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Neoclassic economics is a thing of considerable beauty. It yet finds an increasing tendency on the part of those trained in its discipline to rebel from its neatly fitted abstractions and intriguing diagrams. The rebellion stems from two sources. Veblen's sweeping attacks upon its postulates¹⁶ shock its theoretical foundations. The rapid changes in the industrial and business world discredited it on another front by bringing into increasingly sharp relief the divergence between the institutional assumptions of the orthodox theory and the conditions actually obtaining. The giant corporation, overhead costs, and the necessity for maintenance of volume, industrial concentration, the trade association, a widening spread among income classes, advertising, the growing inability of the consumer to gauge quality, the resort to reorganization instead of the “going out of business” of the long-run analyses – what place could the orthodox theory give to these important characteristics of the existing business economy?

The concept of the commons, or common goods, is becoming increasingly widespread in the world of research and among civil society. The commons are defined as resources that are shared and collectively managed by communities of users, such as natural commons (e.g. fisheries, the climate) and knowledge commons (e.g. Wikipedia, open-source software). The paper aims to discuss this issue.

This paper presents the findings of the PhD dissertation “Social finance and the commons,” recipient of the 2017 Emerald/EFMD Outstanding Doctoral Research Award, category Management and Governance, sponsored by Management Decision. Adopting an interdisciplinary perspective of the commons, this dissertation investigates how community enterprises govern financial resources as commons to serve the common good. To do so, it builds on data collected on community development banks in Brazil and complementary currencies in multiple countries.

The findings explain how collective action favors the implementation of new forms of governance and management potentially enabling finance to create and support communities. In doing so, this dissertation provides insights on the transformative power of some governance features for the creation of commons.

This dissertation advances theoretical and conceptual foundations for a theory of the commons in management sciences. It contributes to a new conceptualization of the commons, especially by extending the concept of commons to finance and showing the variety of commons according to governance structures and values. It also generates theoretical insights into social and community entrepreneurship research through an in-depth investigation of social finance organizations.

The paper aims to study the relevance of the German historical school and American Institutionalism for contemporary research in social sciences. The subject scope of the paper is to trace how concepts, ideas, and frameworks trickle from the historical school into later research programs.

The methodology of the paper is a textual analysis of articles and books that either relates the relationship between the historical school and the institutionalism or make explicit or implicit references to the most important concepts and methodologies in these schools.

The paper has two main findings. The first is that Commons was heavily influenced by Weber's ideal‐types when he wrote his most important book Institutional Economics. The second is that concepts and methodologies used by the historical school and American institutionalism are used in nearly all areas of the social sciences. But the researchers seldom make explicit references to these schools.

A limitation of the present paper is that it draws too a very limited extent directly on the publications of the German historical school. Future research could try and reconstruct how the American instutionalists came to the conclusions they did on the historical school. It is possible that differences in political opinions and competition between two schools with partly similar messages prompted writers like Veblen and Commons to exaggerate differences of opinion.

One important contribution of the paper is the discussion of the influences the historical school had on leading institutionalists. Another important contribution is the exploration of present and future research projects that could benefit from revisiting the theories and methodologies of the historical school and institutionalism. By making more explicit the references to these schools, new insights can be gained on how to develop research methodologies and understanding the limits and potentials of pursuing a research approach.

This chapter aims to use the theory of commons to reflect on the mechanisms that supported the recent (micro)financial crisis. This approach naturally extends the analysis of the growing field of green microfinance and the financialization of commons and in particular the environment.

The study provides a theoretical analysis of the recent crisis and the introduction of the environmental dimension to microfinance. This theoretical analysis is supported by extensive experience in many years of field research and qualitative and quantitative analysis of the (micro)financial crisis and green microfinance. The theoretical analysis is based on the results of previous research developed using primary and secondary data.

Using the theory of commons we interpret the recent crisis and the financialization of the environment as the tragedy of commons.

We highlight that when the private profit prevails over community benefit, both at the financial and environmental level, efforts toward financial inclusion and environmental conservation could instead lead to financial crisis and environmental damage.

Financial inclusion and environmental economy cannot be analyzed simply in terms of economic utility; a systemic view that embraces the complexity of poverty and the human–environment system is required to assess the actual outcomes of programs dealing with financial inclusion.

Policymakers, international agencies, and implementing institutions such as financial intermediary institutions should question an oversimplistic view of financial inclusion and the economic value of environmental goods. They should instead include in their analysis and program design considerations of the complex interactions between actors, collective behavior, and emerging properties of human and environmental systems.

The theory of commons is employed to analyze both financial inclusion and green microfinance. We propose that (micro)finance should be understood and managed as a common good to support the development of a socially, economically, and environmentally sustainable financial system.

