The Dynamics of Encapsulation: Innovation, Annihilation, and Contradiction in Practice

Abstract

This article proposes an institutionalist analytical framework designed to understand the contradictory relationship between innovation and annihilation within modern capitalism. Following original institutional economics’ perspectives on technology, encapsulation, corporate hegemony, and the potential mismatch between institutions and social provisioning, we present an analytical framework devised to understand contemporary innovative and annihilative processes. In this sense, we selected two different phenomena to demonstrate our perspective. The first concerns the contradictory relationship between biotechnology, genetic engineering, and biodiversity. The second concerns the problematic relationship between heterodox and mainstream economics in the beginning of the twenty-first century.