Dear colleagues,

enclosed is a Call For Papers for a special issue of the *Revue d'Economie
Politique,* one of the main general-interest scholarly journals about
economics in France (https://www.cairn.info/revue-d-economie-politique.htm).
Paper proposals and final papers should be written in English.

Kind Regards,

Beatrice Cherrier

*CALL FOR PAPERS*

*The role of workshops, seminars and conferences in the history of economic
thought*

BeatrCherrier (CNRS & Université de Cergy)

and Aurélien Saïdi (Université Paris Nanterre)





There are very few history of contemporary economics articles which make no
mention, as a background, of an important conference, workshop or seminar.
Yet, there are very few articles taking them as the central protagonist.
Turning this pervasive background into an object of study is the purpose of
a forthcoming special issue of the *Revue d’Economie Politique*
<https://www.cairn.info/revue-d-economie-politique.htm>, one of the major
French economic journals, for which we solicit contributions.



It seems that economic ideas, models and practices are largely developed,
challenged and disseminated through weekly seminars, seasonal workshops and
annual or landmark conferences. The annual ASSA/AEA conference has been a
focal point for US-based economists for more than a century, and their
summers are now often spent attending NBER field summer schools. The
methodology of economics, concepts of equilibrium, growth, interest rates
and dynamics were debated in famous private gathering including the Vienna
circle, Menger’s seminar or Keynes’s Cambridge circus. International and
national economic policies are decided in famous venues such as the Bretton
Woods conference, as well as political philosophies. Neoliberalism famously
emerged from the Walter Lippman colloquium and consolidated through annual
Mont Pelerin conferences. Expected utility theory was both stabilized and
destabilized as the major postwar rational decision theory framework during
a famous *Conférence sur le Risque *organized in Paris in 1952 by Maurice
Allais. Decision theory, game-theoretic models, as well as all sorts of
mathematical applications to micro and macroeconomics were dissected
throughout a multi-week long Stanford summer workshop organized by the
Institute for Mathematical Studies in Social Science (now Stanford
Institute for Theoretical Economics) under the leadership of Mordecai Kurz
since the 1970s. It took three Santa Fe seminars on *The Economy as an
Evolving Complex System*in 1987, 1996 and 2001 to shape a new field,
complexity economics. Macroeconomic models have been debated during the
regular meetings of the Brookings panel and the Carnegie-Rochester and NBER
workshops. Outside the United States, the Roy-Malinvaud seminar has long
remained the reference for French economists, attracting many colleagues
from all over the world. These are just a few examples.



In spite of such ubiquity, conferences, seminars and workshops have hardly
be used as telescopes to study “science in action,” the state of a debate
or a field at a given moment of time, even less as threads to track the
dissemination of an idea, a model or a practice or the transformation of a
field: notable exceptions include Till Düppe and Roy Weintraub (2014), who
locate the birth of a new scientific culture in economics as well as a new
set of tools in the 1949*Activity Analysis *conference organized by the
Cowles Commission, one that wasn’t, at that time, perceived as a watershed.
Aurélien Goutsmedt (2017) uses the 1978 macroeconomics conference organized
by the Federal Reserve Bank of Boston to contextualize Robert Lucas and
Thomas Sargent’s attack on Keynesian macroeconomics. Neither has the direct
role played by gathering with various organizations, lengths, recurrence,
etc., in the development of economics been investigated. Two exceptions is
Ross Emmett’s (2011) examination of the role played by the set of workshops
established by 1950s and 1960s Chicago economists in the sharpening of
their tools and approaches, and the quantitative analysis thatElliott Ash,
Daniel Chen & Sureh Naidu (2018) run to analyze the effect of Henry Manne’s
law & economics training program for US federal judges on criminal
sentences.



This leaves a sizeable range of questions unanswered. Contributions can be
of qualitative and/or quantitative nature, focus on what these objects
reveal or what they create,  and deal with questions including but not
limited to:



1)  What are the purposes of workshops, conferences and seminars in
economics?  Are they primarily intellectual or institutional? Is it about
communicating research and to whom? How much are workshops and conferences
oriented toward academics, journalists, policy-makers? Is it about
debating, structuring a community, recruiting, targeted at minorities,
helping doctoral students master tools? Are they focused on laying out
disagreement or reaching agreements, brainstorming new ideas or stabilizing
paradigms? Do they play a special role in interdisciplinary ventures?



2)  Is there any difference in format, purposes, uses and cultures across
sciences (say economics as compared with physics, psychology, philosophy,
etc.), across fields (does macroeconomics rely on workshops more than, say,
development economics or public finance?), across places and types of
institutions?



3)  To what extent do organizational features of conferences, workshop and
seminars matter: recurrence, closed or opened, size, formal or informal,
turnover, share of juniors and seniors, share of academic vs non-academic,
type of funding, location, set up, discussants, keynotes, etc.



4)  How to evaluate the legacy of a conference, a workshop or seminar:
which output is a relevant proxy? A volume, consistent set of papers, an
agenda, a series of grants, some textbooks or curricula? Is it possible at
all to track a workshop’s influence, and how so





*Deadlines*



*We would like to receive paper proposals (one to two pages) by May 31,
2019 *(to beatrice.cherrier[at]u-cergy.fr and aurelien.saidi[at]
parisnanterre.fr).


Notifications of approval will be sent by July 1st.


A full first draft is due on December 1 and will be sent to referees.


Referee reports and editorial decisions will be known by February 5, 2020,
and final draft are due by May 31, 2020.



*References*



Ash, E. Chen, D. Naidu, S. 2018: “Ideas have consequences: the impact of
law & economics on American Justice”
https://elliottash.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/08/ash-chen-naidu-2018-07-15.pdf


Düppe, T. and Weintraub, E. R. 2014. Siting the New Economic Science : The
Cowles Commission’s Activity Analysis Conference of June 1949. *Science in
Context*, 27(3) :453–483


Emmett, R. 2011. “Sharpening Tools in the Workshop: The Workshop System and
the Chicago School’s Success” in Van Horn, Mirowski & Stapleford
(eds.), *Building
Chicago Economics. *Cambridge University Press.


Goutsmedt, A. 2017. Stagflation and the crossroad in macroeconomics : the
struggle between structural and New Classical macroeconometrics. *Documents
de travail du Centre d’Economie de la Sorbonne*