Conclusions

Abstract

While attention on the role of institutions in the economy has increasingly permeated the communication of economists in recent years, the positivist inclination has not. Discussions of the concept of institutions have thus been informed by ideas from either Newtonian physics or from biology (Hodgson and Knudsen 2006; special issues of the Journal of Evolutionary Economics 2006 and the Journal of Economic Methodology 2004). Is the biological metaphor the proper one for evolutionary economics to pursue, given that it leads to the incorporation of more from biology as an academic discipline than would be called for? Is the economy, the subject of analysis for economists, not fundamentally different from a biological or a natural system? I argue that social systems are different from physical ones and that such an acknowledgement has consequences of a theoretical nature (compare Leydesdorff 2006a, 2006b).