Institutions and Organizations
19 Jul 2024 09:55
Institutions keep society from falling apart, provided that there
is something to keep institutions from falling apart.
---Jon Elster, Nuts and Bolts for the Social Sciences,
ch. 15
Institutional economics (old-style
à la Commons;
neo-institutional
à la Douglass North; new institutional
à la Williamson). Empirical studies of different sorts of
economic institutions. Industrial organization and market structure
(institutions beyond the bounds of any one formal organization). Organization
theory. Theories of institutional change, formation. Difference between
institutions which are products of policy and those which are products of
custom. (Intermediate cases abound
naturally.)
Evolutionary
economics.
Memes. Institutional design.
Centralized vs. decentralized institutions. Corruption. Distribution of power
vs. formal organization. History of bureaucracy and other sorts of formal
organization. (Did Europeans take civil service exams from China? How did
they evolve in China?) Game-theoretic approaches. Simulations. Spontaneous
formation of institutions. How,
exactly, do "institutions matter"
in
economic development and growth?
Recommended, big picture:
- Kenneth Arrow
- James Beniger, The Control Revolution: Technological and
Economic Origins of the Information Society [Review]
- Samuel Bowles, Microeconomics: Behavior, Institutions, and
Evolution
- Thráinn Eggertsson, Economic Behavior and
Institutions [Review: Homo
economicus on the Grand Tour, or, When Is a Lizard a Good Enough Dragon
for Government Work?]
- F. A. Hayek, "Use of Knowledge in Society"
and "Economics and Knowledge" in Individualism and Economic Order
- Albert O. Hirschman, Exit, Voice and Loyalty
- Jack Knight, Institutions and Social Conflict
- Gary J. Miller, Managerial Dilemmas: The Political Economy of
Hierarchy [Review by Steve Laniel]
- Douglass
North, Institutions, Institutional Change and Economic
Performance
- Mancur Olson, The Logic of Collective Action [How
groups work, and why volunteerism is almost never sufficient to secure public
goods. (Short version: if it's a public good, i.e. one from which everyone
benefits without exclusion, why should you put yourself out to secure
it? Surely somebody else will... Olson provides a detailed economic analysis
to flesh this out.) How interest groups work, why people won't show up to
union meetings but will overwhelmingly vote to make union membership
compulsory, taxes and government, the weakness of large classes, etc., etc.
Brilliant.]
- Elinor Ostrom
- Understanding Institutional Diversity in Open
Societies [partial online
draft]
- Governing the Commons
- Thomas Schelling, Micromotives and Macrobehavior
Recommended, close-ups:
- F. G. Bailey, Humbuggery and Manipulation: The Art of
Leadership
- Roland Bénabou, "Groupthink: Collective Delusions in
Organizations and Markets"
[PDF
preprint. A really brilliant paper on "individually rational collective
reality denial in groups, organizations and markets".]
- Samuel Bowles, "The coevolution of institutions and
preferences: History and theory", SFI Working Paper 09-04-008 [PDF]
- Samuel Bowles and Herbert Gintis, "The Evolutionary Basis of
Collective Action", forthcoming in the Oxford Handbook of Political
Economy
[PDF
preprint]
- Samuel Bowles and Suresh Naidu, "Persistent Institutions"
[PDF preprint]
- David Chisholm, Coordination without Hierarchy: Informal Structures in Multiorganizational Systems
- Andy Clark, "Economic Reason: The Interplay of Individual
Learning and External Structure" [PDF reprint]
- Colin Crouch and Henry
Farrell, "Breaking the Path of Institutional Development? Alternatives to
the New Determinism", Rationality and
Society 16 (2004): 5--43
- R. A. Dahl and C. E. Lindblom, Politics, Economics and
Welfare: Planning and Politico-Economic Systems Resolved into Basic Social
Processes
- Jerker Denrell, "Radical Organization Theory: An Incomplete
Contract Approach to Power and Organizational Design", Rationality and
Society12 (2000): 39--66
[My comments]
- Paul J. DiMaggio and Walter W. Powell, "The Iron Cage Revisited: Institutional Isomorphism and Collective Rationality in Organizational Fields",
American Sociological Review48 (1983): 147--160 [JSTOR. This is an interesting and deservedly-classic paper in sociology, which deals with an important issue, namely, why do so many organizations in the same field resemble each other so closely? One possibility would be that the common structure is the most efficient one, but they correctly point out that often the selective pressures which would need to be invoked to ensure this are weak or even absent, yet the similarity is there. They instead consider a range of alternative mechanisms, which all sound plausible and indeed one can see at work all around.
