Interdisciplinary Economics

Kenneth E. Boulding’s Engagement in the Sciences

Wilfred Dolfsma, Stefan Kesting

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2013
• Print ISBN: 9781138901872
• eBook ISBN: 9781134081905
• Topic: Business
• Subtopic: Business General
• Index: Business

Kenneth Boulding was a prolific writer across so many different fields that not only is he often much referred to and cited, he is considered a core member of many of these fields. Boulding is the quintessential interdisciplinary scholar. He died in 1993, but he has left a legacy in economics, conflict studies, systems theory, ecology, biology, communication studies, and ethics. As an economist proper he has tested and expanded the boundaries of that field without unduly "invading" and undermining the expertise and established knowledge of the other social sciences. This proposed volume will allow scholars who have worked or are starting to work in areas that Boulding has initiated, established and made a continued contribution to, to understand the links between these fields and other related ones. The volume will establish a source of inspiration for some time to come.

Part I

Introduction

1 Boulding and interdisciplinary economics

Introduction to the volume

Wilfred Dolfsma and Stefan Kesting

Interdisciplinary social science

One reason for us to choose Kenneth Boulding as a focal point of attention in this volume is that his research and thinking is, in its very nature, one that engages, from a background in economics, with a wide range of disciplines in the social sciences and beyond. There has been much methodological discussion of late about how to conceptualize from a methodological point of view research that engages with other research traditions beyond discipline borders. Scientific disciplines develop along trajectories that have an internal logic, as Thomas Kuhn has argued (Kuhn 1962; Dosi 1982; Dolfsma & Welch 2009), yet may expect novelty and innovation to be instigated when insights from beyond its borders enter (cf. Dolfsma et al. 2011). Allowing such insights to intrude, possibly breaching what Thomas Kuhn has called a “protective belt” that actively defends core insights in a discipline from falsification, a process that involves active policing by the community (Gieryn 1999), is not obvious, despite the prodding by funding agencies. A major impetus for funding agencies to promote interdisciplinary research, besides a belief that new insights may thus be stimulated, is that such research is regarded as being more beneficial to society. The view of science as part of society, which this entails, is one that is wholeheartedly supported by Boulding.

Three figures may help to clarify what it can mean and entail for a particular science to relate to other sciences or reach beyond its own boundaries.

Using insights from two (or more) disciplines without actively bringing the two together to explore where they connect and really, substantively, complement each other would be a case of multidisciplinary research, as illustrated in Figure 1.1a. Actively exploring connections and exploiting complementarities, as illustrated in Figure 1.1b, would be characterized as interdisciplinary research. When insights are exchanged between two such science-systems, drawing on systems theory expounded, amongst others, by Luhmann (1995), one would expect that each of these systems will not remain unaltered, but influence each other. Both science a and science b, at least in the perception of the practitioners involved, will develop in a different way afterwards from how they would develop had they not actively been brought to engage with each other. The purview of each science changes as a result in the meantime.

Figure 1.1 a Multidisciplinary research; b Interdisciplinary research; c Transdisciplinary research.

When the might of two separate disciplines is brought to bear, simultaneously, on a theme or domain where an academic issue is addressed, transdisciplinary research happens. Such transdisciplinary research does not hold concepts or approaches sacred just because a protective belt insulates them from scrutiny. Transdisciplinary research would appear to result most likely from research efforts to address a particular real-world problem, rather than from researchers looking around for a problem from the perspective of their discipline (cf. Phelps-Brown 1972). The latter is likely to result in what some call “blackboard economics/science” without regard for real-world problems or phenomena, or in A′–C′ economics (science) (see McCloskey 1994). The latter produces scientific “results” by ever so slightly changing the assumptions (A′) for a new model when compared to a previous model (A), to derive and publish slightly new conclusions (C′).

