In the last decades, revolutionary changes in financial markets, instruments, and institutions have stimulated empirical and theoretical investigations into the interaction of the financial and the "real" side of economic systems. While a considerable body of empirical investigations seems to provide evidence of positive correlations between stock market development and economic growth, there is no consensus in other social sciences as to whether there are twoway linkages, and if so, how to conceive a possible mechanism of interaction. Particularly, the hypergrowth and ubiquity of financial markets has triggered controversial debates on how to understand today's economic landscape. With the objective of clarifying the relationship between finance and economy, this article restructures the present debate through the lenses of Talcott Parsons's and Niklas Luhmann's theories of social systems. Basic system-theoretical ideas on social aspects of finance and economy as well as on uncertainty and risk hint at new insights into the global system of finance that might go far beyond explanatory models of causality.
Hanno Pahl: Textbook Economics: A Social Studies of Science Perspective. The paper arguesthat introductory textbooks in economics are an important object of inquiry. Althoughthe knowledge presented in this type of literature often does not cover the research frontiersof the discipline, economics textbooks are influential media of the external communicationof mainstream economics as well as agents of academic socialization on the inside. Therefore,they need to be analysed in terms of content and rhetorical strategies, a task that is notidentical with the general critique of neoclassical economics. A case study is undertaken toidentify symptomatic and problematic framings of the bodies of knowledge in three populartextbooks. The final section contextualizes the findings and poses further research questions.
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