Posts filed under ‘Institutions’
Final Call for Papers for the 2007 DRUID Conference
| Nicolai Foss |
The annual conferences of the Danish Research Unit for Industrial Dynamics (of which this blogger is a founding member) are characterized by their hopeless names and their increasingly high quality level.
This year’s conference on “Appropriability, Proximity, Routines and Innovation” (no less) takes place at the Copenhagen Business School, Denmark, June 18 at 1 pm to June 20 at 5 pm, 2007. Among the confirmed participants are Allan Afuah, Gautam Ahuja, Keith Aoki, Ron Boschma, Thomas Brenner, Bo Carlsson, Kathleen M. Eisenhardt, David Hsu, William Ocasio, Joanne Oxley, Chris May, Orietta Marsili, Anita M. McGahan, Mariko Sakakibara, Olav Sorenson, Michael Storper, Joel West, and Sidney Winter.
To cite from the DRUID site: “In addition to the paper sessions the conference will include plenary panel debates where internationally merited scholars take stands on contemporary issues within the overall conference theme.” One such event is a debate between Peter Abell, Giovanni Dosi, Sidney Winter and yours truly over the issue of whether strategy research needs to become more methodologically individualist.
Deadline for full paper submission: February 28, 2007 (Twelve noon, Pacific time (GMT -8). See instructions for submission at the conference site.
Entrepreneurship: Ameliorative or Transformative?
| Peter Klein |
Amar Bhide and Carl Schramm take the O&M position on microfinance in a Monday WSJ op-ed. Comparing the views of Nobel Laureates Mohammad Yunus and Edmund Phelps, they write:
Mr. Yunus’s ameliorative entrepreneurship however is very different from the transformative entrepreneurship that Mr. Phelps argues has been central to modern capitalism. . . .
Economic development does wonders for peace, but what does microfinanced entrepreneurship really do for economic development? Can turning more beggars into basket weavers make Bangladesh less of a, well, basket case? A few small port cities or petro-states aside, there is no historical precedent for sustained improvements in living standards without broad-based modernization and widespread improvements in productivity brought about by the dynamic entrepreneurship that Mr. Phelps celebrates.
In principle, microfinance does not preclude modern entrepreneurship. But in practice, we wonder if the romantic charm of the former might distract governments in impoverished countries from undertaking reforms needed to foster the latter.
It’s a nice piece — and how often do you see both F. A. Hayek and Frank Knight lauded in a newspaper editorial?
Ofek on Seabright’s Company of Strangers
| Peter Klein |
Haim Ofek reviews Paul Seabright’s The Company of Strangers: A Natural History of Economic Life (Princeton, 2004) for EH.Net. Some friends have highly recommended the book to me as a grand synthesis of market theory, institutional analysis, economic history, and evolutionary biology. I started reading it last year but my interest waned after a couple of chapters. (I guess I don’t have a taste for evolutionary biology; a lot of it reads like Just So Stories to me.)
Here is a 2005 interview with Seabright in Reason Magazine.
The Dark Side of Open Source: Parenting Edition
| Peter Klein |
The open-source model works well when producers want to encourage collaboration. A potential downside is too much collaboration — sometimes project leaders just want to be left alone.
Who knows this better than parents of small children?
With all due respect to Ward Cunningham, I’d like to take issue, for a moment, with the claim that he is the originator of the wiki. Because anyone who’s had a child can assure you that collective public authorship, collaborative editing, and anonymous generative correction — those wiki hallmarks — have been around since Mrs. Cain first brought Baby Cain over to Uncle Abel’s house dressed only in a too-thin fig-leaf onesie.
That’s Slate’s Dahlia Lithwick reminding us that “babies invented community-based collaborative authorship.” When your kid is sick, all your friends and relatives try to re-write the owner’s manual, whether you want them to or not.
Schumpeterian Competition and Economic Growth
| Peter Klein |
Nobel Laureate Michael Spence writes about sustained high growth in today’s (gated) WSJ. Focusing on Botswana, China, Hong Kong, Indonesia, Korea, Malaysia, Malta, Oman, Singapore, Taiwan, and Thailand, Spence notes:
While each instance of sustained high growth is to some extent idiosyncratic, they share certain features. In all cases, there is a functioning market economy with its price signals, incentives, decentralization and enough definition of private property ownership to enable investment. All attempts to circumvent this necessary condition through central planning have met with major misallocations of resources and failure.
