This paper investigates whether since the 1980s neoclassical economics has been in the process of being supplanted as the dominant research programme in economics by a collection of competing research approaches which share relatively little in common with each other or with neoclassical economics. A shortlist of the new approaches in recent economics includes game theory, experimental economics, behavioral economics, evolutionary economics, neuroeconomics, and non-linear complexity theory. Two hypotheses are advanced – one regarding the relation between economics instruction and economics research and one regarding the nature of the economics research frontier – to describe social-institutional practices that contribute to the replication of economics as a field. Two further hypotheses are advanced – one regarding the boundaries of the field and one regarding how the field appraises itself – to create a historical–methodological framework for evaluating the question of change in economics and change in recent economics in particular. Finally, the paper distinguishes three leading explanations – the ‘breakdown’ view, the ‘takeover’ view, and the ‘maturity’ view – of why neoclassical economics no longer dominates a mainstream economics.

In this study the international trajectories of mature district evolution are investigated as a special case of institutional change, and a theoretical model for their evolution is proposed. This model is based on the idea that international growth and re-positioning represent the fundamental alternative to district sterilization and decline, in a framework where global markets provide the major pressure for change or decline but could also provide new opportunities for renewal. Alternative paths emerge from the combination of trigger events due to globalization and district leaders' behaviour: disembeddedness, re-embeddedness and multiple embeddedness are proposed here as the three main outcomes of mature district evolution. The latter constitutes a new construct introduced in this study in order to explore the possibility that districts relate themselves to global space creating similar systems abroad and/or establishing ties with existing systems, each one representing both a local network and a node of a global network.

Bounded rationality, opportunism, the primacy of markets and the action of economizing are building blocks of Oliver Williamson's Transaction Cost Economics (TCE). As in all intellectual exchanges, Williamson has used a range of argumentative devices to set up and negotiate his basic notions and assumptions with economists. Rhetorical analysis is applied here to study his argumentation in a certain institutional context within economics. Negotiations with the mainstream, with the competence view of the firm and within the New Institutional Economics, for instance, have had an impact on the construction of TCE and are given attention here. Difficult decisions have been made in order to forge ahead with TCE, including whether to uphold some notions (e.g. opportunism) at the cost of leaving others behind (e.g. economics of atmosphere). Rhetorical transactions like this have shaped TCE and its recognition in economics and related areas.

This paper provides an evolutionary perspective on financial systems based on complex systems theory. This perspective is used to organize the discussion about the convergence and non-convergence of financial systems. Based on a notion of financial systems as configuration of complementary elements, it is suggested that the convergence of financial systems is best conceptualized as a path-dependent process of institutional change and innovation. The implication of the evolutionary perspective on the dynamics of financial systems is that neither convergence theories using a simple evolutionary argument of survival of the fittest nor divergence theories related to strong complementarities can provide much guidance for analyzing institutional transformations of financial systems.

This review article looks back at the first ten years of one of the most contentious elements of the global economy's new institutionalized governance regime. It examines the global political economy of protecting intellectual property, focusing on some key issues regarding the extension of such protection into the economies of developing countries, as discussed in three recent books. The review concludes that, for institutional economics, the problem of intellectual property is the problem of institutionalizing property rights writ large. As such, the problem of intellectual property in the global political economy can only be fully understood by establishing the historical and institutional context in which these rights are claimed.

Werner Sombart was a leading member of the German historical school in the later decades of its existence. This movement is conventionally divided into two: the ‘older historical school’ beginning with Wilhelm Roscher (1817–1894) and others in the 1840s, and the ‘younger historical school’ beginning with Gustav Schmoller (1838–1917) in the 1880s. The German historical school lasted until the devastations of the Nazi period and the Second World War.