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The Emergence of Organizations and Markets
... Industries and professions are becoming more diverse and fragmented, globally interconnected, disrupted, unpredictable, and ambiguously bounded, and so organizations that do the work of "meta-organizing" institutional fields are seen as increasingly important (Ahrne and Brunsson, 2008). As the perceived need for collective trust in an organizational environment grows, the perceived value of metaorganizations rises (Pfeffer and Salancik, 2003;Powell et al., 2012). According to this literature, meta-organizations 3 primarily play three roles in an institutional space: ...
... They facilitate interaction and communication and decrease transaction costs associated with interaction. They reduce uncertainties about new ideas and new actors, aiding shared sense-making and growing social trust, which fosters both cohesion and change (Pfeffer and Salancik, 2003;Powell et al., 2012;Scott, 2014). ...
This study sheds light on the increasingly important roles that meta-level organizations, a type of institutional actor, play in the processes of local journalism innovation. Examples of meta-level organizations in journalism include journalism professional associations, training and research centers, nonprofits, and trade publications. Definitionally, metalevel organizations embrace the functions of coordination, regulation, agenda-setting, information diffusion, and the boundary negotiation of an institutionalized space. This qualitative study uses in-depth interviews to explore the roles of meta-level organizations in relation to the troubles of local journalism, how these roles are enacted at professional association conferences, and how they are conceptualized by journalists and representatives of meta-level organizations. We found evidence of three traditional roles of meta-level organizations – information, interaction, existential roles – across different types of meta-level organizations. Respondents tended to view these roles through a lens of resource scarcity. We also found evidence of the role of self-maintenance—i.e., meta-level organizations have their own institutional spaces and an interest in self-preservation—as well as the role of conceptualization or theorization, of innovations, and an emergent role of translation. Translation involves adaptation of abstract ideas to local-level sites, as well as communication of results from local-level experimentation back to the field level, an increasingly important role in a resource-poor local journalism space that is inundated with a flood of new field-level initiatives.
... In particular, it seeks to build on the work of scholars such as Sydow et al. (2012) at the organisational leveland Holmen and Fosse (2017) and Baumgartinger-Seiringer et al. (2021) at the regional levelwho consider the pre-formation, formation and lock-in phases of path development. In order to focus specifically on the agency and structure of new path creation the 'potential-formation-actualisation' framework provides a conceptual fit with theories related to the evolution of human agency and the behavioural aspects of networks and systems within and across regions (Bristow and Healy, 2014;Powell at al., 2013). ...
... In general, network dynamics, in terms of their formation and evolution, have long been acknowledged as playing a key role in mobilising diverse individual agency to establish a more collective agency that has underlined the processes of new path creation in leading high-tech regions (Powell et al., 2013). In these cases, network formation and evolution lead to the increasing technological complexity of these regional economies, which ultimately allows them to grow faster than their counterparts (Mewes and Broekel, 2021). ...
New path creation processes are a vital component of regional economic development. This paper establishes a behavioural framework to examine and understand such processes. It is argued that human agency and the network dynamics through which these agents interact are at the heart of new path creation processes. In particular, effective new path creation requires the formation of collective forms of agency based on strong strategic networks
underpinned by a shared commitment. Regions that are equipped with such agency and networks are more likely to be capable of embracing and managing the economic complexity and adaptability necessary to generate the innovation associated with new development paths.
... new firms organized by (teams of) en- trepreneurs who previously worked at other firms in the same industry 1 -have received particularly high levels of scholarly attention. Spin-offs account for a sizeable fraction of all de novo entrants in high-tech in- dustries such as semiconductors ( Kenney and Von Burg, 1999;Fontana and Malerba, 2010), disk drives ( Agarwal et al., 2004), lasers (Sleeper, 1998), or biotechnology ( Powell et al., 2012). They tend to outperform other entrepreneurial entrants (e.g., Klepper, 2007;Wenting, 2008;Dahl and Sorenson, 2014), with their success often matching that of de alio entrants diversifying from related markets (Klepper, 2002). ...
... The backgrounds of founders and early employees not only con- tribute to the capabilities of entrants. They are also associated with how embedded entrants are in the regional industry network (Granovetter, 1985(Granovetter, , 2017Powell et al., 2012). Personal ties to members of other firms in the industry may be crucial to access relevant knowledge. ...
