Social Ontology and Economic Theory Dynamics
Summary
Social ontology investigates the fundamental structures—roles, norms and institutions—that constitute collective life, while economic theory dynamics examines how these structures evolve and interact with economic processes over time. The convergence of these fields has led to a richer understanding of how money, markets and policy instruments emerge from, and in turn reshape, the social fabric. By recognising that economic variables are embedded in social relations and institutional contexts, scholars have developed novel frameworks that capture the fluidity of institutional change, the relational constitution of value and the normative dimensions of market behaviour. This integrated perspective has practical applications in governance, financial stability and sustainable resource management, offering policymakers tools to anticipate systemic risks and design interventions that account for both structural constraints and agentive capacities.
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Social Ontology and Economic Theory Dynamics publication trend
The graph below shows the total number of articles in social ontology and economic theory dynamics across all publications each year (not limited to Nature Index journals).
Technical terms
Social ontology: The study of the basic entities, relations and institutions that constitute social reality.
Social positioning theory: A framework emphasising how community structures organise individuals and objects into economic roles with correlated rights and duties.
Structure–agency framework: A model analysing how social and economic outcomes arise from the interplay between institutional structures and individual decision-making.
Common-pool resources: Shared goods for which exclusion is costly and one user’s consumption reduces availability to others, central to governance challenges.
Growth imperative: The hypothesis that inherent properties of credit and monetary systems generate systemic pressures for continuous economic expansion.
References
- Social positioning theory. Cambridge Journal of Economics (2021).
- Bloomington and Cambridge compared: varieties of ontological thinking, social positioning, and the self-governance of common-pool resources. Cambridge Journal of Economics (2024).
- The Structure–Agency Relation of Growth Imperative Hypotheses in a Credit Economy. New Political Economy (2021).
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