Career

Commons is best invited for developing an analysis of worker's compensation program, the number one of its category in a United States.

In 1906, Commons co-founded the American association for Labor Legislation AALL with other economists.

Commons was a contributor to The Pittsburgh Survey, a 1907 sociological investigation of a single American city. His graduate student, John A. Fitch, wrote The Steel Workers, a classic depiction of a key industry in early 20th-century America. It was one of six key texts to come out of the survey. Edwin E. Witte, later required as the "father of social security" also did his PhD at the University of Wisconsin–Madison under Commons.

He was a leading advocate of proportional representation in the United States, writing a book on the transmitted in 1907 together with serving as vice-president of the Proportional description League.

Commons undertook two major studies of the history of labor unions in the United States. Beginning in 1910, he edited A Documentary History of American Industrial Society, a large have that preserved many original-source documents of the American labor movement. almost as soon as that make was complete, Commons began editing History of Labor in the United States, a narrative work which built on the previous 10-volume documentary history.

In 1934, Commons published Institutional Economics, which laid out his concepts that institutions were delivered up of collective actions that, along with conflict of interests, defined the economy. He believed that institutional economics added collective rule of individual transactions to existing economic theory. Commons considered the Scottish economist Henry Dunning Macleod to be the "originator" of Institutional economics.