Theorizing competition: an interdisciplinary framework

Altreiter, Carina; Gräbner, Claudius; Pühringer, Stephan; Rogojanu, Ana; Wolfmayr, Georg Working Paper Theorizing competition: an interdisciplinary framework SPACE Working Paper Series, No. 4 Provided in Cooperation with: Johannes Kepler University Linz, Institute for Comprehensive Analysis of the Economy (ICAE) Suggested Citation: Altreiter, Carina; Gräbner, Claudius; Pühringer, Stephan; Rogojanu, Ana; Wolfmayr, Georg (2020) : Theorizing competition: an interdisciplinary framework, SPACE Working Paper Series, No. 4, Johannes Kepler University Linz, Research Project SPACE - Spatial Competition and Economic Policies, Linz This Version is available at: https://hdl.handle.net/10419/301075 Standard-Nutzungsbedingungen: Die Dokumente auf EconStor dürfen zu eigenen wissenschaftlichen Zwecken und zum Privatgebrauch gespeichert und kopiert werden. 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If the documents have been made available under an Open Content Licence (especially Creative Commons Licences), you may exercise further usage rights as specified in the indicated licence. https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/ SPACE Working Paper Series Working Paper No. 4 (December 2020) Carina Altreiter, Claudius Gräbner, Stephan Pühringer, Ana Rogojanu, Georg Wolfmayr Theorizing competition: an interdisciplinary framework About SPACE SPACE investigates the impact of an increasing reliance on “competitiveness” as a prime mode of social organization and as a core concept for designing institutions on different ontological levels of social reality. The approach taken is interdisciplinary and SPACE scholars come from economics, sociology, and ethnology, among others. For more information about SPACE visit www.spatialcompetition.com. SPACE is funded by the Austrian Science Fund under grant ZK-60. About the series The SPACE Working Paper Series presents ongoing research results of the project „Spatial Competition and Economics Policies“ funded by the Austrian Science Fund (FWF) under grant ZK-60. The content of the working papers does not necessarily reflect the views of the FWF of the institutions the authors are affiliated with. For all working papers visit www.spatial-competition.com *: Corresponding authors email address: [email protected] (CG), [email protected] (AR). Theorizing competition: an interdisciplinary framework Carina Altreitera, Claudius Gräbnerbc*, Stephan Pühringerb, Ana Rogojanud, Georg Wolfmayrd December 15 2020 a: Institute for Sociology and Social Research, Vienna University of Economics and Business, Vienna, Austria b: Institute for the Comprehensive Analysis of the Economy, Johannes Kepler University, Linz, Austria c: Institute for Socioeconomics, University of Duisburg-Essen, Germany d: Institute for European Ethnology, University of Vienna, Austria Abstract This paper introduces a framework to facilitate an interdisciplinary analysis of ‘competition’. While such an interdisciplinary analysis can be justified by referencing the various fields of social and economic life in which ‘competition’ is important, three challenges are found to aggravate such endeavor. To mitigate these challenges, and to explicate the often implicit meta-theoretical assumption in the scope, methodological and normative dimension, a meta-theoretical framework is proposed. Its usefulness is illustrated via a comparative description of selected contributions from the social sciences and humanities. Despite its limited scope, it yields some preliminary conjectures that may inspire future research: first, there are sufficient common elements across different concepts of competition that justify an interdisciplinary approach to study competition; second, apart from differences between disciplines, there are remarkable differences within disciplines that are at least of similar importance. Finally, there are important interdependencies between the meta-theoretical dimensions considered in the framework. Keywords: competition, interdisciplinarity, methodology of the social sciences and humanities License: Creative-Commons CC-BY-NC-ND 4.0 Altreiter et al.: Theorizing competition – an interdisciplinary framework 1 1 Introduction Competition is becoming more and more relevant in various fields of economic, political, and social life (Hartmann and Kjaer, 2015). Not only is it applied as a central principle of economic coordination, but has also gained in importance for the relationship between nation-states (Werron, 2012; Kapeller et al., 2019), as a policy tool (Kjaer, 2015), for the funding of academic work (Tauschek, 2013; Wetzel, 2013), in the field of entertainment (Tauschek, 2012, 2013), or even in love relationships (Wetzel, 2013). Some scholars trace the growing relevance of competition to the middle or end of the 20th century and consider it as a characteristic feature of the governmental rationality of neoliberalism (Foucault, 2010), as an element of the economization of the social (Jessop, 2012; Schimank and Volkmann, 2012), as an example of the performativity of economics (Callon, 1998; Mackenzie et al., 2008), or as a consequence of the political power of economic