Economic Ontology Research Articles

On the Ontological Turn in Economics: The Promises of Agent-Based Computational Economics

This article argues that agent-based modeling (ABM) is the methodological implication of Lawson’s championed ontological turn in economics. We single out three major properties of agent-based computational economics (ACE), namely, autonomous agents, social interactions, and the micro-macro links, which have been well accepted by the ACE community. We then argue that ACE does make a full commitment to the ontology of economics as proposed by Lawson, based on his prompted critical realism. Nevertheless, the article also points out the current limitations or constraints of ACE. Efforts to overcome them are deemed to be crucial before ACE can make itself more promising to the current ontological turn in economics.

Inclusive development of Ukraine in the context of economic ontology

The purpose of the study is to determine the compliance of existing scientific ideas on the inclusive development of Ukraine with the fundamental principles of economic ontology and justification of the conditions and ways of the transition of Ukrainian society to the principles of inclusiveness. The attention of the domestic and foreign scientific community is focused on the study of various aspects of inclusive development. At present, the number of non-holistic publications has reached a critical mass, which has led to an urgent need for works of a generalizing nature. One of these areas related to the methodology of inclusive development is economic ontology – a scientific field whose task is to clarify the relevance of ideas about the inclusiveness of society to the real state of affairs in it. The scientific novelty of the study is to compare inclusive development with the following ontological dimensions: economic reality (basic structures, forces, mechanisms, and trends that determine its content and forms), economic activity (economic resources and institutions), the art of economics (economic policy). In this context, the inclusive development of Ukraine is positioned as a certain state and mode of functioning of society, characterized by organic unity and common interests of the entire human community in its movement towards ensuring expanded reproduction. The proposed approach to the methodology of economic ontology is based on identifying the conformity of ideas about the nature and content of inclusive development of the country reflected in scientific discourse and the basic principles of economic ontology. According to the results of the study, certain problems with the quality of economic resources, institutions, and policies were detected, which complicate the process of transition of Ukrainian society to the principles of inclusiveness. The conditions and ways of creating an inclusive environment within the rural-urban space (united territorial communities, new administrative districts) are substantiated.

Individual and social fides: the contribution of Reformation to the ontology of economics

This essay wishes to address what is believed to be a central historical crossroad that allowed the development of economics, and other social sciences, in the modern era. Such development would not have been possible without the transformation of the fundamental ontology through which European and Christian societies understood the world around them and their own social structures. I identify the turning point of such transformation, as other scholars, philosophers and social scientists have done, with the Reformation, which was the center and cause of major cultural, political and scientific development. Philosophers and social scientists have developed such interpretation of the Reformation as the historical event in which the cultural and political landscape of western civilization has been utterly transformed. My interest in the Reformation as a religious, political and cultural upheaval lies in the fact that I identify Luther’s reforms not only as a shift in the landscape of political/religious authorities of the time, but also as a crucial moment in which the ontological landscape of western civilization has been radically changed. I am of the belief that the fundamental, ontological, assumptions of economics are based on the ontological revolution represented by Luther’s theology, and Reformation more generally, in a fundamental way. Such that economics would be unthinkable without the Reformation.

