Search results for "institutionalism"

BETWEEN PROGRESSIVISM AND INSTITUTIONALISM: ALBERT BENEDICT WOLFE ON EUGENICS

2013

Albeit concerned with the biological element in social evolution, Albert B. Wolfe was among the very few economists of the progressive era who openly expressed his concerns about certain implications of eugenic rhetoric for the social science. Specifically, Wolfe questioned the strong hereditary boundaries that more extreme eugenicists suggested about human beings. As I will attempt to show in paper, a careful examination of Wolfe’s writings reveals that his reaction was rooted in the belief that many of the social problems which eugenicists attributed to hereditary limitations, were actually imputable to the influence that the social, economic, and physical environment exercised on the ind…

Human Nature and Economic Institutions: Instinct Psychology, Behaviorism, and the Development of American Institutionalism

2004

Recent articles have explored from different perspectives the psychological foundations of American institutionalism from its beginning to the interwar years (Hodgson 1999; Lewin 1996; Rutherford 2000a, 2000b; Asso and Fiorito 2003). Other authors had previously dwelled upon the same topic in their writings on the originsand development of the social sciences in the United States (Curti 1980; Degler 1991; Ross 1991). All have a common starting point: the emergence during the second half of the nineteenth century of instinct-based theories of human agency. Although various thinkers had already acknowledged the role of impulses and proclivities, it was not until Darwin's introduction of biolo…

Dynamics of agency governance: Evidence from the Nuclear safety sector

2021

Public organizations are compound bodies characterized by competing endogenous dynamics of governance. This study makes two main contributions. First, it contributes to an organizational approach to studies of public policy and administration by conceptualizing compound agency governance. Second, by determining how variation in agency governance reflects endogenous organizational factors. Based on a study of the Norwegian Radiation and Nuclear Safety Authority (DSA), two observations are highlighted: Firstly, DSA staff are torn between two competing behavioural logics: A governmental and a transnational logic. Moreover, portfolios of core state powers are more closely monitored by parent m…

Nordic Cooperation in the Nuclear Safety Sector: High, Low, or Differentiated Integration?

2020

Nordic cooperation has been depicted as eroding due to the increased importance of EU-related cooperation and integration. However, scholars propose that longstanding Nordic networks, grounded in professions and located in the state administration, may prove to be more robust toward external changes. This article discusses this proposal by looking at Nordic cooperation between the national radiation protection and nuclear safety authorities in Iceland, Denmark, Norway, Sweden, and Finland. The article maps behavioural perceptions of agency staff based on a dataset of 37 interviews to illustrate if the cooperation between the Nordic authorities is characterized by high integration, low integ…

Review of Jacob Viner, Lectures in Economics 301, edited by Douglas A. Irwin and Steven G. Medema, Transaction Publishers, New Brunswick (USA) and Lo…

2014

John Maurice Clark's contribution to the genesis of the multiplier analysis: A note with some related unpublished correspondence

2008

The multiplier is a central concept in Keynesian and post-Keynesian economics. It is largely what justifies activist full-employment fiscal policy: an increase in fiscal expenditures contributing to multiple rounds of spending, thereby financing itself. Yet, while a copingstone of post-Keynesian theory,

FRANK KNIGHT, JOHN DEWEY, AND AMERICAN PRAGMATISM: A FURTHER NOTE

2011

The new configuration of the Valencian party system. An institutional approach

2018

International audience; The main objective of this article is to explain the evolution of the party system of the Valencian Community (Spain) between 1978 and 2015. We will start from a historical neo-institutionalist approach and a methodology focused on historical analysis (path dependence and critical junctures). It will be centered on the changes produced in political parties, in terms of the Valencian cartelization and identity and its present position. This way, three working sub-hypotheses are to be explained: H1a: parties have had a continuity dynamic that has changed due to abrupt changes in the environment; H1b: political forces have taken advantage of these events to obtain elect…

Zwischen Kultur und Kalkül? Vertrauen und Sozialkapital im Kontext der neoinstitutionalistischen Wende

2004

Trust and social capital work in social networks as informal institutions, favouring cooperation between the participants of such social interaction. However, the increasing use of both terms has been accompanied by vanishing conceptual and theoretical precision. In order to counterbalance this development this article tries to clarify some of the major puzzles connected with both terms. First, we embed trust and social capital within the institutionalist turn in political science. Second however, we demonstrate that trust and social capital have been modelled from at least two perspectives: sociological institutionalism and economic institutionalism. Furthermore, attempts of combining thos…

Human Nature and Economic Institutions Instinct Psychology, Behaviorism and the Development of American Institutionalism

2003

This paper explores the evolution of the psychological foundation of institutional economics between the early XXc and the 1940s. The first part deals with the rise and fall of instinct psychology. Inspired by Veblen's taxonomy of instinctive behavior, several American economists attempted to build a viable alternative to psychological hedonism of neoclassical economics then only at its infancy. In this debate we show how instinct theory came to be applied to the field now as industrial psychology. The second part discusses some of the reasons why this methodological approach began to lose momentum among leading American institutionalists. In this section we also present the emergence of be…