This paper investigates whether since the 1980s neoclassical economics has been in the process of being supplanted as the dominant research programme in economics by a collection of competing research approaches which share relatively little in common with each other or with neoclassical economics. A shortlist of the new approaches in recent economics includes game theory, experimental economics, behavioral economics, evolutionary economics, neuroeconomics, and non-linear complexity theory. Two hypotheses are advanced – one regarding the relation between economics instruction and economics research and one regarding the nature of the economics research frontier – to describe social-institutional practices that contribute to the replication of economics as a field. Two further hypotheses are advanced – one regarding the boundaries of the field and one regarding how the field appraises itself – to create a historical–methodological framework for evaluating the question of change in economics and change in recent economics in particular. Finally, the paper distinguishes three leading explanations – the ‘breakdown’ view, the ‘takeover’ view, and the ‘maturity’ view – of why neoclassical economics no longer dominates a mainstream economics.

In this paper I advance a model in which institutional innovation is induced by changes in resource endowments, cultural endowments, and technical change. I also introduce the role of advances in social science knowledge as a source of institutional innovation. The sources of institutional innovation are illustrated by changes in land tenure and labor relations in Philippine agriculture, by the transition from command and control to market-based systems of resource management in the United States, and by the development of institutional design principles based on studies of small-scale resource management. In a final section, I elaborate a pattern model that maps the relationships among changes in resource endowments, cultural endowments, technology, and institutions.

Institutions, the rules that govern interactions between people, evolve over time. This special issue presents a number of detailed case studies of human–environment interactions during a significant historical period. With social-ecological systems we mean a set of people, their natural and human-made resources, and the relationships among them (Anderies et al., 2004, Janssen et al., 2005).

In The New Industrial State John Kenneth Galbraith famously argued large corporations would seek to manage the demand for their products. Although attracting a degree of attention and notoriety around the time of publication, Galbraith's thesis of the direct manipulation of the consumer has slipped somewhat from view in favor of a view of advertising as information provision. We reconsider Galbraith's theory of the Management of Specific Demand and illuminate its salience in the context of the US tobacco industry. We conclude that the US experience is congruent with many of the claims that Galbraith made regarding the manipulation of the consumer by large corporations and thus warrants rehabilitation of the Galbraithian view.

Societies frequently generate public infrastructure and institutional arrangements in order to mediate short-term environmental fluctuations. However, the social and ecological consequences of activities dealing with short-term disturbances may increase the vulnerability of the system to infrequent events or to long-term change in patterns of short-term variability. Exploring this possibility requires the study of long-term, transformational change. The archaeological record provides many examples of long-term change, such as the Hohokam who occupied the Phoenix Basin for over a thousand years and developed a complex irrigation society. In the eleventh and fourteenth centuries, the Hohokam society experienced reductions in complexity and scale possibly associated with regional climatic events. We apply a framework designed to explore robustness in coupled social-ecological systems to the Hohokam Cultural Sequence. Based on this analysis, a stylized formal model is developed to explore the possibility that the success of the Hohokam irrigation system and associated social structure may have increased their vulnerability to rare climactic shocks.

In this study the international trajectories of mature district evolution are investigated as a special case of institutional change, and a theoretical model for their evolution is proposed. This model is based on the idea that international growth and re-positioning represent the fundamental alternative to district sterilization and decline, in a framework where global markets provide the major pressure for change or decline but could also provide new opportunities for renewal. Alternative paths emerge from the combination of trigger events due to globalization and district leaders' behaviour: disembeddedness, re-embeddedness and multiple embeddedness are proposed here as the three main outcomes of mature district evolution. The latter constitutes a new construct introduced in this study in order to explore the possibility that districts relate themselves to global space creating similar systems abroad and/or establishing ties with existing systems, each one representing both a local network and a node of a global network.

The recent wave of subdivision of Maasai group ranches is not an isolated event, but rather part of a broader, historical process of transformation in land relations and policy development in Maasailand. Maasai have over time supported land privatization, first by formalizing collective rights in group ranches and more recently by individualizing collective land holdings. Privatization is perceived to be an effective strategy for safeguarding Maasai land claims against appropriation by non-Maasai, the government and elite Maasai. Construction of the Uganda railway in early twentieth century and the subsequent influx of European settlers who were granted individual title to secure their investments are events that began the institutional path of privatization. The persistence and dominance of individualized arrangements regardless of other more optimal property rights options is a result of the dominance of elite interests (supported by state institutions) even as state imposed institutions replaced Maasai customary systems of land allocation.

