Book Publication: The Relational View of Economics. A New Research Agenda for the Study of Relational Transactions

Under the title "The Relational View of Economics. A New Research Agenda for the Study of Relational Transactions" Josef Wieland and authors Lucio Biggiero, Derick de Jongh, Birger Priddat, Adrian Zicari, and Dominik Fischer have published a new book in 2022. It highlights a relational view of economics and offers insights into an emerging field of research by analyzing the role of relational transactions in the study of economic phenomena.

An excerpt from its preface reads as follows:

For several years now, in the field of economics a research perspective has gradually emerged that can be characterized as the “relational view.” Thinking in terms of relations has a venerable tradition in, for example, network theory, economic geography, complexity research and relational sociology. In economics, various research programs have contributed to this trend. Examples there of are institutional and organizational economics, as well as several variations of the resource based view of the firm, that are increasingly focusing on relational elements such as relational contracts, relational governance and relational rents. These relational elements serve as fundamental aspects of grasping economic transactions and value creation in global and regional networks. The central aspect of relational goods, as covered in the perspective of happiness research also belongs to this context. In terms of organizational and management theories, the stakeholder theory of the firm and relational leadership approaches are fundamentally based on a relational view. This trend, only briefly outlined here, corresponds to an advanced epistemological and methodological reflection on how the previously mentioned research approaches can be mathematically formalized in economics and the management sciences. An implicit paradigmatic reorientation is a shared component of these research developments.