The goal of this paper is to develop a conceptual framework to understand the processes by which rural communities are using commons‐based social enterprises to engage global actors and forge local places.

The paper uses a four‐step conceptualization of commons‐based social enterprises within a complex world: deal with communities as complex systems embedded in larger complex systems, understand cross‐scale linkages between communities and other levels of organization, identify drivers of change, and build adaptive capacity to increase the resilience of communities in the face of globalization. The paper draws upon an international set of cases undertaken by the Centre for Community‐based Resource Management to illustrate each step.

Social enterprises are one means by which rural communities are negotiating with global actors through recent processes of globalization. The social enterprise provides a mechanism for rural people to secure tenure for common‐pool resources and allows them to make direct decisions regarding their management.

To further develop the understanding of commons‐based social enterprises will require further integration of theory regarding commons and social enterprises.

States and development agencies lack enabling policies for commons‐based social enterprises that support the multiple goal strategies of rural communities for natural resources.

Commons and social enterprise literature have tended to exist in separate domains and this paper makes a first step toward their integration.

The purpose of this paper is to consider the relevance of the institutional analysis and development (IAD) framework (Ostrom, 1990) in understanding the incentives for public relations (PR) practitioners’ interactions with Wikipedia, and other common-pool media.

This interdisciplinary conceptual paper applies the economics theory of commons governance to two case studies of PR interactions with Wikipedia.

The analysis concludes that commons governance theory identifies the downside risks of opportunistic behaviour by PR practitioners in their interactions with media commons such as Wikipedia. The paper concludes that Ostrom’s IAD model is relevant to the governance of PR interactions and offers guidance on productive PR practice in common-pool media.

The analysis was applied to only two cases for which information was widely available.

The paper includes implications for the scope of PR practice in its interactions with common-pool media. The economic value of information held by PR professionals has been undermined by the collaborative nature of common-pool media, which has consequences for the role of PR.

The paper introduces an economic theory and related literature to PR scholarship and applies them to PR practice. The paper aims to stimulate further research into the application of economic ideas to PR practice and to encourage discussion on the place of economic theory in PR knowledge.

The paper discusses the rationale for a widespread reliance on Codes of Conduct (CoC) in European crowdfunding through the lenses of economic theories of self-regulation. By analysing the institutional design of CoCs in crowdfunding, the paper illustrates the differences in their regulatory context, inclusiveness, monitoring and enforcement. It offers the first systematic overview of substantial rules of CoCs in crowdfunding.

A comparative case study of nine CoCs in Europe is used to illustrate differences in their institutional design and discern the economic purpose of the CoC.

The institutional design of different CoCs in Europe mainly supports voluntary theories of self-regulation. In particular, the theory of reputation commons has the most explanatory power. The substantial rules of CoC in different markets show the potential sources of market failure through the perspectives of platforms.

CoCs appear in various regulatory, cultural, and industry contexts of different countries. Some of the institutional design features of CoC might be a result of these characteristics.

Crowdfunding associations wishing to develop their own CoC may learn from a comparative overview of key provisions.

For governments in Europe, contemplating creating or revising bespoke crowdfunding regimes, the paper identifies areas where crowdfunding platforms perceive market failure.

This paper is the first systematic study of self-regulatory institutions in European crowdfunding. The paper employs a theoretical framework for the analysis of self-regulation in crowdfunding and provides a comparison of a regulatory context, inclusiveness, monitoring and enforcement of different CoCs in Europe.

Transport infrastructure in most countries is owned and maintained either by public authorities, private organisations, or individuals. However, in Sweden, about 50 per cent of the road network is owned and maintained by civic road associations. By using the analytic notion of commoning, this chapter seeks to explore how road maintenance is organised and in what ways civic participation is contributing to infrastructure maintenance. Through interviews with representatives of civic road associations in Vellinge municipality and municipal representatives, we conclude that property owners are being commoned, that is, they are obliged to be a member of the civic road association in the neighbourhood where they own property. This means that property owners are given the opportunity to collectively decide on matters of road infrastructure, including maintenance and investments. Each civic road association is also acting as an organisational collective, demanding or pressuring the municipality and its politicians to reform subsidies and the organisation of ownership of roads and responsibility for their maintenance. As a single property owner, this is difficult, but as an organisational collective, in a civic road association, they have a voice. As a citizen, local municipal election offers opportunities to push for change, but at these institutionalised moments of democracy, road infrastructure issues compete with other issues. Election campaigns rarely target road maintenance, although Vellinge seems to be an exception here. Nevertheless, as citizenship is built around the provision of universal and evenly distributed infrastructure, crumbling infrastructure in different parts of the municipality tends to raise concerns over equal access and opportunities – and also differentiated citizenships.