How Textbooks Create Knowledge and Meaning: The Case of the Coase Theorem in Intermediate Microeconomics, 1960–1979

Abstract

Textbooks are seldom thought of as part of the knowledge-creation process. Their role, instead, is typically classified as that of knowledge diffusion. The textbook, so conceived, serves as a passive conveyor of generally accepted knowledge in a field. The treatment of the Coase theorem in the economics textbook literature, though, is an exception. The theorem entered the textbook literature when the theorem was not part of the “generally accepted knowledge of”—or even widely known among—economists. The present article examines the diffusion of the Coase theorem into the intermediate microeconomics textbook literature in the 1960s and 1970s. The textbook treatments of it then and even today never have been “stable and formulaic.” The theorem's treatment in the textbooks works as a spectacular illustration of the halting and sometimes even confused process of knowledge creation.