Introduction to the special issue: William M. Dugger’s concepts of social and institutional economics

Abstract

William M. Dugger’s contributions to social and institutional economics are critically evaluated, reconstructed, summarized, and applied to various problems and issues in this special issue. This short paper introduces the special issue and summarizes the papers included here. It explains how Phillip O’Hara’s paper merges Dugger’s concepts with O’Hara’s principles in order to situate, reconstruct, and summarize the concepts. It summarizes William M. Dugger’s paper, where the concepts of vesting, entrenching, shirking, and faking are applied to the negative impact of competition on the quality of life and socioeconomic performance of modern capitalism. It describes how Ahmet Öncü applies some of Dugger’s concepts to the role of engineers in Turkey through attempts to promote the community’s joint stock of knowledge and the common good. It outlines William Waller’s discussion of Dugger’s concepts of power and hegemony, and the theoretical and methodological contributions Dugger makes to these concepts. It surveys Samuel Rosenberg’s paper, which explains the continuing relevance of Dugger’s concept of the administered labor market. And it sketches Alexander Dunlap’s analysis of Dugger’s four invaluation processes vis-à-vis the medical, ecological, and economic anomalies with flush toilet infra-systems. A conclusion follows.

Keywords:

• Dugger’s concepts
• social and institutional economics
• principles
• joint stock of knowledge
• vesting
• entrenching
• shirking and faking
• vested interests v. common good
• power and hegemony
• administered labor markets
• invaluation processes

Keywords:

• JEL Classifications: A31
• B52
• P10
• Z13