Dynamic Analysis of Changes in the Field of Institutional and Organizational Economics

The purpose of this paper is to present the methodology we have been developing to explore the topical structure of a collection of texts and its dynamics without an a priori understanding of the relevant categories and concepts. Since we believe that this methodology is particularly promising for studying organizational and institutional phenomena through archives or digital traces, we focus on the "archive" of the Society for Institutional and Organizational Economics (SIOE), which celebrated its 20th anniversary in 2018, as well as on the papers published in the journals in which the core members of the society have been publishing since 1998. The topic modeling of these data highlights two major trends. First, there is over time a reversal of fortune between the study of institutions and the analysis of organizational arrangements, which have become dominant since the 2010s. Second, within each main domain of investigation, a shift can be observed from a broad approach contrasting alternative orders (e.g. market vs. hierarchy, private vs. collective property) to a micro-analytical approach of mechanisms, whether contractual, organizational or institutional.