ISNIE Annual Conference, Stanford University, June 16–18

21 January 2011 at 10:46 am Scott Masten Leave a comment

| Scott Masten |

The 15th Annual Conference of the International Society for New Institutional Economics will be held this year at Stanford University on June 16-18. The conference is being organized by President-Elect Barry Weingast, and my inside, not-yet-public information is that the conference will have two very interesting keynotes. The ISNIE website has the just-released Call for Papers.

O&M readers are probably already pretty familiar with ISNIE. But its history could provide an interesting case study for students of organization and institutions. First is the institutional entrepreneurship involved in conceiving of and getting the Society off the ground. Obviously, Ronald Coase, Douglass North, and Oliver Williamson — the Society’s first three presidents — were key players. But much credit for the Society’s early success also goes to the group at Washington University at St. Louis, particularly, Lee Benham, and John Drobak, and to Claude Menard at the University of Paris, whose combined efforts assured the Society’s broad reach and inclusiveness. Interesting also from a governance perspective is the problem of balancing the Society’s founding objectives with the desire for responsiveness and accountability to the Society’s members. ISNIE also went through a major technology- (and cost-) induced reorganization as many of the functions performed manually in the St. Louis office were shifted to the web (for which the bulk of the credit goes to the heroic efforts and contributions of current ISNIE Secretary Eric Brousseau). Thanks to the efforts of these and many others, ISNIE as an organization remains strong, and the annual conferences have become excellent opportunities for interaction with top scholars of organization and institutions from around the world. The 2011 conference at Stanford is not to be missed.