Generative Relational Economics, Volume IV: Application-Dominant Praxis, Intervention, and Economic Architecture

This volume develops Generative Relational analysis for situations in which action, decision, and intervention cannot be postponed until knowledge is complete. It introduces application-dominant praxis as a configuration in which epistemic inquiry remains active while practical commitments must nevertheless be made under uncertainty, historical contingency, institutional constraint, and normative contestability. The analysis addresses practical judgment, action spaces, decision formation, risk, reversibility, responsibility, participation, intervention, monitoring, adaptation, evaluation, and revision. Practical closure is distinguished from epistemic closure: the necessity of acting does not transform uncertainty into knowledge, and interventions themselves alter the relational systems that subsequent inquiry must study. The volume subsequently turns toward substantive economic analysis by developing the relational architecture of economic systems. Economic entities, memberships, institutional boundaries, infrastructures, productive capacities, resource relations, and modes of coordination are treated as historically constituted relational structures. Economic architecture therefore concerns not only the distribution of resources but also the relations through which economic actors, capacities, opportunities, and institutional forms become possible. The volume links application-dominant praxis to economic architecture by examining intervention as participation in a history-bearing relational system. It thereby provides the transition from general decision and intervention methodology to the substantive economic theories developed in the following volumes.