RT Article
T1 The Elephant in the Room: On the Absence of Corporations in Bernard Hodgson’s Economics as a Moral Science
JF Journal of business ethics
VO 108
IS 1
SP 27
OP 35
A1 Bishop, John Douglas
LA English
YR 2012
UL https://ixtheo.de/Record/1785644963
AB In his book Economics as a Moral Science, Bernard Hodgson argues that economics is not value neutral as is often claimed, but is a value-laden discipline. In the long argument for this in his book, Hodgson never discusses or even mentions corporations. This article explains that corporations are absent from Hodgson’s discussion because he considers only the consumption side of general equilibrium theory (GET), and it shows that if Hodgson had included corporations and the production side, his overall argument would have been more complete and convincing. This article shows that Hodgson’s methodology, when applied to the production side of GET, has value implications for CEOs of large corporations, for shareholders and members of Boards of Directors, and for legislators and regulators of business. Hodgson’s claim that economics must consider the ability of economic agents to create or change the institutional, cultural, and organizational conditions of their own economic actions is supported and expanded.
K1 Rationality
K1 Neo-classical economics
K1 Moral science
K1 stockholder theory
K1 Economic Theory
K1 Corporations
K1 Value-laden economics
DO 10.1007/s10551-011-1084-6