Transdisciplinary research pragmatically adopts concepts from any of the fields believed to be relevant, discusses the extent to which these are complementary and relevant to the study at hand, and applies these in the context of a particular problem. Concepts and relations between concepts may need to be re-considered as a result, however. Transdisciplinary research will also need to apply Occam’s Razor to cut out what should be considered “noise” just as much as single-discipline research—it is not less scientific in this sense, and perhaps more so.

Kenneth Ewart Boulding

Mott authored an outstanding personal and academic biography of Kenneth Boulding soon after his death in 1993 in the Economic Journal (Mott 2000). Boulding’s personal and academic lives are closely intertwined; his interdisciplinary approach in his scientific endeavors seems very much inspired by his personal experiences and convictions. While this volume primarily is meant to address interdisciplinary research in the social sciences in general and in economics in particular, Boulding is exemplary in what an interdisciplinary approach can lead to.

Kenneth Boulding’s research can be characterized as much more than adopting two (or more) otherwise separate disciplines in the social sciences without relating the two or bringing them together. Rather than merely being multidisciplinary, as Figure 1.1a illustrates, Boulding actively aimed to engage different sciences by bringing them together to allow for cross-fertilization. This would seem to hold in particular for economics, sociology, and anthropology under the overarching frameworks of exchange theory and systems theory. In particular his emphasis on communication, one could claim, allows Boulding to bring disciplines to cross into each other’s conceptual domains. Boulding did not opt for the easy imperialist approach of taking a given conceptual framework to “apply” it to a set of problems not normally considered by that discipline. Current practitioners in economics, and Gary Becker in particular, have been accused of imperialism of this kind (Swedberg 1990, 1990a). Rather, Boulding has adopted what may be called transdisciplinary research (Figure 1.1c)—his life-long project on the grants economy of love, threat, and exchange might best signify this.

In a way, however, Kenneth Boulding can be seen to have, almost single-handedly, created new fields of study that have grown into disciplines by themselves over the past decades. Most prominently among these are ecological and grants economics as well as peace and conflict studies.

Judged by the criterion of the amount of interdisciplinary research undertaken by an individual researcher, Boulding’s research might well be characterized as extraordinarily interdisciplinary. For one, the area of overlap for him is very large. The rugged edges in Figure 1.2 suggest active engagement as well as involvement in the changing nature of boundaries between disciplines and newly emerging disciplines. Boulding has been much more willing and able than others to venture into areas well beyond what economists would normally dare. He has learned from that, no doubt, but has also taught many how to start and pursue such an endeavor.

While placing great emphasis on transferring knowledge and transforming it, Boulding has not been afraid of taking academic risks. Single-discipline research is relatively safe, as it will surely deliver novel insights, albeit of a more circumscribed nature. Single-discipline research is likely to be incremental, too. More radical research is, however, risky in itself. It might yield nothing new, and a proportion of the research that Boulding has been engaged in has not produced something to stand the test of time. More radical research may, however, also result in highly valuable insights and entirely novel and rich streams of research. In producing such insights and research streams, Boulding can be compared to Nobel Laureates. Maintaining such a research effort does mean that, personally, one must not be discouraged by just any sign of falsification. Fortunately, even the great philosopher of science Karl Popper has hinted that scientists may have to be stubborn at times (Popper 1976). Boulding may well have been stubborn to a degree, which is visible both in his overall goals and in his associative approach to reach those goals. While being stubborn enabled him to be productive, the associative approach has given some the impression of sloppiness. His approach to science, however, fitted with his view of how systems of knowledge develop and how communication occurs. After reviewing the different topics indicative of Boulding’s interdisciplinary research, in this Introduction and the sections with chapters to come, an epilogue briefly assesses Boulding’s contributions.

Figure 1.2 Interdisciplinary research by Boulding.

