Présentation

Rebeca Gomez Betancourt, professeure de sciences économiques à l’Université Lumière Lyon 2, interviendra sur :

• « Hazel Kyrk’s Intellectual Roots : When First-Generation Home Economists Met the Institutionalist Framework ».
  Cette communication, co-écrite avec David Philippy (CY Université Cergy Paris) et Robert W. Dimand (Brock University), sera présentée dans le cadre de la session 100 Years after the Publication of “A Theory of Consumption” by Hazel Kyrk (1923).

  In the years following its publication, Kyrk’s Theory of Consumption (1923) became the epicenter of the field that would later be known as the “economics of consumption,” which gathered together theoretical and empirical works on consumption. In the existing literature on Kyrk, her theory is generally depicted as the starting point of the field’s history, thus failing to appreciate how and why it emerged the way it did (Kiss and Beller, 2000 ; Tadajewski, 2013). This paper examines Kyrk’s intellectual heritage, which, we argue, can be traced back to two main threads : the American home economics movement and the institutionalist movement. Both movements conveyed specific answers and endeavors as responses to the American society’s material and social transformations that occurred at the turn of the 20th century (i.e. the changing role of consumption and that of women in American society). On one hand, Kyrk pursued first-generation home economists’ effort to make sense and put into action the shifting of women’s role from domestic producer to consumer. On the other hand, she reinterpreted Veblen’s (1899) account of consumption in order to reveal its operational value for a normative agenda directed toward good consumption. This paper examines how Kyrk carried on first-generation home economists’ progressive agenda, and how she adapted Veblen’s fin-de-siècle critical account of consumption to the context of the household goods development in the 1900-1920. Our account of Kyrk’s intellectual roots offers a novel narrative to better understand the role played by gender and epistemological issues in her theory.

• « How to promote the common good through a new “ industrial ethics” : The contribution of Charlotte Perkins Gilman »
  Cette communication, co-écrite avec Guillaume Vallet (Université Grenoble Alpes), sera présentée lors de la session Applied Economics in the Progressive and Interwar Eras : Mutually Contextualizing Economic History and the History of Economics.

  The idea to promote the common good was shared by many intellectual figures of the Progressive Era. At stake was social and economic progress, with the underpinnings of the nation-building. This paper sheds light on Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s thought, an eminent figure of American feminism of the early 20th century. Her originality is to envision social progress through the reframing of industrial ethics, implying to build new links between the economy of the home and the rest of the economy on a new fair basis. However, her proposals to instantiate this industrial ethics also bring some problematic concerns/issues that the paper deals with.