Chair person of the defence: Professor Mats Benner, Lund University
Examination committee:
- Associate Professor Chris Mathieu, Department of Sociology, Lund University
- Professor Johannes Lindvall, Political Science Department, Lund University
- Professor Linda Wedlin, Uppsala University
Main supervisor: Carl-Göran Heidegren
Supervisor: Mats Benner
Synopsis
Economics is one of the most influential social science disciplines, with a high level of internal consent around a common theoretical and methodological approach. However, marginalised schools of thought have increasingly unified under the term “heterodox” economics, with their critique of the “neoclassical mainstream” as common denominator.
But why do mainstream economists think the way they do, and what is the relation between the mainstream approach on one hand, and heterodoxy on the other?
Disciplined Reasoning provides a novel approach to understanding the broad intellectual dynamics of the economics discipline. It is a theoretically well-grounded empirical study of Swedish economics, drawing on in-depth interviews with academic economists and a document analysis of expert evaluation reports from the recruitment of professors over 25 years. Drawing on the sociology of science, it develops a theoretical framework of relational disciplinary styles of reasoning to account for the social and intellectual dynamics of modern academic economics.