Choice of texts, choice of commentaries, and choice of commentators

We have chosen 13 different themes indicative of Boulding’s approach to interdisciplinary social science and have included poems and drawings by Boulding for each section. Research straddling the academic disciplines in particular has left a mark long after Boulding actively contributed to it. It may be here, studying conflicts and peace, and the ecology (Kesting 2010), for instance, that he has been most influential. Where he focused on single-discipline research, such as his work on post-Keynesian economics (Canterbery 1994; Harcourt 1983; Wray 1997), his work has been less influential, it would seem. Some of the interdisciplinary research has not had much of an impact, or has had less of an impact than one would have expected. His Grants Economy project may have been too far ahead of its time and could find a more conducive audience ready to be persuaded by its strengths now that behavioral economics is “in the swim”. We have thus chosen themes central to his work, characterizing its interdisciplinary nature.

While in most cases the choice for specific texts was quite obvious and will not rattle this volume’s audience, other choices have been more difficult to make. Mostly this has been because the themes for which choices were more difficult to make were more central to the work of Boulding. He has thus written more and more extensively on them. Some of these texts will be better known to a wider audience than others, but these may not be the ones that best and most concisely characterize Boulding’s work on the theme.

Systems theory is certainly Boulding’s predominant framework of analysis. It may even be seen as the significant one which unifies and gives direction to all his work. It is therefore not surprising that the key text chosen for the part focusing on systems theory has a lot of similarities with the key text chosen for the part on the unity of social sciences. Because the systems approach was so important for Boulding overall, it surfaces in some of the other chapters of this book, too. We chose to reprint one of his foundational, very early articles on the matter (1956). The text provides a good introduction to his view on systems theory and his hopes of what it could achieve for the progress of science in general and social science in particular. Khalil’s article (reprinted from 1996) can be read as a comment for this part because he concentrates on Boulding’s Ecodynamics, which is a key element of his systems theory and which Khalil carefully distinguishes from evolutionary economics. Joseph Pluta, who has currently written on the topic, kindly agreed to write the comment for this part.

Unfortunately, what appears to be Boulding’s direct statement to the topic of the unity of the social sciences in the pages of the journal Human Organization is just spontaneous and polite oral comment on Gunnar Myrdal’s address to a meeting of the society of applied anthropology in 1975, and covers only one page in print. While three chapters in his book Economics as a Science definitely hold a lot of material for this part, it is too broad-ranging to be reprinted in this volume. The best text to represent his views on the relation between economics and other social sciences is, thus, his paper on the relations of economic, political, and social systems (1962a). Boulding’s message is that all phenomena can be described as systems, each with different characteristics. This unifies the social and natural sciences in their attempt to analyze their specific subject areas. Social sciences are abstracting from and reducing the complexity of the social system of human history as a whole by breaking it up into manageable subsystems and dealing with each of those separately. The areas of social subsystems identified by Boulding (population, exchange, threat, and learning systems) create overlapping boundaries between disciplines in the social sciences. Moreover, they are not independent and constantly interact with each other. Hence, specialization in the social sciences is at once productive and dangerous. Thomas Marmefelt, an expert in the field, agreed to do the job. An earlier treatment of Boulding’s interdisciplinary research focusing on structuralism was produced by Robert Solo (1997).

The presidential address, given at the annual meetings of the American Economic Association, is the definitive contribution by Boulding on morality (1969). It discusses the topic in both directions: the ethos of economics and its ethical critiques, as well as the contribution of economics to the moral sciences. The text touches upon quite a few other schemes in this book and includes some remarks on religion. The excellent commentary articles by Warren Samuels and John Davis thus also tak...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• List of figures and tables
• List of contributors
• Acknowledgements
• PART I Introduction
• PART II Systems theory
• PART III Unity of social sciences
• PART IV Economics and morality
• PART V Communication/persuasion
• PART VI Power theory
• PART VII Evolutionary economics
• PART VIII Institutions/institutional economics
• PART IX Spaceship earth (ecological economics)
• PART X Cultural economics
• PART XI Grants economics
• PART XII Conflict resolution, peace
• PART XIII Teaching economics
• PART XIV The future of economics
• Sonnet for Economics
• Epilogue: Boulding transformations?
• Index