The contemporary social science in general and economics in particular are dominated by the method of logical positivism in the British tradition. This method has been extremely successful in dealing with physical phenomena in science that scholars in social sciences attempt to investigate the possibility of applying the scientific method to explain and predict human actions and social phenomena. Since then, positivism has been widely adopted in economics, management and sociology, including criminology, marketing research, policy analysis, program evaluation, urban planning and so on.

In contrast to the British philosophy, some scholars in the continental Europe think that social sciences differ from natural sciences. A science of human action consists in meaningful behaviour and cannot be observed as in physical science. Max Weber, the social science giant, suggests a method which he called Verstehen (or subjective interpretation) to understand human behaviour and social action. Unlike positivism, this subjectivist approach, with its root in German idealism, takes human experience as the sole foundation of factual knowledge. All objective facts have to be interpreted and evaluated by human minds. In this approach, experience, knowledge, expectation, plans, errors and revision of plans are key elements. Unlike most reference books in the market which take on the positivist method, this volume uses the subjectivist approach originated in Max Weber's interpretation method, Alfred Schutz's phenomenology, Peter Berger and Thomas Luckmann's sociology of knowledge to understand economic and social phenomena. Our method brings human agency back into the forefront of analysis, adding new insights not only in economics and management, but also in sociology, politics, psychology, and organizational behaviour. This book puts together 13 papers in human agency perspective while the author taught economics and ethics, economic development and entrepreneurship at Monash University (Australia), Feng Chia University (Taiwan), and Shue Yan University (Hong Kong).

Chapter 1 introduces the method of subjectivism and interpretation in social science. It also serves as a methodological foundation for the arguments in subsequent chapters. Acknowledging the shortcomings of contemporary research methodology on social science in general and economics in particular, this opening chapter proposes a subjectivist research program. This subjectivist perspective is originated in German idealism and found its base in the Austrian School of Economics.