The point I want to peeve about, however, is their name. In mathematics, an isomorphism is an invertible mapping between two domains which preserves some structure or property. For instance, the binary relation \( R \) on a domain \( A \) is isomorphic to the binary relation \( S \) on the domain \( B \) when there is a function \( \phi: A \mapsto B \) such that (i) \( a_1 R a_2 \Leftrightarrow \phi(a_1) S \phi(a_2) \) and (ii) the inverse function \( \phi^{-1} \) is well defined, so (iii) \( b_1 S b_2 \Leftrightarrow \phi^{-1}(b_1) R \phi^{-1}(b_2) \). (You can fill in how things go for higher-order relations.) "Isomorphism" thus isn't a name for similar structure, it's a name for identical structure. One could apply this to organizations: define a bunch of relations \( R_1, R_2, \ldots R_k \) for organization \( A \) (relations of formal authority, informal interaction, etc., etc.), and similarly \( S_1, S_2, \ldots S_k \) for organization \( B \), and demand that the same mapping \( \phi \) be an isomorphism for each pair \( R_i, S_i \) at once. But this is a much stronger notion of similarity than DiMaggio and Powell are working with, or could reasonably want. (For instance it straightforwardly implies that \( A \) and \( B \) must have the same cardinality, so a small organization could not be isomorphic to a larger one.) They plainly want some notion of similarity of structure which comes in degrees and is not, in fact, isomorphism. Of course, I do not have a better suggestion for alternative jargon; this is, as I said, a peeve.]
- Steven N. Durlauf and H. Peyton Young (eds.), Social Dynamics
- Henry Farrell and Jack Knight, "Trust and Institutional Compliance"
[Thanks to Henry for a preprint]
- John Kenneth Galbraith, The New Industrial State
- Uri Gneezy and Aldo Rustichini, "A Fine Is a Price", Journal of Legal Studies 29 (2000): 1--17
- Bennett Harrison, Lean and Mean [As an example of how
to analyze a particular set of institutions and formal organizations]
- Rakesh Khurana, Searching for a Corporate Savior: The
Irrational Quest for Charismatic CEOs
- James March and Herbert Simon, Organizations
- John W. Meyer and Brian Rowan, "Institutionalized Organizations: Formal Structure as Myth and Ceremony", American Journal of Sociology 83 (1977): 340--363 [JSTOR]
- Scott Page, "Uncertainty, Difficulty, and Complexity" SFI
Working Paper 98-08-076
- Herbert Simon, "Organizations and
Markets," Journal of Economic Perspectives, 5
(1991) 25--44 [Collected in Models of Bounded Rationality, vol.
