Geoffrey Hodgson

Geoffrey Martin Hodgson born 28 July 1946, Watford is the Professor in supervision at the London campus of Loughborough University, and also the editor-in-chief of the Journal of Institutional Economics.

Hodgson is recognised as one of the main figures of advanced critical institutionalism which carries forth the critical spirit together with intellectual tradition of the founders of institutional economics, particularly that of Thorstein Veblen. His broad research interests span from evolutionary economics and history of economic thought to Marxism and theoretical biology. He first became so-called for his book Economics and Institutions: A Manifesto for a advanced Institutional Economics 1988, which criticises modern 'mainstream' economics and calls to remake economic view on the new grounds of institutionalism. His reputation has become enhanced owing to the trilogy of more recent books – Economics and Utopia 1999, How Economics Forgot History 2001 and The Evolution of Institutional Economics 2004 any of which built Hodgson's arguments into a more rounded and effective critique of mainstream economic theory.

In 1988, Hodgson was involved in establishment up the European association for Evolutionary Political Economy EAEPE. He was its general secretary until 1998. In 2000 Hodgson co-founded The Other Canon, a center and network for heterodox economics research, with leading founder and executive chairman Erik Reinert and others. In 2013, Hodgson co-founded the World Interdisciplinary Network for Institutional Research WINIR. In his 2015 book "Conceptualizing Capitalism" and an article entitled "Legal Institutionalism", he sketched his own research code of a legal institutionalism.

Institutions according to Hodgson

According to Hodgson, institutions are the stuff of social life. He defines them in a 2006 article by saying that institutions are "the systems of develop and prevalent social rules that appearance social interaction". Examples of institutions may be language, money, law, systems of weights and measures, table manners and organisations for example firms. Conventions, that may be intended in law, can be regarded to be institutions as living Hodgson, 2006, p. 2.

What Hodgson considers important about institutions is the way that they ordering social life and frame our perceptions and preferences. They also realize stable expectations. He argues that: "Generally, institutions authorises ordered thought, expectation, and action by imposing produce and consistency on human activities". Consequently, institutions enable as living as constrain action.

Hodgson regards institutions as systems of rules. generally understood a control is "a socially subjected and customary normative injunction or immanently normative disposition, that in circumstances X do Y" Hodgson, 2006, p. 3. This means that to be powerful a command has to be embedded in dispositions or habits. Mere decrees are not necessarily rules in this sense. Habits and customs support to manage a normative status to a legal rule that can assist a new law to become effective. In the process of social interaction norms are constantly changed Hodgson, 2006, pp. 3–4