This paper examines Karl Mittermaier's A Realist Philosophy of Economics (RPE) in light of developments in Cambridge Social Ontology (CSO), par ticularly its focus on enduring social structures and causal mechanisms. Vari ous parallels between Mittermaier's distinction between ex ante and ex post facts and CSO's layered ontology are highlighted, especially in connection with institutions and the "open" nature of social systems. The analysis concludes by contrasting some of the key themes in RPE with recent advances in CSO, notably Social Positioning Theory, and some reflections on Mittermaier's later work which shifted from structural realism to an emphasis on theory-ladenness and issues of language for economics

This paper contributes to the literature on ontology and the history of economic thought by examining the ontological commitments of Nobel Laureate Elinor Ostrom from the vantage point of recent work on social positioning theory (SPT). The comparison highlights important features of Ostrom's thought on common-pool resources (CPRs), most notably her emphasis on social positions and the correlative nature of the rights and duties and the role of power and authority associated with them. In addition to highlighting similarities between Ostrom and SPT, the paper also identifies differences and possible gains from trade. It is argued that Ostrom's approach could potentially be enhanced by following SPT in allowing for the social positioning of objects as well as people and that SPT might benefit from Ostrom's ideas about the epistemic challenges involved in deliberate attempts at social positioning and the possibility of failures in social positioning such challenges might entail.

Scenario planning is a tool used to formulate contingent but potentially impactful futures to aid strategic decision-making. A crucial element of many versions of scenario planning is an assessment of levels of uncertainty about the broad drivers of change within the system under consideration. Despite the importance of this element, the scenario planning literature is largely silent on the appropriate conception of uncertainty to use, exactly what it attaches to and how it might be measured. This paper seeks to fill this gap by advancing a non-probabilistic measure of uncertainty based on the concept of evidential weight drawn from the economist John Maynard Keynes' 1921 A Treatise on Probability.

"Unknowns" and "Black Swans" have become familiar terms in the public administration literature but tend to be used in different and often conflicting ways. This article provides a typology of the terms, develops a framework for thinking about how their elements relate, and distinguishes four varieties of the Black Swan. Using the Challenger Space Shuttle disaster, 9/11, the international withdrawal from Afghanistan, and the trade boycott associated with the Danish cartoon controversy as examples, we examine how these four varieties may arise in public sector organizations. We offer recommendations on how such organizations might reduce psychological and organizational barriers to uncovering unknowns before they can go on to become Black Swans.

Recent studies on the construction and use of "small world representations" in strategic decision-making under Knightian uncertainty say little about how such representations should be updated over the implementation phase. This paper draws on the psychology of reasoning to take a step toward answering this question. We begin by theorizing small world representations and how the scenario spaces they contain are constructed and may be updated over time. We then introduce two well-known heuristic methods of inquiry, disconfirmation and counterfactual reasoning; translate them into practical procedures for updating scenario spaces; and compare the relative performance of these procedures in strategic situations of Knightian uncertainty. Our principal findings are that the procedure based on counterfactual reasoning is superior to that based on disconfirmation with respect to (a) counteracting the confirmation bias, (b) promoting the exploration of the set of imaginable scenarios, and (c) facilitating action to mitigate or exploit the consequences of what would otherwise have been Black Swans. We close with some broader implications for the study of strategic decision-making under Knightian uncertainty.

Drawing on social positioning theory, we examine how the identity of the city of Hamburg has been affected by the identity and system functions of its recently completed Elbphilharmonie building. We explore the social positioning and identity formation processes involved, and argue that, rather than having a 'Bilbao Effect' as is often claimed, the Elbphilharmonie project is in fact having a distinct 'Hamburg Effect' of its own.

In a recent article in this Journal, Brian McCann argues that making good decisions in the face of increasing uncertainty about the future requires thinking in probabilistic terms and acting as someone who “defines the s et o f possible outcomes [of some alternative] along with their associated values and probabilities . . . [and] then chooses the alternative that maximizes expected value” (p. 26). McCann observes that the quality of decisions made in this way depends on the accuracy of the probability estimates employed, and the purpose of his article is to advocate Bayesian updating as a means of increasing such accuracy.

