The Social Construction of the Economy

Abstract

Such a strategy goes well with the ideas that Weber and Schumpeter advocated and also with those that one can find today in the work of Amitai Etzioni. Etzioni said in his key article Making Policy for Complex Systems (1985) that socioeconomics can be seen as a policy science in the sense that one should always use findings from a variety of basic sciences. These sciences should include mainstream economics, sociology, political science, and so on. That there must be open communication between the social sciences is perhaps more implicit than explicit in Etzioni's writings. Still, it is clear that socioeconomics will never flourish unless there also exists a rich inter-