Isn’t it wonderful that the Austrian and public-choice critiques of central planning are so well-known that invoking them seems almost, well, trite?
A key feature of sustained high growth, Spence adds, is resource mobility:
Contrary to the image that sometimes comes from a macroeconomic overview, productivity growth at these rates is not achieved by having everyone do what they were doing before, but a little bit more efficiently. The portfolio mix of economic activity changes very rapidly. This is what Schumpeter called “creative destruction” and Paul Romer calls “churn.” . . . This movement of people geographically and across sectors is not an ancillary side effect of the growth process, but rather the essence of it.
Incidentally, Schumpeterian competition is not always easily discernible at a microeconomic level. Paul Vaaler and Gerry McNamara find mixed evidence for increasingly “dynamic competition” in the US technology sector. (See also the essays in Paul’s book with Lee W. McKnight and Raul L. Katz.)
Workshop on (Old) Institutional Economics
| Peter Klein |
Geoff Hodgson’s 9th International Workshop on Institutional Economics takes place 21-22 June 2007 at the University of Hertfordshire. The theme is “Property, Money, and Firms: The Forgotten Role of Law and the State.” (Um, “forgotten”?)
Social Capital and Diversity
| Peter Klein |
Speaking of social capital. . . . In case you missed it, there was a recent flap over research by Robert Putnam purportedly showing that racial and ethnic diversity is harmful to social capital. A Financial Times column broke the story in October 2006, implying that Putnam — feeling guilty about the study’s politically incorrect implications — was delaying or suppressing the results. Putnam put out a press release claiming the newspaper report was one-sided, though not addressing the claim that he was holding back the findings.
Steve Sailer calls Putnam’s remarks to the FT, while in Sweden to receive a prize for his work in Bowling Alone, “one of the more irony-laden incidents in the history of celebrity social scientists.” Arnold Kling thinks Putnam is a publicity hound who “position[s] his research in ways to maximize sensationalist coverage, and then complain[s] about sensationalist coverage.”
Syllabus Exchange
| Peter Klein |
As a new semester begins professor-bloggers are sharing their notes and class syllabi. We previously mentioned Thom Lambert’s opening lecture in his Business Organizations class. Here are some syllabi that might interest O&M readers:
- Kieran Healy’s Economic Sociology (Arizona)
- Teppo Felin’s Microfoundations of Strategic Organization (BYU)
- Pete Boettke’s Austrian Theory of the Market Process II (George Mason)
- Cory Doctorow’s Is Everyone on this Campus a Copyright Criminal? (USC)
- Henry Farrell’s Institutions and Politics (George Washington)
TV Reduces Social Capital, But Does It Matter?
| Peter Klein |
A new NBER working paper by Benjamin Olken:
In Bowling Alone, Putnam (1995) famously argued that the rise of television may be responsible for social capital’s decline. I investigate this hypothesis in the context of Indonesian villages. To identify the impact of exposure to television (and radio), I exploit plausibly exogenous differences in over-the-air signal strength associated with the topography of East and Central Java. Using this approach, I find that better signal reception, which is associated with more time spent watching television and listening to radio, is associated with substantially lower levels of participation in social activities and with lower self-reported measures of trust. I find particularly strong effects on participation in local government activities, as well as on participation in informal savings groups. However, despite the impact on social capital, improved reception does not appear to affect village governance, at least as measured by discussions in village-level meetings and by corruption in a village-level road project.
Here is the link (will be gated for some of you).
“Atheist” Academics
| Cliff Grammich |
Peter kindly draws my attention to a study by Neil Gross at Harvard and Solon Simmons at George Mason, released last fall but discussed this week here, here, and here, about religiosity of American professors. Among the findings: (more…)
The Case for Killing the FCC
| Peter Klein |
Jack Shafer has a very nice piece in Slate on the Federal Communications Commission:
Although today’s FCC is nowhere near as controlling as earlier FCCs, it still treats the radio spectrum like a scarce resource that its bureaucrats must manage for the “public good,” even though the government’s scarcity argument has been a joke for half a century or longer. The almost uniformly accepted modern view is that information-carrying capacity of the airwaves isn’t static, that capacity is a function of technology and design architecture that inventors and entrepreneurs throw at spectrum. To paraphrase this forward-thinking 1994 paper (PDF), the old ideas about spectrum capacity are out, and new ones about spectrum efficiency are in.
