TheMarketForIdeas

Academic disciplines, like nations, cultivate myths about their origins. Economics especially. Some say it was born from rational choice. Others swear by spontaneous order. Some invoke institutions, others values. Each camp writes its own genealogy; each believes the plot finds its resolution in itself. Yet if there is one lesson that social sciences should have learned by now, it is this: intellectual monocultures are lethal. A discipline does not collapse because it disagrees – it collapses because it stops disagreeing.

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There is something quietly subversive about academic events that refuse to stage intellectual combat. In a field that has grown accustomed to dichotomies, scorekeeping and theoretical coronations, the workshop “Where Social Economics Meets Institutional Economics: On Norms, Values and Ethics”, held on 8 November 2025 at the University “Lucian Blaga” of Sibiu, offered an alternative: not the theatre of final answers, but the choreography of questions that remain deliberately open. It was not a summit of certainties; it was a symposium of curiosity.

The pairing of social economics and institutional economics was not accidental. Social economics asks the economic discipline to look beyond efficiency and equilibrium and to acknowledge justice, identity, dignity and the moral fabric of collective life. Institutional economics, in turn, insists that behaviour does not arise from abstract axioms but from rule-bound contexts, from the incentives and constraints embedded in law, governance, culture and power. These two perspectives do not cancel one another; they correct each other. Where social economics provides purpose, institutional economics provides structure. A society that understands one without the other is either righteous and ineffective, or efficient and indifferent.

Even within institutionalism, the contrast between the old and new traditions illustrates this deeper complementarity. The old school of Veblen and Commons approached institutions as slow-moving psychological and cultural patterns; the new school of Coase, Williamson and North reframed institutions as transaction-cost-minimising architectures. The two are periodically portrayed as rivals, yet the real evolution of institutional thinking occurs precisely when they converge: habits shape incentives, and incentives reinforce habits. Culture without rules is wishful thinking; rules without culture are dead letters.

This dynamic extends outward into the larger heterodox landscape. The Austrian School tradition reminds us that knowledge is dispersed and coordination fragile. The Chicago School perspective reminds us that incentives and competition matter. Institutional economists remind us that neither knowledge nor incentives operate in a vacuum; they require enforceable and legitimate rules. Social economists remind us that rules cannot be separated from values and that any economic system must be able to morally justify itself. The tensions among these traditions – so often narrated as irreconcilable – are, in fact, sources of vitality. No school sees the whole terrain; each sees a continent others risk ignoring. The misunderstandings arise not because the insights contradict but because each fears the other’s insights will dilute its own authority.

Hovering above all this is the long and unfinished negotiation between heterodox economics and the neoclassical mainstream. It is tempting to cast the two as combatants in an ideological war: the mainstream accused of rigidity, heterodoxy accused of fragmentation. But the dualism is misleading. The mainstream provides coherence, common language and analytical discipline, but it is heterodoxy that injects creativity, historical memory and epistemic humility. The future of economics does not belong to whichever side prevails; it belongs to the discipline that refuses to let the conversation(s) end.

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The closing lecture of the workshop – Octavian-Dragomir Jora and Mihaela Iacob on the metaphor and mechanics of the “market for ideas” – sharpened this lesson.

Ideas do not circulate in some purified ether where only truth determines survival. They pass simultaneously through filters of epistemic credibility, economic viability and political acceptability. When these forces reinforce one another, scholarship prospers; when they distort one another, fashions replace breakthroughs and metrics replace meaning. Scientific life becomes a contest of visibility rather than discovery, and methodological loyalty begins to matter more than intellectual honesty.

Yet the greatest danger is not distortion – distortion has always existed. The greatest danger is the belief that the filtering process is unproblematic, neutral or settled once and for all. Markets for goods (are doomed to?) fail; markets for ideas do too (even more!). However, an “imperfect-yet-free-market” for ideas remains a better guarantor of knowledge than a “closed marketplace” – or a “centrally-planned” -mimicking setup, horribile dictu – where a single paradigm defines what may be thought, what may be published, what may be funded and what may be taught.

This is why events such as Sibiu matter more than the uninitiated might assume. They do not provide definitive answers, and they are not meant to. What they provide is something rarer: a venue where disagreement is not a scandal but a resource, where contrasting schools of thought do not attempt to defeat one another but to understand one another, and where the discipline remembers that its strength does not lie in unanimity but in dialogue. Economics does not advance when one voice becomes louder; it advances when no voice believes it has the right to silence the others.

In a world increasingly enamoured with expertise as proclamation, what the Sibiu workshop reclaimed was expertise-as-inquiry. And perhaps this is the quiet moral of the event: that the real mark of intellectual maturity is not the claim to have solved the debate, but the commitment to keep it alive and kicking.

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Workshop Program

Where Social Economics Meets Institutional Economics: On Norms, Values and Ethics

8 November 2025 – Faculty of Economic Sciences, University “Lucian Blaga” Sibiu, Romania

09:00-09:15 – Opening remarks

Dr. Cosmin Țileagă (ULBS), Dr. Ioana Negru (ULBS), Dr. Delia-Elena Diaconașu (UAIC)

09:15-10:00 – Where institutional (needs to) meets social economics: Towards a health care economics
Prof. Robert McMaster (University of Glasgow) & Prof. John Davis (University of Amsterdam / Marquette University)

10:00-10:45 – Commitment and Institutional Stability

Dr. Craig Duckworth (London South Bank University)

10:45-11:00 – Coffee/tea break

11:00-11:45 – Greening-up Business and Greening the Economy – Institutions and Policy – Cycle and Epi-cycles

Prof. Wilfred Dolfsma (Open University, Netherlands)

11:45-12:45 – Roundtable with journal editors: Prof. Paolo Ramazzotti (Forum for Social Economics), Prof. Roberto Veneziani (Review of Social Economy – online), Prof. William Waller (Journal of Economic Issues)

12:45-13:30 – Institutional Economics: Good Governance & Social Values

Prof. Karina Ochiș & Prof. Cosmin Marinescu (Bucharest University of Economic Studies)

13:30-14:30 – Lunch

14:30-15:15 – Social Entrepreneurship, Gender & Sustainability: Conflicting or Reinforcing?
Prof. Tonia Warnecke (Rollins College – online)

15:15-16:00 – Human Action and “Real” Economics: Why Institutions Matter for Entrepreneurship
Prof. Gabriel Staicu, Prof. Marius Cristian Pană & Drd. Denisa Stroe (Bucharest University of Economic Studies)

16:00-16:15 – Coffee/tea break

16:15-17:00 – Valuation as Institutional and Ethical Practice: Revisiting the Social Theory of Value for the Case of Higher Education

Prof. Danielle Guizzo (University of Bristol)

17:00-17:45 – The Market for Ideas, between Social Settings and Institutional Infrastructures: A Glimpse “From” and “Towards” Economics

Prof. Octavian-Dragomir Jora & Assoc. Prof. Mihaela Iacob (Bucharest University of Economic Studies)

17:45-18:30 – Ph.D. Candidates’ Research Platform

Drd. Petruț Iatan (Bucharest University of Economic Studies) & Drd. Nastassia Harbuzova (Tallinn University of Technology)

19:00 – Dinner at Hanul lui Tulgheș – Village Museum, Sibiu