Economists receive high social recognition in media, politics and business discourses where they often obtain a status as 'star economists' and 'financial prophets'. This paper investigates the social conditions that make the formation of size in the economic sciences possible. It analyses the "institutional constraints,"…

The higher education sector has been undergoing a far-reaching institutional re-orientation during the past two decades. Many adjustments appear to have strengthened the role of competition in the governance of higher education, but the character of the sector's emerging new political economy has frequently remained unclear. Serving as the…

From the 1990s onwards, economics departments in Europe have changed toward a culture of "excellence." Strong academic hierarchies and new forms of academic organization replace "institutes" and "colleges" by fully equipped "economics departments." This article seeks to demonstrate how and why…