A14 - Sociology of EconomicsReturn

The purpose of the paper is to examine the methodology of Max Weber and outline its relation to the economic science. The fi rst part analyses Weber's article "Objectivity in Social Science and Social Policy" (1904). The second part examines the paper titled "Meaning of Ethical Neutrality in Sociology and Economics" (1917). The third part discusses the Weber's lecture "Science as a Vocation" (1918/19). The fourth part deals with the question in what respects Max Weber can be close to modern economists.

The paper poses the question whether the economics of science could be the key to economic methodology. First, the sociology of science, which tries to put science in social context, is described. Then, the economic approach to science, inspired by Tullock, Stigler and Becker, is explained. We point out the problem of circle, according to which putting science in context does not imply relativism as concerns the truth. This conclusion underlines the Popperian message of the paper.

The paper is concerned with the famous study "The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism" (1904/1905) by Max Weber. It analyzes both main content and context of this work. It is shown that the main idea of the "Protestant Ethic" is not originally one of Weber, but it was taken over from Sombart and Troeltsch. Weber was significantly influenced - similarly as in his other works - by his environment and contemporaries. The article describes critical reactions of German historians towards "Protestant Ethic" and reserved attitudes of the Catholics.

The article contributes to the growing body of literature dealing with the bibliometric evaluation of the Czech economic research. In particular, this article introduces a recently invented measure of both the scientific output and impact - the Hirsch index (h) - into the Czech academic economics. While the theoretical part of the article contains a discussion of the strenghts and weaknesses of the Hirsch approach, the empirical part presents two original top50s of the Czech economists ranked by their individual h's. The first of our charts comes from the Web of Science's General Search dataset, and the second one reflects the use of the Web of Science's Cited Reference Search dataset. Both datasets cover the 1980-2006 period. It appears that the rate of correspondence among the top 25 economists in each chart and the top25 of the celebrated Turnovec's citation-based ranking (2005) amounts to 60%. In addition, our empirical results reveal that the elite Czech economists attain h's being 3-10 times lower than the h's of the foreign academic "superstars".

The article deals with socio-economic aspects of responsible behaviour of owners, entrepreneurs and managers in practice of economic transformation. As the starting point of defining the concept of responsibility serves the elaboration of basic theoretical economic, juristic, philosophical and ethical approaches. The validity of the hypothesis that private owner is invariably the responsible owner is examined. The article argues, that social responsibility isn't the bare result of private property and that it heavily depends on appropriate institutions. The study proceeds to the institution of liability as realized in basic forms of business organizations. The liability is studied and viewed upon as a constitutive element of the market order. The responsibility is examined in the framework of rights and liabilities of entrepreneurs, partners, shareholders, managers and directors of corporations and business organizations.

The paper deals with the thematic structure of journal articles according to the Journal of Economic Literature (JEL) classification system. For this purpose, three representative periodicals from 1999 to 2002 are analysed by examining the publications by Czech and European economists. The research methodology is as follows. First, the institutional affiliation of the journals' contributors is identified by examining the information provided by the authors in their articles. Second, the JEL classification stated in the journals is investigated with respect to co-authorship issues and the relative significance of the multiple JEL codes. The results indicate that when compared to the rest of Europe, Czech economists prefer macroeconomic problems to the microeconomic ones and have a strong bias for the methodology and history of economic thought, as well as for the mathematical and quantitative methods. On the other hand, Czech researchers exhibit a markedly lower interest in labour and demographic economics.