Transformation, Agency and the Economy

Book excerpt: Producing, buying, selling, inventing, destroying, caring, imagining, failing – with their everyday practices, people bring about what we call ‘the economy’. In order to both understand and transform these practices in the context of mounting socio-ecological challenges, respective knowledge on economic practices becomes crucial. Yet, when it comes to the respective scientific discipline – economics – such knowledge is limited due to a long-standing tradition of favouring abstraction and modelling over assessing real-world economic action. By contrast, this book draws the contours of an economics grounded in real-world phenomena and experiences by outlining the foundations of a Grounded Economics. Building on the philosophical traditions of pragmatism, phenomenology and critical realism, and basic concepts from institutional thought and social scientific practice theories, the book provides a consistent framework to grasp the economy as an ‘unfolding process’. By putting forward a strong account of economic agency, the framework allows to identify and differentiate between multiple pathways for social transformations. The book addresses readers from all branches of the social sciences seeking a new vision for economic research, particularly within political economy, heterodox economics, science studies and economic sociology.