Special Issue “Perspectives of Social Economics Today”: European Contributions

Dear Reader,

The present edition is a themed issue on the present state of social economics, with papers taking stock, discussing conceptual questions, outlining a philosophy of future research and applying social economics or socio-economics to two major fields of research—labour markets and personnel. Against the background of financial and economic crises and the subsequently diminishing trust in orthodox economics, we witness a renaissance of socio-economic approaches. They are expected to deliver thicker descriptions, better explanations and superior public policy recommendations regarding the burning issues of the economies. Social economics or socio-economics, of course, is not the only addressee of such high expectations; it finds itself in the best company with widely recognized research traditions beyond the economic mainstream.

Like neighbouring research traditions, the overarching notion of socio-economics comprises a spectrum of different approaches. Nevertheless, social or socio-economics may, in principle, be characterized by four typical perspectives varying in specificity and emphasis: (1) social embeddedness of the economy, its institutions and actors, (2) historicity of patterns of economic action, processes and structures, (3) multiple motivation of economic action and (4) interdisciplinary and transdisciplinary analysis (cf. Hedtke, 2015).

Some of the authors of this special issue deliberately use the notion socio-economics in a more or less similar way as social economics. They locate socio-economics within the field of social science disciplines, outline alternative paradigmatic scenarios and present concrete profiles of socio-economic research.

The issue starts with an overview of the field of socio-economics and its neighbouring areas of research. In his paper, Simon Niklas Hellmich provides orientation of the topography of socio-economics, its major theoretical and methodological currents and key subject areas. From his point of view, socio-economics could best be characterized as a research tradition with a potential and a need for developing a more coherent overarching approach.

The conceptual paper of Karl H. Müller outlines four dimensions of a sustainable evolution of socio-economics. As main building blocks for future research, he suggests evolution and complexity theories, knowledge and information theories, theories of creativity and cognition, and second-order analyses.

Wolfram Elsner discusses the convergence of different streams of social economic theorizing into a common research programme which may mutually reinforce the strength of “heterodox” approaches. Common characteristics of social economics are embeddedness and socially situated decision, complexity, consideration of values and institutional diversity. Simultaneously, heterodox diversity is looming large. Therefore, debates on how to increase convergence and active pluralism are needed.

Controversies on orthodox economic and socio-economic approaches are also familiar within sub-disciplinary areas of research, for example, in personnel management and labour market theory.

The post-disciplinary approach of Steve Fleetwood combines socio-economics of labour market and critical realism to achieve an alternative model of labour markets as mechanisms. Fleetwood emphasizes the simultaneous relevance of several mechanisms beside market mechanism, e.g. immigration control, which are connected with institutions, organizations and structures. He suggests a broad spectrum of phenomena to be studied in order to explain labour markets which necessarily entails post-disciplinary work.

Werner Nienhüser presents the key concepts of a socio-economic perspective on personnel calling it political personnel economy. He conceptualizes human resource management as a “social and political arena of tension” constituted by socially constructed interests. Nienhüser delineates a two-sided socio-economic mechanismic approach, explaining the influence of the social context on decisions as well as the changes of the context.

Reinhold Hedtke
Special Issue Editor