Homo Oeconomicus or Homo Situs

• Article: Homo oeconomicus ou Homo situs ? Un choix de civilisation. Hassan Zaoual. Finance & Bien Commun 2005/2 (No 22), pages 63 à 72

URL = https://www.cairn.info/revue-finance-et-bien-commun-2005-2-page-63.htm

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Synopsis originally in english:

"This article highlights the anomalies of the market paradigm by underlining the way in which it generates uncertainties. It points out the paradoxes inherent in the principal concepts of ordinary economic thought, such as the homo economicus. It invites readers to discover the worlds of homo situs, the site man. This is actual living man, capable of juggling a plurality of imperatives, within which inter-relationships make good any rational deficits in the scientific sence.

In economics, human behaviour is driven by a single, unique rationality, the maximisation of objectives seen in homo economicus. This model of rationality is scientifically postulated, hence universal.

Homo economicus is prone to going to any extreme to maximise his usefulness and profit. Consequently, opportunism, moral uncertainty, cynicism, and so on become the norm in trading relationships. Thus, in paroxysm, the market destroys the quality of human relationships and opens the way to the destruction of social ties.

In this sense we are definitely witness to an economy at work against humans and nature. Freed from humans’ ethical restraints and need for harmony vis-à-vis their fellows and living conditions, the market’s only goal is the market itself. In so doing, it desocialises humans. We should not be surprised by the resurgence of regions, identities, religions and spirituality in general: faced by uncertainty, all actors seek greater certainties.

The values upon which informal and solidarity-based practices repose are, in fact, the expression of the necessity to alter the definition of humans in relation to their daily existence. It is not the definition of homo economicus that is sought, but that of a relationship-centred human living in solidarity with his/her fellows and the neighbourhood within which s/he actually acts: homo situs, the local economy man.

From the ‘sitologist’ viewpoint, and unlike economism, no dimension of human existence can be totally separated from all others. Beliefs, concepts and behaviour all inter-mesh around a sense of belonging and thereby create a large degree of relativity within laws of economic and societal evolution at the very moment when the world is becoming more uniform, or so it might appear.

The theory of symbolic sites of belonging is posited upon greater proximity to the human condition. This proximity can only be achieved through accessing the shared beliefs that shape a site and its structures. The belief spaces generate a confidence and cohesion that markets cannot provide.

Proximity and solidarity are two sides of a single process. They can only be unified by leaving the make-believe world of economics. This would require economic and solidarity-based alternatives to be set up and strengthened through the incorporation of the meaning with which the actors invest their world. It is another way of conducting economic activities, one where technical considerations are overridden by a shared ethical sense. Through this agency we begin to glimpse new vision of humanity in all its universality and diversity.

The site-based paradigm offers us recognition of the invisible. If the market can be said to uproot, the site provides a space for roots to take hold. Neighbourhood is first a story, then a memory, and finally knowledge. This knowledge is that of the inclusive community that forms within the neighbourhood; it identifies and organises its own reproduction with this endogenous social learning.

As a concept, homo situs is far more empirical and ’realistic’ than homo economicus.

In spite of a host of anomalies, the political economy continues to think that there is only one model, and that only that which can be modelled and quantified is scientific. Arrogant economic science must acknowledge the tremendous relativity of paradigms, all the more so as the topics that it addresses are in reality wholly embedded within the social.

It remains true, however, that the proximity approach that seeks to reduce the scale of intervention cannot guarantee a scientific revolution: whatever the scale of the research and intervention, the same distortions and misrepresentation may occur at any moment.

The concept of governance should thus also be treated with caution. We live in a mosaic world, which presupposes a situated mode of governance, i.e. one that is flexible and modular."