Showing papers on "Embeddedness published in 1990"

Reputation and Efficiency in Social Interactions: An Example of Network Effects

Abstract: Reputations emerge if an actor's future partners are informed on his present behavior. Reputations depend on the "embeddedness" of interactions in structures or networks of social relations. They illustrate the effects of such embeddedness on the outcomes of interactions.This article presents simple game-theoretic models of reputation effects on efficiency (in the Pareto sense) in interactions. In a comparative perspective, the authors start with a baseline model of a social system in which reputation effects (of a specific kind) are excluded: actors do not receive information on their partners' behavior in interactions with third parties. Such a system of "atomized interactions" is compared to a system with interactions that are "perfectly embedded": actors are immediately informed on all interactions of their partners with third parties.Efficiency is more easily attained as a result of individually rational behavior in perfectly embedded systems. In a final step, the comparative perspective is broadened...

A Sociocultural Analysis of a Midwestern American Flea Market

Abstract: The ethnographic case study presented in this article illustrates the institutional complexity and sociocultural significance of a midwestern American flea market. A conception of marketplace structure and function that incorporates informal and festive dimensions of consumer behavior is advanced. The article explores the relationship of primary and secondary economic activity. Buyer and seller behavior, marketplace ambience, the social embeddedness of consumption, and experiential aspects of consumption are considered at length.

Modern Organizations: Organization Studies in the Postmodern World

Abstract: Theoretical Contrasts and International Contexts Organizations and the Modernization of the World Why and Where did Bureaucracy Triumph? Contingencies, Markets and Hierarchies Ecologies, Institutions and Power in the Analysis of Organizations French Bread, Italian Fashions and Asian Enterprise The Embeddedness of Organizational Diversities Organizational Diversities and Rationalities Modernist and Postmodernist Organization Postmodern Skill Formation and Postmodern Capital Formation?

Purchasing Behavior in Embedded Markets

Abstract: This article explores the concept of market embeddedness and its impact on purchasing behavior in a consumer market. Embeddedness exists when consumers derive utility from two sources simultaneously: from attributes of the product and from social capital found in preexisting ties between buyers and sellers. This framework is applied to the home party method of direct sales. We find that the degree of social capital present, as measured by the strength of the buyer-seller tie and buyer indebtedness to the seller, significantly affects the likelihood of purchase. We cannot tell the precise moment when friendship is formed. As in filling a vessel drop by drop, there is at last a drop which makes it run over; so in a series of kindnesses there is at last one which makes the heart run over.-Boswell ([1777] 1835)

Socio-Spatial Prototypes of a New Organization of Consumption: The Role of Real Cultural Capital:

Abstract: The recent proliferation of new market-based consumer goods and experiences, and the high visibility of such consumption-biased spatial complexes as `gentrification' and `Disney World', call attention to the real, rather than the symbolic, role of cultural capital in contemporary service economies. Cultural capital is linked, on the one hand, with the circulation of financial capital in investment and production. It is related, on the other hand, to new demands more affluent consumers make of the consumption process (e.g., demands for authenticity and security), and a changing nature of consumer products. These observations suggest a new organization of consumption, most marked at the high end of the market, that has to be examined in terms of spatial embeddedness, which locates consumption in space and localizes specific features of a service economy; the social creation of new relations between cultural producers and consumers, especially a relation of mediation; and the role of new consumer products an...

Economic rationality and hierarchical gift economies: value and ranking among british pakistanis

Abstract: This article analyses the tendency of Pakistani immigrants in Britain to transform commodities into gifts, and the rationality of their economic behaviour Central to the argument is the view that South Asian gift economies may be typified as 'hlerarchical gift economies' and that this is reflected in specific consumption patterns The argument extends recent discussions of unilateral gifting in South Asia and elsewhere, and focuses on the systematics of gift economies and the way such economies come to be embedded in capitalist, market economies, and in plural societies Consumption and exchange In his Theory of the leisure class (1950 [1899]), Veblen analysed consumption as displayconspicuous waste and leisure As display, consumption was, he argued, a primary dimension of individual competition for status The social dynamics he describes are thus the dynamics of emulation and self-indulgent individualism He ignores, apparently, the use of goods in exchange, as objectifications of valued social relationships; the creation through consumption of social debts which generate trust and underline the durability of relationships Douglas and Isherwood (1978) criticise his theory on similar grounds, and point to the embeddedness of goods within cultural systems, the metaphoric significance of goods, and their function in the creation and maintenance of social relationships Consumption, production and social reproduction are inseparable features of a continuing cycle