Coordinator: Victor Nee
With: Douglas Heckathorn, Michael Macy, and Richard Swedberg
Explaining institutions and institutional change has become part of the core agenda for the social sciences, which this working group seeks to advance through the combined study of institutions, networks, and economic action.
The focus on institutions as a foundation concept in the social sciences has given rise to a variety of institutionalist approaches. Not since the behavioral revolution of the 1960s has there been so much interest in a cross-disciplinary concept, one that offers a unifying theme for productive exchange and debate across the disciplines.
The New Institutional Economics has pioneered new research on the endogenous emergence and evolution of economic institutions in a broadly based movement of economists. In a parallel shift of analytic attention, economic sociologists argue for a new focus to explain how institutions combine, decouple, and interact with networks and norms to shape and direct economic action.
The working group seeks to generate an interdisciplinary research program to examine the role of social structure (networks, norms, beliefs, and institutions) and of agency (e.g., rationality and learning) in economic life. It aims to integrate choice-theoretic and new institutionalist approaches into a broader vision of economic sociology.
Catalyst Working Groups from 2002-2003:
