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

Introduction: Disenchantment with industrialization in Latin America, 1. — I. Four impulses of import-substituting industrialization (ISI), 4. — II. Characteristics of the initial phase of ISI: industrialization by tightly separated stages, 6; "late" vs. "late late" industrialization, 8; the sources of entrepreneurship, 9; the exuberant phase of ISI and its political consequences, 11. — III. The alleged exhaustion of ISI, 13; a naive and a semi-naive exhaustion model, 13; criticism of the semi-naive model: the importance of policy, 14. — IV. Economic, political and technological determinants of backward linkage, 17. — V. The inability to export manufactures: "structural" causes and remedies, 24. — Conclusion, 31.

The Political Economy of Import-Substituting Industrialization in Latin America

Economics as a science of human behavior has been grounded in a remarkably parsimonious postulate: that of the self-interested, isolated individual who chooses freely and rationally between alternative courses of action after computing their prospective costs and benefits. In recent decades, a group of economists has shown considerable industry and ingenuity in applying this way of interpreting the social world to a series of ostensibly noneconomic phenomena, from crime to the family, and from collective action to democracy. The â€œeconomicâ€ or â€œrational-actorâ€ approach has yielded some important insights, but its onward sweep has also revealed some of its intrinsic weaknesses. As a result, it has become possible to mount a critique which, ironically, can be carried all the way back to the heartland of the would-be conquering discipline. That the economic approach presents us with too simpleminded an account of even such fundamental economic processes as consumption and production is the basic thesis of the present paper. (This abstract was borrowed from another version of this item.)

Against Parsimony: Three Easy Ways of Complicating Some Categories of Economic Discourse

The experience accumulated in the wake of more than two decades of sustained effort to promote growth and change in the low-income countries presents a rich field for scholarly inquiry and new insights into the development process. The success and failures of such projects, the new skills and attitudes they impart, and the internal tensions they sometimes generate obviously have an important bearing on the next stages of a county's development effort. Yet little has become known about these truly formative experiences which are due to the behavior --and misbehavior --of development projects. In this recent volume, Professor Albert O. Hirschman turns his attention to the ways in which decision making is molded, activated, or hampered by the specific nature of the project that is undertaken; for example, the establishment and operation of a pulp and paper mill in east Pakistan, an irrigation project in Peru, railway expansion in Nigeria, and other development undertakings. In some parts of the present inquiry Hirschman elaborates on his earlier writings in this series; and occasionally, he qualifies or modifies his previous conclusions; the bulk of the study explores new territory.

Development Projects Observed

1. The rise and decline of development economics Part I. Around National Power and the Structure of Foreign Trade: 2. Beyond asymmetry Part II. Around The Strategy of Economic Development: 3. The changing tolerance for income inequality in the course of economic development 4. A generalised linkage approach to development with special reference to staples 5. The turn to authoritarianism in Latin America and the search for its economic determinants Part III. Around Journeys Toward Progress: 6. Policy-making and policy analysis in Latin America 7. On Hegel, imperialism and structural stagnation 8. The social and political matrix of inflation Part IV. Around Exit, Voice and Loyalty: 9. Exit, voice and loyalty 10. Exit and voice 11. Exit, voice and the state 12. Three uses of political economy in analysing European integration Part V. Around The Passions and the Interests: 13. An alternative explanation of contemporary harriedness 14. Morality and the social sciences Index of authors cited.

Albert O. Hirschman

Papers

The Political Economy of Import-Substituting Industrialization in Latin America

Against Parsimony: Three Easy Ways of Complicating Some Categories of Economic Discourse

Development Projects Observed

Essays in trespassing : economics to politics and beyond

Development Projects Observed.