Institutionalisms in Economics: What are Behinds Their Variety?

Abstract

The institutional approach in economic science arose, as is known, more than a century ago and is now called "the original institutional economics." In the middle of the last century, an alternative version of this approach emerged, called the "new institutional economics". Over the past forty years, in the institutional approach, it has been declared the creation of a significant number of new economic institutionalisms, such as cognitive, critical, monetary, “incomplete”, “new new”, generic, post-institutionalism, post-Keynesian, and legal institutionalisms. This article is devoted to the analysis of the main provisions of the listed above institutionalisms in economics, in order to answer the question whether they are alternatives to the previously created original and new institutional economics, or whether they clarify some details in these basic institutionalisms. The study showed that the most developed part of the institutionalisms that have arisen in recent decades expands the fields and methods of research within either the original institutionalism or the new institutional economics, without suggesting the grounds that would go beyond the foundations of the named "basic" institutionalisms. Based on this, the article concludes that the growth in the number of institutionalisms indicates the development of "basic" institutionalisms, and not that they have exhausted the research opportunities inherent in them.