The enduring debate on institutional pillars of contemporary political economies has gathered a noticeable momentum in terms of the change, path-dependence, and varieties of capitalism. By taking a methodological standpoint claiming that ’the current structure and the future of contemporary societies can only be understood by using an evolutionary and macro institutional approach that would explain the trajectories of social structures from a systemic perspective’, this book first aims at formulating a novel analytical framework thus, Institutional System Analysis in Political Economy. This framework comprises, inter alia, a model of path-dependent changes, and then attempts to apply it to the case of the Ottoman-Turkish social system. In sum, the book develops an ’interaction-theoretic and evolutionarily-structured approach’ with an aim to better capture the path-dependence and change of political, economic, and cultural action in terms of their intersectional dynamics.
By taking a methodological standpoint claiming that ’the current structure and the future of contemporary societies can only be understood by using an evolutionary and macro institutional approach that would explain the trajectories of ...
From its genesis in the seventh century onwards, Islam has been a major paradigm that has shaped the politico-economic life of a vast portion of the world population, nearly a quarter at present. In view of the underdeveloped or developing structures of Muslim-majority nations, it has mostly been assumed that Islam predicates an autocratic theocracy and a conservative, rather than a progressive, economic policy that retards scientific research and entrepreneurial innovation. Conversely, with a reactive consciousness, orthodox Muslims take it for granted that Islam's divinely ordained normative axioms would be enough for them to spontaneously establish the most conciliatory political regime on the earth and an advanced economic system irrespective of the power and money-oriented dimensions of human interaction and the assimilative potential of capitalist world economy. To clarify this ambiguity between the reductionist and mythicising perceptions over the theory and praxis of Islamic political economy, this paper first and basically examines its framing institutions at the level of theory and then the causes and consequences of [in]consistencies between its theoretical axioms and their praxis by the Muslim nations.
From its genesis in the seventh century onwards, Islam has been a major paradigm that has shaped the politico-economic life of a vast portion of the world population, nearly a quarter at present.
The Arab Uprisings and their transformational impact across the Middle East and North Africa [MENA] have generated immense debate about the future of the region's countries during a period of re-organizational crisis in the international political economy. At this stage of the unfolding region-wide transition in the MENA, this paper performs a two-step theoretico-practical examination of the processes between and after the Uprisings. The first step is to crystallize the ambiguous manifestations between the theory of Islamic political economy and the praxis of these Muslim-majority countries: the high-income Arab Gulf States, upper-middle-income Tunisia, and lower-middle-income Egypt. The second is to contextualize the evolving continuities and discontinuities in these case countries between economy, polity, and society using the eight patterns of path-dependent changes that the author develops. And a discussion will ensue on the prospective changes these nations will face in terms of the potential trajectories of systemic change between the embedded path-dependencies of the established regimes and the patterns of change demanded by the subversive Islamic factions drawn from the pure theory of Islamic political economy.
The Arab Uprisings and their transformational impact across the Middle East and North Africa [MENA] have generated immense debate about the future of the region's countries during a period of re-organizational crisis in the international ...