This paper considers the signalling aspect of monetary policy. We introduce a heuristic framework for the study of signal uncertainty, and use this to analyses the signal uncertainty implicit in the communications of the Bank of England’s Monetary Policy Committee (MPC). Our findings suggest...

Ecological questions have proven particularly fruitful to illustrate Luhmann's theory of society as an integrative perspective cutting across the scientific, economic, legal, and political domains. In this paper, we will discuss the development of carbon trading as a case study of how reflexive...

With the increasing attention to how monetary policy is communicated has come a focus on the scope for diverse messages to arise from the committee making the decisions. While the existing literature sees the source of such diversity in relation to a 'correct' decision based on one 'true' model,...

At first sight one might be tempted to regard Mirowski’s latest book primarily as a move away from the conceptual and metaphorical history of economics that one finds in More Heat than Light (Mirowski 1989, 'MHTL'), towards a historiography inspired by recent studies in the sociology of...

Robert Skidelsky, author of a key biography of Keynes, notes in this biography that Keynes’s relationship to modernism is crucial to the understanding of his work, yet difficult to grasp historiographically. This may be true if one seeks to uncover influences from modernism as as a...

The concept of bounded rationality has been at the forefront of a recent empiricist program in economics which under the heading of ‘behavioral economics ‘ seeks to broaden the rational choice paradigm in the direction of psychology, to the neglect of a similar broadening in the direction of...

Evolutionary economics is an increasingly influential but vaguely defined field of economic research. This article discusses different ways of defining evolutionary economics: at its object level, at the level of core concepts and, distinguishing between meaning determinist and meaning finitist...