Volume VIII
kind of progress on economics. In terms of research priorities, it seems to me that that focus on ontology is quite crucial and very important. Interviewer: Just to touch upon that a little bit more, what was the point where you started thinking that conventional economics is very problematic and there needs to be something done about it? Prof. Pratten: Well, one of the things that struck me even as a graduate student doing my Master’s degree was how different the current conventional economics’ approaches were from the kind of works that I found most convincing. I read Keynes’ chapter 12 of The General Theory, I read Marx and his discussion of labour process, and I was very interested in various institutional economists like Veblen and John Commons. Now all of these approaches seemed very different from the conventional economics that I was studying during my Master’s course, and a great deal more insightful. These alternative perspectives seemed to be doing a much better job of generating interesting and powerful social theory. So there was this kind of mismatch between what I felt to be the most valuable kind of economics and what was most dominant in the discipline at the time, and that really stimulated a lot of interest in trying to understand that better—why was it that the mainstream approach that dominates the economics discipline is so weak when it comes to developing powerful explanations. Interviewer: Could you briefly tell us about your empirical research into structural and regulatory change in broadcasting industries? Prof. Pratten: When I was in the Centre for Business Research at Cambridge, I got involved in a very empirical project that was analysing structural change in media industries during the 1990s. We were interested in looking at various kinds of quasi-market reforms within the broadcasting sector especially. During the early 1990s in Britain, there was an attempt to introduce market-like mechanisms into the broadcasting sector as a way of trying to improve the functioning of the
17