Page 82 - Sustainable Cities and Communities Design Handbook

Cross-Disciplinary Scientific Foundation for Sustainability Chapter j 3 59

Furthermore, through a growing body of literature, the firm, interactionism,
and its linguistic framework for analysis provides hypotheses, description,
explanation, and rules that become generalizable. In short, qualitative
economics is science. However, for our purposes now, the consideration of the
firm, and particularly the commercialization of an innovation, provides an
understanding on the building of economic theory from the Lifeworld para-
digm in everyday business life.
Interactionism is the cornerstone for moving from the microeconomics or
case study perspective to the larger more “universal” macroeconomic one. In
this context, research on more cases about innovation in light of business
economics must be gathered and analyzed. Transformational linguistic theory
provides the framework for scientific rule making. The definition of economics
as exchanges and therefore as engagement allows for an understanding of
economic phenomena, events, and situations when the data are drawn from a
knowledge base to construct the economic reality of everyday life. Since
action among actors is predicated upon their knowledge and understanding of
others, the description of the cases presented earlier in such terms should be
considered.
To summarize the interactionist framework from Blumer, symbolic inter-
actionism draws its roots from the subjectivists’ philosophical tradition in
Europe and the United States, which is now conceptualization in the Lifeworld
paradigm. When we look at symbolic interactionist theory and the inter-
actionist perspective applied to business economics, cases can be described,
understood, and explained for business activities in a scientific manner. When
transformational linguistics is included, then there is a very powerful and
robust theoretical model from which to formalize (not quantify) business
economics into sets of rules, interactions, and predictive analyses.

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