1From May 30 to June 1, 2022, an international conference was hosted at the Maison des Sciences Économiques (Université Paris 1 Panthéon-Sorbonne), whose topic was “Recent Shifts in the Boundaries of Economics: Philosophy and History”.

2The aim of the conference was to gather original contributions on the relationships between economics and other disciplines. More precisely, the goal of the organizers was to renew the literature on disciplinary boundaries in order to go beyond the now standard narratives about disciplinary incompatibilities, formal or discursive borrowings or economic imperialism. Notably, the organizers called for contributions exploring disciplines or fields underrepresented within the literature on economics’ disciplinary boundaries—such as engineering, geography, bio-physical sciences, anthropology, political sciences, management. Also, the call for papers invited contributions that would account for a change in internal boundaries of economics, considering the development and institutionalization of new fields (e.g. gender economics, forensic economics, happiness economics) as providing a potential basis for a renew kind of interplay between disciplinary practices and methods.

3The outcome met the expectations, and we are pleased to present this special issue of Œconomia as a selection of papers presented at the conference. All the articles in this issue are witness for these new trends and new objects of study to think about economics’ boundaries. They are taking seriously the idea that specific sub-fields of economics and rarely discussed inter-disciplinary exchanges are worth studying and that they represent favorable environments for original and complex instances of interdisciplinarity. This issue would not have been possible without the exchanges that took place at the conference, and we renew our acknowledgments for financial support from various institutions: Université Paris 1 Panthéon-Sorbonne (grant AAP Politique Scientifique), Centre d’Économie de la Sorbonne, Université Paris-Est Créteil, and the Laboratoire Interdisciplinaire d’Étude du Politique Hannah Arendt (LIPHA).

4The most noteworthy aspect of the selection gathered here is precisely that it takes a definitely complex look at boundaries. The reader of this special issue should not expect to learn that such idea or method used in economics has been borrowed from another clearly delimited discipline or field of study. Instead, several case studies reported here focus on some blending of ideas and incomplete transfers of tools and concepts. They also point out that, over the past century, interdisciplinary exchanges have been gaining higher recognition by the profession. Also, the disciplines and tools that are at the core of the following articles have not received much recognition in the past, and they open interesting perspectives for future research.

5A short presentation of the content follows.

6Far from standard views about economic imperialism, Gianluca Damiani documents the case of the introduction of game theory in political science in the magnus opus of William H. Riker, The Theory of Political Coalitions (1962). This book, alongside other works (James Buchanan and Gordon Tullock, 1965; Anthony Downs, 1957; Duncan Black, 1958) has marked the birth of a formal political theory. It turns out that this introduction of modern formal tools of mathematical economics goes together with an outdated view of economics, at odds with the representation of economics as “a system of relations” that game theory was supposed to convey (an expression borrowed from Giocoli, 2003). In this case, the introduction of game theory into political science—a tool borrowed from economics—is disconnected from a global narrative about the representation of political coalitions. Instead, the author argues that Riker’s views about economics were still grounded in the idea of representing equilibrium as the outcome of “a system of force”, looking for stable arrangements.

7“Hope in Economic Analysis: From the Psychological Approach to a Transactional and Institutional Conception” (in French), by Emmanuel Petit, aims to provide a genuine interdisciplinary understanding of the role of a single individual emotion, hope, through a transactional and institutional approach. Hope has been rarely mobilized in economics (for instance, Hirschman,1971 and Duflo, 2012), since behavioral economists are more interested in cognitive emotions and social emotions. However, as a concept linked to confidence, expectations or motivations, hope is key to think about such fundamental issues as behavior towards environmental damages and climate change or in the face of geopolitical conflicts. As the concept of fear, hope is an emotion linked to individuals’ thoughts about what might happen. Economics would benefit from using a concept of hope. However, hope needs to be analyzed as a dynamic and social concept. Absent a representation of social and environmental contexts, no relevant theory of hope can be erected. That is why the institutionalist and transactional approaches are promising tools for a theory of hope in economics. To this effect, Petit draws on Commons’s concept of futurity and Dewey’s analysis of emotions.