ideas (Mirowski and Plehwe, 2009; Pühringer, 2018). Others argue that competition has already been a core principle of social organization much earlier (Simmel, 1995 [1903]; Nullmeier, 2002; Werron, 2015). Irrespective of this discussion about timing, the multitude of fields in which competition is an empirically relevant factor today makes it an attractive subject of investigation for a variety of disciplines. In economics, competition has been a central concept and object of study ever since its formation as an academic discipline. Already in the middle of the 19th century, John Stuart Mill stated that “only through the principle of competition has political economy any pretension to the character of a science” (Mill, 1909 [1848], p. 191). Over the years, economists such as Adam Smith, David Ricardo, Karl Marx, Leon Walras, Joseph Schumpeter, Joan Robinson, Friedrich von Hayek, or Gerard Debreu have sketched out different theories and conceptualizations of competition, all of which come with distinct implications, e.g. regarding its character as static or dynamic, regarding the adequate methods to investigate it, or regarding its positive or negative normative connotation. The role of competition as a central concept, in any case, has remained uncontested until today (Backhouse, 1990; Shaikh, 2016; Gane, 2019). In other social sciences and humanities, competition has become a central topic only in the more recent past, yet early theories of competition can be traced back to the beginning of the 20th century: At a time when sociology began to form as a discipline of its own, competition was explicitly addressed by Georg Simmel (1995 [1903]) as one of the key principles of the organization of modern society. Max Weber (1978 [1922]) or Karl Polanyi (Polanyi, 2011 [1957]) who both were trained in economics as well as sociology respectively anthropology, implicitly dealt with competition in their work on the relationship between the social and the economic realm. This work gave rise to the fields of economic sociology and economic anthropology (Smelser and Swedberg, 2005; Wilk and Cliggett, 2007; Granovetter and Swedberg, 2011). In the more recent past, competition also gets regularly addressed in sociology, anthropology, and political science (Hartmann and Kjaer, 2015), as well as business and management studies (e.g. Barney, 1991; on the topic of ‘coopetition’ see e.g. Bouncken et al., 2015). The fact that competition has not only become a relevant phenomenon in various fields of life but also an important topic in several disciplines calls for an interdisciplinary approach to its investigation. Such an approach, however, gets aggravated by the many different notions of, and methodological approaches to the study of competition. Thus, attempts to sketch out the intellectual history of the term across various disciplines have, so far, been rather scarce: Werron (2015) takes a comparative perspective on the study of competition in different disciplines since the 18th century, and Gane (2019) outlines four key conceptions of competition since the 19th century, taking into account economic, socio-biological and sociological positions. Both present similarities and differences between the concepts with a focus on the normative dimension, yet they abstain from a discussion of these along conceptual analytical lines. Jessop (2015) points to differences in the understanding of competition in different contexts, yet with an exclusive focus on the economic and the political field and an interest in the actual realization of certain concepts of competition in terms of an economization of societal organization. The present paper aspires to facilitate an interdisciplinary approach to competition in a different manner: in a first, diagnostic, step we identify three challenges that aggravate any interdisciplinary approach to competition; in a second, solution-oriented, step, we address these challenges explicitly by introducing a meta-theoretical framework geared towards the interdisciplinary Altreiter et al.: Theorizing competition – an interdisciplinary framework 2 comparison and triangulation of different concepts of competition. The three challenges we diagnose are the following: 1. The challenge of scope, which refers to the generality of the concept and the fact that contributions differ with regard to the competing actors (‘competition among whom?’) and the object of competition (‘competition for what?’). 2. The challenge of methodology, which exists because different scientific disciplines study competition with distinct methods and epistemological orientations (i.e. receipts for how knowledge about the object of interest can be gained, and requirements an adequate analysis must meet). 