John R. Commons and Convention Theory around the transformations of the employment relationship
Résumé
This text explores how John R. Commons' Institutional Economics (IE) and Economics of Convention (EC) frame basic concepts to understand institutional evolution and how they draw and analyze the historical evolution on employment relationships. It presents three issues to compare them: the double meanings of common goods, endogenous changes in institutions, the intermediaries promoting the changes. Both approaches on historical changes of employment relationship are compared. In particular, EC has developed works showing how legal intermediaries promote individualization of employment relationship in modern France (section 3-1). Especially, this approach argues linkage between employment relationship fragmentation and financial dynamics.
After, with assistance from the issues of EC, the IE approach of intermediaries is clarified by enhancing the collective dimension of employment relationship in the interwar era of the U.S. Commons saw a link between employment and financial dynamics in his policy proposal. In conclusion, the text confirms the convergence of the IE and the EC toward an institutional change approach. This will be seen not only in their basic issues but also in, more fundamentally, their presumption of socioeconomists's pragmatic position and thus their research program. This current trend can be expressed as their convergence toward the theory of social inquiry into reasonable values.
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