As every freshman economics student knows — but most regulators (and ecologists) do not — the degree to which a particular resource is “scarce,” in the economic sense, depends on consumer preferences and the state of technology. Oil was not a scarce resource until people learned how to refine it into useful products like kerosene and gasoline. The supply of a given resource, like spectrum, is not fixed, but varies with our knowledge of how, and for what, to use it.
Shafer also points out that the FCC has been not an enabler, but an obstacle, to technological advances in telecommunications. The Commission “stalled the emergence of such feasible technologies as FM radio, pay TV, cell phones, satellite radio, and satellite TV, just to name a few. As Declan McCullagh wrote in 2004, if the FCC had been in charge of the Web, we’d still be waiting for its standards engineers to approve of the first Web browser. ”
Update: James Delong likes it too.
Measuring Research Productivity
| Peter Klein |
The Chronicle of Higher Education reports rankings of 7,294 PhD programs in 104 disciplines at 354 US universities. The rankings are from the Faculty Scholarly Productivity (FSP) Index computed by Academic Analytics. Unlike the Business Week and US News and World Reports rankings, based largely on subjective, peer evaluations, the FSP purports to be an objective performance index. (I’m reminded of Frank Knight’s reported interpretation of Kelvin’s dictum: “If you can’t measure, measure anyway.”)
A few surprises: In economics, Johns Hopkins, Duke, and UC-San Diego make the top ten, ahead of Chicago, Stanford, and Berkeley. Iowa ranks #5 in management, behind heavyweights Columbia, Wharton, MIT, and Northwestern (Cornell and Florida also make the top ten). The top ten in finance includes Emory, Temple, Boston College, and Houston. No surprises in sociology (at least to my untrained eye).
Thanks to Rich Vedder for the pointer. Rich interprets these data as evidence that the traditional, subjective rankings are biased toward the elite universities. On the other hand, quantitative metrics for intangibles like knowledge creation can’t possibly incorporate quality in a satisfactory way.
Psychology and Economic Development
| Peter Klein |
A Vietnam story for Nicolai to enjoy during his holiday. Writes a World Bank staffer:
At the end of the day, it is the mentality of our government clients that matter. It is their willingness to reform and their interest in facilitating private sector development that make the difference. We just give them the tools. We have to put more emphasis on why they should change their mentality and adopt the “Vietnam approach.” But we are not psychologists — we are economists, lawyers, bankers, investors, bureaucrats, you name it, but not psychologists.
Virtual Veneration
| Cliff Grammich |
Earlier this week, Peter asked about “the impact of technology on the existence, boundaries, an internal structure of religious organizations.” Yesterday, Liz Birge had a story in the Newark Star-Ledger on “virtual veneration,” including “how houses of worship use the Web to reach old members and attract new ones.”
12 January 2007 at 2:54 pm Clifford Grammich Leave a comment
Nature Gives Up on Open-Source Peer Review
| Peter Klein |
The open-source, wiki model does not, apparently, work well for scientific publishing. Nature had placed a selection of submitted manuscripts online and invited feedback from researchers around the world, promising to take the feedback into consideration as part of the formal review process. But the scientific community showed little interest. Few authors were willing to participate in the experiement, and the online papers didn’t get much feedback.
During Nature’s trial, only 5 percent of 1,369 papers ranging from astronomy to neuroscience that were selected for traditional peer review were also posted on the Internet for open commentary. Of those, 33 papers received no comments. The rest received a total of 92 technical comments.
The journal concluded that many researchers were either too busy or had no real incentive in evaluating their colleagues’ work publicly. In addition, none of the editors found the posted comments influenced their decision whether a paper gets published.
I’m a little surprised by this. According to Lerner and Tirole, the open-source model should work in settings with strong reputation effects. One would think that in small, close-knit, specialized scientific communities the incentives to provide useful feedback — assuming it’s not anonymous — would be fairly high. On the other hand, there are opportunities to do so at conferences, seminars, workshops, the faculty lounge — and even blogs! — and the opportunity costs of doing it via Nature’s setup may have been too high.
