How behavior and institutions are affected by social relations is one of the classic questions of social theory. This paper concerns the extent to which economic action is embedded in structures of social relations, in modern industrial society. Although the usual neoclasical accounts provide an "undersocialized" or atomized-actor explanation of such action, reformist economists who attempt to bring social structure back in do so in the "oversocialized" way criticized by Dennis Wrong. Under-and oversocialized accounts are paradoxically similar in their neglect of ongoing structures of social relations, and a sophisticated account of economic action must consider its embeddedness in such structures. The argument in illustrated by a critique of Oliver Williamson's "markets and hierarchies" research program.

Economic Action and Social Structure: The Problem of Embeddedness

After briefly explaining why social capital (civil society) is important to democracy, Putnam devotes the bulk of this chapter to demonstrating social capital’s decline in the United States across the last quarter century. (See Putnam 1995 for a similar but more detailed argument.) While he acknowledges that the significance of a few countertrends is difficult to assess without further study, Putnam concludes that crucial factors such as social trust are eroding rapidly in the United States. He offers some possible explanations for this erosion and concludes by outlining the work needed to consider these possibilities more fully.

/pdf/bowling-alone-america-s-declining-social-capital-cqbzoi2a0n.pdf

“Bowling Alone: America’s Declining Social Capital”

A growing number of sociologists, political scientists, economists, and organizational theorists have invoked the concept of social capital in the search for answers to a broadening range of questions being confronted in their own fields. Seeking to clarify the concept and help assess its utility for organizational theory, we synthesize the theoretical research undertaken in these various disciplines and develop a common conceptual framework that identifies the sources, benefits, risks, and contingencies of social capital.

https://www.jstor.org/stable/pdfplus/4134367.pdf

Social Capital: Prospects for a New Concept

Marketing theory and practice have focused persistently on exchange between buyers and sellers. Unfortunately, most of the research and too many of the marketing strategies treat buyer-seller excha...

Developing Buyer-Seller Relationships:

This paper develops a simple model that shows how a country can endogenously become differentiated into an industrialized "core" and an agricultural "periphery." In order to realize scale economies while minimizing transport costs, manufacturing firms tend to locate in the region with larger demand, but the location of demand itself depends on the distribution of manufacturing. Emergence of a core-periphery pattern depends on transportation costs, economies of scale, and the share of manufacturing in national income. The study of economic geography-of the location of factors of production in space-occupies a relatively small part of standard economic analysis. International trade theory, in particular, conventionally treats nations as dimensionless points (and frequently assumes zero transportation costs between countries as well). Admittedly, models descended from von Thunen (1826) play an important role in urban studies, while Hotelling-type models of locational competition get a reasonable degree of attention in industrial organization. On the whole, however, it seems fair to say that the study of economic geography plays at best a marginal role in economic theory. On the face of it, this neglect is surprising. The facts of economic geography are surely among the most striking features of real-world economies, at least to laymen. For example, one of the most remarkable things about the United States is that in a generally sparsely populated country, much of whose land is fertile, the bulk of the population resides in a few clusters of metropolitan areas; a quarter of the inhabitants are crowded into a not especially inviting section of the East Coast. It has often been noted that nighttime satellite

/pdf/increasing-returns-and-economic-geography-51p2gbi38l.pdf

Increasing Returns and Economic Geography

1. Introduction and Doctrinal Background Enter "exit" and "voice" Latitude for deterioration, and slack in economic thought Exit and voice as impersonations of economics and politics 2. Exit How the exit option works Competition as collusive behavior 3. Voice Voice as a residual of exit Voice as an alternative to exit 4. A Special Difficulty in Combining Exit and Voice 5. How Monopoly Can be Comforted by Competition 6. On Spatial Duopoly and the Dynamics of Two-Party Systems 7. A Theory of Loyalty The activation of voice as a function of loyalty Loyalist behavior as modified by severe initiation and high penalties for exit Loyalty and the difficult exit from public goods (and evils) 8. Exit and Voice in American Ideology and Practice 9. The Elusive Optimal Mix of Exit and Voice Appendixes A. A simple diagrammatic representation of voice and exit B. The choice between voice and exit C. The reversal phenomenon D. Consumer reactions to price rise and quality decline in the case of several connoisseur goods F. The effects of severity of initiation on activism: design for an experiment (in collaboration with Philip G. Zimbardo and Mark Snyder) Index

Exit, voice, and loyalty : responses to decline in firms, organizations, and states

The strategy of economic development

Exit, Voice, and Loyalty

Summer 1994 272 Professor Hirschman wrote this book while in residence at the Center for Advanced Studies in the Behavioral Sciences at Stanford University. Reprinted by permission of the publishers from Exit, Voice, and Loyalty: Responses to Decline in Firms, Organizations, and States by Albert O. Hirschman, Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, © 1970 by the President and Fellows of Harvard College.

Exit, Voice, and Loyalty: Responses to Decline in Firms, Organizations, and States

In this volume, Albert Hirschman reconstructs the intellectual climate of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries to illuminate the intricate ideological transformation that occurred, wherein the pursuit of material interests--so long condemned as the deadly sin of avarice--was assigned the role of containing the unruly and destructive passions of man. Hirschman here offers a new interpretation for the rise of capitalism, one that emphasizes the continuities between old and new, in contrast to the assumption of a sharp break that is a common feature of both Marxian and Weberian thinking. Among the insights presented here is the ironical finding that capitalism was originally supposed to accomplish exactly what was soon denounced as its worst feature: the repression of the passions in favor of the \"harmless,\" if one-dimensional, interests of commercial life. To portray this lengthy ideological change as an endogenous process, Hirschman draws on the writings of a large number of thinkers, including Montesquieu, Sir James Steuart, and Adam Smith. Featuring a new afterword by Jeremy Adelman and a foreword by Amartya Sen, this Princeton Classics edition of \"The Passions and the Interests\" sheds light on the intricate ideological transformation from which capitalism emerged triumphant, and reaffirms Hirschman's stature as one of our most influential and provocative thinkers.

Albert O. Hirschman

Papers

Exit, voice, and loyalty : responses to decline in firms, organizations, and states

The strategy of economic development

Exit, Voice, and Loyalty

Exit, Voice, and Loyalty: Responses to Decline in Firms, Organizations, and States

The Passions and the Interests: Political Arguments for Capitalism before Its Triumph