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

Scholars of the theory of the firm have begun to emphasize the sources and conditions of what has been described as “the organizational advantage,” rather than focus on the causes and consequences of market failure. Typically, researchers see such organizational advantage as accruing from the particular capabilities organizations have for creating and sharing knowledge. In this article we seek to contribute to this body of work by developing the following arguments: (1) social capital facilitates the creation of new intellectual capital; (2) organizations, as institutional settings, are conducive to the development of high levels of social capital; and (3) it is because of their more dense social capital that firms, within certain limits, have an advantage over markets in creating and sharing intellectual capital. We present a model that incorporates this overall argument in the form of a series of hypothesized relationships between different dimensions of social capital and the main mechanisms and proces...

https://www.jstor.org/stable/pdfplus/259373.pdf

Social Capital, Intellectual Capital, and the Organizational Advantage

In this article we offer a view that suggests that a firm's critical resources may span firm boundaries and may be embedded in interfirm resources and routines. We argue that an increasingly important unit of analysis for understanding competitive advantage is the relationship between firms and identify four potential sources of interorganizational competitive advantage: (1) relation-specific assets, (2) knowledge-sharing routines, (3) complementary resources/capabilities, and (4) effective governance. We examine each of these potential sources of rent in detail, identifying key subprocesses, and also discuss the isolating mechanisms that serve to preserve relational rents. Finally, we discuss how the relational view may offer normative prescriptions for firm-level strategies that contradict the prescriptions offered by those with a resource-based view or industry structure view.

https://www.jstor.org/stable/pdfplus/259056.pdf

The Relational View: Cooperative Strategy and Sources of Interorganizational Competitive Advantage

Output per worker varies enormously across countries. Why? On an accounting basis, our analysis shows that differences in physical capital and educational attainment can only partially explain the variation in output per worker--we find a large amount of variation in the level of the Solow residual across countries. At a deeper level, we document that the differences in capital accumulation, productivity, and therefore output per worker are driven by differences in institutions and government policies, which we call social infrastructure. We treat social infrastructure as endogenous, determined historically by location and other factors captured in part by language.

/pdf/why-do-some-countries-produce-so-much-more-output-per-worker-r25pge75qn.pdf

Why Do Some Countries Produce so Much More Output Per Worker than Others

This paper analyzes a newly assembled data set consisting of subjective indices of corruption, the amount of red tape, the efficiency of the judicial system, and various categories of political stability for a cross section of countries. Corruption is found to lower investment, thereby lowering economic growth. The results are robust to controlling for endogeneity by using an index of ethnolinguistic fractionalization as an instrument.

/pdf/corruption-and-growth-2z9d0x0u16.pdf

Corruption and Growth

Economic history is about the performance of economies through time. The objective of research in the field is not only to shed new light on the economic past but also to contribute to economic theory by providing an analytical framework that will enable us to understand economic change. A theory of economic dynamics comparable in precision to general equilibrium theory would be the ideal tool of analysis. In the absence of such a theory we can describe the characteristics of past economies, examine the performance of economies at various times, and engage in comparative static analysis; but missing is an analytical understanding of the way economies evolve through time.

Economic Performance through Time

When the Chairman asked me to undertake this paper he reminded me that the general theme was the West as an underdeveloped area and suggested that some comparison be made with underdeveloped areas today. However, it should be made clear at the outset that the problems of the development of the American West in the nineteenth century are very different from the problems of achieving sustained growth in the underdeveloped areas today. The underdeveloped areas today are most typically characterized by a factor combination of abundant labor with scarce capital and land (and resources), usually complicated by a social and political structure not geared to economic advance. America in the nineteenth century, in contrast, was characterized by scarce labor and capital combined with seemingly endless land (and natural resources) set in a framework of social and political institutions that was highly favorable to economic growth.

International capital flows and the development of the American West

This essay explores Elster's analysis of Marx's theory of historical evolution. The meaning of the terras ‘productive forces’ and the ‘relations of production’ are examined both as specified by Marx and interpreted by Elster. The essay then goes on to demonstrate how the modern literature on transaction costs can provide a more precise and useful framework within which to explore the ongoing tension between productive forces and relations of production.

Is it worth making sense of Marx

The performance of an economy is a function of both the institutions and technology developed in a society but the literature on productivity is devoid of any discussion of the institutional foundations of the economy. Instead that literature and the growth accounting quantitative foundations of that analysis focus on the significance of the capital stock, technology, R&D, and savings in the rate of growth of productivity. The new growth economics literature equally equates growth with human capital investment, physical capital, savings and sometimes as a negative function of population growth. The argument of this essay is that productivity increases result from both improvements in human organization and from technological developments.

https://ecsocman.hse.ru/data/778/763/1216/9411003.pdf

Institutions and Productivity in History

presentation of papers analyzing in quantitative terms the history of the economies of the United States and Canada. Two papers by Alfred Conrad and John Meyer on methodology (1957) and on the economics of slavery (1958) were milestones in initiating this new approach to economic history. With 20 years of perspective, what can we say about the contribution of the new economic history to an understanding of the economic past? An evaluation requires that we agree on ( 1 ) what we

Douglass C. North

Papers

Economic Performance through Time

International capital flows and the development of the American West

Is it worth making sense of Marx

Institutions and Productivity in History

The New Economic History after Twenty Years.