Methodology

" External validity is sometimes also referred to as “range of validity” (e.g., Jackson and Cox 2013, 35), because it concerns the question of how far the applicability of results goes... My notion of “range validity” refers not to this spatial connotation of “range” but, instead, to those occasions when the term “range” can be used to refer to the limits and structure of a spectrum of possible options—as in the physics question of “what is the range of visible light?”

Conventionally, the “range” at stake in the measurements of any behavioral game is the one going from Homo economicus to Homo socialis. Yet the gradual spectrum and extreme poles described by this binary range are much harder to conceptually determine or methodologically stabilize than is currently being assumed, implicitly or explicitly, by experimental researchers. Pressing the issue of range validity amounts to questioning whether a simplistic binary spectrum of behavioral options can truly encompass the range of human conduct within and outside experimental games" (2024, p. 9).

" An important aspiration of a socialist market is to be comprehensive in the way it balances the costs of production for a whole society. But against an accounting method that thoroughly considers 'given' quantities—of exploitable resources, urgent needs, manufacturable goods, and social costs or 'externalities'—Hayek’s argument is that only the live dynamic of a truly competitive market can tell us how productive an economy can actually be. 

[However,] any market-driven discovery of 'optimal efficiency' can also be said to be a 'given' quantity of manufacturable goods that has only a relative value. If 'scarcity' is not the same as 'limited resources,' if it is a critical tool we conceptually use to question a population’s relation to its material potential—as even Malthus thought and Hayek was keen to remind market socialists through an argument about competitive production—then assessing the policy needs of any economy that is trying to deal with this critical matter deserves, in every context, a fully relational analysis. " (2021, p. 58)

" To discover how to envision a new critical analysis of complicity, we needed to identify a strategic opening that could eventually shift the very terms in which agency works and is being approached in the present and that did not just amount to a topographic fracture or gap of resistance in the neoliberal landscape. This challenge demanded, as all qualitative inquiry demands, exemplary rather than statistically significant data. But ‘exemplary’ for such a theoretical and virtual line of questioning meant that the qualitative material had to be illustrative in an inductive rather than deductive sense (Marshall, 2010, 379): a single example would do as long as it offered a way of opening our thinking to a critically significant shift in a temporal register. " (2022, p. 239)