This volume rethinks the classic question of what, how and for whom economics is produced. Drawing from a range of perspectives, from postmodernism to critical realism, it casts light on the relationship between the producers and consumers of economic knowledge, both academic and non-academic. Challenging the ivory tower view of economists as disinterested producers of scientific knowledge against the unscientific economics of the lay person, the authors advance a vision of economic knowledge as irreducibly plural and dispersed, rather than as a unified accumulation of academic thought. It...

'No reality please. We're economists'. There is a wide spread belief that modern economics is irrelevant to the understanding of the real world. In a controversial and original study, Tony Lawson argues that the root of this irrelevance is in the failure of economists to find methods and tools which are appropriate for the social world it addresses.
Supporting his argument with a wide range of examples, Tony Lawson offers a provocative account of why economics has gone wrong and how it can be put back on track.

Critical realism, with its focus on the causal structures underlying observable phenomena, has been one of the most significant developments in the philosophy of social science in the latter-20th century. This volume extends its insights into the fields of economic philosophy methodology and theory in such a way as to open up new forms of investigation in economics and change the nature of economic reasoning. It is argued that the specific value of this approach is that it encourages attention to the capacities, structures and powers that explain observed event regularities in economic life...

This volume from Tony Lawson contends that economics can profit from a more explicit concern with ontology (enquiry into the nature of existence) than has been its custom. By admitting that economics is not exactly a picture of health at the moment, Lawson hopes that we can move away from the bafflingly intransigent belief that economics is at its core reliant upon mathematical modelling. This maths-envy is the reason why economics is in a state of such disarray.

Economics today has been widely criticised as being more concerned with mathematical technique than the understanding and explanation of real world phenomena. However, one hundred years ago, in Europe and America, economics was fused with the study of history and its practitioners emphasised the importance of the understanding of specific institutions. How Economics Forgot History shows how the German historical school addressed a key problem in social science and concerned themselves with the historical specific character of economic phenomena and the need to make economic theory more...

Feminist economists have demonstrated that interrogating hierarchies based on gender, ethnicity, class and nation results in an economics that is biased and more faithful to empirical evidence than are mainstream accounts.
This rigorous and comprehensive book examines many of the central philosophical questions and themes in feminist economics including
. History of economics
. Feminist science studies
. Identity and agency
. Caring labor
. Postcolonialism and postmodernism
With contributions from such leading figures as Nancy Folbre, Julie Nelson and Sandra Harding,...

In the last half century, economics has taken over from anthropology the role of drawing the powerful conceptual worldviews that organize knowledge and inform policy in both domestic and international contexts. Until now however, the colonial roots of economic theory have remained relatively unstudied. This book changes that.
The wide array of contributions to this book draw on the rapidly growing body of postcolonial studies to critique both orthodox and heterodox economics. This book addresses a large gap in postcolonial studies, which lacks the type of sophisticated analysis of economic...

Economics has become polarised. On the one hand there is a body of economists who concern themselves with progressing their discipline via an increasing use of mathematical modelling. On the other hand, there are economists who believe passionately that in order for economics to be useful it needs to take account of its history, its impact on society and its real world applications. The contributors to this book fix their scholarly glare on the heterodox section of economics, and in particular upon critical realist approaches to the subject. Experts from a variety of perspectives have come...

What is the source of our environmental problems? Why is there in modern societies a persistent tendency to environmental damage? From within neoclassical economic theory there is a straightforward answer to those questions: it is because environmental goods and harms are unpriced. They come free.

This position runs up against a view which runs in entirely the opposite direction, that our environmental problems have their source not in a failure to apply market norms rigorously enough, but in the very spread of these market mechanisms and norms. The source of environmental problems...

This work examines the key controversies within Marxian theory and the different schools of thought that make up the Marxian community.