Exploring the factors that explain the choice of governance structures in interfirm alliances, this study challenges the use of a singular emphasis on transaction costs. Such an approach erroneously treats each transaction as independent and ignores the role of interfirm trust that emerges from repeated alliances between the same partners. Comprehensive multiindustry data on alliances made between 1970 and 1989 support the importance of such trust. Although support emerged for the transaction cost claim that alliances that encompass shared research and development are likely to be equity based, there is also strong evidence that repeated alliances between two partners are less likely than other alliances to be organized using equity.

Does Familiarity Breed Trust? The Implications of Repeated Ties for Contractual Choice in Alliances

"Structure" is one of the most important, elusive, and undertheorized concepts in the social sciences. Setting out from a critique and reformulation of Anthony Giddens's notion of the duality of structure and Pierre Bourdieu's notion of habitus, this article attempts to develop a theory of structure that restores human agency to social actors, builds the possibility of change into the concept of structure, and overcomes the divide between semiotic and materialist visions of structure. "Structure" is one of the most important and most elusive terms in the vocabulary of current social science. The concept is central not only in such eponymous schools as structural functionalism, structuralism, and poststructuralism, but in virtually all tendencies of social scientific thought. But if social scientists find it impossible to do without the term "structure," we also find it nearly impossible to define it adequately. Many of us have surely had the experience of being asked by a "naive" student what we mean by structure, and then finding it embarrassingly difficult to define the term without using the word "structure" or one of its variants in its own definition. Sometimes we find what seems to be an acceptable synonym-for example, "pattern"-but all such synonyms lack the original's rhetorical force. When it comes to indicating

https://www.jstor.org/stable/pdf/2781191.pdf

A Theory of Structure: Duality, Agency, and Transformation

While much attention has been focused on Japan's meteoric rise as an economic power, South Korea has been quietly emerging as the next industrial giant to penetrate the world market. South Korea is one of a series of countries (ranging from Taiwan, India, Brazil, and Turkey, to Mexico, and including Japan) to have succeeded through borrowing foreign technology rather than by generating new products or processes. Describing such countries as `late-industrializers,' Amsden demonstrates why South Korea has become the most successful of this group. Available in OSO: http://www.oxfordscholarship.com/oso/public/content/economicsfinance/0195076036/toc.html

Asia's Next Giant: South Korea and Late Industrialization

Since the early 1980s, social scientists have increas ingly focused upon the significance of the region to the organization of economic life. This article considers three main lines of analysis which have emerged. These concentrate respectively on insti tutions, industrial organization and transactions, and technological change and learning. Each has made strong claims about the role of the region. I argue here, however, that none has yet developed a wholly convincing explanation for the resurgence of regional economies. To do this it is necessary to understand the region as a locus of untraded interdependencies. This has implications for how we think about regional and industrial policies. I illustrate these points with some remarks on regional policies in contemporary Europe.

The Resurgence of Regional Economies, Ten Years Later The Region as a Nexus of Untraded Interdependencies

This famous passage from Marshall’s Principles of Economics (it first appeared in the fifth edition which came out in 1907) nicely brings out two issues, which are as germane to economics today as they were when Marshall wrote. The first is the heavy reliance by economists in their formal theorizing on the notion of “equilibrium”. The other is the appeal that “biological conceptions3x201D; have for many economists, particularly when their focus is on economic change.

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Recent Evolutionary Theorizing About Economic Change

Historical alternatives to mass production: politics, markets and technology in nineteen-thcentury industrialization

World of Possibilities: The battle of the systems

World of Possibilities: Stories, strategies, structures: rethinking historical alternatives to mass production

Local industry and actors' strategies: from combs to plastics in Oyonnax

EU Governance is a growth industry. It has produced a substantial body of knowledge on various aspects and most, if not all issue areas of EU decision- and policy-making. But it has done much less to theorize EU governance, and to connect it to broader social and political theory. The theorizing is exactly what the present paper seeks to do. Hence, it responds to a genuine need in a field that runs the risk of fragmentation into descriptive case-studies and typologies under the label of ‘governance’, a term that remains “underspecified as a concept, let alone as a theory” (Kohler-Koch and Rittberger 2006:

This is a highly stimulating as well as ambitious attempt to present a unified theoretical interpretation of a range of phenomena that are being studied under the label of EU Governance. I am sympathetic to this enterprise and the paper's agenda. But I would also like to play the devil's advocate role and raise some issues and concerns.

Jonathan Zeitlin

Papers

Historical alternatives to mass production: politics, markets and technology in nineteen-thcentury industrialization

World of Possibilities: The battle of the systems

World of Possibilities: Stories, strategies, structures: rethinking historical alternatives to mass production

Local industry and actors' strategies: from combs to plastics in Oyonnax