Finding and addressing problems

Loasby’s most cited work is his 1976 book Choice, Complexity and Ignorance. It draws heavily on works that he published in the preceding decade. He argues therein that decision-making should be viewed as a multi-stage problem-solving process whose first stage, the finding of a problem, is followed by attempts to formulate the nature of the problem and assemble an agenda of potential ways of dealing with it. These stages are prerequisites for choosing, but further problems may be encountered when attempting to implement the option that is selected. Whether or not problems are found and given attention will depend on the reference standards that the decision-maker uses, and habitual modes of thinking will, like scientific paradigms (Kuhn, Reference Kuhn1962), affect how problems are viewed and which strategies are taken seriously as potential solutions. This view of decision-making is instructive for understanding the 15-year gap between Loasby’s graduation with his Cambridge First and his appointment to his first tenurable lectureship in economics.

Loasby’s problem at the time of getting his Cambridge First was whether he should then attempt to obtain a PhD and, if so, what his topic should be. Until around 1980, it was possible to obtain a lectureship in economics without having commenced a doctorate or being close to completing one. So, unlike today, career scripts for academic economists in the UK could begin in diverse ways. However, those with doctorates that had been completed in a timely manner and who achieved early publications related to their dissertations could expect to advance to their first full professorship in their late twenties or very early thirties. A very early example of this is the career of G.C. Allen, who was born in 1900 and whose dissertation (published as Allen [Reference Allen1929] Reference Allen2018) opened the door to a chair in economics at University College Hull in 1929 and the Brunner chair at the University of Liverpool in 1931. Such examples were not common by the time that Loasby graduated, but if he had been served by an effective mentor, Allen’s career would have been drawn to his attention – not least of all because Allen’s post-PhD book The Industrial Development of Birmingham and the Black Country, 1860–1927 provided an exemplar of a doctorate on a topic that was spatially and temporally close to the topic that Loasby chose to study. Indeed, an effective mentor might have advised Loasby to approach Allen (who moved to a chair at University College London in 1947) about the possibility of doing a PhD under Allen’s supervision.

However, Loasby did not view choosing the topic for his postgraduate research as a problem that it was crucial to address as if it was going to determine whether he would then be able to move directly to a lectureship in economics, let alone offer a fast-track route to a chair. Rather, as he put it, ‘I had no research career in mind. [Working towards a doctorate provided] a chance of staying in Cambridge for three more years, which was fun, if I didn’t have to pay for it’ (Loasby, Reference Loasby2017: 6). His decision was, in effect, a short-term lifestyle choice that enabled him to defer his choice of career.

This was not conducive to a wide-ranging search for highly original thesis topics and extensive pre-choice evaluation and problem-solving to confirm the feasibility of projects that he considered. Rather, all he needed to find was a project that both looked like it would be interesting enough for him to enjoy studying and had the potential to result in a sufficiently substantial contribution to knowledge to satisfy his examiners. With such modest reference standards, what he chose was near at hand and far from bold, namely, the economic development of Kettering – his hometown in the East Midlands county of Northamptonshire – between 1850 and 1914. It was already on his mind as an interesting topic, but it was not something that would enable him to develop his skills as an economist because he envisaged it essentially as a historical study. Even if he had earned a PhD, the topic would have constrained his career options because lectureship vacancies in economic history were much rarer than those in economics.

At the time of this decision, he was also interested in a problem that was close to the economic issues on which he later came to focus, but the way that he construed what constituted economic issues prevented him from seeing this other problem as something he could investigate for a doctorate. As an undergraduate, he had noticed the clash between his existing knowledge of business in Kettering and how he was being encouraged to think via Joan Robinson’s lectures on her theory of imperfect competition (Robinson, Reference Robinson1933). In the second half of the 19th century, as a result of the commercialization of sewing machines, Kettering had grown rapidly into one of Britain’s leading producers of footwear. Growth in that sector levelled off in the early 20th century, but the industry did not stand still. Instead, it displayed a churning process: some firms failed, while new firms entered, for the technology was simple enough for firms to be started by former employees who had picked up skills as ‘clickers’ (i.e. in cutting parts for shoes without wasting leather) or in the marketing of footwear (Loasby, Reference Loasby2017: 2–4). It bore little resemblance to Joan Robinson’s static equilibrium analysis, whose equilibria depended on her having assumed away the problems that entrepreneurs face when deciding what to do as competitive conditions change (Loasby, Reference Loasby1989, ix–x).