Economic Ontology and the Science of Nonpachydermology

Economic Ontology and the Science of Nonpachydermology

Energy, growth, and evolution: Towards a naturalistic ontology of economics

In recent years new approaches to the integration of economics and thermodynamics have been developed which build on the physics of open non-equilibrium systems, the so-called ‘Maximum Entropy Production Principle’. I review these contributions in the light of the implications for economic ontology, i.e. the question what the fundamental constituents of real world economic phenomena are. I argue in favor of the ‘naturalization’ of economic ontology, using the phenomenon of economic growth as my workhorse, and I explore the implications for the cross-disciplinary foundations of ecological economics. The paper shows how economic growth can be conceived as a ‘natural’ process that is driven by fundamental physical forces. The argument proceeds in three steps. After a short review of recent research on the linkage between energy and growth, I establish the connection with bioeconomic theories about evolution that allow restating the role of Lotka's Maximum Power Principle (MPP) as a property of open non-equilibrium flow systems with sufficient degrees of freedom of structural adaptation. The MPP is then related to the recent literature on Maximum Entropy Production (MEP), especially as deployed in the Earth Sciences. Economic growth can be seen as resulting from evolutionary adaptations of flow gradients in economic systems that increase throughputs of exergy and generation of work, and which thereby enhance the capacity of the Earth System to maximize entropy production. This framework offers fresh perspectives on a number of issues in research and policy, which I discuss in the conclusion.

A fast and economic ontology engineering approach towards improving capability matching: Application to an online engineering collaborative platform

Fulfilling needs through internal and external resources is a key business requirement. To better enable this, description of both needs and resources, using a common domain language is required. Using techniques from social network analysis (SNA) this paper describes a SENSUS-based methodology which generates domain ontology that can provide the breadth and depth of coverage required for automated need and resource matching systems. The mechanism described also enriches the semantic relationships in the generated ontology to form a network structure. This enables concept investigation to be undertaken from multiple perspectives, with fuzzy matching and enhanced reasoning through directional weight-specified relationships. The methodology was used to derive an ontology for engineering and tested against a traditionally derived and structured ontology. The methodology has the flexibility and utility to be of benefit in a wide range need and resource matching business applications.

Provocation: Rethinking Rhetorical Ontology: An Intersection Between the Work of James Arnt Aune and Bruno Latour in the Field of Rhetoric

The Technocracy brethren were certainly very badly advised when they put no flavoring matter into their dose. H.L. Mencken (1933, p. 505) ... the current 'poverty of strategy' on the Left has something to do with the rejection of a tradition [rhetoric] that emphasized the study and practice of strategic J.A. Aune (1994, p. 5) When coming to terms with the legacy of James Amt Aune, I am struck by the extent to which Aune's thinking was almost constantly operating on multiple levels--the argumentative, the material, the practical. Aune engages economics in discussion of substantive questions in a way that rhetorical scholars rarely engage with texts. Aune's work breaks from the rhetorical mold in that it often engages directly with the material--one of the elements that marked Aune as a self-described old fashioned (Aune, 2001, xiii-xiv) or Marxist materialist. My contention in this paper will be that Aune's work reflects assumptions consistent with studies and ANT's ontology, and that a similar turn in rhetoric will help us make sense of Aune's writings about economics, as well as to better cope with topics including but not limited to economic and practice, climate science, gender, and anything else where empirical data and non-human objects are part of the conversation. Before I critically address Aune's work, I want to clarify what I mean by an project here. In political and sociology, recent scholarship has undergone what has been called an ontological turn, which is understood in reaction to a perceived division between political and factors and factors related to non-human objects, which can be understood broadly to refer to anything existing in the physical world (including, potentially, the human body, or at least the parts of it which are not thinking). This turn is often grounded in the actor-network theory (ANT) of Bruno Latour, a scholar whose work is largely classified as part of science studies, a branch of sociology interested primarily in observing the scientific method. However, scholars in the social sciences who focus on questions explicitly outside the scientific method--such as conventional political science, anthropology, and even rhetoric--have appropriated ANT's ontology to look at more conventional artifacts in a context that includes non-humans and scientific evidence. In this essay I examine Aune's economic scholarship as an instance of two important divergences from the rhetorical norm: its focus upon non-human objects that are hard (unlike, for instance, speeches and other written/spoken texts) to describe as humanistic artifacts; and its use of an ontology which assumes extant, permanent physical reality that remains regardless of its mediation by discourse. I suggest that Aune's methods make similar assumptions and reach similar conclusions to that of science students such as Latour, and that when working with Aune's work and with work on similar topics, rhetorical scholars will be well served by acknowledging and working with ANT and with object-oriented ontologies. AUNE'S MATERIALIST ECONOMICS: MORE THAN MARXIST MATERIALISM? A trend in Aune's scholarship was the connection of seemingly disparate topics and ideas, having the function of creating histories of ideas at the same time that he was critiquing specific articles of discourse. In Selling the Free Market: the Rhetoric of Economic Correctness, Aune does not merely analyse the discursive strategies used by the American right wing to sell unbridled capitalism to the American people--the stated goal of the book--but rather takes readers on a tour de force that gives insight into the economic ontology of libertarians (which he does not believe to be as objective as its proponents would claim). Perhaps most dramatically, Aune makes the case that libertarian theories about big government and its effect on politics and discourse parallel similar claims about false consciousness in Marxism, despite libertarianism's frequent claim to reflect a common sense understanding of the world in contrast to the Left's hermeneutics of suspicion, a trend which Aune critiqued in his previous book Rhetoric & Marxism (1994). …

