This paper considers the prospects for constructing a neoclassical theory of growth and international trade that is consistent with some of the main features of economic development. Three models are considered and compared to evidence: a model emphasizing physical capital accumulation and technological change, a model emphasizing human capital accumulation through schooling, and a model emphasizing specialized human capital accumulation through learning-by-doing.

The mechanics of economic development

http://individual.utoronto.ca/zheli/sa1.pdf

On the mechanics of economic development

Few discussions in modern social science have occupied as much attention as the changing nature of welfare states in Western societies. Gosta Esping-Andersen, one of the foremost contributors to current debates on this issue, here provides a new analysis of the character and role of welfare states in the functioning of contemporary advanced Western societies. Esping-Andersen distinguishes three major types of welfare state, connecting these with variations in the historical development of different Western countries. He argues that current economic processes, such as those moving toward a postindustrial order, are shaped not by autonomous market forces but by the nature of states and state differences. Fully informed by comparative materials, this book will have great appeal to all those working on issues of economic development and postindustrialism. Its audience will include students of sociology, economics, and politics."

The Three Worlds of Welfare Capitalism

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.

/pdf/bowling-alone-america-s-declining-social-capital-cqbzoi2a0n.pdf

“Bowling Alone: America’s Declining Social Capital”

This research was supported by grants provided to the first author by the Social and Behavioral Sciences Research Institute, University of Arizona, and the Aspen Institute Nonprofit Sector Research Fund and by grants to the second author by the College of Business and Public Administration, University of Arizona. We have benefited from productive exchanges with numerous audiences to whom portions of this paper have been presented: a session at the 1994 Academy of Management meetings, the Social Organization workshop at the University of Arizona, the Work, Organizations, and Markets workshop at the Harvard Sociology Department, the 1994 SCOR Winter Conference at Stanford University, and colloquia at the business schools at the University of Alberta, UC-Berkeley, Duke, and Emory, and the JFK School at Harvard. For detailed comments on an earlier draft, we are extremely grateful to Victoria Alexander, Ashish Arora, Maryellen Kelley, Peter Marsden, Charles Kadushin, Dick Nelson, Christine Oliver, Lori Rosenkopf, Michael Sobel, Bill Starbuck, Art Stinchcombe, and anonymous reviewers at ASQ. We thank Dina Okamoto for research assistance and Linda Pike for editorial guidance. Address correspondence to Walter W. Powell, Department of Sociology, University of Arizona, Tucson, AZ 85721. We argue in this paper that when the knowledge base of an industry is both complex and expanding and the sources of expertise are widely dispersed, the locus of innovation will be found in networks of learning, rather than in individual firms. The large-scale reliance on interorganizational collaborations in the biotechnology industry reflects a fundamental and pervasive concern with access to knowledge. We develop a network approach to organizational learning and derive firm-level, longitudinal hypotheses that link research and development alliances, experience with managing interfirm relationships, network position, rates of growth, and portfolios of collaborative activities. We test these hypotheses on a sample of dedicated biotechnology firms in the years 1990-1994. Results from pooled, within-firm, time series analyses support a learning view and have broad implications for future theoretical and empirical research on organizational networks and strategic alliances.*

https://www.jstor.org/stable/pdfplus/2393988.pdf

Interorganizational Collaboration and the Locus of Innovation: Networks of Learning in Biotechnology.

The Competitive Advantage of Nations

This is a book unlikely to be read by historians. Or rather, they may read it, but in their capacity as citizens concerned as the book's subtitle puts it about "Possibilities for Prosperity." The Second Industrial Divide is indeed a work of contemporary analysis. Like other books this publishing season, it is intended to give us the lowdown about the economic crisis of the 1980s. But this one is also very much a work of history. The book is remarkable in general for its intellectual breadth, but in particular for its reliance on recent scholarship in American social and economic history. More than that, it is deeply historical in perspective and sensitive to the contingent, complex nature of industrial change. Historians are accustomed to draw on the social sciences. In this book, the terms of trade have shifted. Historical scholarship contributes crucially to the making of The Second Industrial Divide. What it offers in return are not the standard commodities of socialscience industry not conceptual and methodological tools that can be appropriated for the historian's use but lessons in the art of sweeping historical analysis and conclusions about the nature of industrial change worth pondering by historians. Michael Piore is a labor economist, well known for his work on labormarket segmentation and labor migration. Charles Sabel, the younger of the two, is the author of Work and Politics: The Division of Labor in Industry (1982), a highly original comparative analysis of shop-floor relations in modern industrial systems. Both are MacArthur Fellows and members of a notable assemblage of MIT social scientists working on industrial relations and technological change. Piore and Sabel can perhaps best be characterized as modern-day institutionalists and, like John R. Commons in his time, contemporary empirical analysis has led them to a serious engagement with history. The key concept of their book is that of "industrial divides" the moments at which choices are made that fix the future course of industrial develop-

https://www.jstor.org/stable/pdfplus/2702598.pdf

William Diebold

Papers

The Competitive Advantage of Nations

The Second Industrial Divide

The Rise and Decline of Nations: Economic Growth, Stagflation, and Social Rigidities

The Borderless World

Politics in Hard Times: Comparative Responses to International Economic Crises