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Customary rule-following behaviour in the work of John Stuart Mill and Alfred Marshall1

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  29 October 2014

MICHEL S. ZOUBOULAKIS
MICHEL S. ZOUBOULAKIS*
Affiliation:
Department of Economics, University of Thessaly, 43, Koraïs Str., 38333 Volos, Greece
*
*Email: mzoub@econ.uth.gr
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Abstract

The informal institutional structure embraces the social norms and moral values of a particular society and together with the formal institutional frame, they compose the social environment. Social norms and values, congealed into customary rules of behaviour, provide a stable and enduring context to economic life that acts positively or negatively on economic activity. Despite their methodological and theoretical differences, Mill and Marshall have both suggested that individual economic decisions are fully embedded in their social environment. Thus, in order to explain the economic phenomena, from simple transaction processes to long term development, they adopted a broader perspective by including the social frame inside which economic choices are made, divulging the role of custom, yet in a quite distinctive way.

Type
Research Article
Information
Journal of Institutional Economics , Volume 11 , Issue 4 , December 2015 , pp. 783 - 801
Copyright
Copyright © Millennium Economics Ltd 2014 

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Footnotes

1

Earlier and partial versions of this work were presented to the 14th ESHET Conference, Amsterdam, March 2010 and the 15th ESHET Conference, Istanbul, May 2011. The author is very grateful to the editor and the two anonymous referees of this journal for their very constructive criticisms, and recognises responsibility for the remaining deficiencies.

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