Embeddedness

About: Embeddedness is a research topic. Over the lifetime, 4773 publications have been published within this topic receiving 229721 citations.

Culture Rules: The Foundations of the Rule of Law and Other Norms of Governance

Abstract: This study presents evidence about relations between national culture and social institutions. We operationalize culture with data on cultural dimensions for some 50 nations adopted from cross-cultural psychology and generate testable hypotheses about three basic social norms of governance: the rule of law, corruption, and democratic accountability. These norms correlate systematically and strongly with national scores on cultural dimensions and also differ across cultural regions of the world. Using a linguistic variable on pronoun drop as an instrument for cultural emphases on autonomy versus embeddedness points to a significant influence of culture on governance. Using cultural profiles of a previous generation as an instrument indicates relative stability of cultural orientations and of their correlates. The results suggest a framework for understanding the relations between fundamental institutions.

The Institutional Embeddedness of Economic Change. An Appraisal of the "Evolutionary" and "Regulationist" Research Programmes

Abstract: In the 1990s, institutional and evolutionary economics emerged as one of the most creative and successful approaches in the modern social sciences. This timely reader gathers together seminal contributions from leading international authors in the field of institutional and evolutionary economics including Eileen Appelbaum, Benjamin Coriat, Giovanni Dosi, Sheila C. Dow, Bengt-ake Lundvall, Uskali Maki, Bart Nooteboom and Marc R. Tool. The emphasis is on key concepts such as learning, trust, power, pricing and markets, with some essays devoted to methodology and others to the comparison of different forms of capitalism. An extensive introduction places the contributions in the context of the historical and theoretical background of

Canal Irrigation and Local Social Organization [and Comments and Reply]

Abstract: Theory linking labor inputs of irrigation agriculture to social organization is briefly reviewed. Labor input is distinguished into five tasks: construction, maintenance, allocation, conflict resolution, and organization of ritual. A sample of world communities is canvassed in search of structural variation. A rationale for studying these phenomena in a local, rather than a society-wide, context is presented. Types of ties of the locality with the larger system are explored. Several propositions about pervasive external linkages with local phenomena are presented. Millon's results, showing no relationship between size of irrigation system and centralization, are challenged. It is found that often irrigation management roles are embedded in other socially powerful roles rather than forming part of a specialized bureaucracy. Conditions for role embeddedness are explored.

Cooperation Contracts between Embedded Firms

Abstract: Successful inter-firm cooperations require that the participating partners mitigate potential opportunistic behaviour. Contractual commitments are one management mechanism to achieve stable mutual cooperation. However, the impossibility in designing complete, explicit and easily enforceable contracts restricts their efficacy as a management mechanism. Mechanisms based on the social embeddedness of the partners can form a viable alternative and compliment for contracts. Hence, the usage of contractual commitments is explained by combining transaction cost economic reasoning with arguments on the social embeddedness of economic transactions. Finally, the derived hypotheses are tested on a data-set of 92 cooperations within five Dutch multinationals.