8The next article in this special issue focuses on the relationships between economics and anthropology (“Two Moments in the Relations between Economics and Anthropology: History and Methodological Issues”, in French). Through a historical record of two distant episodes of confrontation between economists and anthropologists, Véronique Dutraive reflects on the institutional and theoretical evolutions that made the interplay between economics and anthropology successful in the beginning of the 21^st century. Dutraive’s account of the interplay between economics and anthropology adds to the usual analysis of disciplinary borrowings and transfers the fact of the internal fragmentation of economics and anthropology at different periods, leading to intra-disciplinary boundaries. The first episode takes place in the 1940s, at a time when the field of anthropology is roughly split between formalists and substantivists. Some anthropologists show a non-reciprocated interest in economics and wish to connect their analysis of preindustrial societies to neoclassical economic thinking, as illustrated by exchanges between Melville Herskovits and Frank Knight. The second episode takes place at the turn of 21^st century. In a context of fragmentation of economics, Dutraive identifies two instances of hybridization between economics and anthropology, intruding into the broad stream of research in behavioral and evolutionary economics. On the one hand, she documents the contributions to behavioral economics of anthropologist Joseph Heinrich, through a famous series of experiments on social dilemmas. On the other hand, she discusses the possible links between David Graeber’s critical anthropology and Sam Bowles and Herbert Gintis’s analysis of redistributive norms.

9Another contribution to this special issue deals with the substantive-formalist opposition. In “Anthropology Facing Embeddedness: The Case of Maurice Godelier’s Reception of Karl Polanyi” (in French), Ariel Guillet deals with another time period—the 1970s and 1980s—and another academic area—France. Guillet sets out to highlight how Maurice Godelier, a Marxist anthropologist, came to change his views about economic phenomena to account for Karl Polanyi’s theses. Guillet documents Godelier’s repeated efforts to open a dialog with Polanyi’s substantivist theses. He shows that Godelier has been constantly amending his Marxist formalist framework of interpretation of socio-economic phenomena in order to introduce substantivist principles in it. Guillet vindicates a philosophy of humanities and an economic philosophy perspectives on his subject. Hence, the contextual elements that may have driven Godelier’s evolution are not developed. In his works of the 1960s, Godelier regards Polanyi’s contributions simply as contributions to “critical empiricism”, hence as plagued by the flaws of empiricism, while instead the Marxist approach bears pretentions to being a genuine theoretical approach. To Gedelier, embeddedness is but a descriptive concept and Polanyi’s analysis of markets prevents him from eliciting the fundamental mechanisms behind markets. Over the next two decades or so, Godelier changed his views about Polanyi. Through an introduction of embeddedness into his system of thought, Godelier has come to reinterpret Marxist concepts (infrastructures, production modes) as functions and not as instances to which separate institutions are associated. Several institutions taken together can form self-sufficient infrastructures at different periods, explaining the variable place of economics in societies.

10Another area where disciplinary hybridization can flourish is bio-physics, meaning by that term the science that studies the laws of energy and material transformations induced by all kinds of natural or artefactual activities. As an illustration, Ambroise Joulin analyses the works and activities of Marion King Hubbert (“Analyzing Economics as A Physicist: An Introduction to the Economic Thought of Marion King Hubbert”, in French). Marion King Hubbert (1903-1989) as a geophysicist well-known for his theory of peak oil; he was also an engineer actively involved in the Technocratic Movement in the 1930s in the United States.

11Hubbert advocates for a planification of economic activities based on a non-metaphorical use of physical phenomena to monitor markets. Joulin shows how Hubbert’s stance is built on a criticism of economics as a theory of production and exchange plagued by its ignorance of physical laws. If geophysics is bound to become a yardstick for thinking about economics planning, another question lends itself then: What becomes the source of normativity if market values are replaced by a simple search for the rational use of physical resources and laws of energy? To illustrate Hubbert’s thoughts and answer to this fundamental question, Joulin analyses in detail Hubbert’s book Technocracy Study Course (Hubbert, [1934] 2005), which contains the most accurate account of his thoughts about economics and the economy. The book is a statement of the historical dimension of the economy governed by the history of geophysical processes. These epistemological foundations determine Hubbert’s views on purely artefactual and instrumental institutions in the economy: money, debts, values; and it is left to the engineer to decide of the goals and rules to be followed for production and distribution.

12As exemplified in the contributions by Joulin, Dutraive, Guillet, Petit or Damiani, the logic of studying disciplinary boundaries between economics and, bio-physics, anthropology, psychology or political theory stems naturally from the fact that economics has developed based on some specific assumptions about the availability of resources, the nature of individual motivations, rational behavior, or the autonomy of individuals as members of a collective through market coordination and voting. Things are quite different when one wants to think of boundaries between economics and management, the latter being the historical outcome of a mix of specialties built from various subfields of economics (industrial organization), finance, sociology, psychology, engineering. Lise Arena and Richard Arena meet the challenge of thinking about “disciplinary boundaries” in this case by providing a comparative analysis of management and business research and teaching institutions in France and Britain since the 1950s (“Management and Microeconomics: A Historical Comparison between the British and the French Traditions”). They definitely stick to a conceptual approach of the history of management thought. The main assumption is that management thought developed in reaction to economic analysis, rejecting some central concepts and methodologies used in microeconomics.

13One of the main characteristics of the French tradition in management studies is the significant role given to methodology and epistemology in the context of its emergence. This trait did not really appear during the “pedagogic” period before the sixties but is essentially related to the emergence of its “research” period, since the 1970s. When considering the creation of British business schools, most fundings were provided by large donations from major British companies or national research councils that were expecting a combination of technical, strategic and organizational perspectives. In both cases, roots of management research can clearly be found in microeconomics tradition, especially regarding the concept of the firm, business behavior and approaches on rationality.

14By contrast, the French tradition experienced a more sudden and abrupt separation that the British one. French management researchers pleaded in favor of an independent discipline, clearly distinct from and opposed to microeconomic theory and other social sciences. In the British case, the notion of fragmentation of research in management (finance and corporate finance, marketing, accounting, human resources, strategy and entrepreneurship) emerged but, as the authors show, it was not a consequence of interdisciplinarity. Quite the contrary, it was thought as favoring the unity of management studies, attributing a more precise meaning to the empirical content of evolving and creative rationality.

15The last article in this special issue is a plea for hybridization. Don Ross, Wynn C. Stirling and Luca Tummolini’s article is a methodological investigation on the usefulness of a specific modeling methodology–conditional game theory—to represent relationships between the stabilization of norms in groups and strategic choices of individual agents As such, it can be read as a contribution to the development of a specific domain of economics in which some principles and methods from game theory and sociology are blended into the domain of evolutionary economics. Another instance of a complex hybridization between economics and other social sciences. As the title of their contribution indicates (“Modeling Norm-Governed Communities with Conditional Games: Sociological Game-Determination and Economic Equilibria”) the starting point of their inquiry assumes that norms are not instituted but created through individuals’ interactions, and it is the task of the evolutionary theory of institutions and norms to account for it.

16Now, the fact is that economists have been used to think about norms as the result of exogenously given preferences and as the outcome of some laws of interactions that can be captured through non-cooperative games. On the contrary, sociologists claim that preferences should be endogenized. This opposition has been somewhat blurred over the past decades, and some communities of economists are now searching for a broader understanding of norms’ emergence and evolutions, which they feel important for better empirical adequacy. As the authors underline, the search for endogenous modeling of norms and preferences that sustain them is not to be attributed to a specific discipline, it has no clear-cut disciplinary “ownership”. Norms arise and spread partly through cultural evolution, for which there is a rich literature linking formal anthropological models (Boyd and Richerson, 1985) with evolutionary game theory (Gintis, 2009; 2016).

17The authors’ exploration aims to blend different processes involved in norms’ formation and the interactions between individuals’ construction of preferences and the shaping of norms. They take as their starting point the idea of conditionality, that is, the view that agents’ choices to conform their actions to norms are often sensitive to the extent to which they observe corresponding behavior in those with whom they interact. Hence, a pure Kantian view about morality, assuming that some norms of behavior can be determined unconditionally to their use by other members of society (Bicchieri, 2017), should be replaced with normative conditionality as a basis for understanding choice-sensitive sociality. The article details the modeling strategies at disposal, relying on conditional game theory to implement a fruitful analytical framework to “rationalize” such a choice-sensitive sociality. Thus, conditional game theory is proposed as a “meta-language” for the purpose of unifying short-run and long-run perspectives on social norms. The bulk of the discussion turns around the modeling of mind-shaping of individuals in these models. Conditional norm-dependent preferences are the product of a mind-shaping processes, which play a role in the dynamics towards the creation and the stabilization of behavioral patterns in interactive contexts. The authors point also to “vertiginous” consequences of their approach for welfare improving policies, to the effect of shifting the focus on the conditions for preference changes. Beyond interdisciplinarity, they claim to contribute to cross-disciplinary unification, “without any implication that disciplines should merge or fuse”.

18Ross, Stirling and Tummolini’s article indicates that discussions about disciplinary boundaries nowadays have become largely integrated into discussion about modeling strategies within communities that are in search of a common, formal language. This is promising a rich future for research on the boundaries of economics.