Given this, we may wonder why Loasby did not counter Robinson’s analytical fudge by conducting an interview-based study of how entrepreneurs dealt with the knowledge problems that Robinson had assumed away. This was a question that he might have addressed via interview-based research in his hometown, rather than simply opting to undertake his historical study. Yet he shows absolutely no sign of having considered this possibility, let alone of having considered it and decided against it for fear that it would have been rather too close to what P. W. S. Andrews had done along the way to writing Manufacturing Business (Andrews, Reference Andrews1949).

This is easy to understand via one of Loasby’s later key sources, Hayek’s (Reference Hayek1952) memory-based theory of cognition (which, like the work of Andrews, we will refer to further in the section ‘Belated connections’). If Loasby had never seen any contributions that had arrived at alternative theories by inferring patterns from actual behaviour, the idea of taking on Robinson’s theory via behavioural analysis would not come to mind when he considered his research options. Furthermore, the idea of studying, within economics, how agents deal with problems of knowledge before arriving at the choice stage of a decision process also would not come to mind if he had never seen economists viewing decision-making as a multi-stage process, rather than viewing choice in terms of selecting the best strategy from among a pre-specified set of options whose capacities to serve particular ends had already been specified. In such a situation, to envisage a study of how, in practice, these knowledge problems were addressed required creative connection-making, which was not necessary if Loasby could readily see a potentially satisfactory project in the form of the Kettering study. By extension, we can see why he has also not said that he considered doing a quantitative applied economics project: although Cambridge’s Department of Applied Economics (DAE) had been established in 1945, it was still too early to see role models for such a PhD. Things would have been different if he had been choosing his project in the mid-1960s, for by then, the DAE had begun publishing monographs based on dissertations by research students who commenced their projects around the time Loasby finished his thesis (including the thesis of Andrew Bain, Reference Bain1964, who became the first professor and head of the Department of Economics at the University of Stirling).

Loasby (Reference Loasby1989, p. xi) reports that his study of Kettering’s development gave him ‘an enhanced sense of historical process, especially of timing and of sequence, not least of unintended consequences’. Unfortunately, because he framed his choice of research problem in terms of history versus theory, the thesis that he produced did not offer a theoretical framework as a means of making sense of the historical picture that he assembled from his meticulous research. (By contrast, Allen’s [1929] project contributed both historically and to the analysis of industrial organization.) As Loasby has explained (reported in Dow and Earl, Reference Dow and Earl1999, p. xiv), the absence of such a framework was the reason why he was only awarded an MLitt for his thesis, without any chance to revise and resubmit.

Today, in a state-of-the-art PhD system, a basic shortcoming of this kind would have a very good chance of being identified by one of the many who would see the research students’ work before it was submitted for examination, namely, members of the advisory team who would meet at least once a month with the student, plus those who attended the student’s presentations or served as assessors during annual progress review ‘milestones’ (see further Earl, Reference Earl2024, chapter 4). But Loasby was let down by the 1950s Cambridge system failing to present him with relevant problems that his way of looking at things prevented him from seeing. In those days (and even into the 1980s), Cambridge’s research students in economics each worked with a single supervisor, not an advisory team (Loasby was supervised in succession by Kenneth Berrill, Austin Robinson, and A. J. Youngson), with whom meetings were usually very infrequent. Not surprisingly, a common consequence of research students being left to fend for themselves was belated completion of doctoral dissertations, undertaken on a remote, part-time basis. In Loasby’s case, the position that he obtained at the end of his three years in residence in Cambridge as a research student was about as far away in the UK as it could have been, namely, ‘Assistant in Political Economy’ at the University of Aberdeen. This was a sub-lecturer-level position, in effect as an assistant to the department’s professor, and according to Loasby (Reference Loasby1989, p. xi), two of the three years in that position required him to teach economic history.

