Why Do Marxists Continue to Debate the Production Boundary?

• In Event: 41063 - Rethinking Economic Sociology

Abstract

A core question in the sociological study of knowledge production is why scientists ask some questions but not others. To address this question we investigate why Marxist economists continued to debate the production boundary (a debate over what constitutes productive economic activity) while mainstream economists by the mid-20th century abandoned this debate. We examine two plausible explanations for this divergence: 1) the constraints imposed by knowledge infrastructures and 2) the way social objects of knowledge structure economic research. To empirically assess these we analyze economic discourse produced in a sample of mainstream and Marxist economic journal articles through the 20th and 21st centuries, and demonstrate how social objects of knowledge anchored and defined the production of a parallel knowledge infrastructure in Marxist economics.

Authors

• Dustin Avent-Holt, Augusta University

• Anna DiMassimo, Augusta University