Generative Relational Economics: Chapter 12 - Relational Architecture of Economic Systems

This chapter develops the foundational economic object architecture of Generative Relational Economics (GRE). Its purpose is architectural rather than exhaustive: it provides a revisable vocabulary for studying economic systems as historically situated and relationally constituted configurations of entities, relations, events, properties, states, processes, structures, constraints, and differences. In this chapter, an economic system does not presuppose a national economy, a market economy, a particular institutional order, equilibrium, closure, or a single mathematical systems representation. The term instead refers, at a specified scale and for a specified inquiry, to an economically consequential configuration whose constituent relations and transformations are sufficiently coupled for their joint organization to matter analytically. The chapter first clarifies economic specificity and the standing of economic reality under a Generative Relational view. It then makes explicit the relation between GRE and the broader GR ontology by connecting four preliminary coordinates—constraint, change, structure, and difference—with six emergent analytical forms: entity, event, relation, property, state, and process. Their correspondence to substantive economic concepts is treated as many-to-many rather than taxonomic: organizations, markets, labor arrangements, ownership structures, institutions, platforms, and other economic formations can simultaneously instantiate several ontological forms at different scales and resolutions. On this basis, the chapter develops economic subjects and entities, first- and higher-order relations, relational configurations, boundaries and membership, organizations, institutions, markets, households, communities, commons, platforms, infrastructures, resources, capacities, constraints, access, ownership and control, transfer and circulation, labor and participation, coordination and dependence, asymmetry, symbolic representation, topology and fields, multiscale historical architecture, and generative potential. Throughout, the analysis distinguishes descriptive generativity from normative desirability and treats economic boundaries, identities, representations, and methodological choices as historically revisable. The chapter concludes by locating allocation within this economic architecture, preparing later GRE analyses of allocation, value, generative spacetime, power, epistemic economy, artificial intelligence, and economic organization.