From Ontological Inconsistencies towards a Post-Mechanist Economic Science : The Innovative Region shaped by Micro-Entrepreneurs in Nature-based Tourism

• A crisis like COVID-19 shows the capacity to challenge the current growth-paradigm. Thus, instead of proposing new tools and methods to resume previously charted economic growth-trajectories, the first part of this presentation reveals ontological discrepancies of contemporary economic science. By following the ontology of modern science rooted in classical physics, mainstream economists presume that ‘objective things’ can be assigned the abstract measuring unit money so as they receive their price. However, through this erroneous (ontological) transformation of (ontic) social acts, not only production processes, but also social acts of exchange, technological processes, and even skills and the arts, stop being social processes, rather become abstract elements in economic equations. Consequently, the uniqueness and diversity of social acts of exchange is transformed into comparable but empty units. By referring to this untenable ontology, one can easily show that economics, despite its ambitious claim, cannot be considered an empirically exact science, exactly because humans do not behave like mechanical objects of classical physics. After finally showing that contemporary economic science is incapable to grasp the nature of creativity, the second part outlines the elements of a post-mechanist economic science which assigns humans’ creativity a central role and defines ‘The Economy’ as a socio-communicative network. Very close to this view comes Feldman’s (2014) Innovative Region understood as inter-connected, open and free territory, which through its unique history and specific beauty fosters place-makers’ creativity and social interactions to transform location factors into assets with high symbolic value and meaning. The correctness and relevancy of this promising concept is confirmed in the third part, showing findings from a large-scale survey (N=580+) with Norwegian micro-entrepreneurs in nature-based tourism. Findings show that entrepreneurs heavily engage in local communities, support volunteer work, create places for creative thinking and contribute to the formation of place identity. By strictly respecting socio-cultural local and regional peculiarities, they add to the creation of public goods, like place brands and ethically grounded social norms. The latter reflect essential values, like fairness seeking and others-regarding with the capacity to crowd-out selfish behavior. From this analysis, propositions for alternative economic spaces to be institutionalized in a post-pandemic era are deduced. 

Subject headings

SAMHÄLLSVETENSKAP  -- Ekonomi och näringsliv (hsv//swe)

SOCIAL SCIENCES  -- Economics and Business (hsv//eng)

Publication and Content Type

ref (subject category)

kon (subject category)