A Strategic Deconstruction of John R. Commons’s Regulatory Discourse
The relevance of the postmodern perspective to extending economic thought has been increasingly recognized within the institutional economics literature [illustrative works include Mirowski 1988, 1989; Samuels 1988, 1990a, 1990b, 1991; Dugger and Wailer 1992; Waller and Robertson 1991; Brown 1991; Tool 1979; Mayhew 1987]. Prominent within this emerging stream of research is the theme that there exists no unitary truth concerning an objective economic reality, but rather economic narratives based upon particular theoretical perspectives [Hoksbergen 1994] in which notions of economic reality are rhetorically constituted [Jennings and Waller 1994; Sebberson 1990; Waller and Robertson 1990, 1991]. This focus on narrative and rhetoric in important, according to Waller and Robertson [1990, 1038] because