3. The challenge of normativity, which refers to the fact that debates about competition have been closely linked to controversial political debates. Many academics dealing with competition were actively involved in these debates, while others claim to represent descriptive accounts of how competition works. With regard to all three challenges, it is important to explicate the often implicit assumptions on scope, methodology, and normativity that are inherent in any approach to study competition. Only then a triangulation of concepts of competition across disciplines can be successful. The key contribution of the present paper is, therefore, the introduction of an analytical framework that addresses the three challenges and can serve as a blueprint for an interdisciplinary comparison and integration. To achieve this aim, we proceed as follows: section 2 introduces the analytical framework, the usefulness of which will be illustrated in section 3, where a selection of theoretical concepts will be presented in a comparative manner. Section 4 reflects on how the categories of the framework are connected to each other and how approaches to study competition differ among and 1 The notion of “ideal types” is often associated with Max Weber, where it stands for a condensed, abstract concept that bears typical features of certain empirical phenomena, which, however, are not necessarily found in reality as such. Our use of the term bears some similarity with Weber’s concept insofar as we consider ideal types to be the most definite positions in the categories within disciplines. Section 5 concludes and outlines avenues for future research. 2 An analytical framework for tracing the intellectual history of competition This section introduces an analytical framework that addresses the three challenges introduced above. It comprises three blueprints for the classification of concepts of competition according to their scope, their methodology, and their normative connotations. For each dimension, it contains guiding questions as well as certain ideal types 1 that facilitate the analysis of conceptions found in the literature (see tables Table 1, Table 2, and Table 3). With regard to the challenge of scope one may classify concepts of competition according to (1) who the competing actors in the concept are, and (2) what these actors are competing for (see Table 1). Regarding the first issue, some concepts, particularly in anthropology, focus on competition among individuals, whereas others are primarily concerned with competition between entities on higher ontological levels. Examples include groups in theories of democracy as a competitive process (Schumpeter, 1994 [1943]) or nation states in the discussion about the ‘race to the best location’ (e.g. Kapeller et al., 2019). The processes of competition on these different levels may be interdependent and affect each other. For instance, rules that policy makers implement on the national level to ensure the competitiveness of their country might foster competition among individuals on the labor market. Yet, the mechanisms operating on each particular level are likely to be different and it seems helpful to explicate the concrete set of competing actors when different concepts of competition are compared. The ideal types in Table 1 offer a first inspiration, although they should be thought to span a continuum on which actual concepts are to be aligned. Moreover, while the examples in the table can we analyze. However, they are not the abstract condensation of our own theoretical work. Rather, they correspond with concrete concepts of competition in the literature which we consider to be good examples of extreme positions in the spectrum of the relevant categories. Altreiter et al.: Theorizing competition – an interdisciplinary framework 3 be clearly identified as either a micro or a macro perspective, many scholars consider their concepts of competition to be applicable on different levels. The second distinction refers to what the actors are competing for. The related ideal types, again, span a continuum on which concrete concepts can be located. An essential distinction here is between universal and particular concepts. While the former consider competition to be a universal logic that is underlying processes and dynamics in basically all relevant social fields, the latter applies to concepts that focus on competition in singular fields, such as economic competition for commodities. Actual conceptions may then be placed in the continuum spanned by these two extreme positions. Table 1. The analytical framework addressing the challenge of scope Challenge of scope Guiding question I Who is competing? Ideal types for GQ 1 Competition among individuals Competition among groups Competition among states Individuals compete with each other for the object of competition. Groups compete with each other for the object of competition. Nation states compete for the object of competition. Examples In a beauty contest, individuals compete against each other for the prize (Tauschek, 2013). In political science, democracy is discussed as a form of competition between parties for the voters’ favor (Schumpeter, 1994 [1943]). Member states of the EU compete for the settlement of firms within a ‘European race for the best location’(Kapeller et al., 2019). Guiding question II What is competed for? Ideal types for GQ 2 Universal Particular Competition is ubiquitous and always follows the same logic in different social fields. That means, there is a ubiquitous competition for a variety of goods in numerous social fields. Competition is considered to operate only