Evolving Financial Institutions in Veblen's Business Enterprise System

Abstract

Thorstein Veblen's theory of institutions has often been interpreted as explaining that institutions (social habits) are formed in previous time periods under the influence of earlier states of technology. Accordingly, in the modern era institutions are “static, backward looking, and resistant to change, alterations…occurring only under pressure from the dynamic of technological progress” (Rutherford 1984, p. 331). As a recent case in point, R. W. Ault and R. B. Ekelund (1988, p. 438; see also p. 435) stated that Veblen's “view of habits was an inert and exogenous view.” Malcolm Rutherford (1984) has noted that Veblen described several processes of internal development of institutions within a system governed by a given logic, e.g., the business enterprise system under the logic of pecuniary values.