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Showing 1 - 8 of 8 matches in All Departments
Capitalism dominates economies all over the world and is a key
force in the process of globalization. What makes it such a
uniquely dynamic social and economic force, however, is open to
debate. The essays in this book take up this issue, offering
theories on both what encourages and what blocks capitalism.
Institutions play a pivotal role in structuring economic and social
transactions, and understanding the foundations of social norms,
networks, and beliefs within institutions is crucial to explaining
much of what occurs in modern economies. This volume integrates two
increasingly visible streams of research--economic sociology and
new institutional economics--to better understand how ties among
individuals and groups facilitate economic activity alongside and
against the formal rules that regulate economic processes via
government and law.
More than 630 million Chinese have escaped poverty since the 1980s, reducing the fraction remaining from 82 to 10 percent of the population. This astonishing decline in poverty, the largest in history, coincided with the rapid growth of a private enterprise economy. Yet private enterprise in China emerged in spite of impediments set up by the Chinese government. How did private enterprise overcome these initial obstacles to become the engine of China's economic miracle? Where did capitalism come from? Studying over 700 manufacturing firms in the Yangzi region, Victor Nee and Sonja Opper argue that China's private enterprise economy bubbled up from below. Through trial and error, entrepreneurs devised institutional innovations that enabled them to decouple from the established economic order to start up and grow small, private manufacturing firms. Barriers to entry motivated them to build their own networks of suppliers and distributors, and to develop competitive advantage in self-organized industrial clusters. Close-knit groups of like-minded people participated in the emergence of private enterprise by offering financing and establishing reliable business norms. This rapidly growing private enterprise economy diffused throughout the coastal regions of China and, passing through a series of tipping points, eroded the market share of state-owned firms. Only after this fledgling economy emerged as a dynamic engine of economic growth, wealth creation, and manufacturing jobs did the political elite legitimize it as a way to jump-start China's market society. Today, this private enterprise economy is one of the greatest success stories in the history of capitalism.
Capitalism dominates economies all over the world and is a key
force in the process of globalization. What makes it such a
uniquely dynamic social and economic force, however, is open to
debate. The essays in this book take up this issue, offering
theories on both what encourages and what blocks capitalism.
To what extent can contemporary socialist economies be reformed by the introduction of markets? The question is usually debated in either a Chinese or an East European context; this collection of eleven essays is unique in taking the first steps toward a comparative analysis. Twenty years of experience with reforms in Hungary and a decade of experimentation with reforms in China proivde a critical mass of evidence for analyzing the problems endemic to cnetrally planned economies and the dilemmas faced in efforts to reform them. In reflecting on the Chinese and East European experiences, these essays trace the shift from a conception of reform as a mix of planning and makrets within the state sector to a socialist mixed economy with implications for the emergence of new social groups and autonomous social organizations. The essays exemplify a new perspective in the study of state socialism that changes the focus from ideologies to economic institutions, examining how the activities of subordinate groups place limits on the power of state elites. The authors include scholars who have shaped debates in Eastern Europe and whose work is now stimulating much discussion in China, as well as representatives of a younger generation of economists, sociologists, and political scientists writing on the basis of field research recently conducted in factories, cities, and villages in China and Eastern Europe. The contributors are: Wlodzimierz Brus, Walter D. Connor, Zhiren Lin, Victor Nee, Susan Shirk, David Stark, Ivan Szelenyi, and Martin King Whyte. An introductory essays surveys recent theories and research on state socialism and outlines a new institutional perspective for understanding the dilemmas of partial reforms, the political cycles of reform and retrenchment, and the role of subordinate groups in stimulating changes outside the state sector.
"The Handbook of Rational Choice Social Research" offers the first
comprehensive overview of how the rational choice paradigm can
inform empirical research within the social sciences. This landmark
collection highlights successful empirical applications across a
broad array of disciplines, including sociology, political science,
economics, history, and psychology.
"By proposing a shift of focus for economic sociology in an important and so far underinvestigated realm, this book represents a significant advancement in the further development of the field. What has been underemphasized in the new economic sociology, the editors rightly claim, is a more macro-oriented investigation of the operation of capitalism as an economic and social system. The high quality contributions in "The Economic Sociology of Capitalism" address concerns that have stood at the center of classical works in economic sociology by Weber, Durkheim, Polanyi, and Schumpeter which are still important and will find more attention through this volume."--Jens Beckert, Georg-August-Universitat Gottingen, author of "Beyond the Market" "An excellent contribution to the field. Not only are the editors and authors leading figures in the social sciences, but the individual contributions are always good and sometimes outstanding. Importantly, the book goes well beyond previous collections on economic sociology, which have overrelied on 'oppositional identity' with regard to economics and have been satisfied for too long with poking holes in specific economic arguments rather than developing coherent sociological ones. From the opening through all of the chapters, this book takes economics seriously--a necessary starting point for an effective economic sociology. Its focus on the institutions of capitalism represents an important first step to constructing economic-sociological theory. The chapters are varied in style and subject, which makes the book interesting and substantively rewarding."--Paul Ingram, Columbia University
In this age of multicultural democracy, the idea of assimilation--that the social distance separating immigrants and their children from the mainstream of American society closes over time--seems outdated and, in some forms, even offensive. But as Richard Alba and Victor Nee show in the first systematic treatment of assimilation since the mid-1960s, it continues to shape the immigrant experience, even though the geography of immigration has shifted from Europe to Asia, Africa, and Latin America. Institutional changes, from civil rights legislation to immigration law, have provided a more favorable environment for nonwhite immigrants and their children than in the past. Assimilation is still driven, in claim, by the decisions of immigrants and the second generation to improve their social and material circumstances in America. But they also show that immigrants, historically and today, have profoundly changed our mainstream society and culture in the process of becoming Americans. Surveying a variety of domains--language, socioeconomic attachments, residential patterns, and intermarriage--they demonstrate the continuing importance of assimilation in American life. And they predict that it will blur the boundaries among the major, racially defined populations, as nonwhites and Hispanics are increasingly incorporated into the mainstream.
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