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This book argues that there is no single best institutional arrangement for organizing modern societies. Therefore, the market should not be considered the ideal and universal arrangement for coordinating economic activity. Instead, the editors argue, the economic institutions of capitalism exhibit a large variety of objectives and tools that complement each other and can not work in isolation. The various chapters of the book ask what logics and functions institutions follow and why they emerge, mature and persist in the forms they do.
In this landmark volume, J. Rodgers Hollingsworth, Karl H. M ller, and Ellen Jane Hollingsworth take a first step towards imposing order on the increasingly diverse field of socio-economics by embedding the various disciplines and sub-disciplines in a common core. The distinguished contributors in this volume show how institutions, governance arrangements, societal sectors, organizations, individual actors, and innovativeness are intertwined and, ultimately, how individuals and firms have a high degree of autonomy. By offering original suggestions and guidelines for developing a socio-economics research agenda focused on institutional analysis, Advancing Socio-Economics: An Institutionalist Perspective, will enlighten all interested in the social sciences.
In this book, nine scholars representing various perspectives examine institutions that govern economic activity in the United States and the dramatic changes they have undergone since the late nineteenth century. They investigate how and why these changes occurred and continue to occur as markets become more volatile, technology changes and international competition becomes more intense. They also address general questions about the governance of capitalist economies by considering several governance mechanisms such as markets, bureaucratic hierarchies, associations and informal networks and by exploring how such mechanisms emerge to coordinate economic activity and affect economic performa...
Nothing affects the modern economy (and society) more than decisions made in the market place, especially, but not only, decisions made by consumers. Although it is not startling to suggest that decisions made in production are affected by choices consumers make, consumers have long been viewed, not only by academic economists, as individual, isolated rational actors that make or refrain from purchases purely on the basis of narrow financial considerations. Markets are not and never were morally neutral. Market relations have always had an often taken-for-granted moral underpinning. The moralization of the markets refers to the dissolution and replacement of the conventional moral underpinni...
State Intervention in Medical Care is a substantial and unique contribution to the ongoing debate about government participation in the delivery of medical care. It offers historical, cross-national comparisons of the performance of medical systems in Britain, France, Sweden, and the United States over most of the last century. J. Rogers Hollingsworth, Jerald Hage, and Robert A. Hanneman examine the impact of state intervention on a number of characteristics: mortality rates, the per capita cost of medical care, the social efficiency of the delivery of services, the introduction and diffusion of innovations, and the equality of the system—including not only regional or spatial equality but also equality in access to medical resources and equality in levels of health across social classes and income groups.
Globalization is one of the buzz-words in the 1990s. It points to a world in which geographic location becomes increasingly irrelevant, a vision that has aroused both hopes and fears. Surprisingly, globalization is accompanied by increasing regionalization. This volume is a timely contribution to the debate on globalization and regionalism. Coming from several disciplines, its contributors explore the consequences of a world with no geographical barriers. Refuting simple notions of globalization, they argue that location and space will remain important dimensions of economic and social development. In view of this, the book develops a more balanced view of the tension between globalization and regionalism.
China’s extraordinary economic growth is inspiring research from a wide spectrum of fields to explain the phenomenon: What are the primary drivers of China’s economic growth? Can it be sustained? Can the Chinese business model be emulated by other countries? What long-term effects will China’s economic growth have on the global economy? In this volume, Chun Liao explores these issues in the context of firms’ governance structures, arguing that China’s dual business system of state-owned enterprises and private enterprises is uniquely suited to the challenges of economic development in the twenty-first century. On the one hand, China’s state-owned enterprises are characterized by ...
The idea behind this book is that institutions are important when it comes to explaining the specialisation and performance of national innovation systems. The idea is not new. But largely the institution-concept has remained somewhat vague and unspecified in the literature. This book is valuable since it succeeds in opening up the black box of institutions and organisations. The distinction between institutions at different levels and how they link up and form a systemic whole is especially original and fruitful. The interdisciplinary team behind the book has also produced a welcome antidote to the current tendency to benchmark innovation systems exclusively on the basis of quantitative ind...
Developing an original blend of perspectives from the fields of international and comparative political economy, this book presents an innovative and in-depth account of the contemporary political economy of the southern cone of Latin America: Argentina, Brazil, Chile, Paraguay and Uruguay. It identifies a new and distinctive model of regional capitalist development emerging in the southern cone and a complex relationship with both the global political economy and the five distinctive national political economies in the region. Ranging across the contours of labour, business, states and regionalist processes, Phillips assesses the significance of the Southern Cone Model for the ways in which we understand contemporary capitalist development at both national and transnational levels.
The notion and interpretation of path dependence have been discussed and utilized in various social sciences during the last two decades. This innovative book provides significant new insights onto how the different applications of path dependence have developed and evolved. The authors suggest that there has been a definite evolution from applications of path dependence in the history of technology towards other fields of social science. They also discuss the various definitions of path dependence (strong or weak) and explore the potential applications of path dependence in new areas such as political economy and economic geography. With new perspectives on how the debate surrounding path dependence has evolved, this book will strongly appeal to postgraduate students and scholars of economic history, economic geography, political science and business studies.