The ‘assistant’ position offered no path to a tenurable economic history lectureship at Aberdeen unless a position became vacant, but such positions rarely came up anywhere in the UK, let alone seeming to be on the horizon at Aberdeen. His historically focused MLitt left him ill-positioned for an economics lectureship, but his experience in interviewing managers at least enabled him to get a three-year position as Bourneville Research Fellow at the University of Birmingham. This was a better job than his Aberdeen position, and it related to economic policy. Thus, from 1958 to 1961, he studied how managers of firms in the Birmingham area had responded to Britain’s regional development policies that made it very difficult for businesses in the South-East and Midlands areas of the UK to have substantial new premises constructed to enable them to grow locally. In essence, they could only get the necessary Industrial Development Certificates if they were proposing to build their new premises in one of the UK’s ‘development areas’ (the euphemism for economically depressed peripheral areas) or one of the post-war ‘new towns’.

The project for which Loasby was hired entailed a survey of 200 firms that had relocated from the Birmingham area. For Loasby (Reference Loasby2017: 7–8), the key finding was that managers of the surviving firms often reported making efficiency improvements that, with hindsight, they realized they could have found long before they ran out of space if they had been under pressure to look for ways of cutting their costs. In effect, what Loasby had stumbled upon was evidence consistent with Herbert Simon’s (Reference Simon1957, Reference Simon1959) ‘satisficing’ view of decision-making, in which search is triggered by a failure to meet aspiration levels for variables such as rate of return, sales, growth of output, etc., which are set as heuristic devices for running organizations in a world in which ignorance and uncertainty make it difficult to specify optimal strategies. In Simon’s analysis, the search to find better, previously unnoticed ways of doing things is initially conducted locally, with the net being cast more widely if solutions cannot be found locally within the time allocated for finding them.

By this point, Loasby had not yet encountered Simon’s work, but by the end of his time in Birmingham, he had realized that he needed to view decision-making as a process (Loasby, Reference Loasby1989, p. xii). As he said (Loasby, Reference Loasby2017: 8),

However, he was well into his next position before he started to write anything in this vein. This occurred in his second and third articles (Loasby, Reference Loasby1966, Reference Loasby1967a). The latter, written in November 1966, was the first in which he mentioned findings from the Birmingham survey. His very first article (Loasby, Reference Loasby1965) was merely a review of how the UK’s location policies had evolved over the preceding three decades, and it ends with concern that the latest turn of policy was in danger of making the same mistake as an earlier iteration by giving insufficient attention to within-area diversity of ‘special’ and prosperous areas.

The job that Loasby took up in 1961 at the end of his three years in Birmingham was at the University of Bristol. Although he was a member of Bristol’s Department of Economics, his initial role was another lowly one, as a tutor in management on a sandwich-style course for practising managers that the department had set up to experiment with teaching in this area. Loasby’s experience in interviewing managers made him a good fit for the role, which included liaising with those enrolled in the course while they were in its middle phase, where they worked on projects back in their firms. Among his colleagues was David K. Clarke, who helped Loasby develop his process-based view of decision-making by providing the ‘decision cycle’ concept as an organizing theme. Clarke also introduced him to organization theory and the work of Herbert Simon and Chester Barnard, with Loasby then becoming an early adopter of Cyert and March’s (Reference Cyert and March1963) behavioural theory of the firm (Loasby, Reference Loasby1989, pp. xii–xiii).

At that time, lecturers with any formal training in management education were a rare breed in the UK, so a scheme was set up to send UK academics to receive such an education in the USA. Loasby applied for a place in this scheme. But instead of being offered what he had applied for, he was offered something that proved to be life-changing: a fellowship funded by Arthur D. Little, Inc., a consulting firm, for the 1965–1966 academic year. It enabled him to take courses at both Harvard Business School and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology’s Sloan School of Management as well as to spend time embedded at A. D. Little (which provided the basis for a paper on how Little operated: see Loasby, Reference Loasby1967d). (He even travelled to Carnegie-Mellon University in Pittsburgh to meet Simon, Cyert, and March, though this did not lead to any long-term research connections with them.) The result was that, within a year of his first article’s publication, Loasby had the ingredients in place that provided the foundation for his distinctive way of being an academic economist. Loasby (Reference Loasby2017: 12) called his A. D. Little Fellowship. experience ‘the most important year of my life because I learnt to see the significance of the differences between systems and the way they operate and what they can produce’.

