The Emergence of Organizations and Markets - Softcover

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0691148872 ISBN 13: 9780691148878

Verlag: Princeton University Press, 2012

Inhaltsangabe

A dynamic framework for studying social emergence

The social sciences have sophisticated models of choice and equilibrium but little understanding of the emergence of novelty. Where do new alternatives, new organizational forms, and new types of people come from? Combining biochemical insights about the origin of life with innovative and historically oriented social network analyses, John Padgett and Walter Powell develop a theory about the emergence of organizational, market, and biographical novelty from the coevolution of multiple social networks. They demonstrate that novelty arises from spillovers across intertwined networks in different domains. In the short run actors make relations, but in the long run relations make actors.

This theory of novelty emerging from intersecting production and biographical flows is developed through formal deductive modeling and through a wide range of original historical case studies. Padgett and Powell build on the biochemical concept of autocatalysis—the chemical definition of life—and then extend this autocatalytic reasoning to social processes of production and communication. Padgett and Powell, along with other colleagues, analyze a very wide range of cases of emergence. They look at the emergence of organizational novelty in early capitalism and state formation; they examine the transformation of communism; and they analyze with detailed network data contemporary science-based capitalism: the biotechnology industry, regional high-tech clusters, and the open source community.

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Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

John F. Padgett is professor of political science and (by courtesy) professor of sociology and history at the University of Chicago. Walter W. Powell is professor of education and (by courtesy) professor of sociology, organizational behavior, management science, communication, and public policy at Stanford University.

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"The scholarship, analytical focus, and sheer energy of this work are nothing short of admirable. It will change the way historians and social scientists study large-scale economic and political transformations."--Jon Elster, Collège de France and Columbia University

"This intellectual tour de force revolutionizes how we think about social transformations. It introduces a brilliant and surprisingly effective new model of explanation based on an analogy with the biochemistry of life-forms. The model's utility is convincingly demonstrated in fascinating case studies, ranging from medieval Florence to contemporary Silicon Valley. Every social scientist interested in the problem of social change should read this book."--William H. Sewell, Jr., University of Chicago

"This book is about the old sociological truth that the substance of social structure--how it is known, how it operates, how it has effects--lies in the structure's history. That truth, here discussed in terms of network autocatalytic mechanisms, has never been said as well, as clearly, or with such profound implications for how we think about organizations and markets. A remarkable book."--Ronald S. Burt, University of Chicago

"For the social sciences, which have been far better at explaining how institutions behave than at understanding where they come from, this is a landmark book. Operating at the horizon where theory and method converge, it presents a genuinely new explanation of the emergence of novelty in a broad array of contexts. Representing social science at its best, this book will resonate through the disciplines for a long time."--Paul DiMaggio, Princeton University

"This book revitalizes the study of social, political, and economic change by linking it to the classic sociological understanding of society as interlocked institutions that borrow from and transform one another. Its rich and subtle merger of network analysis, organization theory, and historical institutionalism will catalyze a generation of new studies. It is the essential starting point for those seeking new and exciting theoretical departures."--Mark Granovetter, Stanford University

"This book is a towering achievement of methodological finesse, bridging multiple scales of structure and time to produce a polyoptic theory of organizational genesis and transformation in politics, economics, and science. A core thesis of this book is that multifunctional social actors and the heterarchical networks they induce coconstruct each other, yielding emergent organizations that shape structural and functional innovation in response to shocks. Padgett and Powell's fantastic demonstration of interdisciplinary conversation will provide systems biologists with thought-provoking ideas for developing a fresh look at the nature of emergence and evolution."--Walter Fontana, Harvard University

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The Emergence of Organizations and Markets

By John F. Padgett, Walter W. Powell

PRINCETON UNIVERSITY PRESS

Copyright © 2012 Princeton University Press
All rights reserved.

