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.

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“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

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Increasing Returns and Economic Geography

The Welfare State in Trouble: Systemic Crisis or Growing Pains?

Introduccion El desengano de la industrializacion en America Latina No hace mucho, la industrialiazacion figuraba entre las prescripciones de politica con mayor jerarquia para sacar a America Latina y otras regiones subdesarrolladas de su atraso economico, social y politico Sin embargo, en los ultimos anos, se ha experimentado un considerable desengano con esta solucion en particular del problema Este documento hara un examen de algunas caracteristicas de la industrializacion a traves de la sustitucion de importaciones (ISI) y hara una evaluacion de su desarrollo y de las principales dificultades que ha encontrado

La economía política de la industrialización a través de la sustitución de importaciones en América Latina

Foreign aid : a critique and a proposal

The case against “one thing at a time”

Little attention appears to have been given by economists and other social scientists to any analysis, systematic or casual, of the behavior of governments of underdeveloped countries as revealed by their economic policy decisions over a period of time. Nevertheless, in view of the considerable role played today by governments in the development process, it is clear that governmental behavior should be subjected to just as close scrutiny as is being given to the motivations and conduct of entrepreneurs.

Albert O. Hirschman

Papers

The Welfare State in Trouble: Systemic Crisis or Growing Pains?

La economía política de la industrialización a través de la sustitución de importaciones en América Latina

Foreign aid : a critique and a proposal

The case against “one thing at a time”

Economic Policy in Underdeveloped Countries