III; see also ch. 2 of his Sciences of the Artificial]
- H. Preyton Young, Individual Strategy and Social Structure:
An Evolutionary Theory of Institutions [Review: A Myopic (and Sometimes
Blind) Eye on the Main Chance, or, the Origins of Custom]
To read, historical interest:
- John Commons, Institutional Economics: Its Place in Political
Economy
- Herbert Simon, Administrative Behavior
- Thorstein Veblen
To read, contemporary case studies:
- Robert C. Feenstra and Gordon H. Hanson, "Ownership and Control in
Outsourcing to China: Estimating the Property-Rights Theory of the Firm", The Quarterly Journal
of Economics 120 (2005): 729--761
- Yi-min Lin, Between Politics and Markets: Firms, Competition, and Institutional Change in Post-Mao China
- David A. Phillips, Reforming the World Bank: Twenty Years of Trial --- and Error
- Abdulkader
H. Sinno, Organizations at War in Afghanistan and Beyond [author's book description]
- Eddy U, Disorganizing China: Counter-Bureaucracy and the
Decline of Socialism
- David M. Woodruff, "Rules for Followers: Institutional Theory and
the New Politics of Economic Backwardness in Russia", Politics and Society 28 (2000): 437--482
To read, stat.-mech.-y modeling and analysis:
- A. Baronchelli, L. Dall'Asta, A. Barrat, V. Loreto, "Non-equilibrium phase transition in negotiation dynamics", cond-mat/0611717
- Youngki Lee, Luís A. Nunes Amaral, David Canning, Martin
Meyer and H. Eugene Stanley, "Universal Features in the Growth Dynamics of
Complex Organizations,"
cond-mat/9804100
- Daniel B. Neill, "Cascade Effects in Heterogeneous Populations", Rationality and
Society 17 (2005): 191--241 ["model of sequential
choice which explains the emergence and persistence of unpopular, inefficient
behavioral norms in society. We model individuals as naive Bayesian norm
followers, rational agents whose subjective expected utility is increased by
adherence to an established norm. Agents use Bayesian reasoning to combine
their private preferences and prior beliefs with empirical observations of
others' decisions. When agents must infer the preferences of others from
observation, this can result in negative cascades, causing the majority of
agents to choose a dispreferred action (because they believe, incorrectly, that
they are following the majority preference). We demonstrate that negative
cascades can result even when the degree of conformity is relatively low, and
under a wide range of conditions (including heterogeneity in preferences,
priors, and impact of public opinion)"]
- Joshua R. Tyler, Dennis M. Wilkinson and Bernardo A. Huberman,
"Email as Spectroscopy: Automated Discovery of Community Structure within
Organizations," cond-mat/0303264
To read:
- Emanuel Adler, World Ordering: A Social Theory of Cognitive Evolution [Via David Auerbach]
- Howard Aldrich, Organizations Evolving
- Masahiko Aoki, Toward a Comparative Institutional
Analysis
- G. C. Archibald, Information, Incentives and the Economics of
Control ["examines methods for controlling or guiding a sector of the
economy that do not require all the apparatus of economic planning or rely on
the vain hope of sufficiently 'perfect' competition, but instead rely entirely
on the self-interest of economic agents and voluntary contract. The methods
involved require trial-and-error steps in real time, with the target adjusted
as the results of each step become
known."]
- Lee Roy Beach, The Psychology of Decision Making: People in
Organizations
- Yochai Benkler, "Coase's Penguin, or Linux and the Nature of the
Firm," cs.CY/0109077
- Gerald Berk and Dennis Galvan, "How people experience and change institutions: a field guide to creative syncretism", Theory and Society 38 (2009): 543--580
- David Braybrooke (ed.), Social Rules: Origin; Character; Logic; Change
- Daniel W. Bromley, Sufficient Reason: Volitional Pragmatism and the Meaning of Economic Institutions
- Francesca Cancian, What Are Norms?
