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A discipline is bound by some combination of a shared subject matter, shared theory, and shared technique. Yet modern economics is seemingly without limit to its domain. As a discipline without a shared subject matter, what is the binding force of economics today? The authors combine topic modeling and text analysis to analyze different approaches to inquiry within the discipline of economics. The authors find that the importance of theory has declined as economics has increasingly become defined by its empirical techniques. The authors question whether this trajectory is stable in the long run as the binding force of the discipline.

Without theoretically specifying the future of money as an equivalent commodity of other commodities, it is impossible to reveal the recent role of the emergence of cryptocurrencies, as a reflection of speculative competition increasingly sophisticated in its technological aspect and in response to the abusive use of the spurious competition of the big banks promoting the huge financial bubbles that have haunted the world economy, such as the one unleashed from Wall Street in 2008. The explosive growth of transactions in cryptocurrencies may mean, at some point, in the capitalist economic cycle, the possibility of a new financial bubble, as well as the emergence of new swindles to investors; but valid answers can also come from those actors who until now have had to endure the almost exclusive dominance of the international monetary system by the currency issued by the US government, the main exporter of inflation on a global scale.

Rankings have become a popular topic in the social sciences over the past two decades. Adding to these debates, the present volume assembles studies that explore a variety of empirical settings, emphasizing the importance of acknowledging that there are multiple “Worlds of Rankings.” To this end, the first part of the chapter addresses the implications of two modes of criticism that characterize much of the scholarly work on rankings and summarizes extant conceptual debates. Taking stock of what we know, the second part distinguishes three areas of empirical research. The first area concerns the activities of those who produce rankings, such as the collection of data or different business strategies. Studies in the second area focus on inter-organizational, field-level, or discursive phenomena, particularly how rankings are received, interpreted, and institutionalized. The third area covers the manifold effects that research has unveiled, ranging from the diffusion of practices and changes in organizational identities to emotional distress. Taken together, the contributions to this volume expand our knowledge in all three areas, inviting new debates and suggesting pathways forward.