Valuing Smallholder Food Production - A Call for New Theories

The idea that industrial agriculture is successful in providing food security during this time of climate change and increasing world hunger is grounded in the ontology and episteme of neoliberal economics. Therefore, the goal of this article is to extend the debates about the transformation of economic theories—from assumptions to concepts to measures—in order to recognize smallholder, food-producing techniques, ones that acknowledge the bio-physical limits of planet earth and demonstrate “evidence-based” resilience. The first proposed alternative set of theories, ecological economics, challenges neoliberal economics by redefining the planet as a closed system in which externalities cannot exist and by recognizing natural capital as an important factor of production. A second alternative, traditional ecological knowledge (TEK), values smallholder food production by emphasizing its defining roots in community and also by offering alternative concepts and measures. The article concludes by discussing ways in which these transformative theories can change the international discourse and policies to re-evaluate and value smallholder food production.

An inquiry into human nature and the cost of the wealth of nations

Current economic ontology development has failed to confront two important errors associated with historicism. Embracing the linearity of economic value being directly attributed to the labor applied to natural resources taken together with efficiency arguments used to justify monetary policy on both the microlevel (transaction) and macrolevel (global trade), we know these legacies of the scientific method applied to economic systems have left the G-20 paralyzed to deal with structural failings evidenced from banking to business to economic policy. An exploration of the structural modalities that impair our current capacity for adaptation and alternative methods for accounting for value is the basis for this inquiry. Integral accounting is proposed as a more suitable method to transition from scarcity-based market models to abundance-based modes of sustainable engagement.

Economy as a Social System: Niklas Luhmann's Contribution and its Significance for Economics

AbstractNiklas Luhmann's (1927–1998) ambitious research project was aimed not only at describing society as a global social system, but it also analyzed various subsystems (including an economic one). The article assesses Luhmann's vision of the economy, summarized mainly in his Wirtschaft der Gesellschaft, wherein he addresses basic economic notions: the economic system, money, prices, rationality, and the market. I then interpret his ideas in the context of modern discussions in economics (intersubjective structures, complex systems, and evolutionary modeling). I also propose some heuristics implied by Luhmann's economic ontology, which are potentially interesting for methodological and theoretical strategies of modern economics.

Desperately seeking social approval: Adam Smith, Thorstein Veblen and the moral limits of capitalist culture

Adam Smith and Thorstein Veblen shared much in matters of economic ontology. Both dismissed the very notion of an autonomous economic self and instead investigated the processes through which self and other are mutually constituted under changing cultural traditions of individual aspiration. Their strikingly similar critiques of status-oriented consumption and concern for the moral basis of the market economy are established in this manner. However, the political implications of their analyses point in different directions, with Veblen being the more radical. The Smithian individual can always use spectatorial insights to assert through genuinely praiseworthy behaviour personal moral distance from social norms of status-oriented consumption. The Veblenian individual, by contrast, has no such capacity for elevating abstract moral principles above socially-situated conduct, as mind and environment co-evolve in line with changing material circumstances of life. For Veblen, the rise of status-oriented consumption itself acted as a form of moral self-education that more deeply entrenched the social norms of ownership out of which it arose, thus the impossibility of an autonomous economic self was matched by the impossibility of an autonomous moral self. To his way of thinking, moral degradation in conspicuous consumption was irredeemably inscribed into the whole cultural structure of capitalism.

