Publication

Institutions are humanly devised rules that affect behaviour, constraining certain actions, providing incentives for others, and thereby making social life more or less predictable. They are “the stuff of socio-economic reality”. It is in a way rather curious that so fundamental an aspect of social life should not have been a more important focus of study in the social sciences (outside anthropology) until relatively recently. This reflects the facts that mainstream, choice-theoretic economics has not previously problematised institutions, such even as those that are necessary for markets to function. This short essay argues that the dominance of this particular style of economics, with its pretensions to universality, has overlain and led to the forgetting of a rich tradition of thought about institutions.