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In this review article, I take three themes from Lynne Chester and Tae-Hee Jo's edited collection Heterodox Economics: Legacy and Prospects. The first is Geoff Hodgson's critique which I summarise thus: heterodox economics lacks consensus, coordination, and organizational coherence because it lacks a definition of heterodoxy. The second and third themes are pluralism and interdisciplinarity. But pluralism has a shortcoming: even a sophisticated structured pluralism would remain within the disciplinary boundary of (heterodox) economics and, therefore, lack valuable insights found in other social science disciplines. Whilst interdisciplinarity appears to offer a solution, it too has a shortcoming: it connects disciplines, whilst leaving the boundaries between them in place. Moreover, the majority of heterodox economists know that economic phenomena are not separate from, but are entangled with, myriad social phenomena, and if so, investigation might require going beyond interdisciplinarity, perhaps to transdisciplinarity. The conclusion draws all these strands together, to consider their implications for the future prospect of heterodox economics. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Rules (i.e. formal rules) are injunctions, constituted by social phenomena. They are learned, mutually understood, located in artefacts and govern agents' actions. When rules are broken, formal sanctions occur. They are cognised and followed consciously. When rules are followed directly, they govern agents' actions. Rules always exist separately from the agents in a rule-circle. Whilst the term unofficial or informal rules is widely used, I consider this to be a mistake: informal rules are not real, the term reifies them. Norms are injunctions are constituted by socio-cognitive phenomena. They are learned, mutually understood and located as memories of past actions, in agents' cognitive systems. They govern agents' actions. Norms are cognised and followed with varying degrees of (un)consciousness. They are always internal to agents, located in their cognitive systems. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The paper argues that it is a mistake to define habit as behaviour or action; as a regular conjunction of actions; as a stock; as a form of automaticity (although habit is acquired and activated automatically); as a tendency, propensity or disposition (even though habit acts tendentially); as a mechanism; and as a process (even though habit is acquired and activated via several processes). A taxonomic definition is provided wherein habit is a cognitive representation of a cue-action response. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The critical realist (CR) conception of open and closed (O&C) systems is not about systems: it is about (ir)regularities in the flux of events and states of affairs. It has recently been criticised on the grounds that critical realists (CRs) should take on board ideas about the general nature of systems; recognise that genuinely open social systems would be impossible; avoid polarities or dualisms where either there are event regularities and open systems, or there are no event regularities and closed systems and accept partial regularities and partially open systems; and understand that orthodox economics is not based upon event regularities, laws or Humean empiricism. The objective of this paper is to 'take stock' of these recent criticisms. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Meta-analysis has proved increasingly popular in management and organization studies as a way of combining existing empirical quantitative research to generate a statistical estimate of how strongly variables are associated. Whilst a number of studies identify technical, procedural and practical limitations of meta-analyses, none have yet tackled the meta-theoretical flaws in this approach. We deploy critical realist meta-theory to argue that the individual quantitative studies, upon which meta-analysis relies, lack explanatory power because they are rooted in quasi-empiricist meta-theory. This problem, we argue, is carried over in meta-analyses. We then propose a ‘critical realist synthesis’ as a potential alternative to the use of meta-analysis in organization studies and social science more widely. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]