Theories Of Social Capital: Researchers Behaving Badly

Description Tracing the evolution of social capital since his highly acclaimed contribution of 2001 (Social Capital Versus Social Theory), Ben Fine consolidates his position as the world's leading critic of the concept. Fine forcibly demonstrates how social capital has expanded across the social sciences only by degrading the different disciplines and topics that it touches: a McDonaldisation of social theory. The rise and fall of social capital at the World Bank is critically explained as is social capital's growing presence in disciplines, such as management studies, ...

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From Economics Imperialism to Freakonomics: The Shifting Boundaries between Economics and other Social Sciences

Ben Fine, School of Oriental and African Studies, University of London, UK Dimitris Milonakis, University of Crete, Greece PDF Is or has economics ever been the imperial social science? Could or should it ever be so? These are the central concerns of this book. It involves a critical reflection on the process of how economics became the way it is, in terms of a narrow and intolerant orthodoxy, that has, nonetheless, increasingly directed its attention to appropriating the subject matter of other social sciences through the process termed "economics imperialism". In ...

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From Political Economy to Economics: Method, the social and the historical in the evolution of economic theory

By Dimitris Milonakis and Ben Fine. Developments within economics of incorporating the historical (and the social, institutional, etc more generally) have been welcomed as progress over excessive formalism and lack of realism. But, by situating these developments in terms of the shifting relationship between economics, the historical and an evolving economics imperialism, a fuller understanding of the role of economic theory and the historical is presented as a prerequisite for analysis that aspires fully to address economic and historical change.

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