Institutionalist and methodological perspectives on law: contributions of the Economics of Convention

Abstract

"The article presents in its first parts main concepts of the French approach of economics of convention (EC) and its main contributions to the analysis of (economic) law. EC represents an endogenous perspective of law as an institution whose usage is embedded in situations wherein competent actors have to coordinate and develop a shared understanding of situations. EC conceives real situations as structured by coordinating actors and a plurality of logics of coordination, which are called conventions in this approach. EC has contributed in some of its historical research studies on economic institutions to the analysis of (economic) law. In the second part of this article, newer trends in EC are discussed which focus on discursive practices and apply strategies of discourse analysis in the analysis of economic institutions as labor law. It is claimed that EC can be regarded as a distinguished approach for the integration of discourse analytic perspectives into a complex pragmatic approach to political economy." (author's abstract)