This Special Issue marks the 100th anniversary of the first publication of two major books by economists on and around the themes of probability, risk and uncertainty: Frank Hyneman Knight's Risk, Uncertainty, and Profit and John Maynard Keynes' A Treatise on Probability. Knight's book was written for economists, went on to become a classic within the discipline, and continues to be widely cited to this day on topics ranging from entrepreneurship to insurance design. Keynes' book, in contrast, was written for a philosophical audience, initially ignored by economists save for a few early reviews,1 and subsequently overshadowed by his own magnum opus, The General Theory of Employment, Interest and Money, published in 1936. Yet the General Theory, alongside Keynes' 1937 reply to its critics, marked something of a return to themes first explored in A Treatise on Probability and this, spurred by rising interest in expectations...

Drawing on social positioning theory and using dishwasher cooking as our running example, we examine how users arrive at alternative uses of already-existing technological objects or what we will call ‘user innovations in function’. The first half of the paper provides an abstract account of three forms of structure: social structure, especially as represented by social positions; structures of cognition and action; and the structure of technological objects. The second half theorises user innovations in function as emerging at the nexus of these different forms of structure, with a view to highlighting (i) the pre-reflective and reflective modes of the agency involved; (ii) how these relate to what we call ‘tinkering’ and ‘reflection’ in user innovation; and (iii) the difference between ‘local’ and ‘non-local’ user innovations in function and their possible roots in tinkering or reflection.

This paper is the introduction to a special issue of the Cambridge Journal of Economics on the topic of ontology and the history of economic thought. It explains what is meant by social ontology and why ontological issues should be taken seriously by historians of economic thought. It then goes on to introduce the contributions to the special issue.

The Symposium on “The Legacy of Ludwig Lachmann: Interdisciplinary Perspectives on Institutions, Agency and Uncertainty” stood out also because of a plenary session organized as a roundtable discussion on “Reminiscences of Lachmann” with the participation of Martin Fransman, Peter Lewin, Jochen Runde and Christopher Torr, and Giampaolo Garzarelli as moderator. The text that follows reports the interesting views about Lachmann’s public as well as private persona that emerged from the roundtable.

The Symposium on “The Legacy of Ludwig Lachmann: Interdisciplinary Perspectives on Institutions, Agency and Uncertainty” stood out also because of a plenary session organized as a roundtable discussion on “Reminiscences of Lachmann” with the participation of Martin Fransman, Peter Lewin, Jochen Runde and Christopher Torr, and Giampaolo Garzarelli as moderator. The text that follows reports the interesting views about Lachmann’s public as well as private persona that emerged from the roundtable.

This Special Issue brings together contributions on financialisation and the prospects for a new capitalism. Our aim in putting it together was to stimulate debate on how finance and financial markets and institutions might better serve the real economy and foster economic, social and environmental sustainability. According to one of its better-known definitions, financialisation is ‘the increasing importance of financial markets, financial motives, financial institutions and financial elites in the operations of the economy and its governing institutions, both at the national and international levels’ (Epstein, 2001, p. 1). While aspects of financialisation in this broad sense have been a feature of industrialised capitalism for a long time (Argitis and Pitelis, 2008; Orhangazi, 2008; Vercelli, 2017; Fasianos et al., 2018), most of the current literature focuses on specific features of financialisation that have emerged since the 1980s. The proliferation of securitisation and other new financial instruments, together with the substantial expansion of credit to households (Sawyer, 2018), are a particular focus here. There has also been a lot of work on the extent to which the present era of financialisation has coincided with and possibly been facilitated by a parallel ‘liberalisation’, de-regulation and move to self-regulation of financial markets and the economy more widely, and how these developments have gone hand-by-hand with the rise of globalisation, neo-liberalism and growing inequality (Palley, 2013).

Prompted by perceived shortcomings of prevailing conceptualizations of digital technology in IS, we propose a theory aimed at capturing both the ontological complexity of digital objects qua objects, and how their identity and use is bound up with various social associations. We begin with what it is to be an object, the differences between material and nonmaterial objects, and various categories of nonmaterial objects including syntactic objects and bitstrings. Building on these categories we develop a conception of digital objects and a novel “bearer” theory of how material and nonmaterial objects combine. The role of computation is considered, and how the identity and system functions of digital objects flow from their social positioning in the communities in which they arise. Various implications of the theory are identified, focusing on its use as a conceptual frame through which to view digital phenomena, and its potential to inform existing perspectives with regard both to how digital technology per se and the relationship between people and digital technology should be theorized. These implications are illustrated with reference to secondary markets for software, the treatment of digital resources in the resource-based, knowledge-based, and service-dominant logic views of organizing, and recent work on sociomateriality.

