The Austrian and Bloomington Schools of Political Economy by Aligica Paul Dragos;Lewis Paul;Storr Virgil Henry;

Author:Aligica, Paul Dragos;Lewis, Paul;Storr, Virgil Henry;
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Emerald Publishing Limited
Published: 2017-10-04T00:00:00+00:00

4. THE BLOOMINGTON METHOD OF UNDERSTANDING

The Bloomington School of Institutional Analysis, founded by Vincent Ostrom and Elinor Ostrom, has been working for over 50 years with an approach explicitly designed to counter concerns about the subjective nature of knowledge and the corollary that meaningful applied research requires intersubjective understanding. Specifically, the Bloomington School emphasized field work and deep archival research as vital components of their multiple methods approach. In so doing, they acted in accord with a theoretical approach to the study of institutions that emphasized meaning and rules as understood by the actors on the ground. The remainder of this chapter will explore the theoretical and practical focus through the context of the Institutional Analysis and Design (IAD) Framework and its intellectual precursors, discussing throughout the relationship between this analytical approach and Austrian concerns about subjectivity and interpretation.

The great range of subjects addressed by Elinor Ostrom and Vincent Ostrom over their long careers all contributed to a single, cohesive research agenda centered around the question of self-governance or, in other words, how people design and enforce rules to keep the behavior of themselves and others in check (Boettke, Lemke, & Palagashvili, 2015). This research agenda began with an empirical puzzle that Vincent Ostrom first became interested in through casual observation of the dry Southern California landscape: with everybody drawing on a common (and not overly abundant) reservoir of water, why was there any left? (Allen, 2011). Over the subsequent decades, variants of this question would be asked in the context of the “American experiment” with self-government and constitutional design; the provision of local public goods, such as police services; and a variety of environmental resource issues, particularly those relating to CPRs. The great commonality between these projects is that they are all matters of institutional analysis, where “institution” is defined as a system of rules that shapes action for a particular group given a particular context.

The method the scholars in the Workshop used to study these institutional questions eventually becomes known as the IAD Framework (Ostrom, 2010, 2011). McGinnis (1999) identifies a 1965 essay as already establishing the approach that would later become more fully articulated as the IAD Framework. In this early effort, the Ostroms are already chafing at the strictures of market and state. They propose thinking of governmental services as industries, where there are multiple players brought into interaction with each other by their diverse but related interests (Ostrom & Ostrom, 1999 [1965]). In order to engage in analysis, then, careful understanding of the particular context and nature of the “industry” are required – simply noting that production is managed by government is not adequate. Already, the Ostroms’ work hints at the emphasis-to-come on articulating the rules of context of particular situations rather than force-fitting into a narrow set of pre-existing models and theories.

In the more developed later articulations of the IAD Framework, Ostrom (2010, p. 646) distinguished between three levels of analysis, the most general level of which is the framework, “…intended to contain the

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