The Evolution of Scientific Knowledge aims to reach a unique understanding of science with the help of economic and sociological theories. The economic theories used are institutionalist and evolutionary. The sociological theories draw from the type of work on social studies of science that has, in recent decades, transformed our picture of science and technology.

This text uses an institutional-evolutionary approach to analyze economic problems associated with developments in capitalism during the 20th century. It argues that economics should centre on institutions - the durable fabric of the economy over time.

For individual actors in economic activities (ie. production, exchanges), conventions and structures represent two different types of opportunity or constraint. Conventions refer to values, rules and representations that influence economic behaviour. Structures refer to patterns of resource interdependencies existing among members of any social system. This book contributes to the current rapprochement between economics and sociology. It examines the fact that individuals use rules and interdependencies to forward their own interests, while living in social environments where everyone does...

Traditional doctrines of economic policy have largely failed to address the fact that human economies are evolving, complex adaptive systems rather than equilibrating mechanisms. This volume represents a step towards a more evolutionary approach to economic policy.

This volume proposes evolutionary microeconomics as a synthesis of the collective schools of heterodox economic thought with complex systems theory and graph theory. The text charts a research programme for evolutionary economics that encompasses various theories.

This work presents a concept of interactive economic institutions and systems, considered by the author to be a bottleneck to scientific progress. In the author's evaluation of contemporary institutional economics, the focus is on the interaction of complex economic structures in terms of their co-ordination routines, emergent behavioural characteristics and also their economic performance. Differences of behaviour characteristics and economic performances are explained as consequences of differently structured co-ordination routines. The book demonstrates that complexity, rather than being...

This volume claims that useful economic knowledge is the most important foundation for the development of a sufficiently strong process of innovation. Within the framework of new institutional economics, the book looks at the institutional conditions required for the interactive sharing and dissemination of knowledge in the development of economies. It outlines in four distinct parts the complex societal process of human interaction by which knowledge is effectively generated and used. between types of interaction and types of actors. Secondly it examines the economic role of knowledge and...

This important book analyses evolutionary approaches to economic policy. Its main purpose is to explore the policy implications of evolutionary economics, in particular of approaches inspired on the one hand by Schumpeter and revived by Nelson and Winter which deal with industrial evolution under constant institutions and, on the other hand, of approaches inspired by Hayek and North, which analyse the ways in which institutions themselves evolve. Hitherto evolutionary economists have paid little attention to policy issues, and the relatively few policy implications that they have produced...

This work acts as a critique of the basis of neoclassical microeconomics, and makes a proposal for the structure of a new evolutionary theory.

This volume investigates the relationship between economic globalization and institutions, or global governance, challenging the common assumption that globalization and institutionalization are essentially processes which exclude each other.