About the book: Unlike psychologistic paradigms, the non-atomistic variant of methodological individualism discussed in this book explains society in terms of complex emergent structures that unintentionally result from human actions, and that in turn influence those actions. Friedrich Hayek is an emblematic representative of this approach, the origins of which date back to the Scottish Enlight...

This paper is about the alleged tension between methodological individualism and evolutionary ideas in the work of Friedrich Hayek. This issue is much debated, but I focus my attention on a quite original incompatibility argument by Geoffrey Hodgson. Hodgson sympathizes with the evolutionary Hayek, arguing that Hayek’s methodological individualism involves an “ontogenetic” approach to social sc...

Part of the difficulty of introducing social economics into the principles course is the perception that social economics is anathema to mainstream economics. 1 As noted by Warren Samuels, however, "neoclassical economics is already a form of social economics" despite its "pretensions of methodological individualism and value-neutrality" [Samuels, p. 2]. Heilbroner also makes the case that the ...

Life is short and time for reading books on business ethics is scarce. Those readers who are interested in the argumentative foundations of business ethics, but do not want to struggle through several hundred pages, can find a compact presentation in Business Ethics and the Austrian Tradition in Economics, written by Hardy Bouillon. The book is composed of four chapters: 1. Ethical Preliminarie...

According to functionalism, the family internalizes and transmits society's supposed value consensus from one generation to the next, and such socialization explains morality, social order, and cultural uniformities. I present three investigations tha t challenge the concept of functionalist socialization, and propose alternative theories that may better explain observations. First, I present e...

Reflexivity is actually a key term in the dramatic and rapid changes confronted by the human sciences (especially sociology) during the last four decades and “yet the word is used in so many different senses that it often sustains confusion rather than clarifying any underlying issues” (Holland, 1999: 463). In general, reflexivity was comprehensively defined by George Herbert Mead as “the turni...

This article tests the assumption that cohabitation makes a difference in the allocation of childcare responsibilities within couples. It has often been assumed that cohabiting individuals are less likely to adhere to traditional gender ideologies than married people, because they tend to have a lower tolerance for poorly functioning relationships, to assign more value to individual freedom, an...

method or conceptual discipline, but rather represented a way of life and a discovery of one’s self. The philosopher was much more a spiritual adviser than a professor. He exhorted his students to mold themselves through a conversion of attention and through spiritual exercises to follow the paths of wisdom. As Pierre Hadot has noted, the discourse on the transcendent and the spiritual experien...

This paper seeks to contribute to the ongoing discussion of the value of structuration theory as ‘an ontology of potentials’ for empirical research in accounting. In engaging with the two main papers in this issue, it considers issues of methodological bracketing and the extent to which the work of Coad and Glyptis (2013) offers an agency focus rather than an institutional focus for analysis. F...