist, but continue to do so as an autonomous scholarly project, cut off from mainstream economics. Like Lee, Garnett interprets pluralism in terms of academic freedom, but unlike him, he proposes a view of pluralism as an open project of freedom, the freedom of autonomous subject to learn and to critically engage with other perspectives. It includes not only the negative freedom from persecution, but also positive freedom, in the sense of resources and literacy. This is a view close to that of Dobusch and Kapeller.

Neoclassical economics and the neoliberal thought collective

A quite different line of work warns from another angle against conflating the notion of neoclassical or mainstream economics with neoliberalism. In an attempt to seriously understand neoliberalism, not as a general concept of a mode of production or phase of capitalism, but as a specific body of ideas, prominent historian of economic thought Philip Mirowski and others have recently studied the origins of what they call the neoliberal thought collective (Mirowski 2009, 2016; Mirowski and Plehwe 2009; Pilkington 2013). Mirowski and Plehwe (2009) argue against what they see as a common misconception that neoliberalism, in line with Ludwik Fleck, should be understood as a concrete thought collective with the explicit project to change

political-economic-philosophical discourse in the long run, starting as a reaction in the 1940s against encroaching totalitarianism and the perceived failure of liberalism.

One of Mirowski’s key points is the warning against the common conflation of neoliberalism with neoclassical economics, which he claims are two distinct bodies of thought, although with occasional historical points of merger, especially in Milton Friedman’s thought.⁴⁵ A second central point is to move theoretically beyond vague concepts of neoliberalism as impersonal discourses and Foucauldian power, and instead focus on instances where a political movement on the level of social thought mobilised largescale resources (both in terms of membership by economists and other intellectuals, and in terms of capital invested in the project) and established vast think-tank networks in order to actively disseminate its worldview (Mirowski 2009, 2014). One important implication is to illustrate how the boundaries between science and politics can at times be porous, and that intellectual change and movements are sometimes the result of conscious and strategic intervention by organised interests with good financial backing.

Mirowski and others have also pointed to the need for an economics of scientific knowledge, that takes insights from science studies seriously (Sent 2013). These bodies of work points to ways that both organised political and intellectual movements, and structures of funding, may have epistemic effects on scientific knowledge.

Organisational and sociological approaches

Among more sociologically-oriented work, Richard Whitley’s (1986, 2000) organisational perspective has been very influential, both as a general framework for studying the organisational basis of scientific knowledge production, and economics more specifically. Whitley’s framework focuses on how the organisation of science influences the production and validation of scientific knowledge. Scientists study the world not as atomistic subjects, but are mutually dependent, pursuing collective goals of new knowledge production within different systems of work organisation, which may take very different forms.

According to Whitley (1986:184), the organisation of the modern academic labour market is one of the most important innovations of modern science, that by the turn of the last century led to the rise of systematic education and

45 Key here is that while neoclassical economics imagines free markets without states, which translates to an ideal of natural state of more market and less state, Friedrich Hayek and later neoliberalism instead realises that this was precisely the failure of classical liberalism. One of Hayek’s key insights, according to Mirowski (2009, 2014), is that markets must be actively constructed by states.

reproduction of epistemic procedures and standards between generations. It also led to the departmentalisation of science, where the department became the unit of day-to-day scientific practice, and where scientific establishments or elites came to increasingly control research and the allocation of immaterial and material recognition and resources:

Particular scientific ideals, goals, and standards thus became entrenched in departments as separate “disciplines”, and problems or issues which did not fit into such units received little attention because they were not central to these disciplines and hence would not lead to high reputations in it. (Whitley 1986:185)

In his view, economics was established at the beginning of the century as a modern work organisation, and came to develop a stronger consensus and academic standardisation, when economists become increasingly oriented towards each other in the professional community, and less towards the general educated public. Whitley writes that by the 1930s, an international reputational system, more and more dominated by North Americans, had been established, as part of the development of the autonomy of the scientific field of economics. The theoretical core of Whitley’s argument consists of a typology of scientific fields along two dimensions: the degree of mutual dependence, and the degree of task uncertainty. The work organisation of different scientific fields can be categorised along these dimensions and the specific working of knowledge production better understood. Economics is characterised by a high degree of mutual dependence, that is, research typically builds in incremental steps on previous results, in a cumulative fashion. Uncertainty is very low for theoretical studies, while it is high for applied, empirical economics. This creates a potential tension in the discipline, which is solved by what Whitley calls compartmentalisation, where work in the theoretical core is given superior status, while subfields may harbour partial divergence from the analytical core, which however doesn’t feed back into the disciplinary core in any significant way. The social reproduction of this disciplinary core, he argues, is highly reminiscent of Kuhn’s notion of normal science:

Indeed, economics training manifests many characteristics of Kuhn’s (1977) account of training in “normal” paradigm-bound science: as “a dogmatic initiation in a pre-established tradition that the student is not equipped to evaluate”, it develops a capacity to solve analytical problems in the prescribed manner with standardized techniques and formalisms. As a result, economists share common analytical skills, a standardized symbol system for communicating the results of analytical research, a strong consciousness of the boundaries of economics and of

appropriate ways of formulating intellectual problems in the field, and an overwhelming commitment to theoretical goals and priorities since none of the skills they have acquired deal with empirical research or the problems of turning data into information. (Whitley 1986:193)

More recently, Marion Fourcade’s (2009) Economists and Societies, presents a detailed comparative study of how the international academic discipline of economics have taken different forms in the United States, Britain and France, in relation to the institutional structure of these three different societies. What

“economics” has come to mean varies between these national contexts, where economists and economic knowledge is entangled in institutions and culture in different constellations. A more recent study by Fourcade and co-authors (Fourcade et al. 2015) investigates the “Superiority of Economists” as both an objective and a subjective fact. It relates this superiority to, among other things, the pronounced internal control and hierarchy within the discipline, connected to a centralised and hierarchical conception of top journal rankings and interest in the elite of the profession. Using a range of data, from bibliometric data on cross-disciplinary citation data to membership structures of professional organisations, the authors show that “economics more than the other fields looks both inward and toward the top of its internal hierarchy” (Fourcade et al.

2015:96). This is the result of both greater intellectual consensus and homogenised training, and of a higher degree of internal control. It is also connected to a disciplinary understanding of hierarchy. Economists, they argue,

“tend to see institutionalized hierarchies as emergent, truthful indicators of some underlying worth, and consequently are obsessed with them. For instance, in no other social science can one find the extraordinary volume of data and research about rankings (of journals, departments, and individuals) that economists produce”, whereas others might react to the existence of hierarchies by pointing to alternative metrics and multiple criteria of worth (Fourcade et al. 2015:98).

In a similar manner, this inclination has been studied as an elitism dispositif by Jens Maesse (2017) in relation to transformation of economics institutions to modern US-style elite departments in the United Kingdom and the German-speaking world. The elitism dispositif is founded upon the interaction of symbolic order of rankings in economics, and the transformation of research organisation guided by these ideals, for example the recruitment of staff selected based on top journal publications, and the establishment of modern US-style doctoral programmes, teaching new generations how to reason like the professional elite, and where the current research front lies. Thus, the symbolic order of ranking systems is not only transformed into differential funding and allocation of resources and symbolic prestige, but also reproduces a specific research

orientation. However, Maesse argues that economics in the studied areas is not homogenous. Rather, there is an internationally and top journal-oriented economics, pursued by elite economists at elite departments, and another economics at other, lower-tier, departments, pursuing somewhat different goals.

There is a final strand of sociological literature that is worth mentioning. This is work that engages not with the production, but with the circulation, use and impact of economics knowledge. Steiner (2001) shows how economic knowledge and economic literacy is an important part of modern societies and economic behaviour. He creates a typology between different forms of economic knowledge, and argues that the formal economic theory of academic economics, or rational economic knowledge is but one of several types of economic knowledge, and that this domain of values that guide economic action has been and continues to be a domain where economic sociology has an important role to play. Focusing on economic expertise, Reay (2012) draws on an extensive interview study with economists working in different contexts, and presents a solution to the apparent paradox that economists are often claimed to simultaneously have a powerful and unified pro-market way of thinking, and on the other hand to be fragmented and come to varying conclusions in practical applications and weak influence. On the one hand, Reay argues that:

economics is unified by a cognitive/cultural frame that both academics and nonacademics try to transmit to lay people and get established as part of institutional routines. This frame is not based on promoting markets per se but on a more general “core” of intuitions and techniques concerning quantitative empiricism, macrolevel connections, and microlevel responses to incentives. (Reay 2012:47)

On the other hand, the actual application of this core framing is very flexible and context-dependent, and thus the apparent paradox is dissolved.

In a similar vein, Hirschman and Berman (2014) discuss the conditions under which economic knowledge influences economic policy. Through a thorough review of literatures in sociology, political science and STS, they argue that we should not ask how economic theory influences economic policy, but rather, under what specific conditions and what form such influence takes. Synthesising the findings from these literatures, they identify three modes through which economics may have policy influence. First, the historically variable authority of the economics discipline grants economists professional authority, which has tended to increase with the post-war formalisation of economics. This authority is a condition for a wide range of forms of influence and interventions in policy processes by economists. Second, economists influence policy through their