The research project contributes to the ISRF’s programme: ‘Reframing the moral foundations of economics’, which responded to the displacement of a social science discipline of economics (Political Economy) by a ‘scientised’ quantification of economic activity. The project’s overall goal is a generally applicable analysis of the relational structures and the normative controversies existing among contemporary economists, to understand how far these determine both the nature of academic economics and economic policy.
Recent controversies over the scientific status of economics in France reveal fundamental intellectual differences with a deep structural determination. To investigate this, in our French case study we will map two complex structures: the social network of economists and the evolving semantic networks emerging from their activity. Our data sources will be (i) texts, in the form of academic publications, policy recommendations and other public documents (ii) recorded affiliations to government institutions, financial and third-sector organizations, and specific policy domains (health, environment). Within this mapping we will identify both alignments and disagreements between positions of epistemic and moral authority. We will also trace the effect of normative positional choices on the development of contemporary economics in its disciplinary and institutional aspects.
Mapping structural and dynamic complexity requires methods going beyond standard multilevel analyses (Bryk & Raudenbush, 1992). We will employ dynamic and multilevel network analyses (Snijders & Bosker, 2012) and visualization techniques from the “complexity sciences” which combine semantic networks and social networks. Tracing both individual and collective actors’ interdependencies will display their contexts of collective action in terms of relational infrastructures and social processes. We also use semantic indicators as a first, quantitative approach to mapping moral-political controversies.
By showing a coevolution of social ties between leading economists based on flows of resources and of moral-epistemic controversies based on semantic networks, the study will lay out the institutional constraints and formations underlying the current situation in economics in France. It would provide both critical material for curricula of alternative economics, and a critique to inform young economists negotiating the career structure they envisage. Although undertaken as a case study in France (for reasons explained elsewhere) there is potential for a comparative approach with other jurisdictions. Longer-term, if a qualitative approach becomes possible, micro-level work could show how these controversies influence or distort substantive arguments between different intellectual positions (as initially tracked by semantic methods).