in particular areas and its functioning is context-dependent. That means the competitors compete only for a well-defined subset of goods within a given field. Examples For Pierre Bourdieu, competition is a universal principle operating in all social fields. While classical economists studied competition for commodities, some sociologists and anthropologists such as Markus Tauschek focused on competition for social goods, e.g. in the form of beauty or music contests. The blueprint summarized in Table 2 addresses the challenge of methodology. This challenge is concerned with the methods applied in different analytical accounts on competition (e.g. statistics, dynamical systems modelling, computer simulation, participant observation, interviews etc.) and its epistemological orientation, which refers to what is accepted as an adequate explanation. In a first step, one should ask whether the concept of competition explicitly or implicitly suggests a particular methodology for its analysis. To facilitate such metatheoretical comparisons, the set of ideal types for the first guiding question draws on Weisberg’s (2007) distinction between model-based and abstract-direct analysis. 2 The classical example is the construction of the periodic table in chemistry by Dmitri Mendeleev. The extent to which Weisberg’s distinction is also applicable In the first case, competition is investigated by first creating an artificial surrogate for the actual system under investigation – a model. This model is then analyzed and, in a third step, related to the system under investigation to derive statements about the latter. This approach is typical for many schools in economics, but less common in, for instance, anthropology: here scholars do not develop models that they investigate instead of their actual target system, but rather focus on a direct analysis of the target. Weisberg calls this strategy abstract-direct analysis since while it also involves abstraction it is – unlike modeling – directly concerned with the target system. 2 within cultural and social studies has not been discussed extensively and should be subject to further investiga- Altreiter et al.: Theorizing competition – an interdisciplinary framework 4 The second guiding question addressing the challenge of methodology seeks to explicate the epistemology underlying a given concept of competition by asking how the concept means to derive new knowledge about the competition investigated. The ideal types refer to the different modes of explanations dating back to Elster (1983). He distinguishes between explanations that explicate the motives of the parties involved (‘hermeneutic explanations’), explanations geared towards the explication of causal mechanisms (‘causal explanations’), and explanations that work by identifying the function a certain process is serving (‘functional explanations’). While the latter are often the goal of anthropological studies using concepts from grounded theory, functional explanations have been prominent in parts of Austrian (e.g. Hayek, 1969) or institutional economics (c.f. Wilber and Harrison, 1978), and causal explanations are regularly aspired by scholars working in the field of evolutionary economics (c.f. Witt, 2014). Many disagreements popping up in applied work can be traced back to different methodological orientations on the epistemological level since the latter usually come with very different quality standards. Unfortunately, meta-theoretical assumptions, such as what kind of explanation is aspired, are seldomly articulated explicitly. This aggravates an interdisciplinary triangulation. Yet, by explicating these differences the present framework allows to identify the ultimate sources of differences between different concepts (Graebner and Strunk, 2020). Table 2. The analytical framework addressing the challenge of methodology Challenge of methodology Guiding question I What kind of methods are suggested for the study of competition? Ideal types for GQ 1 Model-based analysis Abstract-direct analysis Scholars represent their target system and competition through a model, analyze the model and make conclusions based on the model analysis. Scholars describe competition in their target system and base their conclusions on this description without relying on a model. Examples In many economic paradigms, one regularly sets up a mathematical model, proves theorems and relates these results to the target system. Much of the current work in social and cultural studies describes the behavior of people and derives more abstract claims from this description directly without building models. Guiding question II What kind of explanations does the concept aspire? Ideal types for GQ 2 Hermeneutic explanations Causal explanations Functional explanations The goal of the analysis is to understand the role competition plays for the decision making of the actors involved. The goal is to identify causal mechanisms. The goal is to identify the function competition is playing. Examples A grounded theory approach to competition in housing would start by interviewing or observing people searching for housing to identify how competition affects them. In many parts of evolutionary economics, scholars are interested to identify the root cause for the effect of competition. Hayek explains the emergence of a competitive market economy via its superior role as an economic coordination device. Finally, addressing the challenge of normativity requires one to explicate the academic, political and socio-historical context in which the concept has been developed (see Table 3). It is often illuminating to ask whether a particular approach to study competition implies a normative connotation of competition. Here one may distinguish two ideal types, which again span a continuum on which actual concepts can be aligned: On the one side tion. We are, nevertheless, convinced that this distinction helps to explicate methodological differences between concepts of competition. are descriptive concepts, where the authors were driven mainly by the desire to describe competition and less by the wish to derive policy implications. On the other side, prescriptive concepts are inherently normative and imor explicitly suggest certain avenues of reform. For instance, Hayek (1969) used his theory of competition as a discovery process to reject the attempt of Lange (1936), who advocated a socialist planning board based Altreiter et al.: Theorizing competition – an interdisciplinary framework 5 on his work. Neither of the two concepts can be properly understood without the explication of the political debate in which they were developed. Once the implicit value judgements have been worked out, those concepts that imply a prescriptive intention can be classified more precisely according to how positive or negative their view on competition is. Table 3. The analytical framework addressing the challenge of normativity Challenge of normativity Guiding question I Does the concept imply a normative connotation of competition? Ideal types for GQ 1 Descriptive intention Prescriptive intention The concept rests upon descriptions and comes without normative implications for policy and behavior. The concept implies certain policies and institutions in reality, which would, if implemented, have beneficial or undesirable societal implications. Examples The classical General Equilibrium Models were – before the introduction of the welfare theorems – meant as purely descriptive means to study competition between economic actors. Adam Smith considers competition as a characteristic of his preferred system of natural liberty, which is why the term is positively connotated. Guiding question II If the concept is normative, how is competition evaluated? Ideal types for GQ 2 Negative evaluation Ambiguous Positive evaluation Examples Wetzel (2013) criticizes the role of competition as a comprehensive governing principle of human conduct in neoliberal contexts. Rosa (2006) points to positive as well as destructive consequences of competition. For Hayek (1969), competition “discovers facts that would otherwise remain unknown” and is essential for economic success. The three blueprints as summarized in tables Table 1, Table 2, and Table 3 can now be used to compare different conceptions of competition with each other. 3 Conceptions of competition in the light of an analytical framework This section applies the analytical framework introduced above to selected contributions in the literature in order to illustrate its usefulness. The section is structured according to the three challenges and their respective guiding questions. 3.1 Scope of competition 3.1.1 Who is competing? First theoretical concepts dealing explicitly with competition emerged during the 18th century in the field of Political Economy (comprising much of what today is separated into economics, philosophy, political science and sociology). These concepts were mainly concerned 3 In the US-American system the distinction between ‘international relations’, and ‘political science’ emerged, with the latter being more concerned with national and sub-national, and the first with international political with competition among firms and/or individuals. But although the wording was different, macroeconomic theories of the time also referred to competition, yet on the level of nation-states: mercantilism, for instance, was characterized by an agonist understanding of international trade and suggested that countries keep most of the value-creating activities within their own boundaries. Until today, theories of competition in economics (and political science 3 ) continue to be concerned with competition among individuals and/or firms, but competition among nations is now recognized more explicitly, particularly in debates about the ‘race to the best location’ (e.g. Kapeller et al., 2019), where the competition among countries for the settlement of wealthy individuals and firms is at center stage of the attention. In social and cultural studies, the focus on theories of competition among individuals is more pronounced, although, as in economics, a remarkable variety regarding the levels on which competition has been discussed exists. On the one hand, Simmel’s influential conceptualization of competition as an indirect fight in which the processes. Not surprisingly, theories of competition from the two fields had the corresponding foci. Outside the US, both fields usually fall under to name ‘political science’. Altreiter et al.: Theorizing competition – an interdisciplinary framework 6 distribution of a scarce good between two or more parties is managed by a third party, was concerned mainly with individuals. The same holds true for more recent approaches in sociology or anthropology that study competition in love relationships or sports (Wetzel, 2013) or competitive formats such as beauty or music contests (Tauschek, 2012, 2019). On the other hand, historians such as Jessen (2014) or Hölkeskamp (2014) or sociologists such as Rosa (2006) or Werron (2014a) point to the applicability of the concept to different analytical levels, ranging from a micro perspective on the everyday life of individuals to competition among organizations or states (Werron, 2012). 3.1.2 What is competed for? With regard to the question what the players are competing for, an ongoing expansion of the scope of competition considered can be observed: early concepts, referring to competition for commodities, were later complemented by concepts of competition for noncommodified goods, such as prestige, recognition or attention, yet all of them remained focused on one particular area of application. The late 20th century brought forth universal concepts of competition, which claim the applicability of the same concept of competition to all fields of social life. The main object of competition for classical economic theorists were commodified goods. Mill, for instance, was very keen about restricting the scope of applicability of his theories of competition to the economic realm, where the distribution of material goods was of central importance. This focus was not limited to the field of economics: in substantivist economic anthropology people such as Karl Polanyi, George Dalton, or Paul Bohannan studied how different societies organize their economy to ensure provision and satisfaction of material needs and examined the role of competition for the distribution of the resources involved (Polanyi, 1977, p. 12). Initially, a similar scope can be found in what was going to be birth of economic sociology, i.e. in Max Weber’s work “economy and society” (1978 [1922]). Yet, Weber already anticipated a broader scope when referring to competition as a “peaceful attempt to attain control over opportunities and advantages which are also desired by others” (Weber, 1978 [1922], p. 38). Despite his clear focus on economic activities, Weber also pointed to other social contexts in which competition may occur. Weber’s contemporary, Georg Simmel, shifted the analysis of competition towards the social realm and focused on competition for social goods. He studied this form of competition in various contexts, reaching from trading to love relationships and sports. A slightly different route for the expansion of competition research to non-economic fields was taken by formal economic anthropologists such as Cyril Belshaw, Richard Salisburg, Fredrik Barth or Harold K. Schneider who followed a neoclassical economic approach by studying social life in non-western societies as characterized by economic principles and as social exchange. Thus, also intangible, social goods, such as recognition, honor, respect, love and prestige were understood as possible objects of competition. Today, scholars continue to investigate competition in different fields of social life and consider a wide range of scarce goods that might be at stake, including symbolic and social goods (Rosa, 2006, p. 86; Tauschek, 2012; Hölkeskamp, 2014, p. 33; Jessen, 2014). One of the key characteristics of these recent approaches is, however, that, instead of attempting a general theory of competition, they point to the specificity of competition in different contexts (Nullmeier, 2002; Tauschek, 2012, 2013). This is different for concepts of universal competition, which were popularized by scholars such as Gary Becker in economics and Pierre Bourdieu in sociology. It was in the 1970s when Gary Becker (and partly his fellow economists George Stigler and James Buchanan) expanded the field of economic research. Becker laid the foundations for the application of economic methodology on a vast variety of issues as crime, family, discrimination, marriage, death penalty and human capital, all of which were considered to be characterized by the same principle of competition. In his Nobel Lecture Becker considers competition as a universal coordination mechanism not confined to particular areas of application. Although using a different methodology, Pierre Bourdieu likewise argued that every social field is characterized by an economic, universal principle. In each field, there is competition for profits and a monopoly over the specific capital of the field (Bourdieu, 1992, p. 17). So, Bourdieu’s concept of competition is universal insofar as he sees every field, including the field of cultural production (Bourdieu, 1993), the academic field (Bourdieu, 1992) or even a sexual field (Green, 2008; Illouz, 2012, pp. 51–58), as characterized by a competitive rationality. 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