The Emergence of Organizations and Markets - Softcover

Padgett, John F.; Powell, Walter W.

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0691148872 ISBN 13: 9780691148878

Publisher: Princeton University Press, 2012

Synopsis

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.

About this title

From the Back Cover:

"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

About the Author:

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.

About this edition

• Publisher: Princeton University Press
• Publication date: 2012
• ISBN 10: 0691148872
• ISBN 13: 9780691148878
• Binding: Paperback
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 608