Loasby swiftly fed this lesson into his second article, published in December 1966, in which he examined the role and organization of management education. In addition to referring explicitly to Simon’s view of choices as being attempts to remedy situations that are perceived to be unsatisfactory (Loasby, Reference Loasby1966: 53), the case that he made for including the analysis of decision-making as a unifying theme in management education centred on a four-stage process – problem recognition, problem formulation, choice, implementation – in which choices are affected by the width of the ‘agenda’ that managers opt to consider (ibid.: 50–5). Furthermore, as in Loasby (Reference Loasby1989: xiii; Reference Loasby2017: 11), he draws attention to contrasts between the ways in which the business schools at Harvard and MIT organized their programmes for enhancing the knowledge of managers, with the former insisting that its students took the same set of core courses and using case-based teaching with a focus on arriving at decisions, whereas the latter offered much more choice in courses with a focus on developing techniques to apply to the available information. In that paper, we thus see the seeds of Loasby’s (Reference Loasby1976) Choice, Complexity and Ignorance and his persistent emphasis on the impact of systems of organization on the knowledge that individuals and teams can apply to problems.

Thus, by the end of 1966, Loasby arrived at a framework that he felt he could use for analysing the behaviour of firms. The choices that managers made were not among pre-specified sets of alternatives. Rather, lists of options were actively assembled as means for dealing with problems whose discovery depended on the criteria that managers used to determine whether they had problems to which it was worth allocating some of their finite attention. Studying these issues with reference to decision cycle and reference standard concepts and the mental and administrative organizing frameworks that managers used was not something that he had seen in the 1950s as part of economics, but he now felt that it needed to be part of economics because it was clear that firms in a given market typically did not operate in the same way as market conditions changed. Two of the five papers by Loasby that were published in 1967 pursued this view in economics journals (Loasby, Reference Loasby1967b, Reference Loasby1967c) as opposed to bank reviews or management journals.

Career-enhancing connections

As his career progressed, Loasby came to view the growth of knowledge as a process of making new connections, with a rule-based organizing frameworks in the minds of decision-makers, in administrative systems, or in markets, affecting which connections are made or precluded. Unfortunately, as Loasby (Reference Loasby and Wiseman1983) recognized, organizations or individuals who might be better at growing their knowledge if they adopted new organizing frameworks can only assess such frameworks from the standpoint of their existing ones. This points to a path-dependent view of the growth of knowledge in which the sequence in which people encounter opportunities for making connections plays a crucial role in shaping the connections they make. So, for example, if Cambridge’s PhD system had operated under different rules and norms, or if Aberdeen’s ‘assistant’ position were part of a different career track, or if Loasby had somehow been offered the Arthur D. Little Fellowship immediately after graduating, etc., what he knew and was capable of doing could have been very different by the time that the new University of Stirling created the lectureship in economics to which he was appointed.

The chain of events by which Loasby ended up working at Stirling in 1967 provides a lesson about how path-dependent processes of making social connections can play decisive roles in shaping career opportunities that can come one’s way and contributions to the literature that one will find it worthwhile to study. Loasby’s success in winning a place in Cambridge depended not merely on his academic ability but on being a pupil of a state school (Kettering Grammar School) whose staff knew which Cambridge colleges were interested in attracting academic high-achievers from state schools rather than focusing on students from top fee-paying schools (Loasby, Reference Loasby1989: viii; 2017: 5). Indeed, if his school developed a track-record of supplying able students to the former types of college, the credibility of references for their students would be enhanced. So, Loasby was advised to apply to Emmanuel College, rather than, say, King’s College. His successful application resulted in one of his early mentors being Emmanuel’s Senior Tutor, Edward Welbourne, whose skills in critical thinking and exposition had a major impact on him (Loasby, Reference Loasby1989, p. viii). His initial economic supervisor as an Emmanuel undergraduate was Charles Carter, who ensured that he had a bigger dose of Marshall than students at other colleges tended to get at that time.

