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The purpose of the “Introduction” is to provide the motivation and context for the articles of this special issue and an overview and summary of the contributions that follow.

The paper provides an overview and summary of the contributions in the special issue.

It is argued that heterodoxies had gained a considerable and growing influence on research orientations, methodologies, and critical reflections, also on the mainstream publishing practices, even in the mainstream. This has been widely acknowledged as “hip heterodoxy” recently. Thus, many heterodox economists have developed optimistic expectations for the future of the profession. However, that influence has left the main mechanisms of reproduction of the mainstream untouched. These are mass teaching, public advising, journal policies, and faculty recruitment. Above that, the last decade has seen something like a “counterattack” to safeguard these mainstream reproduction mechanisms. The means used for this seem to be journal (and publisher) rankings based on purely quantitative citation measures and “impact factors”. These have an obvious cumulative “economies‐of‐scale” effect which triggers a tendency towards reinforcement and collective monopolization of the dominating orientation. Department rankings and individual faculty evaluations are then based on journals rankings. As a result, there are observable tendencies towards the cleansing of economics departments in a number of countries.

The paper also discusses potential reasons and methods for alternative approaches to measure citation interrelations, networks, cooperation, and rankings among heterodoxies (journals and departments), and for alternatives of publishing and the future of heterodoxies in general. Finally, it draws the picture of the present situation and the foreseeable future of heterodoxies as it emerges from the 11 contributions of the special issue.

This article explores what is meant by social economics in a set of ten specific commentaries or interpretations which appear to be widely accepted by social economists. In brief those commentaries are organized and presented in the following manner. Social economics is: heterodox; evolutionary, revolutionary, and counter‐revolutionary; a social science; a moral science; social economics because it addresses the social question; recognizes that the invisible hand does not protect the common good; anthropocentric; teleological; has vision; and has a three‐part structure. This article tends toward simplicity and brevity, the better to set forth the essential nature of social economics. Social economics is more than just a subspecialty area within or a branch of the tree of conventional economic thought. Rather social economics is an entire body of thought, a different way of thinking about economic affairs. It resembles mainstream economics in the same way that one tree resembles another. But it is a separate tree, with its own life force supplied by the scholarly energies of those who identify with social economics.

The purpose of this paper is to empirically ascertain whether an ideological barrier to entry exists, preventing heterodox economists from publishing in mainstream journals.

The empirical results were obtained from a questionnaire asked of heterodox economists. The ten questions include where respondents submitted their research; their treatment by editors and referees; and whether an ideological barrier to publication exists.

The evidence overwhelmingly supports the existence of an ideological entry barrier. This barrier goes beyond the normal competitive nature of journal publishing, that is limited journal pages constricting the number of “good papers” that can be published, suggesting that there is an insidious ideological entry barrier preventing heterodox ideas from being published.

Based on this evidence, the last section proffers several research suggestions, including more sophisticated models predicting the likelihood of a heterodox economist submitting to a mainstream journal and the likelihood of acceptance. And, finally, several reforms are suggested including the adoption of a universal code of conduct for referees.

The purpose of this paper is to lay down the methodological structure of the epistemology of tawhid (Oneness of Allah). In this paper, the meaning of tawhid also refers to the monotheistic unity of knowledge (consilience) in the cast of its organic pairing by circular causation relations between the moral and material possibilities. The paper thereby raises the critique of mainstream economic reasoning and its imitation by existing Islamic economics. Consequently, by the ontological, epistemological and phenomenological foundation of tawhidi methodological worldview, an altogether new socio-scientific reasoning in generality and economic reasoning in particular is introduced.

The socio-scientific methodological reasoning of unity of knowledge according to the tawhidi methodological worldview is introduced contrary to the inept rational choice postulates of mainstream economic reasoning and its imitation by existing notions of Islamic economics. The method of instructing students in the light of this approach according to Tawhidi Islamic Economics (TIE) is introduced from the existing literature.

The existing nature of mainstream economics and its imitation by Islamic economics is critically deconstructed and replaced by the true epistemological, ontological and phenomenological perspectives of TIE in the world of learning. Some inner properties of such a methodological study of TIE are laid bare for further investigation.

This is the first paper of its kind in this journal to expound the original and most creative methodological worldview that Islamic economics must bear. This is the foundation of the development of the true stance of Islamic economics and finance.

The paper aims to show that economic theory has become “desocialised” and separated from social theory through the adoption of individualistic methods and neglect of social relations and structures. It also seeks to assess the upshot of these trends, as well as the prospects for reversing them.

A historical overview traces how the social content of economic theory has diminished, considering the reasons why. This leads on to a wider evaluation of what desocialisation entails and whether economics could be done differently.

