Empirical Studies in Institutional Change is a collection of nine empirical studies by fourteen scholars. Dealing with issues ranging from the evolution of secure markets in seventeenth-century England to the origins of property rights in airport slots in modern America, the contributors analyse institutions and institutional change in various parts of the world and at various periods of time. The volume is a contribution to the new economics of institutions, which emphasises the role of transaction costs and property rights in shaping incentives and results in the economic arena. To make the papers accessible to a wide audience, including students of economics and other social sciences, the editors have written an introduction to each study and added three theoretical essays to the volume, including Douglass North's Nobel Prize address, which reflect their collective views as to the present status of institutional analysis and where it is headed.

This book is about the role of agents in policy and institutional change. It draws on cross-country case studies. The focus on ‘agency’ has been an important development, enabling researchers to better reveal the causal mechanisms generating institutional change (i.e., how institutional change actually takes place). However, past research has generally been limited to specific intellectual silos or scholarly domains of inquiry. Policy scholars, for example, have tended to focus on the various mechanisms and levels at which agency operates, drawing on institutionalist perspectives but not always actively contributing to institutionalist theory. Institutionalist perspectives, by contrast, have tended to operate at macro-levels of enquiry, embracing the ontological primacy of institutions in processes of isomorphism but not necessarily contributing to or embracing policy perspectives that engage in more granular analyses of policy making processes, implementation, and the instantiation of institutional and policy change. Despite the obvious complementarities of these two intellectual traditions, it is surprising how little collaborative work, or indeed cross fertilization of theory and analytical design has occurred. The core novelty of this volume is thus its focus on agential actors within institutional settings and processes of entrepreneurship that facilitate isomorphism and policy change. The book’s theoretical framework is grounded in variants of institutional theory, especially historical, sociological and organisational institutionalism and policy entrepreneurship literature. The overall conclusion is that that both institutionalists and public policy scholars have largely overlooked the importance of complex interactions between interdependent structures, institutions, and agents in processes of institutional and policy change.

This book brings together some 15 papers drawn from the 330 papers presented at the Third Annual Conference of the Society for the Advancement of Socio-Economics in Stockholm, Sweden in June 1991. Part 1 outlines a basic theory of institutional change; Parts 2 and 3 examine case studies in international experience with institutional change. The authors of the original papers include Douglas North, Amitai Etzioni, Oliver Williamson, as well as eminent scholars from Eastern and Western Europe, representing views and analyses from ten different countries.

The essays in this book contribute to emerging debates in political science and sociology on institutional change, providing a theoretical framework and empirical applications.

An analytical framework for explaining the ways in which institutions and institutional change affect the performance of economies is developed in this analysis of economic structures.

Embedded Politics offers a unique framework for analyzing the impact of past industrial networks on the way postcommunist societies build new institutions to govern the restructuring of their economies. Drawing on a detailed analysis of communist Czechoslovakia and contemporary Czech industries and banks, Gerald A. McDermott argues that restructuring is best advanced through the creation of deliberative or participatory forms of governance that encourages public and private actors to share information and take risks. Further, he contends that institutional and organizational changes are intertwined and that experimental processes are shaped by how governments delegate power to local public and private actors and monitor them. Using comparative case analysis of several manufacturing sectors, Embedded Politics accounts for change and continuity in the formation of new economic governance institutions in the Czech Republic. It analytically links the macropolitics of state policy with the micropolitics of industrial restructuring. Thus the book advances an alternative approach for the comparative study of institutional change and industrial adjustment. As a historical and contemporary analysis of Czech firms and public institutions, this book will command the attention of students of postcommunist reforms, privatization, and political-economic transitions in general. But also given its interdisciplinary approach and detailed empirical analysis of policy-making and firm behavior, Embedded Politics is a must read for scholars of politics, economics, sociology, political economy, business organization, and public policy. Gerald A. McDermott is Assistant Professor of Management in The Wharton School of Management at The University of Pennsylvania. His research applies recent advances in comparative political economy and industrial organization, including theories of social networks, historical institutionalism, and incomplete markets to analyze issues of economic governance, firm creation, and industrial restructuring in advanced and newly industrialized countries. As evidenced by Embedded Politics, his current focus is on problems of institutional and organizational learning in the formation of meso-level governance institutions in emerging market and postsocialist economies. McDermott also works as Senior Research Fellow at the IAE Escuela de Direccion y Negocios at Universidad Austral in Buenos Aires, and he has served as Project Coordinator at the Inter-American Development Bank. He has consulted for the Finance, Private Sector, and Infrastructure Division at the World Bank and advised the Deputy Foreign Minister of the Czech Republic. In addition he has published many papers and book chapters on entrepreneurship, privatization, institutions, and networks in Central Europe and Latin America.

Phillip Y. Lipscy explains how countries renegotiate international institutions when rising powers such as Japan and China challenge the existing order. This book is particularly relevant for those interested in topics such as international organizations, such as United Nations, IMF, and World Bank, political economy, international security, US diplomacy, Chinese diplomacy, and Japanese diplomacy.