The lacklustre decade that followed Loasby’s success in the Cambridge Economics Tripos is also the period for which the only personal connection he refers to as having helped him advance his work was with his father, who had been a ‘clicker’ in the footwear sector but had also served as a well-known and well-respected trade union official in Kettering. This made it much easier for Loasby to obtain interviews for his thesis with those who ran the town’s footwear companies (Loasby, Reference Loasby2017: 4). Otherwise, for 1952–1961, he refers to no one who helped advance his career or gave him key leads about what to read. This contrasts sharply with what unfolded after he moved to the University of Bristol in 1961, where, as we noted in the previous section, his colleague David Clarke played a key role in giving him new sources and the ‘decision cycle’ notion. But it was his academic year away from Bristol as an Arthur D. Little Fellow in Boston that gave him career-changing connections. They went beyond the role of MIT’s Bill Pounds, who introduced him (via a working paper later published as Pounds, Reference Pounds1969) to the idea of reference standards that became a key ingredient in his first two books (Loasby, Reference Loasby1973, Reference Loasby1976). The trigger for these connections was an unlikely issue, namely, the fact that because part of the fellowship was spent working in A. D. Little, which was also claiming tax deductibility against their sponsorship of Loasby’s training at Harvard and MIT, he had been given a business visa rather than a student visa for his year in the USA.

The business visa puzzled Eugene Chamberlain, the Advisor to Foreign Students at MIT, and he summoned Loasby to meet him to explain what was going on. On resolving the puzzle and hearing of Loasby’s experience in interacting with managers, Chamberlain realized that Loasby might be able to help him run some of the social functions that MIT held for executives from corporations who visited with a view to hiring its top business graduates (Loasby, Reference Loasby1989, pp. xiii–xiv; Reference Loasby2017: 13–14). It was at one of these functions that Loasby first met Charles Suckling, an industrial chemist and senior executive from Imperial Chemical Industries (at the time, the UK’s largest chemicals company and usually referred to as ICI). Suckling realized that Loasby’s background was ideal for what he wanted someone to do, namely, spend a month shadowing him as he worked and then give him advice about how he was allocating his attention. Loasby agreed to visit Suckling to set this up once he had returned to the UK at the end of his fellowship year. When he did so, Suckling introduced him to one of his colleagues, Frank Bradbury, who was about to move to the position of Professor of Industrial Science at the new University of Stirling (Loasby, Reference Loasby2017: 13–14). Stirling’s first principal, Tom Cottrell, had formerly been an ICI chemist, too, and wanted to make an interdisciplinary programme in technological economics one of Stirling’s innovative attractions under the direction of Bradbury. Suckling made this introduction because he realized that Loasby had just the right profile for the kind of economist that would fit this programme. Loasby was duly hired, following interviews with Cottrell and Andrew Bain, who was about to move from the Bank of England to head Stirling’s Department of Economics.

Suckling subsequently got involved with the University of Stirling, too, as an honorary visiting professor and thereby maintained his link with Loasby. As well as discussing ideas with Loasby and providing feedback on Loasby’s work, Suckling also strongly recommended (in late 1978/early 1979) George Kelly’s (Reference Kelly1963) book A Theory of Personality, which he had found very useful for making sense of how people behaved in organizations. Loasby followed this advice and soon started employing ideas from Kelly in most of his works. This began with working papers in 1979 (listed in the bibliography compiled by Earl, Reference Earl2023), though the first of Loasby’s publications to refer to Kelly is Loasby (Reference Loasby and Wiseman1983), which he had presented at the conference of the British Association for the Advancement of Science at York in 1981.

About six months after being introduced to Kelly’s book, Loasby discovered, via Skinner (Reference Skinner1979), that Kelly’s core proposition, that it could be useful to view people in everyday life as if they are scientists, had been advanced by Adam Smith ([Reference Smith and Wightman1795] Reference Smith and Wightman1980) in his posthumously published work on the history of astronomy. Both Kelly and Smith were precursors to Kuhn (1962) in offering a view of how existing frameworks for making sense of the world (in Kuhn’s terms, ‘paradigms’) could hold up the growth of knowledge. It is unlikely that Loasby would otherwise have connected with this aspect of Smith’s work had Loasby and Skinner not both been members of the Scottish Economic Society, in whose journal Skinner’s paper appeared. As with Kelly, Smith’s analysis of the history of astronomy became one of Loasby’s most frequent sources.