Call for Papers: Putting Social Capital to Work
| Peter Klein |
Those of you studying networks, clusters, and social capital may find this Call for Papers of interest:
Doing business is a profoundly social process. Social capital and its dynamics, therefore, are inescapable components of every interaction. Among other things, they affect group cohesiveness and functionality, and they give advantages or disadvantages to some individuals and groups relative to others. This special issue of Business History will explore the research and analytical opportunities in putting social capital to work.
Full details: (more…)
Do Multinationals Restrain the State?
| Peter Klein |
I referred early to Ralph Raico’s essay on the European Miracle, the unprecedented, long-term rise in living standards that began in late-medieval Europe. As discussed there, the consensus of mainstream scholars such as Rosenberg and Birdzell, Mokyr, North, Landes, and Weingast is that Europe grew rich because unlike more centralized Eastern civilizations, European political and social life was controlled by a complex, decentralized mosaic of institutions and organizations, each of which placed limits on the other.
The most important of these institutions was the transnational Church. The concept of the sovereign as subordinate not only to a Higher Law, but also to a higher earthly authority, located outside his realm, was unique to European politics. State power was thus restricted by horizontal competition among sovereign states and complex vertical relationships between church and state.
Today, of course, the Catholic Church no longer plays this limiting role. However, there are other multinational and transnational institutions that place powerful limits on state power. These include charitable and relief organizations such as the Red Cross or Doctors Without Borders, religious movements and groups, the news media (we bloggers especially!), and other voluntary associations. But the most important of these institutions is the multinational or transnational corporation. What role do multinational firms play in limiting the power of the state? (more…)
The Virtual Church
| Cliff Grammich |
Peter asks below about research “on the impact of technology on the existence, boundaries, an internal structure of religious organizations.” This is, to my knowledge, a nascent field, but there are some resources on this, listed below, of greater and lesser relevance to Peter’s question. (more…)
The Religious Marketplace
| Cliff Grammich |
Many thanks to Peter for the kind invitation and introduction. A political science student whose dissertation research focused on ethnography of sectarian Baptists (good and, I confess, flattering summary here of its revision for those interested) is, I know, a bit out of place in blogging on “organizations and markets.” Nevertheless, given how much recent research on American religion has used the language of organizations and markets — indeed, one of the most influential works in sociology of religion of the past decade focuses on “winners and losers in our religious economy” — I’ve some reason to hope I can contribute something to the conversation here. I know I’ve learned plenty here, and am grateful for this opportunity to learn still more.
As Peter notes, one of my main interests is a decennial county-level enumeration of religious congregations and memberships in the United States. The most recent version of this work included 149 religious bodies. The data are generally self-reported by participants, and therefore vary from year-to-year. At present, one of my pet projects is cleaning and matching data by county for the 48 bodies with comparable data in 1980, 1990, and 2000. Multiplying that by the 3,000+ counties in the United States yields quite a few data points on religious “competitors” in literally thousands of local “markets” over time, often featuring organizational adaptations to reflect these.
What “marketplace” explanations have been offered for religious change, and what do recent data say about them? I’ve a broader discussion of this here, but offer some abbreviated insights below. (more…)
The New Model CEO
| Peter Klein |
The firing of Home Depot’s Robert Nardelli, whose Saban-esque compensation package was a flashpoint of controversy during his six-year tenure as CEO, dominates the front page of Thursday’s WSJ. Alan Murray’s column, “Executive’s Fatal Flaw: Failing to Understand New Demands on CEOs,” neatly summarizes the New Corporate Governance:
What Mr. Nardelli missed . . . is that in the post-Enron world, CEOs have been forced to respond to a widening array of shareholder advocates, hedge funds, private-equity deal makers, legislators, regulators, attorneys general, nongovernmental organizations and countless others who want a say in how public companies manage their affairs. Today’s CEO, in effect, has to play the role of a politician, answering to varied constituents. And it’s in that role that Mr. Nardelli failed most spectacularly.
Here’s the problem: Do we really want CEOs to be politicians? If we accept Hayek’s argument that in the political marketplace, the worst get on top, what kind of leader becomes our New Model CEO? (more…)
Organizations and Markets 
Recent Comments