This paper reviews the growing body of research that explores ‘the social shaping of technology’ (SST) — how the design and implementation of technology are patterned by a range of ‘social’ and ‘economic’ factors as well as narrowly ‘technical’ considerations. It shows how researchers from a range of disciplinary backgrounds were brought together by a critique of traditional conceptions of technology (for example, ‘linear models’ of innovation that privileged technological supply or restricted the scope of social inquiry into technology to assessing its ‘impacts’). Though their analytical frameworks differ to a greater or lesser extent in terminology and approach, some explanatory concepts have emerged, and constitute an effective model of the innovation process. Here, it is suggested, SST offers a deeper understanding and also potentially broadens the technology policy agenda. These claims are assessed through a review of recent research into specific instances of social shaping, particularly in relation to information technology. Finally the article discusses some of the intellectual dilemmas in the field. Though the intellectual cross-fertilisation has been creative, points of tension and divergence between its constituent strands have resulted in some sharp controversies, which reflect upon the theoretical and policy claims of SST.

The Social Shaping of Technology

The social shaping of technology

▪ Abstract This essay synthesizes the results of the large number of studies of late–20th-century democratization published during the last 20 years. Strong evidence supports the claims that democracy is more likely in more developed countries and that regime transitions of all kinds are more likely during economic downturns. Very few of the other arguments advanced in the transitions literature, however, appear to be generally true. This study proposes a theoretical model, rooted in characteristics of different types of authoritarian regimes, to explain many of the differences in democratization experience across cases in different regions. Evidence drawn from a data set that includes 163 authoritarian regimes offers preliminary support for the model proposed.

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What Do We Know About Democratization After Twenty Years

Organizational Implications of Institutional Pluralism

A comprehensive account of economic size distributions around the world and throughout the years In the course of the past 100 years, economists and applied statisticians have developed a remarkably diverse variety of income distribution models, yet no single resource convincingly accounts for all of these models, analyzing their strengths and weaknesses, similarities and differences. Statistical Size Distributions in Economics and Actuarial Sciences is the first collection to systematically investigate a wide variety of parametric models that deal with income, wealth, and related notions. Christian Kleiber and Samuel Kotz survey, compliment, compare, and unify all of the disparate models of income distribution, highlighting at times a lack of coordination between them that can result in unnecessary duplication. Considering models from eight languages and all continents, the authors discuss the social and economic implications of each as well as distributions of size of loss in actuarial applications. Specific models covered include: Pareto distributions Lognormal distributions Gamma-type size distributions Beta-type size distributions Miscellaneous size distributions Three appendices provide brief biographies of some of the leading players along with the basic properties of each of the distributions. Actuaries, economists, market researchers, social scientists, and physicists interested in econophysics will find Statistical Size Distributions in Economics and Actuarial Sciences to be a truly one-of-a-kind addition to the professional literature.

Statistical Size Distributions in Economics and Actuarial Sciences

Since the 1950s, taxpayers have been the primary investors in stadia built for the use of privately-owned professional sports teams. Team owners have argued that sports facilities boost local economic activity; however, economic reasoning and empirical evidence suggest the opposite. Public support for stadia is also driven by demand for community image, and owners of sports teams supply a scarce input into image enhancement--participation in the major league--for which they have been able to extract monopoly rents from dispersed taxpayers. We suggest reforms to dissipate the monopoly sports leagues exercise when negotiating with host communities for their teams.

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The Economics of Sports Facilities and Their Communities

This book examines the economic impact of new stadiums or a sports franchise on the local economy. It explores such general issues as the appropriate method for measuring economic benefits and costs, the source of the bargaining power of teams in obtaining subsidies from local government, the local politics of attracting and retaining teams, the relationship between sports and local employment, and the importance of stadium design in influencing the economic effects of a facility. The book also contains case studies of major league sports facilities in Baltimore, Chicago, Cincinnati, Cleveland, Indianapolis, San Francisco, and the Twin Cities and of minor league baseball stadiums and spring training facilities. The primary conclusions are the sports teams and stadiums are not a source of local economic growth and employment; the size of the net subsidy exceeds the financial benefit of a new stadium; and cities are probably willing to subsidize sports teams because of the intense popularity of sports among a substantial proportion of voters and businesses and the leverage that teams enjoy from the monopoly position of professional sports leagues.

Sports, jobs, and taxes : the economic impact of sports teams and stadiums

Preface ix Chapter One Introduction 3 Chapter Two The Student as Athlete 16 Chapter Three Gender Equity I: Equal Opportunity for Athletes 54 Chapter Four Gender Equity II: Equal Pay for Coaches 74 Chapter Five The Media: Commercialization and Stratification 90 Chapter Six Commercial Connections 125 Chapter Seven The Bottom Line: Deficit or Surplus? 149 Chapter Eight The NCAA: Managing the System 173 Chapter Nine Whither Big-Time College Sports? Reform and the Future 188 Notes 207 Index 245

Unpaid Professionals: Commercialism and Conflict in Big-Time College Sports

The link between team payroll and competitive balance plays a central role in the theory of team sports but is seldom investigated empirically. This paper uses data on team payrolls in Major League Baseball between 1980 and 2000 to examine the link and implements Granger causality tests to establish whether the relationship runs from payroll to performance or vice versa. While there is no evidence that causality runs from payroll to performance over the entire sample period, the data shows that the cross section correlation between payroll and performance increased significantly in the 1990s. As a comparison, the paper examines the relationship between pay and performance in English soccer, and it is shown that Granger causality from higher payrolls to better performance cannot be rejected. We argue that this difference may be a consequence of the open market for player talent that obtains in soccer compared to the significant restrictions on trade that exist in Major League Baseball.

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Testing Causality Between Team Performance and Payroll: The Cases of Major League Baseball and English Soccer

Competitive balance is like wealth. Everyone agrees it is a good thing to have, but no one knows how much one needs. Economic theory tells us that the optimal level of balance in a sports league is a function of the distribution of fan preferences, fan population base, and fan income across host cities. Profit maximizing teams will accumulate units of talent until the marginal revenue per win is equalized across all teams. This implies that in leagues with a fixed supply of teams (and monopoly or duopoly team rights to a territory), the league will maximize revenues when teams from large, rich, and fan-intense cities win more often. In his seminal 1956 article, Rottenberg, among other things, anticipated the relevance of the Coase Theorem (Coase, 1960) in understanding talent distribution across teams and argued that the profit motive would limit the accumulation of player talent on any single team. El-Hodiri and Quirk (1971), in the first formal modeling of a professional sport league, find that individual team profit maximization is inconsistent with equal playing strengths among the teams except in the special case of identical team revenue functions. Fort and Quirk (1995) focus on the problem of competitive balance in sports leagues and assess the degree to which different mechanisms create greater balance. Based on the Coase Theorem, they conclude that neither the reserve clause nor the reverse-order amateur draft aid balance. Explicitly assuming that gate revenue grows in proportion to the home team’s playing strength, that each team faces the same cost per unit of playing strength, and implicitly assuming that owner risk aversion is invariant to team revenue and that cross subsidies are proportional to team revenue and not team rent, Fort and Quirk also conclude that increased revenue sharing will not improve competitive balance. The only mechanism in their

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Andrew Zimbalist

Papers

The Economics of Sports Facilities and Their Communities

Sports, jobs, and taxes : the economic impact of sports teams and stadiums

Unpaid Professionals: Commercialism and Conflict in Big-Time College Sports

Testing Causality Between Team Performance and Payroll: The Cases of Major League Baseball and English Soccer

Competitive balance in sports leagues - an introduction.