ISBN: 978-0-691-14887-8

Contents

Contributors, 
List of Illustrations, 
List of Tables, 
Acknowledgments, 
Chapter 1 * The Problem of Emergence JOHN F. PADGETT AND WALTER W. POWELL, 
Part I Autocatalysis, 
Chapter 2 * Autocatalysis in Chemistry and the Origin of Life JOHN F. PADGETT, 
Chapter 3 * Economic Production as Chemistry II JOHN F. PADGETT, PETER MCMAHAN, AND XING ZHONG, 
Chapter 4 * From Chemical to Social Networks JOHN F. PADGETT, 
Part II Early Capitalism and State Formation, 
Chapter 5 * The Emergence of Corporate Merchant-Banks in Dugento Tuscany JOHN F. PADGETT, 
Chapter 6 * Transposition and Refunctionality: The Birth of Partnership Systems in Renaissance Florence JOHN F. PADGETT, 
Chapter 7 * Country as Global Market: Netherlands, Calvinism, and the Joint-Stock Company JOHN F. PADGETT, 
Chapter 8 * Conflict Displacement and Dual Inclusion in the Construction of Germany JONATHAN OBERT AND JOHN F. PADGETT, 
Part III Communist Transitions, 
Chapter 9 * The Politics of Communist Economic Reform: Soviet Union and China JOHN F. PADGETT, 
Chapter 10 * Deviations from Design: The Emergence of New Financial Markets and Organizations in Yeltsin's Russia ANDREW SPICER, 
Chapter 11 * The Emergence of the Russian Mobile Telecom Market: Local Technical Leadership and Global Investors in a Shadow of the State VALERY YAKUBOVICH AND STANISLAV SHEKSHNIA, 
Chapter 12 * Social Sequence Analysis: Ownership Networks, Political Ties, and Foreign Investment in Hungary DAVID STARK AND BALÁZS VEDRES, 
Part IV Contemporary Capitalism and Science, 
Chapter 13 * Chance, Nécessité, et Naïveté: Ingredients to Create a New Organizational Form WALTER W. POWELL AND KURT SANDHOLTZ, 
Chapter 14 * Organizational and Institutional Genesis: The Emergence of High-Tech Clusters in the Life Sciences WALTER W. POWELL, KELLEY PACKALEN, AND KJERSTEN WHITTINGTON, 
Chapter 15 * An Open Elite: Arbiters, Catalysts, or Gatekeepers in the Dynamics of Industry Evolution? WALTER W. POWELL AND JASON OWEN-SMITH, 
Chapter 16 * Academic Laboratories and the Reproduction of Proprietary Science: Modeling Organizational Rules through Autocatalytic Networks JEANNETTE A. COLYVAS AND SPIRO MAROULIS, 
Chapter 17 * Why the Valley Went First: Aggregation and Emergence in Regional Inventor Networks LEE FLEMING, LYRA COLFER, ALEXANDRA MARIN, AND JONATHAN MCPHIE, 
Chapter 18 * Managing the Boundaries of an "Open" Project FABRIZIO FERRARO AND SIOBHÁN O'MAHONY, 
Coda: Reflections on the Study of Multiple Networks WALTER W. POWELL AND JOHN F. PADGETT, 
Index of Authors, 
Index of Subjects, 

CHAPTER 1

The Problem of Emergence

John F. Padgett * Walter W. Powell

ORGANIZATIONAL NOVELTY

Darwin's question about the origin of species is worth posing and exploring as much in the social sciences as it was in biology. Human organizations, like living organisms, have evolved throughout history, with new organizational forms emerging and transforming in various settings: new types of banks and banking in the history of capitalism; new types of research organizations and research in the history of science; new types of political organizations and nations in the history of state formation. All of these examples are discussed in this book. The histories of economies and polities are littered with new organizational forms that never existed before. In biological language, this emergence of new organizational forms is the puzzle of speciation.

We economists, political scientists, and sociologists have many theories about how to choose alternatives, once these swim into our field of vision. But our theories have little to say about the invention of new alternatives in the first place. New ideas, new practices, new organizational forms, new people must enter from off the stage of our imaginary before our analyses can begin. Darwin asked the fundamental question, but our concepts are like those of Darwin before Mendel and Watson and Crick. We understand selection and equilibrium, but we do not understand the emergence of what we choose or of who we are. Our analytical shears are sharp, but the life forces pushing things up to be trimmed elude us.

Novelty almost by definition is hard to understand. Something is not genuinely new if it already exists in our current practice or imagination. The terms innovation and invention, as we use them in this book, mean the construction of something neither present nor anticipated by anyone in the population. We do not mean that planned incremental improvement on what already exists is not possible — quite the opposite. This type of learning occurs far more often than does the production of genuine novelty. The conundrum for both researchers and participants is that logical cognition, no matter how useful for refinement and improvement, is unlikely to be a fundamental process for generating novelty, because logic can only use axioms that are already there.

The literature on "organizational innovation" is voluminous, but that literature largely focuses on learning, search, and diffusion and often uses patents as indicators. The term innovation in organization theory refers to products and ideas, never to the emergence of organizational actors per se. Social science studies processes of innovation, so defined, but mainly by abstracting from the content of innovation itself. Lest this limitation be mistaken for criticism, it is important to remember that Darwin himself never truly answered his own question about the origin of species. He "only" analyzed the natural selection of populations of organisms within species, once species existed. Some parts of social science with an evolutionary sympathy have absorbed Darwin, but natural (or artificial) selection alone does not solve his puzzle of speciation.

Besides this introductory chapter and a coda, this book contains fourteen historical case studies of the emergence of organizations and markets, plus three modeling chapters that apply concepts from biochemistry to social evolution. The case studies are divided into three clusters: four case studies on the European co-evolution of early capitalism and state formation, four case studies on Communist economic reform and transition, and six chapters about technologically advanced capitalism and science. These case studies, discussed below, were selected because all of them contain instances of the historical emergence of organizational novelty. Some chapters also discuss failed emergence as a control group. Not all of the chapters involve speciation in the radical sense of new to human history, but nearly half of them do. All involve speciation in the sense of organizational novelty in the context of the population under study.

The three modeling chapters in part 1 extract the foundational concept of autocatalysis from the existing chemistry literature on the origins of life and then apply this concept, through agent-based computer models, first to the self-organization of economic production and second to the evolution of primitive language and communication. These simple, biochemically inspired models are in no way rich enough to capture the phenomena or the array of emergence mechanisms observed in the historical case studies. But they do provide an analytical...

Details zur Ausgabe

• Verlag: Princeton University Press
• Erscheinungsdatum: 2012
• Sprache: Englisch
• ISBN 10: 0691148872
• ISBN 13: 9780691148878
• Einband: Taschenbuch
• Anzahl der Seiten: 583
• Herausgeber: Padgett John F., Powell Walter W.
• Kontakt zum Hersteller: Nicht verfügbar
• Verantwortliche Person: Buchbär; info@buchbaer.de; ; Weberstr. 67; Osnabrück; 49084; Deutschland