This innovative Handbook presents a comprehensive overview of the significance of complexity theory for understanding institutions. Eminent scholars cover the key tools and concepts of the field, including emergence, networks, ergodicity, and modularity, exploring their contributions to institutional formulation and evolution.
This innovative Handbook presents a comprehensive overview of the significance of complexity theory for understanding institutions. Eminent scholars analyse the key tools and concepts of the field, including emergence, networks, ergodicity, and modularity, exploring their contributions to institutional formulation and evolution.
Bridging the gap between complexity theory and mainstream economics, this pioneering Handbook reveals novel approaches to understanding institutional processes from the micro to the macro level. Chapters balance theoretical discussions with practical analysis, showcasing the relevance of complexity to specific areas such as cities, forests, religion, and historical development. Ultimately, the Handbook argues that viewing economies and societies as co-evolving, non-linear, path-dependent, and non-equilibrium systems can provide invaluable insights into the study of institutional emergence and impact.
Academics and students in economics, politics, public policy and other social sciences will benefit from the in-depth analyses in this prescient Handbook. It is also a valuable resource for policy-makers interested in the study of complex systems and their ever-growing applications.
Recenzijos
This is a superb collection. No one reading this book can be left in any doubt that to recognise institutions matter is also to understand that what we mean by institutions is a complex entanglement of actors, norms and practices that cannot be reduced to any one dimension. -- Mark Pennington, King's College London All social science involves the study of interactions, and interactions lead to complexity. In this pathbreaking, heterodox, and fascinating collection, the editors have brought together twenty highly original thinkers who show the astonishing multiple ways in which institutions and complex systems connect and how the study of complexity can enrich our understanding of societies and their institutions past and present. -- Joel Mokyr, Northwestern University, USA The Handbook on Institutions and Complexity is a vital resource for any practitioner of modern political economy and social theory. Young scholars will have a hard time envisioning a time when the social sciences strove to develop an institutionally antiseptic theory of society. In response to this sterile vision of the social sciences, New Institutional Economics was developed and the powerful framework of analysis provided had wide acceptance in economics, politics and history. But translating the insights into the scientific strategy of modern social science often had the result for tractability of reasons of flattening the notion of institutions matter to its most simplistic rendering. The Handbook challenges that rendering and insists on the essential complexity of both the world we are trying to study and the theoretical framework we use to study that complex reality. The chapters inside this book represent foundational contributions to that effort. -- Peter Boettke, George Mason University, USA
Contents
Introduction: towards a complex theory of institutional analysis x
Eric Alston, Lee J. Alston, and Bernardo Mueller
1 On the complexity of the link between institutions and complexity: an
overview 1
Eric Alston, Lee J. Alston and Bernardo Mueller
2 Five uncanny rules, results, restrictions, and regularities from complex
systems 23
Bernardo Mueller
PART I COMPLEXITY THEORY HELPS US UNDERSTAND SOCIAL AND ECONOMIC ORDERS
3 Douglass North, new institutional economics, and complexity theory 50
John B. Davis with Mauro Boianovsky
4 Rethinking Systems of Survival: Jane Jacobs amplifed via complexity theory
66
Meg Tuszynski and Richard E. Wagner
5 Institutional dynamics in an economy seen as a complex adaptive system 83
Miguel Vazquez, Gustavo Andrećo, and José Maria F.J. da Silveira
6 Exiting ergodicity 105
Abigail Devereaux
7 The coevolution of everything, everywhere, all at once: institutions,
culture, and the great enrichment 126
Bernardo Mueller
PART II HISTORICAL DEVELOPMENT AND COMPLEXITY
8 Beliefs, institutions and norms in a complex system 159
Lee J. Alston
9 Social models and institutional policy: four walks in the dark 174
Thrįinn Eggertsson
10 Religion, political legitimacy, and complexity 190
Jared Rubin
11 Political and economic institutional emergence 205
Eric Alston
PART III ECONOMIC INSTITUTIONAL UNITS AND COMPLEXITY
12 The complex architecture of property rights 241
Henry E. Smith
13 The complex world of micro-institutions: the illustrative case of hybrids
263
Claude Menard
14 Complex systems interplay: cities and institutions 285
Bernardo Alves Furtado
PART IV HOW ORGANIZATIONS AND INSTITUTIONS LIMITEDLY CONFRONT COMPLEXITY
15 Imprisoning complexity in modules 303
Richard N. Langlois
16 Economic complexity, institutions, and industrial policy 325
Renan Sousa and Bernardo Mueller
17 The challenge of governing complex forest ecosystems: can a polycentric
approach help? 349
Komal Preet Kaur, Varnitha Kurli, and Krister Andersson
Index 374
Edited by Eric Alston, Scholar in Residence, Finance Division, University of Colorado Boulder, Lee J. Alston, Professor of Economics and Affiliate Professor of Law, Emeritus, Indiana University, and Research Associate, NBER, USA and Bernardo Mueller, Department of Economics, University of Brasķlia, Brazil