Numerous studies attest to the distinctive performance of intra-industry spin-offs located in agglomerated regions. Besides entrepreneurs' pre-entry experience, both superior hires and regional embeddedness have been suggested as factors contributing to this pattern. We employ linked employer-employee data to assess their relevance in the empirical context of the Portuguese plastic injection molds industry. We find that the longevity of entrants is associated with the number and quality of early employees hired from within the industry, consistent with the importance of embodied knowledge flows. Our findings do not suggest that entrants' centrality in the regional industry network enhances their longevity.
... contact, given that a new autocatalytic set exists in the union of the originals. This second, reconfigurative feature of the hypercycle model makes it a particularly rich metaphor for understanding the evolution of social organization (Baron 2014;Page 2013;Zuckerman 2014). It can explain how a network of actors and practices can stabilize in the short run, but also how those actors and practices can be fundamentally transformed as different networks are brought into contact with each other. ...
This dissertation is concerned with the emergence of social patterns. The ability of groups of humans to bring order to both the physical and abstract realms may be our species’ most distinguishing characteristic. It is dependent upon our willingness to cooperate and otherwise coordinate, yet willingness alone is not sufficient for achieving coordinated outcomes on a large-scale because the informational demands of bottom-up organizing are high. Understanding the emergence of social order then requires, in part, understanding how information flows are structured in ways that allow groups to meet the informational demands of self-organization. Of particular importance in this regard are the patterns of person-to-person interactions. In contemporary social network research these interactions are often described as the conduits through which information flows, but person-to-person interactions are also the site and source of the coordination problem needing to be solved. To resolve this tension, network interactions must be patterned in ways that allow for the free flow of information, yet social networks most often exhibit high degrees of clustering, a characteristic which can impede the free flow of information and, thus, large-scale coordination. Does this mean bottom-up processes do not drive coordination within large groups? Is resolution by fiat the only way? Many have made the argument we create and tolerate authorities for precisely this reason, but is that the only viable mechanism for the establishment of large-scale coordination? Inspired by stigmergy, a form of communication used by social insects to coordinate hive activities, this dissertation explores the value of signals occurring outside or alongside of the person-to-person interactions studied using social network analysis. Social life features an abundance of small signals—often in the form of verbal or written communication, but also physical objects and even sounds and smells—potentially freighted with meanings or embedded knowledge. Several research traditions have regarded these signals as part of the fabric of social life, but is the information these signals yield patterned in a way that can help overcome the challenges of large-scale coordination? To begin to answer whether these signals can play a role in mass coordination, this dissertation takes three distinct approaches. The first analyses coupled differential equations describing a system in which a common resource environment is structured by the ongoing actor-to-actor interactions. This system is a modification of a canonical model of molecular self-organization, the hypercycle, and succeeds in organizing vastly more complex sets of interactions than the original. This confirms the information embedded in the environment can indeed be a powerful source of information for coordination. The second paper takes this formal insight into the lab to test whether the addition of a small number of extra-network signals can enable the emergence of conventions in a large, networked group of human participants. It can, and the probability of it happening depends on the strength of the extra-network signal and the topological features of the network. The final paper uses a unique dataset and topic modeling in an attempt to track the emergence of consensus around the themes in works of fiction. While there can be movement in the direction of consensus, the path lengths of the underlying network are too long to support large-scale consensus, a finding consistent with results of the experiment. Implications of these three findings are discussed in the conclusion.
Prior accounts of the experimenter’s regress in laboratory testing are set against the background of a relatively stable institutional context. Even if the tools are new or the object of investigation is unknown, participating entities are named, a certain degree of funding is presumed, and an organization exists to conduct the test. In this paper, I argue that this background assumption obscures the importance of institutional and organizational context to the sociology of testing. I analyze ethnographic data gathered among a NASA team whose funding is uncertain, whose mission organization is not yet established, and whose object of investigation is inaccessible. In what I characterize as “ontological flexibility,” I reveal how scientists shift their accounts of object agency in response to changes in their institutional environment. As they describe the moon as “uncooperative” or “multiple” while they make appeals to institutions at various stages of support in their exploration projects, this reveals the presence of an “institutional regress”: a previously overlooked aspect of the sociology of testing.