Using the user-led innovation of dishwasher cooking as an example, we explore some shortcomings of the common characterization of technology as something that both constrains and enables human action. While we agree that technology discourages or completely precludes some actions while enabling others, we argue that this characterization says little about how actors arrive at particular uses of technology. In particular, we argue that it fails to do justice to the idea that, over and above merely creating possibilities, technology also actively orients actors towards using it in particular ways. This paper provides an account of this third effect. It does so by outlining a new theory of the affordances of technological objects as a nexus of three types of structures: social structure, actors’ structures of cognition and action, and the structure of technological objects. We show how this theory allows us to go beyond merely acknowledging the possibility that users devise new uses of technological objects, and to say something about the propensity of different uses to emerge out of the many that may be possible. We develop implications for theorizing the middle ground between technological determinism and voluntarism and discuss ramifications for debates in organizational theory.

The behavioral strategy literature investigates how decision makers might use Small World Representations (SWRs) to guide their actions in situations of extreme uncertainty, but says little about how such representations should be updated during the implementation phase. In this paper, we provide a framework to capture the relationship between SWRs, unknowns and Black Swans, and, drawing on the psychology of reasoning literature, explore different heuristic methods of inquiry that decision makers might use to update their SWRs. We compare the performance of two such methods⎯disconfirmation and counterfactual reasoning⎯in highly uncertain situations characterized by ambiguous and non-definite information. We find that counterfactual reasoning is superior to disconfirmation with respect to (1) counteracting the confirmation bias, (2) promoting the exploration of the scenario space, and (3) favoring the adoption of actions able to mitigate or exploit the consequences of Black Swans.

This paper examines the claim that de Fined and Savage totally rejected the notion of indeterminate, as distinct from imprecise, probabilities. It argues that their examination of imprecise reasoning refers both to descriptive and normative issues, and that the inability for a decision-maker to commit to a single prior cannot be limited to measurement problems, as argued by Arthmar and Brady in a recent contribution to this Journal. The paper shows that de Finetti and Savage admitted that having an interval of initial probabilities may sometimes have normative relevance, thereby leaving an opening for indeterminate probabilities.

The strategy literature evaluating the effectiveness of comprehensive decision processes in turbulent environments defines comprehensiveness in quantitative terms as the amount of investigatory activity undertaken by decision-makers, but says little about how decision makers might go about being comprehensive. In this paper, we argue that comprehensiveness has qualitative as well as quantitative dimensions and, drawing on the psychology of reasoning literature, that there are different ways of being comprehensive. We compare the performance of two of these⎯disconfirmation and counterfactual reasoning⎯in facilitating the framing of decision situations and promoting decision quality, in turbulent environments characterized by ambiguous and non- definite information. We find that counterfactual reasoning is superior to disconfirmation with respect to (1) counteracting the confirmation bias, (2) promoting the exploration of the scenario space and, thereby, ultimately (3) reducing exposure to Black Swans.

The dominant approach in economics, often referred to as neoclassical economics, gradually acquired its leading status in the years following the publication of Lionel Robbins’s (1932) famous essay on the nature and significance of economic science. In this essay Robbins argued that economics should be about the efficient allocation of scarce resources, rather than about resource creation and the creation and distribution of wealth as advocated by classical economists such as Adam Smith, David Ricardo and Karl Marx. As Robbins saw it, a focus on scarcity and efficient allocation would delimit economics more clearly from other social sciences and also render it more amenable to scientific and mathematical investigation, particularly once certain subsidiary assumptions such as rational behaviour by economic agents were made. The debate about Robbins’s views and the extent to which they set rather than merely anticipated the future direction of economics continue to this day (Witztum and Cowell, 2009; Pitelis and Runde, 2011). But either way it is clear that economics took the route he was describing, with an ever-increasing emphasis on exchange relationships over production relationships and, as a result, to various challenges to the scarcity assumption, such as the existence of producible resources, technical change, innovation, learning and increasing returns to scale (Pasinetti, 2007; Pitelis, 2016), slipping from view. It also led to deep methodological commitments to rational choice modelling (focusing on risk as opposed to uncertainty in the sense of Keynes [1921, 1937] or Knight [1921]), equilibrium theorising and an emphasis on comparative static analysis under conditions of perfect (or less often imperfect) competition. Both sets of factors led in very different directions from the focus on evolutionary dynamics under conditions of real-life rivalry in the form of Schumpeterian creative destruction, as in Schumpeter (1942) and later Penrose (1959) and Nelson and Winter (1982), or the focus on increasing returns to scale, learning, structural change and uncertainty, found in the work of representatives of the Cambridge School such as Kaldor (1972), Robinson (1977), Pasinetti (1981, 2007) and Keynes (1936, 1937).