Belated connections

Loasby’s progress was hindered because the network to which he was initially connected got in the way of making potentially useful connections to other networks of economists. His Cambridge education delayed his use of what eventually became two of his major sources, Friedrich A. Hayek and P. W. S. Andrews. Both were mentioned in Cambridge but only negatively. As Loasby explains in Foss (Reference Foss1997: 6), ‘It was undisputed Cambridge religion in the 1940s and 1950s that Hayek was wrong and that we did not need to bother about [what he said]’. After accepting what he was taught about Keynesian macroeconomic thinking, Loasby went on to ignore Hayek’s work altogether until 1978. At that point, he was contacted by Kirzner and some other Austrian economists (see Foss, Reference Foss1997: 6), who were puzzled about the absence of any discussion of Austrian subjectivist thinking in Choice, Complexity and Ignorance. However, although references to Hayek soon began to appear in Loasby’s work, almost two further decades elapsed before Loasby (Reference Loasby1996) started to use ideas from Hayek’s (Reference Hayek1952) book The Sensory Order, which he cited very frequently thereafter. The latter delay is surprising, for Hayek’s book was shelved barely a foot along the shelf in the psychology section of the library at Stirling where the complementary work by Kelly (Reference Kelly1963) could be found. Opportunities for this type of serendipitous connection-making will be a casualty of libraries switching from hard copies to electronic editions of books.

Loasby’s (Reference Loasby1989, p. x) claim that ‘Andrews was scorned in Cambridge’ is consistent with the fact that Andrews’s (Reference Andrews1949) Manufacturing Business was dismissed by Austin Robinson (Reference Robinson1950), who previously had been very critical of work by Andrews’s colleagues in the Oxford Economists’ Research Group (Robinson, Reference Robinson1939). As a research student, with Robinson as one of his succession of doctoral supervisors, Loasby failed to connect to Andrews’s neo-Marshallian view of the competitive process. The connection did not get made until Loasby was at Bristol after Andrews’s (Reference Andrews1964) On Competition in Economic Theory appeared. Its critique of the theory of imperfect competition complemented Loasby’s undergraduate misgivings about Joan Robinson’s analysis and made it much easier to appreciate the neo-Marshallian process-based theory that Andrews (Reference Andrews1949) had previously offered.

If Loasby had not trusted the Cambridge view of Andrews and had read Manufacturing Business in the early 1950s, he would have had an opportunity to notice that it provides a ready-made framework for making sense of how the competitive process worked in Kettering. The fact that Manufacturing Business provides such a framework is easy to understand, for in the process of interviewing managers in Kettering, Loasby discovered that some of them had earlier been interviewed by Andrews as part of the field research that had informed the analysis offered in Manufacturing Business. These managers remembered Andrews and mentioned to Loasby that they had not been impressed by him (reported in Dow and Earl, Reference Dow and Earl1999, p. xiv). This was a further deterrent to reading Andrews at that time. As a result, Loasby remained puzzled: he could see that what had happened in Kettering did not look like Schumpeterian creative destruction, but he did not connect it with Marshall’s evolutionary perspective (Loasby, Reference Loasby1989, p. xi) and thus ended up offering no theoretical framework in his dissertation. These failures to make connections stemmed from the fact that, as Jacobsen (Reference Jacobsen2019) has shown, Austin Robinson’s critique of Andrews’s view of competition was a case of talking at cross purposes. Coincidentally, around the time that Jacobsen was preparing his paper, Loasby belatedly read Robinson (Reference Robinson1931) and realized that Austin, unlike Joan Robinson, was thinking in terms of an unfolding process rather than comparative statics (see Loasby, Reference Loasby2017: 18).

Branding and positioning

From Loasby (Reference Loasby1999) onwards, Loasby emphasized the role of social and market institutions as facilitators of economic coordination in a world of incomplete and dispersed knowledge. Among these institutions are the brands that suppliers attach to their businesses and products. Brands are distinctive systems of connected elements that people remember (not necessarily in the way that the brand owner would like) via brand names and logos that serve as shorthand signifiers of what, as a rule, they should expect if they connect with the suppliers and products that bear these names and logos (see also Harper and Endres, Reference Harper and Endres2017). Brand names also make it easier for people to inform each other rapidly about their values and how they run their lives. But people need to construe what particular brands signify in similar ways to each other for brands to contribute to effective social coordination.

