Institutions and Organizations

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? Why do the contributions from economics seem so much more convincing than those from sociology?

Kenneth Arrow
- Social Choice and Individual Values [Full text free online]
- The Limits of Organization
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".]
James Beniger, The Control Revolution: Technological and Economic Origins of the Information Society [Review]
Samuel Bowles, Microeconomics: Behavior, Institutions, and Evolution
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 [Commentary elsewhere]
Steven N. Durlauf and H. Peyton Young (eds.), Social Dynamics
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?]
Henry Farrell and Jack Knight, "Trust and Institutional Compliance" [Thanks to Henry for a preprint]
John Kenneth Galbraith, The New Industrial State
Bennett Harrison, Lean and Mean [As an example of how to analyze a particular set of institutions and formal organizations]
F. A. Hayek, "Use of Knowledge in Society" and "Economics and Knowledge" in Individualism and Economic Order
Albert O. Hirschman, Exit, Voice and Loyalty
Rakesh Khurana, Searching for a Corporate Savior: The Irrational Quest for Charismatic CEOs
Jack Knight, Institutions and Social Conflict
James March and Herbert Simon, Organizations
Gary J. Miller, Managerial Dilemmas: The Political Economy of Hierarchy [Review by Stephen Laniel]
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.]
Thomas Schelling, Micromotives and Macrobehavior
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]

Howard Aldrich, Organizations Evolving
Masahiko Aoki, Toward a Comparative Institutional Analysis [Blurb]
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." Full blurb]
A. Baronchelli, L. Dall'Asta, A. Barrat, V. Loreto, "Non-equilibrium phase transition in negotiation dynamics", cond-mat/0611717
Lee Roy Beach, The Psychology of Decision Making: People in Organizations
Roland Bénabou, "Groupthink: Collective Delusions in Organizations and Markets" [PDF preprint]
Yochai Benkler, "Coase's Penguin, or Linux and the Nature of the Firm," cs.CY/0109077
Samuel Bowles and Suresh Naidu, "Persistent Institutions" [PDF preprint]
Samuel Bowles and Herbert Gintis, "The Evolutionary Basis of Collective Action", forthcoming in the Oxford Handbook of Political Economy [PDF preprint]
Ori Brafman and Rod Beckstrom, The Starfish and the Spider: The Unstoppable Power of Leaderless Organizations [sounds dubious, but worth looking at]
David Braybrooke (ed.), Social Rules: Origin; Character; Logic; Change [Blurb]
Daniel W. Bromley, Sufficient Reason: Volitional Pragmatism and the Meaning of Economic Institutions [Blurb, ch. 1]
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
Alfred Chandler
- The Visible Hand
- Scale and Scope
- Strategy and Structure
David Chisholm, Coordination without Hierarchy: Informal Structures in Multiorganizational Systems [Free online]
John Commons, Institutional Economics: Its Place in Political Economy
Alex Cooley, Logics of Hierarchy: The Organization of Empires, States and Military Occupations [Blurb]
Barbara Czarniawska, Narrating the Organization: Dramas of Institutional Identity
Paul J. DiMaggio and Walter W. Powell, "The Iron Cage Revisited: Institutional Isomorphism and Collective Rationality in Organizational Fields", American Sociological Review 48 (1983): 147--160 ["Once a set of organizations emerges as a field, a paradox arises: rational actors make their organizations increasingly similar as they try to change them." JSTOR. "Isomorphism" seems like the wrong word.]
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, Clauss Offe and Ulrich K. Preuss, Institutional Design in Post-communist Societies: Rebuilding the Ship at Sea
Henry Farrell, The Political Economy of Trust: Institutions, Interests, and Inter-Firm Cooperation in Italy and Germany [Blurb]
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
N. Fligstein, "Fields, Power and Social Skill: Critical Analysis of the New Institutionalisms"[PDF]
Diego Gambetta, The Sicilian Mafia: The Business of Private Protection
Robert E. Goodin (ed.), The Theory of Institutional Design
Avner Greif, Institutions and the Path to the Modern Economy: Lessons from Medieval Trade [Full text of a draft available as a series of single-chapter PDFs]
Judith Gruber, Controlling Bureaucracies: Dilemmas in Democratic Governance [online]
Michael T. Hannan and John Freeman, Organizational Ecology
J. Richard Harrison and Glenn R. Carroll, Culture and Demography in Organizations [Blurb, ch. 1]
Bryan D. Jones, Politics and the Architecture of Choice
Eric L. Jones, Cultures Merging: A Historical and Economic Critique of Culture [Blurb]
Michael Kenney, From Pablo to Osama: Trafficking and Terrorist Networks, Government Bureaucracies, and Competitive Adaptation [Blurb]
Martin Kilduff and David Krackhardt, Interpersonal Networks in Organizations: Cognition, Personality, Dynamics, and Culture [blurb]
Robert Klitgaard, Controlling Corruption
Ken Kollman, John Miller and Scott Page (eds.), Computational Models in Political Economy [Always a good idea to read your boss's books]
Neil Komesar, Imperfect Alternatives: Choosing Institutions in Law, Economics and Public Policy [Blurb]
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
L. M. Lachmann, The Legacy of Max Weber: Three Essays [PDF. Recommended by Tyler Cowen.]
Lazonick, Business Organization and the Myth of the Market Economy
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
Yi-min Lin, Between Politics and Markets: Firms, Competition, and Institutional Change in Post-Mao China [Blurb]
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
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
Max Neiman, Defending Government: Why Big Government Works
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)"]
Douglass North, Institutions, Institutional Change and Economic Performance
Joe Oppenheimer
Elinor Ostrom
- Understanding Institutional Diversity in Open Societies [partial online draft]
- Governing the Commons
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
Scott Page, "Uncertainty, Difficulty, and Complexity" SFI Working Paper 98-08-076
Charles Perrow
- Normal Accidents
- Organizing America: Wealth, Power, and the Origins of Corporate Capitalism
David A. Phillips, Reforming the World Bank: Twenty Years of Trial — and Error [blurb]
Paul Pierson, Politics in Time: History, Institutions and Social Analysis [Blurb]
Amy R. Poteete, Marco A. Janssen and Elinor Ostrom, Working Together: Collective Action, the Commons, and Multiple Methods in Practice [Blurb]
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 E. Roemer, Political Competition: Theory and Applications [Blurb]
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]
Andrei Shleifer and Robert W. Vishny, The Grabbing Hand: Government Pathologies and Their Cures
Herbert Simon, Administrative Behavior
Abdulkader H. Sinno, Organizations at War in Afghanistan and Beyond [Blurb; author's book description]
Daniel Spulber, Market Microstructure: Intermediaries and the Theory of the Firm
Arthur Stinchcombe, Information and Organizations [Free online]
Grahame F. Thompson, Between Hierarchies and Markets: The Logic and Limits of Network Forms of Organization
Joshua R. Tyler, Dennis M. Wilkinson and Bernardo A. Huberman, "Email as Spectroscopy: Automated Discovery of Community Structure within Organizations," cond-mat/0303264
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
Thorstein Veblen
- Theory of the Leisure Class
- Theory of Business Enterprise
- Higher Learning in America
- "Why Is Economics Not an Evolutionary Science?"
Harrison White, Markets from Networks: Socioeconomic Models of Production
Oliver Williamson
- Markets and Hierarchies
- Mechanisms of Governance

Notebooks

Institutions and Organizations