Enseignement et recherche pragmatistes en économie et gestion[Pragmatist teaching and research in economics and management]

The open letter from economic students to professors and others responsible for the teaching of this discipline has been published in Le Monde of June 17th, 2000. The text of this letter was signed by nearly a thousand students and dozens of teachers in just one month. Here is the beginning of this text: “Most of us have chosen to study economics so as to acquire a deep understanding of the economic phenomena with which the citizens of today are confronted. But the teaching that is offered, that is to say for the most part neoclassical theory or approaches derived from it, does not generally answer this expectation”. The institutional economics of John Commons can be seen as an approach to the study of economic realities. After its founder, it turns to the law and ethics to understand economic activity. This approach consists to study formal and informal rules that actors follow in their behaviour. Sets of rules constitute different institutions (eg ownership, contract, employment, enterprise), hence the name of this approach. The study of the rules (formal and informal) reveals to the researcher regularities of behaviour of economic actors. All these behaviours form together economic realities. These behaviours are dynamic and their deep understanding requires the study of the dynamics of rules, that is to say, the study of history of "law and ethics" concerning economic activity (the study of historical roots of current institutions). In this paper I show how this institutional economics could meet the demand of French students.