Economic history, in France at least, sometimes suffers from rather shallow thinking, the result of a lack of communication with other human sciences whose concepts and fields of investigation it appropriates without reciprocation. There are, of course, exceptions to this rule as is seen in a number of studies based on the analysis of institutions and organisations, on discourse or representation analysis, or in some divergent field of economics inspired by conventional theory or the Regulation School, which is influential in France and Belgium but little known elsewhere.