Organization and the division of labor: biological metaphors at work in Alfred Marshall's Principles of Economics

Equilibrium and Evolution

“…11. The linkages between Haeckel's contribution and Marshall's analysis of industrial organisation are depicted most clearly in Limoges and Menard (1994). 12.…”

A transdisciplinary perspective on economic complexity. Marshall's problem revisited

“…For further discussion, see paragraph 2.3.3. 18 For further discussion, see Limoges and Ménard (1994). 19 Marshall's explanatory model, based on the innovation-routine pair, is developed in detail in Industry and Trade (1919), in particular with regard to the issue of industrial organization.…”

“…Miroswki's judgment is also substantially shared by many studies on the history of economics, which, although they usually place greater stress on the relevance of biological references in Marshall's vision of economics -emphasising the influence of Spencer's view of social evolution in particular -consider Marshall's attempt to develop an "economic biology" a failure. Thomas (1991) writes that "economic biology remained promise rather than substance"; Limoges and Ménard (1994), although they show the importance of Darwin's principle of divergence for Marshall's analysis of industrial organization, end up by considering the notion of the representative firm as a "regression to pre-Darwinian biology", as a fundamental shift from a populationist approach to a typological one, which marked "a turning point in the modern history of economics" (p. 355); Hodgson (2006a) points out the impact of Spencerism on Marshall's thought: "Marshall hitched his wagon to the Spencerian train, but encountered difficulties when Spencer's prestige declined rapidly from its high point in 1890s" (p. 200). 1 In the past decade these interpretations have been challenged by a number of studies -we refer in particular to Raffaelli (2003Raffaelli ( , 2006aRaffaelli ( ,b, 2007 and Cook (2005aCook ( ,b, 2006a -which have investigated the relationship between Marshall and the British scientific culture of his times and identify Marshall's seminal idea of the self-development of the mental machine, developed in his earlier studies in psychology and neuro-physiology, as the core of his vision of economic and social evolution as the gradual absorption of novelties into an increasingly complex structure through successful phases of standardization and innovation.…”

Whatever happened to Marshall's industrial economics?

“…Marshall's attempt to combine analysis of the mechanical forces leading to partial equilibrium with overall understanding of economic and social tendencies pervades the entire range of his scientific tools, which were later judged only by their statical content. Thus the representative firm, often interpreted as a way of confining evolutionary phenomena into the straitjacket of pure equilibrium (Limoges and Ménard 1994), is a tool devised to convey the idea that equilibrium itself is relative to historical circumstances. Similarly, external and internal economies are concepts which anchor equilibrium to the system's evolution.…”