Despite being a key term in institutional economics, the term 'institution' seems to be used in various different ways. To what extent is this problematic, given that a shared understanding of key terms among scholars is a necessary condition for scientific progress? We review prominent...

This paper discusses the actual relevance and historical origins or ‘competition universalism’. In economics, competition is conceptualized as a nearly ubiquitous element of societies, or, at least, used to study a wide array of social and political relations, including competition between...

This paper explores whether the EU's new economic development model of "competitive sustainability" could serve as a role model for ecologically sustainable development models for advanced economies in general. To this end, we first discuss theoretically the interplay between "competitiveness"...

The goal of this paper is twofold: first, it assesses the current state of collaboration between institutionalist economics and the academic degrowth discourse on the topic of global inequalities. Since a systematic literature review of the current degrowth discourse shows that the level of such...

The article is a contribution to the evolving field of competition research. More precisely our paper provides a comprehensive typology of the different ways competitization is and has been studied across different disciplines and research programs. The article goes beyond a classical literature...

We conduct a systematic literature review comprising both a quantitative and qualitative content analysis of the academic degrowth literature considering the Global South, and delineate substantive and methodological implications for future research. We find two main narratives: one stressing...

At its core, the discussion on the micro-macro link in heterodox economics is concerned with the correct treatment of aggregates and aggregation in social theory. In this chapter we survey heterodox approaches to the micro-macro link with a focus on shared understandings and convictions that...

This short paper explains the theory of path dependence and clarifies its relation to concepts such as positive feedback or lock-in, arguing that path dependence is a core theoretical element of political economy in general, and institutional and evolutionary economics in particular. We first...

This short paper discusses the concept of "systemism", elaborates how it implicitly underpinned most seminal works of evolutionary-institutional economics, and explains how future research would benefit from making the systemist nature of evolutionary economics more explicit. More precisely, the...

This chapter delineates an evolutionary approach to the comparative analysis of economic systems and illustrates its usefulness via an exemplary application to recent developments in the European Union. The first part of the chapter describes the meta-theoretical foundations of the approach,...