“Circuits of Commons”: Exploring the Connections Between Economic Lives and the Commons

Research output: Contributions to collected editions/worksChapter

Authors

The insight that the economy is made of social practices, institutionally framed and culturally dependent, arises mostly from the domains of economic sociology, anthropology, and institutional economics. Despite the evident connections among these areas, each one emerges out of remarkably distinctive methodologies, theories, and epistemological premises. This trend has not disengaged scholars such as Elinor Ostrom and Viviana Zelizer who demonstrated how interdisciplinary studies come in favor of the advancement of economics in an enlarged manner. With the support of fieldwork, these authors inaugurated novel interpretations on collective governance, bottom-up arrangements, and the moralities of monetary and non-monetary exchange widely cited in various disciplines. This article aims at: a) exploring examples of what constitutes an ethnographic study on economic lives, b) showing how the meaning making of economic transactions relates to institutional norms present in those works, and c) scrutinizing its connections with institutional economics, mostly in relation to the framework developed by Ostrom on the commons. As the paper argues, much of the fieldwork-based observations present in these studies show deep connections with key elements of institutional analyses as the rules-in-use often relate to the access to resources, knowledge as commons, path dependency, and analyses on the economic incentives. This effort does not aim at producing re-interpretations, but rather wishes to surpass the boundaries between these domains and encourage future scholars to build up on the fertile intersections. The expected contribution of this article is to continue the interdisciplinary path undertaken by Ostrom and Zelizer with a focus on ethnography as seen through the lenses of economics.
Original languageEnglish
Title of host publicationLiving Better Together : Social Relations and Economic Governance in the Work of Ostrom and Zelizer
EditorsStefanie Haefele, Virgil Henry Storr
Number of pages26
Place of PublicationCham
PublisherSpringer Nature Switzerland AG
Publication date2023
Pages51-76
ISBN (print)978-3-031-17126-0, 978-3-031-17129-1
ISBN (electronic)978-3-031-17127-7
DOIs
Publication statusPublished - 2023

Recently viewed

Publications

  1. Modelling, explaining, enacting and getting feedback: How can the acquisition of core practices in teacher education be optimally fostered?
  2. Extending Enterprise Architectures for Adopting the Internet of Things
  3. Instruments for research on transition. Applied methods and approaches for exploring the transition of young care leavers to adulthood
  4. Jackson networks in nonautonomous random environments
  5. Consular Assistance: Rights, Remedies, and Responsibility Comments on the ICJ's Judgment in the LaGrand Case
  6. Material utilization of organic residues
  7. Editorial: Courts in Context. An Empirical Re-Evaluation of Categorization in the Asylum Regime
  8. Extraction of information from invoices - challenges in the extraction pipeline
  9. Predicting the future performance of soccer players
  10. Ecosystem functions as indicators for heathland responses to nitrogen fertilisation
  11. Trust in scientists, risk perception, conspiratorial beliefs, and unrealistic optimism
  12. Simple measures and complex structures
  13. Utilization of protein-rich residues in biotechnological processes
  14. Ansparabschreibung durch Existenzgründer
  15. Multi-level Governance, Policy Implementation and Participation
  16. Minimal conditions of motor inductions of approach-avoidance states
  17. Combating Climate Change through Organisational Innovation
  18. Interpersonal Physiological Synchrony Predicts Group Cohesion
  19. Understanding complex links between fluvial ecosystems and social indicators in Spain
  20. Comparison of different in vitro tests for biocompatibility screening of Mg alloys
  21. Reconsidering adaptation as translation