While searching for a suitable example for this preface one of the editors of this book had the opportunity of hearing a senior manager reporting on an executives' training course, and was particularly struck by one image. Participants in their forties and fifties were asked to engage in groups in a game. At one point they had to pass through a network of cords without touching them. After a while they were playing so excitedly that, in order to ease the passing, not only was everybody's clothing reduced practically to underwear but somebody's protrusive stomach was pressed by mates' hands during the most crucial phases. Interestingly, this unconventional session ignited a fruitful communication among participants that contributed positively to the course's educational outcome.

We are not advocating that our readers should be involved in similar learning procedures. What we claim is that invisible and hardly definable interpersonal elements – such as those that made training more effective after that bizarre game than before it – do matter in economic life, even though this is usually viewed as the province of the material, the measurable, the objective. And, secondly, that this has momentous consequences for how we depict, conceptualise and manage economic life.

According to conventional interpretations of the thematic and methodological boundaries of economics, interpersonal relations seem not to be the business of economists at all.