For more than a decade regionalism has been on the rise in the global economy. Based on the concept of allocative efficiency, standard trade theory regards regionalism as a form of protectionism. The paper confronts this view with an institutionalist explanation and draws on recent research on the role of specific investments into international market access, uncertainty and asymmetric information in policy coordination. A distinction between regionalism and regionalist policies is proposed. Endogenous regionalism reflects the economic forces of path-dependent comparative advantage and manifests the embeddedness of trade relations in social networks. Regionalism translates into regionalist policies via political entrepreneurship in policy networks that aims at stabilizing expectations about future market access and balancing negotiation power in a multilateral setting. Regionalism is thus presented as the standard case in global economic integration between the two extremes of unilateral liberalization and complete multilateralism.

Bounded rationality, opportunism, the primacy of markets and the action of economizing are building blocks of Oliver Williamson's Transaction Cost Economics (TCE). As in all intellectual exchanges, Williamson has used a range of argumentative devices to set up and negotiate his basic notions and assumptions with economists. Rhetorical analysis is applied here to study his argumentation in a certain institutional context within economics. Negotiations with the mainstream, with the competence view of the firm and within the New Institutional Economics, for instance, have had an impact on the construction of TCE and are given attention here. Difficult decisions have been made in order to forge ahead with TCE, including whether to uphold some notions (e.g. opportunism) at the cost of leaving others behind (e.g. economics of atmosphere). Rhetorical transactions like this have shaped TCE and its recognition in economics and related areas.

This paper provides an evolutionary perspective on financial systems based on complex systems theory. This perspective is used to organize the discussion about the convergence and non-convergence of financial systems. Based on a notion of financial systems as configuration of complementary elements, it is suggested that the convergence of financial systems is best conceptualized as a path-dependent process of institutional change and innovation. The implication of the evolutionary perspective on the dynamics of financial systems is that neither convergence theories using a simple evolutionary argument of survival of the fittest nor divergence theories related to strong complementarities can provide much guidance for analyzing institutional transformations of financial systems.

This paper aims at offering a reconstruction of the salient features of the most important formal institution introduced by European states in the Early Modern Period with the aim of recognizing and protecting the intellectual property of the inventors. Such institutions went under different names – ‘Privilegio’ in Venice, ‘Patent’ in England, ‘Privilège’ in France, ‘Cedula de privilegio de invençion’ in Spain – and, in general, took the form of the concession of a special prerogative to the inventor by the sovereign or the republic, by virtue of which he could exploit, in economic terms, his own invention through holding a monopoly. The article starts with the origins of the privileges for invention, of which the first examples are to be found in the Middle Ages, but whose official ‘genesis’ is commonly identified with the Venetian law of 1474. The fundamental characteristics of the Venetian system, which was later imitated by other European states, are analysed. In the following section, the adoption of this model by those other states – Spain, France, England, and the Netherlands – is illustrated. In fact, the majority of these would make legislation on intellectual property an instrument of mercantilist policy, under the same conditions as prevailed in Venice. Further, we will examine some of the opportunities that the diffusion of these measures offered to those involved and the way in which they – as craftsmen, merchants, and speculators – took advantage of the business of privileges. Finally, before concluding, some thoughts on the changes made in the policy of privileges given the transformations that took place in the course of the eighteenth century, in order to understand the ‘adaptive’ capacity of these institutions.

In this article, we look into the question whether the Dutch waterboards can still be considered resilient institutions, effectively adapting to changing circumstances as often described in literature. We argue that current waterboards resemble the CPR management form of old only in name. Their institutional nature has changed considerably, thus providing a challenge to the future of CPR water management in the Netherlands. We examine not only the implications for the institutional performance and future of the waterboard system but also discuss possible ways to regenerate the system. With respect to the latter (changes in), the system of governance and community base character of waterboards are examined.