Desocialisation stems from the desire for boundaries between academic disciplines, which drove economics towards individualism and other social sciences towards structural methods. Such an artificial divide between economic theory and social theory is argued to be detrimental to all the disciplines concerned.

Restrictions imposed by desocialised theory have practical consequences for how we understand and model the economy. Some reforms that would loosen the restrictions so as to promote a resocialised economics are suggested.

The idea of desocialisation is defined and interpreted, drawing attention to the changing nature of economics, its isolation from other social sciences, and the possibilities for alternative modes of economic theorising.

This paper aims to argue that Economics is not a neutral science.

Post-structuralist perspective of Lyotard (1984), alongside the Pragmatics of Searle (1979) and Travis (1981) are useful for analyzing enunciations in mainstream Economics.

Economists use illocutionary acts expressed in formal language to achieve perlocutionary effects. Because of the importance attached to objectivity in mainstream Economics, the use of artificial languages is preferred to natural language. However, formal language is preferred regarding its perlocutionary effects on economists' community.

This paper puts together the Continental and the Analytical Philosophy and show, in an original manner, how their intersections and how they can be useful to better understand the epistemology of Economics.

The aim of this paper is to reconcile the diverging opinions among Islamic economists toward the concept of scarcity and to present a holistic model of scarcity and abundance from a Qur’anic perspective.

Analyses of both interviews and texts were performed. The method in studying scarcity from Islamic perspective consisted of semi-structured interview with five experts in the field of Islamic economics and development.

One major implication of this study is that the concept of scarcity as it is postulated by mainstream economics tends to clash with the Islamic worldview, as it does not have any reference in Islam. Scarcity can act as a phenomenon in economic activities but not as the defining concept in Islamic economics.

Practically, this paper will contribute to the making of the first lecture of the course of Islamic economics.

Socially, this paper will contribute to the process of transforming the science of economics and Islamic economics for a sustainable tomorrow.

This paper is a fundamental paper that addresses some aspects from critical realism and transcendental idealism into the making of Islamic economics. Not only that the discussion on the concept of scarcity in Islamic economics is limited and seems to be lacking; in addition, this paper offers a critical discussion on the validity of the concept of scarcity in economics from a critical perspective.

To demonstrate that person and the philosophy of personalism are more relevant to contemporary economic affairs than individual and the philosophy of individualism.

This paper addresses two tasks. First, it provides a sketch of what it means to approach economic affairs from the perspective of person and personalism versus individual and individualism. Second, it traces the origins of personalist economics to Aristotle, Aquinas, and Smith, shows why personalist economics departs from mainstream economics, and how it is linked to Weber and Walras principally through Schumpeter.

This paper provides a schematic showing that personalist economics originates with Aristotle, Aquinas, and Smith without embracing the individualism of the Enlightenment and a timeline that connects the three stages of human communication – oral/aural, script, and electronic – to the evolution of economics since the Enlightenment.

This paper challenges mainstream economics to consider the adequacy of individual/individualism in an age where it is self‐evident that human beings are not autonomous individuals.

The individual as the basic unit of economic analysis is a creature born of the individualism of the script stage. The person as the basic unit of economic analysis was born of the personalism of the electronic stage and, therefore, is much better suited to economic analysis in an age of economic globalization.

The integration of work on human communication with the way in which economists should be thinking about contemporary economic affairs.

Western economics came into being with the rise of the capitalist market economy. It had a nature of duality beginning from its birth: the justificativeness of providing theoretical pillars for the capitalist market economy system and the scientificity of revealing the internal relations and operating rules of the capitalist market economy. The paper aims to discuss this issue.

However, after the 1830s, this justificativeness gradually evolved into vulgarity. Since the 1930s, modern western mainstream economics has mainly explored the general market economy on the assumption that the capitalist system remains unchanged, and many outcomes of such research are positive and beneficial.

Political economy of socialism with Chinese characteristics, at the present stage, is mainly a Chinese socialist market economics. It is guided by the Marxist political economy and rooted in the great practice of China’s reform and opening up and socialist modernization.

According to political complexion, western economic theories can be divided into political economic theory, mainstream economic theory and basic economic theory. By subjecting these theories to what we term “elimination,” “transformation” and “transplantation” surgeries, respectively, we can absorb and accommodate their beneficial elements in building a political economy of socialism with Chinese characteristics, which in turn is conducive to the development and prosperity of such an economy.

Is there such a field as social economics? Let us begin by providing some justification (the sceptics may call this rationalisation) for asking the question. The very fact that we are gathered here in Fresno ought to be a reassurance that, indeed, there does exist such a field. But this reassurance amounts to little more than a Descartian feeling of, “I think, therefore I am”. Some people question implicitly or explicitly whether there is such a field of enquiry called social economics. If you think this statement needs empirical support, consider the following: