Getauschte Arbeit. Das Konzept des Arbeitsmarktes in dogmenhistorischer Perspektive

The emergence of an industrial labor market is an important dimension of structural change in the 19th and 20th century western world. The paper describes how the labor market has been modeled in economic theory from classical liberalism through neo-classicism up to the New Institutional Economics and evaluates the fruitfulness of these theoretical schools for historical analysis. The examination of the changes in how economic theory has treated the exchange of labor in markets suggests that the separation of the once-integral subject of national economy into theory and history was accompanied by a fading concern for the institutional framework of labor market processes. It argues that this lack of institutional foundation has widened the gap between economic and historical approaches and led to an artificial vision of labor markets which is not appropriate for historical-empirical questions. In the author’s view, meaningful empirical findings in this field call for a theoretical framework for labor market analysis that is institutionally sensitive. The paper concludes that this goal can best be achieved by refashioning the theory-kit according to the postulates laid down in the New Institutional Economics.