Abstract
Since its inception—traditionally identified with Adam Smith’s The Wealth of Nations (1776)—economies has gradually detached itself from the other social sciences and rapidly gained autonomy. Its field has been defined by the quantitative relationships between the individuals in a society arising from the production, exchange, and consumption of goods and services. Today, it is one of the disciplines closest to the physical or biological sciences, having developed highly sophisticated objective methods to describe, explain, and analyse the phenomena it studies. Of course, it is out of the question here to attempt even a concise summary of the history of economics; rather, this chapter aims to show the originality of its approach, relative to the other social sciences, and to identify the concepts of temporality and socio-economic space that it applies to different levels. It is important, therefore, to outline the theoretical foundations of the arguments developed in the following chapter.
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Walliser, B. (2003). Organizational Levels and Time Scales in Economics. In: Courgeau, D. (eds) Methodology and Epistemology of Multilevel Analysis. Methodos Series, vol 2. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4020-4675-9_6
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4020-4675-9_6
Publisher Name: Springer, Dordrecht
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