Addressing Global Systems Failure Through An Integral Systems Paradigm for Sustainable Development

Current economic ontology development has failed to confront two important errors associated with historicism. Embracing the linearity of economic value being directly attributed to the labour applied to natural resources taken together with efficiency arguments used to justify monetary policy on both the micro (transaction) and macro (global trade), we know these legacies of the scientific method applied to economic systems have left the G-20 paralyzed to deal with structural failings evidenced from banking to business to economic policy. An exploration of the structural modalities that impair our current capacity for adaptation and alternative methods for accounting for value is the basis for this inquiry. Integral Accounting is proposed as a more suitable method to transition from scarcity-based market models to abundance-based modes of sustainable engagement.

‘We’re shit and we know we are’: identity, place and ontological security in lower league football in England

Supporting a football team in the lower leagues of the English league system is rarely a glamorous endeavour that is full of success and glory. So why do fans keep turning up game after game, season after season, in spite of the frequent false dawns, regular disappointment, and apparent lack of success of their adopted team? This essay aims to offer a sociological analysis of this question by firstly examining the historical, social, economic and place-related ontology of English football clubs and the English football league. Secondly, the paper explores how recent developments in the organization and management of football, and wider society more generally, have threatened the very identities that football clubs are built upon and have traditionally relied on. Finally, the paper explores how these developments can actually be seen to both sustain and inhibit lower league football support.

Nature as adversary: the rise of modern economic conceptions of nature

This article problematizes the reliance of ecological economics on neo-classical economic analysis by revealing an adversarial conception of nature in modern economic ontology. It traces the rise in post-classical economics of this adversarial conception, which superseded the idea of a natural moral economy in classical political economy. The origins of this transformation in the conception of nature are located in the breakdown of the long-standing project of natural theology in Britain during the first half of the nineteenth century, precipitated by the geological controversies of the 1820s and 1830s.

Wie viel Geschichte braucht die Ökonomie? Das Verhältnis von Theorie und Geschichte in evolutionstheoretischer Interpretation

Abstract Economic History and History of Economic Thought haven been relegated increasingly from the teaching and research curricula of economics in recent years. The paper starts off arguing that this trend is due to the mechanistic ontology of mainstream economics, and it continues setting out an alternative evolutionary ontology expounding how the historical element must and can be integrated into the body of economic theory. Centre stage is a lingua franca composed of analytical terms that are designed to bridge the domains of theoretical and of historical economic analysis. Economists are viewed in their status as observers whose cognitive dispositions as well as social behaviour co-evolve with the environment they inhabit. Further advances in economic theory are seen as being critically dependent on employing an evolutionary approach and on establishing a communication link to economic history and the history of economic thought which likewise may get essential inspirations from applying that approach.

Scale, Security, and Political Economy: Debating the Biopolitics of the Global War on Terror1

Critical scholarship in Political Science and International Relations (IR) theory is turning increasingly to Michel Foucault's writings on governmentality and biopolitics to explore the complex discursive interdependencies between transnational governance and the War on Terror. Marxist critics have assailed this effort recently, however, for its premature assumption that the practices of governmental power can simply be “scaled” without the interventions of specific state-imperial powers. Yet both sides in this “debate about biopolitics” seem to rest their arguments on readings of Foucault which ignore his views on the importance of developments in the discourses of political economy for the emergence of modern governmental relations. Inspired by Foucault's recently published lectures on importance of the concept of “economic man” for neoliberal governmentality in particular, this article suggests that Foucault attributed to governmentality an explicit impulse toward economic globalization. Moreover, based on comments made in the same lectures concerning the emergence of contemporary “anarcho-liberalism” and its radically economic ontology of security, the article closes with an exploration of the crucial role played by economic knowledge in the integration of Iraq into a regime of global-governmental security.

