{"title":"The Economics of Convention: From the Practice of Economics to the Economics of Practice","authors":"O. Favereau","doi":"10.12759/hsr.44.2019.1.25-51","DOIUrl":null,"url":null,"abstract":"»Die Economics of convention: Von der Praxis der Ökonomie zur Ökonomie der Praktiken«. There would not have been an economics of convention (EC) without the use of the word “convention” in chapter 12 of the “The General Theory of Employment, Interest, and Money” (1936) by Keynes, and without the book “Convention. A Philosophical Study” (1969), by the philosopher and mathematician David Lewis. But representatives of EC reinterpret the usual reading of those two texts. They extract from the first one the idea of a convention as regulating a professional community (the financial one and the academic one in economics). As for the second one, they privilege the final revision of Lewis’ initial game-theoretic definition, which puts non-observable “beliefs” on a par with observable “actions.” The coherence between both elements can only be produced by the emergence of a “(social) practice.” Therefore a very different practice of economics is promoted by EC (for instance reunifying coordination and reproduction). Following Foucault who studied states as a practice (through the notion of “governmentality”), we study business firms as a practice. Because of the gap between the legal person (corporation whose members are the share-holders) and the economic organization (with all its stake-holders), the firm as a practice needs to be regulated by a convention, in order to make the inequality not unbearable for workers. Otherwise the working of the firm as a dispositive of collective creation would be blocked. We conclude that conventions, practices, and dispositives belong to the same ana-","PeriodicalId":47073,"journal":{"name":"Historical Social Research-Historische Sozialforschung","volume":"44 1","pages":"25-51"},"PeriodicalIF":0.9000,"publicationDate":"2019-01-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":"3","resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":null,"PeriodicalName":"Historical Social Research-Historische Sozialforschung","FirstCategoryId":"98","ListUrlMain":"https://doi.org/10.12759/hsr.44.2019.1.25-51","RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"历史学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":null,"EPubDate":"","PubModel":"","JCR":"Q1","JCRName":"HISTORY","Score":null,"Total":0}
引用次数: 3
Abstract
»Die Economics of convention: Von der Praxis der Ökonomie zur Ökonomie der Praktiken«. There would not have been an economics of convention (EC) without the use of the word “convention” in chapter 12 of the “The General Theory of Employment, Interest, and Money” (1936) by Keynes, and without the book “Convention. A Philosophical Study” (1969), by the philosopher and mathematician David Lewis. But representatives of EC reinterpret the usual reading of those two texts. They extract from the first one the idea of a convention as regulating a professional community (the financial one and the academic one in economics). As for the second one, they privilege the final revision of Lewis’ initial game-theoretic definition, which puts non-observable “beliefs” on a par with observable “actions.” The coherence between both elements can only be produced by the emergence of a “(social) practice.” Therefore a very different practice of economics is promoted by EC (for instance reunifying coordination and reproduction). Following Foucault who studied states as a practice (through the notion of “governmentality”), we study business firms as a practice. Because of the gap between the legal person (corporation whose members are the share-holders) and the economic organization (with all its stake-holders), the firm as a practice needs to be regulated by a convention, in order to make the inequality not unbearable for workers. Otherwise the working of the firm as a dispositive of collective creation would be blocked. We conclude that conventions, practices, and dispositives belong to the same ana-
《传统经济学:Von der Praxis der Ökonomie zur Ökonomie der Praktiken》。如果在凯恩斯的《就业、利息和货币通论》(1936)第12章中没有使用“惯例”这个词,如果没有《惯例》这本书,就不会有惯例经济学(EC)。《哲学研究》(1969),作者是哲学家和数学家大卫·刘易斯。但是欧共体代表重新解释了对这两个案文的通常解读。他们从第一个观点中提取了公约作为规范专业团体(金融团体和经济学学术团体)的观点。至于第二种,他们对刘易斯最初的博弈论定义的最终修订给予了特权,该定义将不可观察到的“信念”与可观察到的“行动”相提并论。这两个要素之间的一致性只能通过“(社会)实践”的出现来产生。因此,欧共体推动了一种非常不同的经济学实践(例如重新统一协调和再生产)。福柯将国家作为一种实践来研究(通过“治理”的概念),我们将商业公司作为一种实践来研究。由于法人(其成员是股东的公司)和经济组织(其所有利益相关者)之间的差距,企业作为一种实践需要由一种公约来规范,以使不平等对工人来说不是无法忍受的。否则,企业作为集体创造的决定者的作用就会受到阻碍。我们的结论是,惯例、实践和否定属于同一范畴