Specialization, fragmentation, and pluralism in economics

Abstract

This paper investigates whether specialisation in research is causing economics to become an increasingly fragmented and diverse discipline with a continually rising number of niche-based research programmes and a declining role for dominant cross-science research programmes. It opens by framing the issue in terms of centrifugal and centripetal forces operating on research in economics, and then distinguishes descriptive from normative pluralism. It reviews recent research regarding the JEL code and economics’ J. B. Clark Award that points towards rising specialisation and fragmentation of research in economics. It then reviews five related arguments that might explain increasing specialisation and fragmentation in economics: (i) Smith’s early division of labour view, (ii) Kuhn’s later thinking about the importance of specialisation, (iii) Heiner’s behavioral burden of knowledge argument, (iv) Ross’s innovation-diffusion analysis and Arthur’s theory of technological change as determinants of specialisation in science, and (v) the effects of space and culture or internationalisation on innovation appropriation. The paper then discusses what descriptive pluralism implies about normative pluralism, and makes a case for multidisciplinarity over interdisciplinarity as a basis for arguments promoting pluralism. The paper closes with brief comments on the issue of specialisation and pluralism in the wider world outside economics and science.

Keywords:

• Specialisation
• fragmentation
• pluralism
• innovation-diffusion
• internationalisation

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

1 Relatedly, others have emphasised the increasingly empirical nature of recent economics (e.g., Hamermesh 2013; Rodrik 2015).

2 “The man whose whole life is spent in performing a few simple operations, of which the effects are perhaps always the same, or very nearly the same, has no occasion to exert his understanding or to exercise his invention in finding out expedients for removing difficulties which never occur. He naturally loses, therefore, the habit of such exertion, and generally becomes as stupid and ignorant as it is possible for a human creature to become. The torpor of his mind renders him not only incapable of relishing or bearing a part in any rational conversation, but of conceiving any generous, noble, or tender sentiment, and consequently of forming any just judgement concerning many even of the ordinary duties of private life… But in every improved and civilised society this is the state into which the labouring poor, that is, the great body of the people, must necessarily fall, unless government takes some pains to prevent it” (Smith (1776) 1937, 734–735).

3 Rogers’ analysis was subsequently formalised in differential equation terms by Bass (1969), and diffusion curves are now conventionally referred to as Bass diffusion curves. See Rogers et al. (2005) for a complex adaptive systems network theory model of a diffusion process employing his four main phases of appropriation.

4 One example Arthur (2009, 39ff) uses is the development of the U.S. F-35 Lightning II fighter aircraft. How decisions were made that combined very different technologies was the result of designers needing to address problems they encountered in making use of individual technologies when the aircraft had to meet certain main design objectives (speed, maneuverability, etc.). In this way, human problem solving replaces natural selection as the determinant of technology evolution.

5 In effect, the increasing rate of innovation reduces the standardisation time in Ross’s cycle so that new innovations begin to become obsolete and adoption stalls before they become standard. An interesting macroeconomic question is: does this tend to suppress business investment?

6 Three important dimensions are: how science texts are translated across languages, how national policy contexts selectively emphasise some dimensions of ideas and de-emphasise others, and how disciplines vary historically in importance across countries.

7 Essentially, disciplines’ autonomy stems, as in trade theory’s treatment of nations’ autonomy, from given resource endowment differences, where “given” is treated statically and in an ahistorical manner.