This review article looks back at the first ten years of one of the most contentious elements of the global economy's new institutionalized governance regime. It examines the global political economy of protecting intellectual property, focusing on some key issues regarding the extension of such protection into the economies of developing countries, as discussed in three recent books. The review concludes that, for institutional economics, the problem of intellectual property is the problem of institutionalizing property rights writ large. As such, the problem of intellectual property in the global political economy can only be fully understood by establishing the historical and institutional context in which these rights are claimed.

This essay reviews three prominent sociological studies of firms and markets: Neil Fligstein's The Architecture of Markets, Glenn Carroll and Michael Hannan's The Demography of Corporations, and Harrison C. White's Markets from Networks. The review essay discusses how economic sociology focuses on processes ignored by economists. However, research findings and theoretical developments are rarely reconciled or integrated with economic research. The conclusion discusses possible links between the varying schools of economic sociology and heterodox economic traditions such as contemporary institutional economics.

The decline of agriculture in Taiwan has adversely affected the incentives of farmers and the government to engage in irrigation management. Despite that, Taiwan's irrigation systems have shown a high degree of robustness. This study seeks to understand how institutions have contributed to the robustness of Taiwanese irrigation. Conceptualizing an irrigation system as a social-ecological system (SES), this study examines the development and design of Taiwanese irrigation institutions, and how these institutions have enabled farmers and irrigation managers to cope with the dynamics in the SES, and hence contributed to the system's robustness.

The study has found that the robust systems are built upon institutions that allow effective coordination of the activities of a multitude of farmers, enhance the development and sustenance of a repertoire of ideas, and nest the problem-solving efforts of various scopes and scales in a complementary manner. The institutions enable individuals and organizations at different levels to engage in continuous learning and adaptation that, in turn, facilitates the systems' adaptation to the changing environment.

In the literature on firms and organizations, in economics, sociology, and business studies, there has been an increasing awareness that firms need others, outside the firm, in order to function, and particularly in order to innovate. This has led to the proliferation of studies on subjects such as outsourcing, inter-firm alliances, and networks of firms. Still, though, most of these studies focus on dyads of firms (i.e., strategic interaction of firms). Even in network studies, networks were seen mostly as aggregates of dyads. In contrast, in network analysis in sociology there has been, for some time, attention to roles and effects of third parties and of triads. In particular, the work of Ronald Burt (e.g. Burt, 1992) noted the importance, especially in the context of the acquisition of new information, of being a third party in ‘bridging structural holes’ between unconnected nodes or networks, and the opportunities for advantage as a tertius gaudens (laughing third) in playing agents off against each other. While in network analysis this attention to triads is relatively new, it has, in fact, a long history, going back, in particular, to the work of the sociologist Georg Simmel. A recent publication that acknowledges this is Krackhardt (1999).

Werner Sombart was a leading member of the German historical school in the later decades of its existence. This movement is conventionally divided into two: the ‘older historical school’ beginning with Wilhelm Roscher (1817–1894) and others in the 1840s, and the ‘younger historical school’ beginning with Gustav Schmoller (1838–1917) in the 1880s. The German historical school lasted until the devastations of the Nazi period and the Second World War.

This paper examines the dynamism and robustness of two irrigation systems of the Kok River system within the Mekong River basin in northern Thailand in the context of changing governance mechanisms and evolution of technological and market forces. It analyzes both temporal and spatial dynamism of the irrigation systems. The temporal dynamism was analyzed over three phases: before intervention, initial operation, and long-term. The before intervention phase analysis examined the effect of various attributes of users on starting an irrigation system, whereas the initial operation phase inquiry included the process of development of rules and level of autonomy in developing the users' own rules over time. The long-term phase analysis focused on external factors affecting the sustainment of these irrigation systems. Spatial dynamism was examined across upstream and downstream systems and within different locations of the system. The analysis was centered on linkages and relationships between five entities: resource, resource users, public infrastructure, public infrastructure providers, and external disturbances. Both systems were still robust, owing to the sustainment of local customs and the role of local leaders still vital, albeit in different forms. The group efforts, their self-governing capabilities, and local institutions, including the changed role of leaders in dealing with external forces, have played an important role in maintaining the robustness of these systems.