Stanford University's world leadership as an entrepreneurial university induced a “paradox of success,” inhibiting further development of its organizational infrastructure for entrepreneurship support. Nevertheless, some prospective academic entrepreneurs realized that there were invisible persisting gaps in the university's innovation system. We discuss the role of the entrepreneurial university and provide a case study of SPARK, an organizational innovation, created to address Stanford's translational research gap, that was then spread to other universities. The creation of a support structure to encourage students and faculty to define entrepreneurial projects as part of their education and research revealed a novel organizational change dynamic.
Theorizing within the umbrella of evolutionary economic geography (EEG) has improved the understanding of how inter-firm relatedness conditions knowledge spillovers, and how this affects the long-term evolution of regions. Still, there are shortcomings in this approach associated with a quantitative and generic methodology, a static notion of relatedness, and a weakly developed policy and institutional perspective. In particular, there is a need for a better understanding of the mechanisms through which relatedness is developed and how policy affects existing and emerging relatedness. Certain mechanisms for knowledge transfer have been suggested, such as labour mobility, firm diversification, spin-offs and social networks. But do the same mechanisms apply to all industries and in all territories, or are there specific mechanisms of knowledge sourcing at work in different contexts? To shed light on these questions, the article reports on a comparative case study of two knowledge-intensive industries (life science and publishing) located in the Oslo metropolitan region. Based on a case study, the article suggests that both industries source knowledge through similar types of channels. However, despite similarities in how knowledge is accessed and absorbed in this diverse urban context, knowledge sourcing also seems to be conditioned by industry-specific dynamics, policies and institutions.
This chapter explores some theoretical elements of the economics of systems integration (and disintegration) by placing the idea of systems integration within the context of evolutionary economics. It argues that systems integrators (as firms) and systems integration (as a key capability within and across firms) perform a central function as the visible hand of much modern industrial activity, especially in complex products and systems. The latter includes a significant subset of capital goods, such as mobile communication systems, military systems, corporate information technology networks, train engines, aircraft, intelligent buildings, air traffic control systems, and tailored software packages.
This article aims is to provide a short critical account of extant economic theory(ies) of the firm, business (and industry organization), and the state and government. It explores competing perspectives, such as neoclassical economics, transaction costs, the evolutionary perspective, resource, capabilities, and the system-based view as well as Marxism and identifies common ground and differences. It also attempts a limited eclectic synthesis. The task of covering such apparently diverse topics in the context of a single entry is facilitated by the fact that extant alternative economic perspectives have implications on all the aforementioned theories. It also tries to show that the issues at hand are central to an appreciation of international organization and system-wide economic performance.
This paper examines a fundamental issue in the theory of economic organization: the optimal level of market competition. Answers in neoclassical and new institutional economics are identified and critiqued. The analysis shows that selective assumptions in both fields produce distinctly market-favoring and "more competition is better than less" conclusions. The paper generalizes these assumptions and demonstrates organization-favoring and "less competition is better" positions are equally plausible. The paper also argues that part of the market-favoring bias in these fields stems from failure to distinguish between conditions of market failure and organizational success. Given these problems in extant theory, this paper develops an alternative institutional theory of economic organization, drawing principally on ideas of Walton Hamilton and John Commons. This proposed alternative shows that the optimal level of competition occurs at an intermediate level in the competition/cooperation spectrum (a mixed economy) and varies with five key determinants of the economic order.
What was obvious to many of us at the time has become even more evident since: the
Since NAFTA was concluded in 1994, talk of next steps in North American integra-tion has been a frequent topic of scholarly and public debate. At the heart of that debate reside questions of whether to deepen or expand, reinvigorate or consoli-date the agreement. As NAFTA matured, part of this debate focused on the agree-ment's relative degree of institutionalization. These issues received renewed attention in the aftermath of the September 11, 2001 terrorist attacks on the United States. Drawing upon the insights of the so-called new institutional economics, this paper argues that NAFTA is, in its entirety, a set of institutions governing North Amer-ican economic relations. As the post-9/11 debate over the next steps in North America moves forward, policy makers would be wise to consider how modifi-cations to these institutional structures are shaping incentives, including the way we think about economic relations in North America.
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