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The award of the inappropriately named Nobel Prize1 in Economics to Elinor Ostrom (together with Oliver Williamson) was remarkable.2 Apart from those working in a particular way on institutional or environmental economics, she would have been known to few economists, having published little in the discipline's core journals. And yet her work clearly has had an impact sufficient to merit the prize. In what follows, I reflect on this idiosyncratic and somewhat paradoxical award, focusing on why her work might prove so attractive to at least some economists, even though that work would seem far from the economics mainstream. Focusing on her major book, Governing the Commons--published 20 years ago--I will suggest that the appeal of her work is explained by the particular way it reflects, modifies, and yet reproduces the colonization of the other social sciences by economics.
Such talk of "colonization" would no doubt be rejected by Ostrom. An outspoken advocate and practitioner of interdisciplinarity, she views relations between economics and politics as "a potlatch, rather than one of imperialism" (Ostrom 2007, 240). At the same time, her theoretical points of reference are all firmly attached to methodological individualism, if not the cruder forms of rational choice, her appeal to anthropological metaphor notwithstanding. Indeed, her appeal to the example of primitive exchange and gift giving practiced by indigeneous communities is telling if probably unintended, and could be shifted to a metaphor on the topic of her own work to highlight the way in which economics has governed its own commons as a discipline--jealously monopolizing and guarding its content, if freely projecting it across other disciplines from which it crudely plunders and tragically degrades, as I will suggest.
Ostrom's work fits comfortably into what Robert Merton (1957) long ago characterized as middle-range theory, suspended somewhere between the individual and society (though heavily skewed theoretically in her case to the former as the foundation for the latter) and between minutiae and grand historical and social issues (as exemplified by her focus upon commons and institutions). At the same time, Ostrom purports "to advance theoretical understanding of a theory of self-organized collective action to complement the existing theories of externally organized collective action: the theory of the