- Dan
Carpenter, "Adaptive Signal Processing, Hierarchy, and Budgetary Control in
Federal Regulation", American Political Science Review 90 (1996): 283--302
- Glenn R. Carroll and Michael T. Hannan, The Demography of
Corporations and Industries [JSTOR]
- Alex Cooley, Logics of Hierarchy: The Organization of Empires, States and Military Occupations
- Barbara Czarniawska, Narrating the Organization: Dramas of
Institutional Identity
- Avinash K. Dixit, Lawlessness and Economics: Alternative
Modes of Governance
- Tom Douglas, Change, Intervention and Consequence: An
Exploration of the Process of Intended Change
- Robert Edgerton, Rules, Exceptions and Social Order
- Thrainn Eggertsson, Imperfect Institutions: Possibilities and Limits of Reform
- Jon Elster, Securities Agianst Misrule: Juries, Assemblies, Elections
- Jon Elster, Clauss Offe and Ulrich K. Preuss, Institutional
Design in Post-communist Societies: Rebuilding the Ship at Sea
- Christoph Engel, Generating Predictability: Institutional Analysis and Design
- Henry Farrell, [The Political Economy of Trust: Institutions, Interests, and Inter-Firm Cooperation in Italy and Germany
- N. Fligstein, "Fields, Power and Social Skill: Critical Analysis of
the New Institutionalisms"[PDF]
- Diego Gambetta
- Robert E. Goodin (ed.), The Theory of Institutional Design
- Judith Gruber, Controlling Bureaucracies: Dilemmas in Democratic Governance
- Francesco Guala, Understanding Institutions: The Science and Philosophy of Living Together
- Thomas Hale, "Catalytic Cooperation", Global Environmental Politics 20 (2020): 73--98
- Michael T. Hannan and John Freeman, Organizational Ecology
- Michael T. Hannan, Lásló Pólos and Glenn R. Carroll, Logics of Organization Theory: Audiences, Codes, and Ecologies
- J. Richard Harrison and Glenn R. Carroll, Culture and Demography in Organizations
- Michael Herzfeld, The Social Production of Indifference: Exploring the Symbolic Roots of Western Bureaucracy
- Marco A. Janssen, Robert Holahan, Allen Lee, Elinor Ostrom,
"Lab Experiments for the Study of Social-Ecological Systems", Science 328 (2010): 613--617
- Bryan D. Jones, Politics and the Architecture of Choice
- Eric L. Jones, Cultures Merging: A Historical and Economic Critique of Culture
- Michael Kenney, From Pablo to Osama: Trafficking and
Terrorist Networks, Government Bureaucracies, and Competitive Adaptation
- Martin Kilduff and David Krackhardt, Interpersonal Networks in Organizations: Cognition, Personality, Dynamics, and Culture
- Robert Klitgaard, Controlling Corruption
- Ken Kollman, John Miller and Scott Page (eds.), Computational
Models in Political Economy
- Neil Komesar, Imperfect Alternatives: Choosing Institutions in Law, Economics and Public Policy
- Jack H. Knott and Gary J. Miller, Reforming Bureaucracy: The
Politics of Institutional Choice
- George Krause and Kennth Meier (eds.), Politics, Policy,
and Organizations: Frontiers in the Scientific Study of Bureaucracy
- Lazonick, Business Organization and the Myth of the Market
Economy
- James Mahoney and Kathleen Thelen, Explaining Institutional Change: Ambiguity, Agency, and Power
- Andrew J. Macintyre, The Power of Institutions: Political
Architecture and Governance
- C. Mantzavinos, Individuals, Institutions, and Markets
- C. Mantzavinos, Douglass C. North and Syed Shariq, "Learning,
Institutions, and Economic Performance", Perspectives on Politics
2 (2004): 75--84
- Alex Marshall, The Surprising Design of Market Economies
- Jerry Mashaw, Greed, Chaos and Governance
- Cathleen McGrath and David Krackhardt, "Network Conditions for
Organizational Change", The Journal of Applied Behavioral
Science 39 (2003): 324--336
[PDF
reprint]
- John McMillan, Reinventing the Bazaar: The Natural History of
Markets
- Bryce Morsky and Erol Akçay, "Evolution of social norms and correlated equilibria", Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (USA) 116 (2019): 8834--8839
- Max Neiman, Defending Government: Why Big Government
Works
- Douglass C. North, "Markets and Other Allocation Systems in History: The Challenge of Karl Polanyi" [PDF]
- Joe
Oppenheimer
- Ostrom, Gardner and Walker, Rules, Games and Common-Pool
Resources
- Elinor Ostrom and Harini Nagendra, "Insights on linking forests,
trees, and people from the air, on the ground, and in the laboratory",
Proceedings of the
National Academy of Sciences (USA) 103 (2006):
19224--19231
- Charles Perrow, Normal Accidents: Living with High Risk Technologies
- Paul Pierson, Politics in Time: History, Institutions and Social Analysis
- Amy R. Poteete, Marco A. Janssen and Elinor Ostrom, Working Together:
Collective Action, the Commons, and Multiple Methods in Practice
- Adam Przeworksi, "The Last Instance: Are Institutions the Primary
Cause of Economic Development?", European Journal of Sociology
45 (2004): 165--188 ["neo-institutionalists claim that
institutions are the 'primary' cause of economic development, 'deeper' than the
supply of factors and methods for their use, which Marxists would call 'forces
of production'. Yet while the conclusion is different, the historical
narratives differ little across these perspectives. How, then, are such
conclusions derived? Can anything be said to be 'primary'? I conclude that
'causal primacy' is an answer to an incorrectly posed question. Institutions
and development are mutually endogenous and the most we can hope for is to
identify their reciprocal impacts."]
- Prietula, Carley and Gasser (eds.), Simulating
Organizations
- John Quiggin, "Cities, Connections and Cronyism",
Australian Public Policy Program Working Paper: P06_3
- John E. Roemer, Political Competition: Theory and
Applications
- Steven Rosefielde, Comparative Economic Systems: Culture,
Wealth, and Power in the 21st Century ["Explains how culture, in various
guises, modifies the standard rules of economic engagement, creating systems
that differ markedly from those predicted by the theory of general market
competition."]
- Michael Rowlinson, Organisations and Institutions:
Perspectives in Economics and Sociology
- Dietrich Rueschemeyer, Power and the Division of Labor
- Ekkehart Schlicht, "Social Evolution, Corporate Culture, and
Exploitation"
[online]
- Craig Scott, Anonymous Agencies, Backstreet Businesses, and Covert Collectives: Rethinking Organizations in the 21st Century
- Timo J. Septer, Jacob Dijkstra and Frans N. Stokman, "Detecting and measuring crucial differences between cognitive maps", Rationality and Society 24 (2012): 383--407
- Aaron Shaw, Benjamin Mako Hill, "Laboratories of Oligarchy? How the Iron Law Extends to Peer Production",
Journal of Communication 64 (2014): 215--238,
arxiv:1407.0323
- Andrei Shleifer and Robert W. Vishny, The Grabbing Hand:
Government Pathologies and Their Cures
- Daniel Spulber, Market Microstructure: Intermediaries and
the Theory of the Firm
- Arthur Stinchcombe, Information and Organizations [Also JSTOR]
- Michael Storper, Keys to the City:
How Economics, Institutions, Social Interaction, and Politics Shape Development [JSTOR]
- Grahame F. Thompson, Between Hierarchies and Markets:
The Logic and Limits of Network Forms of Organization
- Jonathan H. Turner, Human Institutions: A Theory of Societal Evolution
- Viktor J. Vanberg, "Rational Choice vs. Program-Based Behavior:
Alternative Theoretical Approaches and Their Relevance for the Study of
Institutions", Rationality and Society 14 (2002):
7--54
- Derek Wall, Elinor Ostrom's Rules for Radicals:
Cooperative Alternatives beyond Markets and States
- Harrison White, Markets from Networks: Socioeconomic Models of Production
- Oliver Williamson
- Markets and Hierarchies
- Mechanisms of Governance
- Richard W. Wilson, Compliance Ideologies: Rethinking Political Culture
- Oren R. Young, Institutional Dynamics:
Emergent Patterns in International Environmental Governance
To finish writing:
- Henry Farrell and CRS, "Selection, Evolution and Rational Choice Institutionalism "
- CRS, "Institutions as Collective Degrees of Freedom"
