ABSTRACT
Ontology is definitely not a prominent topic in economics, but it has experienced increasing recognition from heterodox economic approaches during recent decades. And it turned out that ontology carries significant content for the making of economic theory. Heterodoxy is concerned with a more realistic re-compilation of economic science and therefore stumbled necessarily upon ontology, because it is about the nature and being of economic reality. The basic outline suggests that economic realities go beyond or even beneath mere individual preferences and their automatic coordination in virtual markets. Since heterodoxy aims at designing economics in a generic way, that means in particular addressing all economic provocations on life, one is interested in those beyond and beneath realities, like institutions for instance. The more we look into details, we find out that these realities also change themselves and their environment over time and are not accountable with static axiomatic conceptions. In sociology we find several principles of social causation (compare for instance Mouzelis 1995, 2007), capable of explaining dynamic change in society by looking into interdependencies between agency and structure. Why do we not just use these principles for a social ontology of economics?