Wie viel Geschichte braucht die Ökonomie? Das Verhältnis von Theorie und Geschichte in evolutionstheoretischer InterpretationHow Much History Does Economics Need? Theory and History in an Evolutionary Perspective

Economic History and History of Economic Thought haven been relegated increasingly from the teaching and research curricula of economics in recent years. The paper starts off arguing that this trend is due to the mechanistic ontology of mainstream economics, and it continues setting out an alternative evolutionary ontology expounding how the historical element must and can be integrated into the body of economic theory. Centre stage is a lingua franca composed of analytical terms that are designed to bridge the domains of theoretical and of historical economic analysis. Economists are viewed in their status as observers whose cognitive dispositions as well as social behaviour co-evolve with the environment they inhabit. Further advances in economic theory are seen as being critically dependent on employing an evolutionary approach and on establishing a communication link to economic history and the history of economic thought which likewise may get essential inspirations from applying that approach.

Ontology of Orthodox Economics: Problems of Construction and Interpretation

The article justifies the definition of economic ontology (ontology of economics) as a study of the most general features, categories and structure which belong to reality described in economic models. The author distinguishes ontology of science from ontology of economic life (the latter often functions as a substitute for science) and points out that ontology plays a significant role in resolving theoretical debates and in making clear philosophical presuppositions of economic theory. In the case of orthodox theory mathematics and mathematical structures are suggested as formal ontology.

Editorial: progress in Green Economics: ontology, concepts and philosophy. Civilisation and the lost factor of reality in social and environmental justice

The inaugural publication of the International Journal of Green Economics constructed formal foundations for the establishment of a new school of thought and an attempt to explore and capture current developments and thinking in Green Economics. The current issue introduces the next step in the development of green economics with a philosophical exploration of our focus, along with investigating potential building blocks from other disciplines. The current issue of The International Journal of Green Economics solicits experts in their respective fields and invites them to share inter-disciplinary contributions to the nascent philosophy, ontology and methodology of Green Economics. This editorial will also ponder some of the emerging and exciting questions in the field; introduce the contributors to this issue; and concludes by introducing the themes of future issues.

Where Economics and Philosophy Meet: Review of the Elgar Companion to Economics and Philosophy with Responses from the Authors

Although Adam Smith’s 1776 Wealth of Nations is often cited as marking the birth of economics, it was really not until after the second world war that economics became the distinctive, more or less unified, and largely separate discipline summarised in the textbooks of today. Even a mere fifty years ago, it was possible for the intelligent reader to move with relative ease between economics on the one hand and political economy, sociology and social theory, psychology and philosophy on the other. This is now no longer the case, and most young economists are taught to think of their discipline, not primarily in terms of the particular economic social phenomena it was once taken to be about, but as a sophisticated and largely self-contained analytical approach to the investigation of social phenomena of any kind. Even so, economics has never been able to separate itself entirely from its sister disciplines, even at the high tide of mathematical economics and positivism during the 1970s and 1980s, and many of the most active new areas in economics currently involve some form of boundary crossing (e.g. experimental economics, neuroeconomics and computational economics to name just three). With respect to the philosophy of economics in particular, the last fifty years or so have seen a steady expansion in scholarly investigation into different connections between economics and philosophy, with the emergence of new journals, professional associations, research networks and the like. There has been a great deal of work on epistemological questions in the wake of the decline of positivism, on boundary issues and the question of whether or not economics constitutes a science, and on the rhetoric of economics, ethics, value and, latterly, the ontology of economics (Hands, 2001). It is against this background that, in 2004, three of us published the Elgar Companion to Economics and Philosophy (Davis, Marciano and Runde, 2004, henceforth the Companion), an edited collection aimed at documenting the current state of play in three important areas of the philosophy of economics: