Institutionalist Thought: Ceremonial-Instrumental Dichotomy of the Veblen-Ayres Tradition
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Veblen and Ayres’ ceremonial-instrumental dichotomy is considered the analytical core of Old Institutional Theory (OIT). This view offers a distinct perspective for analyzing economic issues. The object of economics is studied at the level of cultural generalization, not individual generalization (as neoclassicists do). Human behavior is understood as a process of cumulative adaptation to contextual circumstances. Thus, understanding the meaning of the dichotomy – of doing things and making social distinctions, and of its application to illuminate modern economic problems – deserves attention. This systematic literature review describes the main theoretical, analytical, methodological, and empirical contributions to the ceremonial-instrumental dichotomy of the Veblen-Ayres tradition. To this end, articles on the topic published in the last 46 years were reviewed, which resulted in the analysis of 45 articles, which can be classified as a) conceptual b) methodological; c) empirical, and d) literature reviews. This body of analysis provided insights that lead to inferring the possibility of research in different fields of social sciences.
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.005 | 0.009 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.002 | 0.002 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.002 | 0.017 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.007 | 0.006 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.003 |
| Research integrity | 0.002 | 0.002 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.003 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".