Paris, January 4, 5 and 6, 2022.
Deadline extension: June 15 2021
Call for Papers
Version française ici.
Over the past four decades, the literature in philosophy and history of economics has sparked a growing interest in the changing boundaries between economics and other disciplines.
Political economy emerged at the end of the 18th century as an autonomous scientific discipline; as other contemporary emerging fields, political economy built its field by drawing clear boundaries with other disciplines, such as demography, political arithmetic, morals, political philosophy, etc. Over the following centuries, these boundaries evolved, notably (1) in response to the emergence of other disciplines in the social sciences - in particular sociology; (2) to adapt the rhetoric of economics to the emergence of new institutional norms regulating the intellectual and academic professions; and (3) as a result of the development of new formal methods, new data constructs, and new data processing techniques.
The purpose of this conference is to invite scholars in economics, history of economics, and philosophy of economics to broaden the scope of research that has developed over the last four decades on the boundaries of economics.
Four main areas of research will be emphasized.
Important contributions have focused on methods and instruments, including quantitative methods, mathematics, modeling and experimental protocols. This conference will offer new perspectives on this first theme, with a particular focus on the changes in methods and instruments that occurred after the 1980s.
Another stream of research has investigated the theme of the changing boundaries of economics in terms of “imperialism” or “interdisciplinarity”. From this perspective, the boundaries of economics establish interfaces of exchanges (of research objects, methods, data, etc.) taking place across different disciplines. Several examples have already been documented, such as the relationship between economics and psychology, economics and law, economics and sociology, economics and biology, economics and physics. The conference will host original case studies illustrating other “exchanges” occurring at the frontiers of economics: between economics and geography, economics and history, economics and management, economics and sustainability sciences, economics and cybernetics…
The boundaries of economics have also been transformed by the implementation of public policies and their evaluation using new quantitative or formal methods - as illustrated by the example of randomized field experiments, imported from medicine. Whether or not these recommendations are followed by practical implementation, they play a central role in the cross-evaluation of the relationships between various disciplines, state intervention and the mechanisms of interaction between the public and academic spheres. The conference will include contributions on case studies of these new interfaces between politics and academia.
Finally, we shall welcome contributions that explore the changing internal boundaries of the economic domain, delineating the contours of its various sub-disciplines. This new field of research has recently been approached through the history of the classification and categorization of fields of research in economics, which have highlighted the emergence of new subfields, based on the implementation of new methods (such as experimental economics), on interest in new objects (such as gender economics) or on the implementation of new practices (for example, forensic economics). The study of these new subfields has the particularity - and interest - of directing the gaze towards smaller units of analysis, thus offering new historiographic approaches to this field of research.
A few dates
The conference will be held in Paris on January 4, 5 and 6, 2022.
Abstracts (from 600 to 800 words) should be sent before June 15, 2021 to Annie.Cot@univ-paris1.fr or Dorian.Jullien@univ-paris1.fr
The Scientific Council's answers will be notified on July 12, 2021
Contributions to the conference should be sent before December 1, 2021
Scientific Council
François Allisson (Université de Lausanne); Roger Backhouse (University of Birmingham); Antoinette Baujard (University Jean Monnet, Lyon Saint-Etienne); Cléo Chassonnery-Zaïgouche (University of Cambridge); Béatrice Cherrier (Center for Research in Economics and Statistics); François Claveau (Université de Sherbrooke); Annie L. Cot (Université Paris 1 Panthéon-Sorbonne); Muriel Dal-Pont Legrand (Université Côte d'Azur, Nice); John Davis (Marquette University); Judith Favereau (Université Lumière Lyon 2); Jérôme Gautié (Université Paris 1 Panthéon-Sorbonne); Wade Hands (University of Puget Sound); Catherine Herfeld (University of Zurich); Jérôme Lallement (Université de Paris); Catherine Larrère (Université Paris 1 Panthéon-Sorbonne); Jean-Sébastien Lenfant (Université de Lille); Harro Maas (Université de Lausanne); Eric Monnet (Paris School of Economics).
