Towards Micro-Foundations of Human Agency: Lessons from Douglass North's Socio-Cognitive Turn

Abstract

A socio-cognitive foundation for human agency requires much deeper exploration to adequately understand the origins of our interests, preferences, and choices as they shape both the emergence of institutions, as well as the process of institutional change. In the collegial spirit of rapprochement and cross-pollination reminiscent of earlier efforts in new institutional organisation studies and in recent work in business history, the central contention of this paper is that the new institutional economics of ‘late’ Douglass North (i.e. North 2005), provides such a socio-cognitive approach and an important ontological frame for dealing with embedded agency that may afford a more thorough account of how institutions are formed and change over time.