Conquering or mapping? Textbooks and the dissemination of human capital theory in applied economics

Abstract

ABSTRACT1 A preliminary version of parts of this text was presented at the Fifth Annual Conference on the History of Recent Economics (Duke University, April 2011) and the UK Meeting of History of Economic Thought (Oxford University, September 2011). I am very grateful for the comments and encouragement received on those occasions, especially from Avi Cohen, Roy Weintraub, Roger Backhouse, Steve Medema, and Yann Giraud. I am very grateful to the comments by the Journal's Editor and by two very careful and sympathetic reviewers. The usual caveat applies and all the remaining errors and omissions are my sole responsibility. Textbooks are an important subject for the study of science in general and economics in particular. In this paper, we analyse at the process of the acceptance of human capital theory through its inclusion in economics textbooks by looking at two specialized fields to which this theory became highly influential: labour economics and the economics of education. The analysis will compare the patterns of the dissemination of these new theoretical developments in a more consolidated field and in an emergent field of economics research with a particular focus in the early stages of that dissemination process.