Michael Hutter (economist)

Michael Hutter (born May 30, 1948 in Munich ) is a German economist and sociologist . He has been retired since the beginning of 2015. He held a research professorship on “Culture, Knowledge and Innovation” at the Institute for Sociology at the Technical University of Berlin and since March 2008 has headed the “Cultural Sources of Novelty” research department at the Berlin Social Science Center (WZB). Before that, he held the chair for the theory of economics and its environment at the private University of Witten / Herdecke for many years .

Life

Michael Hutter began his university education with a degree in mathematics at LMU Munich and, with a BA degree, at Portland State University in Portland, USA. After completing a master's in economics at the University of Washington in Seattle, USA, he wrote his dissertation at the LMU Munich on the subject of "The design of property rights as a means of socio-economic allocation". The work, supervised by Knut Borchardt , was awarded the doctoral prize of the Bavarian Academy of Sciences. In the same year he received the ARD's Kurt Magnus Prize for young journalists. In parallel to his academic career, Michael Hutter worked for many years as a music journalist for the Bavarian Broadcasting Corporation, where he significantly further developed the "Zündfunk" format.

After another year of teaching and research at Claremont Mc Kenna College, Claremont, USA, Michael Hutter wrote his habilitation thesis on “The Production of Law. A self-referential theory of the economy and the case of drug patent law, ”for which he spent time doing comparative research in New York and Florence. The examination of art and culture in Florence during the Renaissance formed the starting point for his steadily intensifying research on the interactions between development processes in art, culture and economy.

In 1987 he was appointed to the chair for the theory of economics and its environment at the private University of Witten / Herdecke . As dean of the business faculty and as a member of the management, he helped shape the development of the university for eight years.

Further research stays took him to the University of Catania (1995), the University of Innsbruck (1995), the University of California, Berkeley (2001), the Rockefeller Foundation Study Center in Bellagio (2002) and the Getty Research Institute in Los Angeles (2003– 2004, 2007).

Since March 1, 2008, he has headed the research department “Cultural Sources of Novelty” at the Social Science Research Center in Berlin .

Act

Michael Hutter turned to Niklas Luhmann's systems theory at an early stage and developed it further for the economic context. In doing so, he consciously pursued an alternative path to economics, which are strongly mathematically oriented and not very interested in communication processes. Characteristic of his work are the crossing of boundaries to other specialist areas (law, sociology and art history). His contributions to the history of economics in the 19th century and the history of the money medium continue to attract attention. Its influence is strongest in the field of art and cultural economics. With his historically based studies on the mutual influence of artistic and economic processes, he has broken new methodological ground. The research projects of his department are currently expanding these approaches to a new type of innovation research.

Michael Hutter was a member of the art expert commission of the state government of North Rhine-Westphalia from 1998-2001, and he was a member of the Committee to Study Global Networks and Local Values, National Research Council, USA. From 1994 to 1996 he was President of the Association for Cultural Economics. He is the curator of the Akademie Schloss Solitude and chairman of the committee for evolutionary economics in the Association for Social Policy.

Michael Hutter was co-editor of the magazine “ Soziale Systeme . Journal for Sociological Theory ”and member of the editorial board of the“ Journal of Cultural Economics ”.

Fonts (selection)

• Serious games. Stories from the rise of aesthetic capitalism, Paderborn: Fink, 2015, ISBN 978-3-7705-5749-3 .
• The Rise of the Joyful Economy. Artistic Invention and Economic Growth from Brunelleschi to Murakami, London: Routledge, 2015.
• Value alternating current. Texts on art and business. Fundus Volume 183. Hamburg: Philo Fine Arts, 2010, 320 pp.
• Beyond Price. Value in Culture, Economics and the Arts (edited with David Throsby). New York: Cambridge University Press, 2008.
• New media economics. Munich: Wilhelm Fink Verlag, 2006.

Web links

• Science Center Berlin
• TU Berlin: How the new comes into the world
• How the abundance became liquid (in: Soziale Systeme, Zeitschrift für sociological theory)
• Future concert, music education and performance culture , symposium on 24. – 25. April 2008
• TU Berlin, introduction