“Conventions and institutions from a historical perspective”Workshop at the Humboldt University Berlin(10 February 2012, location: re:work, Georgenstraße 23)Introducing the special issue of Historical Social Research HSR 36-4, 2011 re:work “Work and Human Lifecycle in Global History”(Humboldt University Berlin) Centre Marc Bloch (Franco-german research centre for the social sciences) Laboratoire “Institutions et dynamiques historiques de l’économie”(École Normale Supérieure de Cachan/Paris) The French approach of “économie des conventions” (economics of convention, EC) today is one of the most important strands of the new pragmatic turn in social sciences. Here the concept of convention is used to analyze different forms of collective coordination under the conditions of uncertainty, of incomplete rules and of contingent quality definitions. Conventions are pragmatic assumptions that actors make in interacting with others and they assumed these conventions to be shared in situations. Conventions evolve as solutions to problems of coordination. In a society, conventions constitute a repertory of action registers, to which the building of institutions borrows for grounding and stabilizing collective action and cognition.Today, EC is the only institutional approach in social sciences which was developed in a real cooperation between economists, sociologists, and historians. From a historical perspective the analysis of the emergence and of the change of conventional foundations of social coordination has been proved seminal to historical research in almost three decades.The new published special issue of the Journal Historical Social Research “Conventions and institutions from a historical perspective” (HSR Vol. 36 No 4) has collected ten contributions to this research field. This special issue of HSR assembled articles of international scholars who applied this approach to historical analysis and demonstrated the conceptual as well as the methodological potential of EC in the field of economic history.The workshop focuses these articles. Three renowned discussants present main arguments of these published articles and sketch out critical perspectives as well as further perspectives. The authors of the articles are invited to participate at the workshop and to discuss with the interested audience.