Lectures and Courses

I have given individual lectures, or series of lectures, at many academic institutions throughout the world. Past and possible lectures include:

Institutional Theory and Methodology

• What are institutions?
• The old and the new institutional economics: how are they different?
• Meanings of methodological individualism
• Institutional economics into the twenty-first century
• Institutional and evolutionary economics as the new mainstream?
• The emergence of institutions: the example of a traffic convention
• Emergent properties and the critique of reductionism
• Institutionalism versus Marxism
• The problem of historical specificity
• Social formations and levels of abstraction
• The shifting boundaries of economics and sociology

A History of American Institutional Economics

• Thorstein Veblen's evolutionary institutionalism
• Thorstein Veblen's success and failure
• The metamorphosis of institutionalism
• John R. Commons and the tangled jungle
• Wesley Mitchell and the rise of macroeconomics
• The evolution of Clarence Ayres

Socio-Economic Evolution

• Evolutionary economics: types and controversies
• Is social evolution Lamarckian or Darwinian?
• Biology and economics: a taxonomy
• Darwinism and the search for general evolutionary principles
• Myths of social Darwinism
• Information, complexity and generative replication
• Selection in socio-economic evolution
• Levels of socio-economic evolution

Firms, Markets and Capitalism

• Exchange, markets and firms
• The legal nature of the firm and the myth of the firm-market hybrid
• Opportunism is not the only reason why firms exist
• Firm-specific learning and the nature of the firm
• The nature and replication of routines
• Knowledge at work: some neoliberal anachronisms
• The historical specificity of capitalism
• Varieties of capitalism
• The future of capitalism

Applications and Legal Aspects of Institutional Economics

• The enforcement of contracts and property rights: constitutive versus epiphenomenal conceptions of law
• On the institutional foundations of law: the insufficiency of custom and private ordering
• The economics of corruption and the corruption of economics
• Institutions, recessions and recovery in the transitional economies
• An institutional and evolutionary perspective on health economics

The above repertoire of over thirty lectures is indicative and flexible. Lectures can be modified and combined in various ways. If you wish to invite me to give a lecture or lecture course, then please email g.m.hodgson@herts.ac.uk