Generative Relational Economics - Chapter 22: Research Programme of Generative Relational Economics

This chapter develops the research programme of Generative Relational Economics (GRE) by translating the conceptual, methodological, and substantive architectures developed earlier in the book into a cumulative, contestable, and revisable programme of inquiry. Its principal concern is answerability: GRE claims should specify what is being investigated, what kinds of evidence can support them, what would count against them, which methods are appropriate to their objects, and under what conditions their scope, formulation, or status should change. The chapter first distinguishes the epistemic status of GRE claims and establishes a modular research architecture. It then formulates research programmes for relational economic structures, allocation, heterogeneous value, value conversion and circulation, generative return, generative spacetime, fast–slow dynamics, economic power, justice, generative exploitation, epistemic economy, and AI-mediated capability asymmetry. These substantive programmes are complemented by domain studies, formal modelling, historical and interpretive inquiry, quantitative and empirical research, comparative theory, institutional experimentation, measurement analysis, counterevidence, negative results, replication, reinterpretation, and research infrastructure. A recurring concern is to prevent operationalization from collapsing the distinctions that motivate GRE. Measurement is therefore treated as a transformation with possible loss and reflexive effects; formalization is treated as task-relative rather than as evidence of ontological commitment; justice research keeps normative premises explicit; power and exploitation require mechanism-level identification rather than inference from asymmetry alone; and cross-domain translation preserves non-equivalence and domain-specific remainders. Failed models, failed translations, null results, counterexamples, and negative evidence are treated as constitutive resources for cumulative research rather than as residuals to be discarded. The chapter concludes by specifying how GRE may interact with neighboring Generative Relational domains while retaining disciplinary containment. Candidate cross-domain structures remain hypotheses for further inquiry rather than presumptive components of a completed general theory. GRE thereby emerges not as a closed theoretical system, but as an open research programme whose concepts, methods, models, and domain claims remain historically situated, empirically answerable, formally inspectable, and institutionally revisable. Files