This long-awaited sequel to the modem classic "Markets and Hierarchies" develops and extends Williamson's innovative use of transaction cost economics as an approach to studying economic organization by applying it to work and labor as well as the corporation itself. In addition, Williamson explores its growing implications for public policy, including its potential influence on antitrust and merger guidelines, labor policy, and SEC and public utility regulations.
"Property and Prophets" is a concise history of the rise and subsequent triumph of capitalism. Focused primarily on England until 1800 and the United States since 1800, the book's economic history is interspersed with the history of ideas that evolved along with the capitalist system.
The Fundamental Institutions of Capitalism presents a radical institutional approach to the analysis of capitalism. Ernesto Screpanti puts forward a number of provocative arguments that expose common ground in both neoclassical and Marxist orthodoxies. It will appeal to a broad audience of social scientists including advanced students and professionals with an interest in politics and economics.
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.
Over 630 million Chinese escaped poverty since the 1980s, the largest decrease in poverty in history. Studying 700 manufacturing firms in the Yangzi region, the authors argue that the engine of China’s economic miracle—private enterprise—did not originate at the top but bubbled up from below, overcoming initial obstacles set up by the government.
This radical account of the evolution of political, social, and economic institutions weaves together strands of anthropology, sociology, political science, history, and economics. In a highly readable text, Howard Sherman explains the interconnections of ideas and economic forces, and traces the evolution of social and economic institutions from primitive times to the present. Sherman focuses on the myth of "inevitable progress" in technology, and argues that it progresses only when social and economic institutions and dominant ideas encourage it to improve. He shows that throughout history technology, as a part of the economic forces, ebbs and flows to create or undermine existing economic institutions.
Based on a timely reassessment of the classic arguments of Weber, Schumpeter, Hayek, Popper, and Parsons, this book reconceptualizes actually-existing capitalism. It proposes capitalism as an impersonal procedural solution to the problems of spontaneously coordinating public institutions that enable durable market-based wealth generation and social order. Few countries have achieved this. A novel contribution of the book is that it identifies a practical sequence of economic and institutional shortcuts to real capitalism. The book challenges current orthodoxies about varieties of capitalism and relativist recipes for economic growth, and it criticizes culturalist and incrementalist viewpoints in institutional economics. It calls on the social sciences to help in constructing dynamic and prosperous open societies of the twenty-first century by reclaiming older ideas of ‘social economics’. Better and faster solutions will emphasize crisis-induced change, rational leadership, ideological persuasion, institutional engineering, rules-based market freedom, and the universalistic formal-procedural impersonality of optimal regulatory systems.
What are the most fundamental differences among the political economies of the developed world? How do national institutional differences condition economic performance, public policy, and social well-being? Will they survive the pressures for convergence generated by globalization and technological change? These have long been central questions in comparative political economy. This book provides a new and coherent set of answers to them. Building on the new economics of organization, the authors develop an important new theory about which differences among national political economies are most significant for economic policy and performance. Drawing on a distinction between 'liberal' and 'coordinated' market economies, they argue that there is more than one path to economic success. Nations need not converge to a single Anglo-American model. They develop a new theory of 'comparative institutional advantage' that transforms our understanding of international trade, offersnew explanations for the response of firms and nations to the challenges of globalization, and provides a new theory of national interest to explain the conduct of nations in international relations. The analysis brings the firm back into the centre of comparative political economy. It provides new perspectives on economic and social policy-making that illuminate the role of business in the development of the welfare state and the dilemmas facing those who make economic policy in the contemporary world. Emphasizing the 'institutional complementarities' that link labour relations, corporate finance, and national legal systems, the authors bring interdisciplinary perspectives to bear on issues of strategic management, economic performance, and institutional change. This pathbreaking work sets new agendas in the study of comparative political economy. As such, it will be of value to academics and graduate students in economics, business, and political science, as well as to manyothers with interests in international relations, social policy-making, and the law.
'This is a well-structured book on a complex question that has been relevant for centuries leading up to the actual crisis in the EU and the international financial markets. the book offers a rich picture of empirics, and discusses, explains and criticizes a number of classical theories in the field (Marx, Schumpeter, Polanyi), as well as modern theories (Greif, North et al., Acemoglu, Perez and others). the familiar topics of property rights, technological development and long waves are presented in an illuminating way, whereas a number of new topics including open and limited access societies, hyper globalization, and the European Union are viewed in a broad perspective of "political economy" and "institutional economics". the limitations of neoclassical economics are well presented as are the benefits (and costs) of political economy.' - John Groenewegen, Delft University of Technology, the Netherlands
'One must admire these chapters. They offer an analysis that cannot be ignored, based on a deeper appreciation of the factors at work than anyone else has ventured . . . It is the best of the analyses of the radical institutionalists.' - Daniel Fusfeld, Journal of Economic Issues '. . . it is certainly one of the major advances in institutional economics and political economy in recent memory.' - Wolfram Elsner, EUEPE Newsletter This book uses an institutional-evolutionary approach to analyse economic problems associated with developments in capitalism during the second half of the twentieth century. It argues that economics should centre on institutions - the durable fabric of the economy over time.
