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Initiatives : Opening Economics
The Opening Economics (OSE) Initiative is the realisation of PSE’s long-held ambition to open up economics – from the inside by deepening its central paradigm and from the outside by exploring its frontiers and connections with other disciplines.
The OSE Initiative is interdisciplinary and involves a variety of projects whose special strength is putting PSE researchers together with researchers from other disciplines in order to address and renew a specific problem.
A paradigm organised largely around the notion of a homo economicus who is rational, asocial and atemporal, has proved remarkably powerful in explaining economic phenomena and understanding their mechanisms. If rightful criticisms have been made of it from time to time, it remains an important basis of economic analysis and the scope of its application has been progressively expanded. But the explosion of new data available – historic, administrative, location-specific, neurological and other – cannot help but have an impact on the economics discipline and invite a renewal of its central paradigm. The fact and implications of a limited rationality, of the role of subjectivity, of ethics, of the social, of history and of culture in the economic are all research directions that are likely to deepen some key conclusions derived from the main paradigm and also to surpass it.
This movement within the discipline should lead to a better exploration than has hitherto been possible of the potential frontier connections with the other social sciences (history, sociology, demography, social psychology, political science, philosophy) and other disciplines including not only the neurosciences and cognitive sciences but also medicine, at a moment when the Covid 19 crisis is undermining dogmas, and the environmental sciences (physics, biology, and geography), in an era when the ecological transition has become the greatest challenge to all our societies.
The OSE Initiative plays an incubating role for several interdisciplinary projects by giving them the specific support offered by the EUR PgSE, and previously through the Labex OSE. Its mission is to host and develop large interdisciplinary projects likely to lead to the renewal of a central problem for society.
Today, the OSE Initiative brings together collaborative projects within the Opening Economics Chair in partnership with Hermès, the Hospinnomics Chair and the Centre for Economic and Social History François Simiand. Each research programme has its own aims and modalities, but all regroup international researchers with an interest in opening up their own fields in order to shift the frontiers of knowledge. OSE, through its research programmes, offers a great many seminars and workshops, welcomes associate researchers, includes doctoral students and post-docs, and hosts associated teaching programmes and scientific partners. Bridges between these programmes create, inter alia, a dense network of interdisciplinary scientific links.