Where a complex, unfamiliar product does not carry a familiar brand, its supplier will need to hold the attention of potential customers for as long as it takes to explain the nature of the product and provide supporting evidence for how it is being characterized. This can be very difficult if the prospective customer already has in mind brands that can be relied upon to serve well enough as a means to the ends they are trying to pursue. However, brands can also be problematic if the customers who are being targeted view them negatively. In the context of economics, a statement such as ‘I’m an institutional economist’ may connote a great deal to those who work in that field or in fields that intersect with it to some degree, but in others, it may merely evoke vague, simplistic notions and unwarranted negative assessments of the person in question. Given this, it seems worthwhile to consider how Loasby positioned his work in relation to established brands in the market for economic knowledge and what lesson his (evidently successful) strategy implies for early-career economists.

Loasby’s contributions are unswervingly heterodox, for his work rejects the mainstream notion of equilibrium, assigns a key role to institutions, does not reduce choice to optimization in respect of a pre-specified set of options, and begins by focusing on problems of knowledge instead of addressing them merely as add-on qualifiers to full-rationality models of behaviour. Yet, despite viewing institutions as facilitators of coordination, he did not try to facilitate coordination in the market for economic knowledge by branding himself as a ‘heterodox’ economist or in terms of any of the other brands – Austrian, (old) behavioural, cognitive, evolutionary, institutional, Post Keynesian – that his work complements in vision and methodology.

The 2017 interview revealed that, despite his interest in the coordination-facilitating role of institutions, Loasby was rather disinclined to view economists in terms of whether they ticked particular boxes whereby they could be pigeonholed as members of a particular school of thought (other than mainstream economics), and he sought to avoid being pigeonholed himself. The first question of the interview was, ‘Do you consider yourself an evolutionary economist?’ He began to reply by saying, ‘Obviously I’m an evolutionary economist in some sense but there are lots of different ideas about what should be in evolutionary economics’ (Loasby, Reference Loasby2017: 1). However, he did not follow this by comparing his work with other modern approaches to evolutionary economics. Instead, he rapidly moved on to illustrate the essence of his kind of evolutionary economics by turning the interview into a monologue and exploring the path-dependent interplay between his intellectual development and his career. When talking about how managers adapted to the UK’s location policy, he summarized the key insight he got as follows:

Eventually (ibid.: 20) he said, ‘I think quite a bit of that is relevant to the question that you asked but not necessarily. I am not terribly interested in formal definitions where, “To count as evolutionary economics, it has to be this …”. I am very much concerned with the idea of a continuing process’.

But this does not mean that he was oblivious to the potential significance of economic branding for the uptake of contributions to economic knowledge or that he never tried to brand the kind of economics that he practised. In fact, Loasby employed two approaches to branding his work. Following his year as an A. D. Little Fellow, Loasby (Reference Loasby1967b) coined the phrase ‘management economics’ to denote the study of managerial decision processes with an emphasis on how managers come to recognize problems and arrive at possible solutions. This is a cognitive view of what managers do in organizations. It is also applicable to consumer behaviour (cf. Earl, Reference Earl2024, chapter 5), aligning neatly with the Greek word ‘oikonomia’ from which ‘economics’ is derived and whose original meaning was ‘household management’. However, Loasby did not pursue that connection and thereby left himself clearly positioned as a specialist in the economics of the firm. Loasby’s enthusiasm for the management economics term is evidenced by the fact that when he was promoted to a personal chair in 1971, he requested that his title be Professor of Management Economics, and he carried the management adjective into the titles of his emeritus and honorary positions after he retired.

Two things should be noted here. The first is that what he was trying to signify with this form of branding is different from managerial economics: when this paper’s second-listed author asked him in the early 1980s about the distinction, Loasby explained that he saw managerial economics as pertaining to the application of optimizing techniques to pre-specified problems, whereas management economics pertained to the study of how managers find problems and seek to find solutions to them. The second noteworthy point is that Loasby launched the management economics concept in the Journal of Industrial Economics, a field journal, not a journal branded in terms of a particular view of how the economy should be analysed. He thus positioned himself in terms of a sub-field (management) within an applied field (industrial economics), in contrast to, say, Cyert and March (Reference Cyert and March1963) whose ideas aligned with what he was advocating but which they branded as ‘behavioural’.

