This major two-volume collection presents a comprehensive overview of the scholarly literature exploring the emergence, functioning and forms of networks, focusing on their role in the economy. The collection draws from a broad range of disciplinary backgrounds to combine key writings that have defined the field with more recent contributions in emerging areas of network research. Volume I introduces networks as a distinctive governance structure. The collection explores critical antecedents and social exchange conditions of networks such as trust, reputation, power, and cohesion and also examines the vulnerability of networks. Volume II features pivotal network processes and dynamics such as access, learning and innovation, mobilization and recombination, and diffusion. The collection covers the spectrum of various network forms and elucidates the key features of regional, informal, business and project networks. These insightful volumes will be an essential source of reference for students and researchers alike.

This book is about change in Central and Eastern Europe, and about how we think about social and economic change more generally. In contrast to the dominant 'transition framework' that examines organizational forms in Eastern Europe according to the degree to which they conform to, or depart from, the blueprints of already existing capitalist systems, this book examines the innovative character, born of necessity, in which actors in the post-socialist setting are restructuring organizations and institutions by redefining and recombining resources. Instead of thinking of these recombinations as accidental aberrations, the book explores their evolutionary potentials.
The starting premise of Restructuring Networks in Post-Socialist Societies is that the actual unit of entrepreneurship is not the isolated individual personality but the social network that links firms and the actors within them. Drawing insight from evolutionary economics and from the new methods of network analysis, leading sociologists, economists, and political scientists report on changes in organizational forms in Hungary, Poland, Eastern Germany, Russia, and the Czech Republic.