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This paper is an initial attempt to discuss the American institutionalist movement as it changed and developed after 1945. Institutionalism in the inter-war period was a relatively coherent movement held together by a set of general methodological, theoretical, and ideological commitments (Rutherford, 2011). Although institutionalism always had its critics, it came under increased attack in the 1940s, and faced challenges from Keynesian economics, a revived neoclassicism, econometrics, and from new methodological approaches derived from various versions of positivism. The institutionalist response to these criticisms, and particularly the criticism that institutionalism “lacked theory,” is to be found in a variety of attempts to redefine institutionalism in new theoretical or methodological terms. Perhaps the most important of these is to be found in Clarence Ayres’ The Theory of Economic Progress (1944), although there were many others. These developments were accompanied by a significant amount of debate, disagreement, and uncertainty over future directions. Some of this is reflected in the early history of The Association for Evolutionary Economics.

Formerly socialist economies of Eastern Europe have been advised by the West to adopt the property rights of classical capitalism. Yet the Western economies from which this advice emanates are all struggling to overcome productivity stagnation, resulting from the tensions between the interests of capital and labour. Experiments range from quality circles to far fuller worker participation in decision making and ownership. However, these experiments are coming forth slowly and timidly. Once in place, property rights are exceedingly difficult to alter. Thus those property rights chosen within East European economies over the next several years may be those which define these economies for the foreseeable future. Consequently, it would be an ironic and tragic twist of fact if East European economies were to turn now towards classical capitalism only to find that the future belongs to post‐capitalist forms of productive organization.

It was typical in nineteenth century economic thought to view the tensions between the interests of capital and labour as critical to industrial society. Yet later economic thought has generally reduced these tensions to those captured in contract theory. Explores how this narrowing of focus has cast an important source of contemporary social dynamics into the shadows. A broad survey is made of the various ways in which capital‐labour tensions are manifested in today′s advanced industrial economies, with special attention given to the case of the USA. Concludes with a discussion of how intensified international competitiveness, combined with our increasing distance from the threat of material privation, may force societies to restructure their economies so as to eliminate the source of capital‐labour tensions. The task facing liberal economic thought is to expand its scope to better provide guidance for meeting this challenge.

This chapter presents the hetrodox theory of Islamic finance in regard to the theme of corporate governance in the light of the particular Islamic epistemological premise. A vast social implication of corporate governance is opened by its epistemological inquiry comprehending integrated decision making and systemic complementarities expending across society at large. Thereby, a socio-financial theory of corporate governance in the epistemological context is elaborated upon. This is a path-breaking chapter premised on its epistemological approach of unity of knowledge and learning systems as a distinct contribution to the theory of corporate governance in the field of ethical socio-financial perspective.

In recent years, in the partial vacuum left by the apparent inadequacy of Keynesian economics, there has been a renaissance of natural law cosmology. Accordingly, the social world is again viewed through pre‐Keynesian spectacles as ideally self‐adjusting through the action of the free market. Although the re‐emergence of this outmoded ideology is reactionary, it has been salutary in checking the hubris of the positivistic and technocratic Keynesian fine tuners. The purpose of this article is to trace this revival of natural law cosmology and assess the challenge this ideological reversal poses to the prospects for the evolution of a “social economics”.

Virtually since its birth 200 years ago, modern economic thinking has been plagued by the question of what role to assign to values in economic theory and research. The dominant stance, initially set forth by Nassau Senior and rigorously reiterated and sophisticated by J. S. Mill, J. M. Keynes, Lionel Robbins, J. A. Schumpeter and M. Friedman, has been that scientific economics and ethical questions must be kept unambiguously separate. Scientific or positive economics deals with questions of fact or “is” questions, while normative economics deals with value or “ought” questions. As scientists, economists must content themselves with the analysis of positive issues. Values are viewed as beyond the purview of science, and consequently they must be taken as given, determined by social processes in which the economist might participate only as citizen. That this is the dominant understanding of what an appropriate stance toward values must be is attested to by its appearance in the preface or introductory chapter of most mainstream economics textbooks.

This chapter highlights why, with the current situation in a VUCA world, governments should consider to ‘leave alone’ the educational policy for the prosperity of special education. One possible way is that governments should let the ‘economic invisible hand’ take on the arrangement of inclusive education and proceed without interference to induce educational competition and the effectiveness of inclusive education.

Introduction The objectives of this paper are twofold. Firstly, we will define economic paradigm by identifying its structure and functions. Secondly, we will apply this concept to social economics and human economics.