The fact that the term ‘management economics’ did not achieve a wide currency did not prove problematic for Loasby: after all, he may readily come to mind as the world’s top management economist. It is too restrictive a term for anyone harbouring visions of a unified approach to economics – including consumer behaviour and macroeconomics, rather than merely decision-making in organizations – based on Loasby-style thinking. However, by the mid-1990s, Loasby was using a different way of branding what he did: he called it a ‘growth of knowledge’ approach to economics. Once again, it was a term that was unlikely to offend members of any of the main heterodox schools of thought. Moreover, by continuing to avoid any explicit heterodox tag of a general or school-specific nature, it might even pique the interest of mainstream economists in a non-threatening way.

Concluding comments

The templates/scripts that academics would be wise to use in setting their career expectations, making career choices, and reflecting on the achievements of themselves and their peers vary depending on the extent of their ambition and capabilities and on the prevailing norms and rules of the academic game. However, academics do not always employ scripts that will help them to advance their careers. Loasby’s recollections about his early career give little evidence that in those days he really had much of a career template in mind. At a time when a PhD was not a prerequisite for getting a lectureship in the UK, his unsuccessful and unduly long attempt to get a PhD may have been more problematic in the academic job market than a choice not to pursue a research higher degree would have been. But eventually, aided by path-dependent connections, Loasby’s career flourished, and he lived up to the potential he had displayed as an undergraduate. His early retirement subsequently gave him the luxury of not needing to follow a career script that incorporated the rules of today’s neo-liberal university systems. Throughout his career, there is little sign of him being driven by personal ambition. Instead, he seemed to operate as a humble seeker after truth, focusing on promoting the legacies of scholars whom he admired, whose contributions he felt should have had much bigger impacts, rather than on assuring his own legacy: this is particularly epitomized by the counterfactual history of economics that he wrote in his mid-eighties (Loasby, Reference Loasby, Chai and Witt2018).

While fortuitous connections were crucial to Loasby eventually getting his career track to align with the potential he had shown as an undergraduate, we suspect that some early-career economists will fail to take the need for active connection-making seriously enough in the 2020s because the modern academic environment is organized on neo-liberal managerialist principles and aided by advanced information technology systems. These factors are conducive to believing that the positions gained by scholars and the popularity of contributions to knowledge depend on their competitive fitness in terms of the current standards and rules of the game. Hundreds of scholars from all across the globe may apply for an academic position in an upper-tier university, where human resource officers ensure that they are systematically and equitably assessed in terms of a standardized set of criteria that are designed to be non-discriminatory. Similarly, when research is being conducted, advanced online library catalogue and database search capabilities enable scholars to find relevant literature. Scholars feel pressure to leave no relevant source unexamined to ensure their work can survive scrutiny in peer review processes. This is supposedly a world in which getting a position or getting published and cited is a matter of merit, not a matter of whom one knows or what scholars in one’s network know, or of which personal search and appraisal rules are employed for filling vacant positions or discovering relevant material.

However, such a perspective on the coordination of markets for academic labour and contributions to knowledge misses two key issues that Loasby’s approach to economics invites us to take seriously. One is that the set of potential employees or useful contributions to knowledge that a search process yields depends on how and where the search is conducted (e.g. choices of search terms and where they are posted can make a difference). Second, choice overload with respect of job applicants has to be dealt with; so, during shortlisting processes connections and heuristics may be used to make inferences about the quality of candidates and their likelihood of taking a position if given an offer, while time scarcity will mean that, in scholarly research, rule- and connection-based choices have to be made about what to read closely, if at all, with one’s interpretive framework potentially leading to misunderstandings of what some authors are saying. Taking advice from a mentor about key sources, and developing a network of sources from them by following up on citations, may seem old-fashioned and not guaranteed to avoid oversight. However, it remains a potentially effective way of dealing with information overload. Much will depend on whom one’s mentors are.