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Institutional
Institutions are humanly devised structures of rules and norms that shape and constrain individual behavior. All definitions of institutions generally entail that there is a level of persistence and continuity. Laws, rules, social conventions and norms are all examples of institutions. Institutions vary in their level of formality and informality. Institutions are a principal object of study in social sciences such as political science, anthropology, economics, and sociology (the latter described by Émile Durkheim as the "science of institutions, their genesis and their functioning"). Primary or meta-institutions are institutions such as the family or money that are broad enough to encompass sets of related institutions. Institutions are also a central concern for law, the formal mechanism for political rule-making and enforcement. Historians study and document the founding, growth, decay and development of institutions as part of political, economic and cultural history. De ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Rational Choice Institutionalism
Rational Choice Institutionalism (RCI) is a theoretical approach to the study of institutions arguing that actors use institutions to maximize their utility, and that institutions affect rational individual behavior. Rational Choice Institutionalism arose initially from the study of congressional behaviour in the U.S. in the late 1970s. Influential early RCI scholarship was done by political economists at California Institute of Technology, University of Rochester, and Washington University. It employs analytical tools borrowed from neo-classical economics to explain how institutions are created, the behaviour of political actors within it, and the outcome of strategic interaction. RCI explains the creation of institutions as an attempt to reduce transaction costs of collective activity which would be significantly higher without such institutions. Institutions persist after their creation because they reduce uncertainty and allow gains from exchange. Rational Choice Institutionalism ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Geoffrey Hodgson
Geoffrey Martin Hodgson (born 28 July 1946, Watford) is Emeritus Professor in Management at the London campus of Loughborough University, and also the editor-in-chief of the ''Journal of Institutional Economics.'' Hodgson is recognised as one of the leading figures of modern critical institutionalism which carries forth the critical spirit and intellectual tradition of the founders of institutional economics, particularly that of Thorstein Veblen. His broad research interests span from evolutionary economics and history of economic thought to Marxism and theoretical biology. He first became known for his book ''Economics and Institutions: A Manifesto for a Modern Institutional Economics'' (1988), which criticises modern 'mainstream' economics and calls to revise economic theory on the new grounds of institutionalism. His reputation has become enhanced owing to the trilogy of more recent books – ''Economics and Utopia'' (1999), ''How Economics Forgot History'' (2001) and ''The ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Kathleen Thelen
Kathleen Thelen is an American political scientist specializing in comparative politics. She is the Ford Professor of Political Science at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), a permanent external member of the Max Planck Institute for the Study of Societies (MPIfG), and a faculty associate at the Center for European Studies (CES) at Harvard University. She is known for her research on political-economic institutions, as well as her frameworks for understanding institutional stability and change. She is influential in the field of historical institutionalism. Education She received her B.A. from the University of Kansas. During her time at the University of Kansas, she spent a year studying abroad in Munich, Germany; her experience in Germany led her to switch her major from English to Political Science. She was awarded an M.A. and Ph.D. from the University of California, Berkeley. During her time at U.C. Berkeley, she was influenced by faculty members John Zsyman, G ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Douglass North
Douglass Cecil North (November 5, 1920 – November 23, 2015) was an American economist known for his work in economic history. He was the co-recipient (with Robert William Fogel) of the 1993 Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences. In the words of the Nobel Committee, North and Fogel "renewed research in economic history by applying economic theory and quantitative methods in order to explain economic and institutional change." Biography Douglass North was born in Cambridge, Massachusetts, on November 5, 1920. He moved several times as a child due to his father's work at MetLife. The family lived in Ottawa, Lausanne, New York City, and Wallingford, Connecticut. North was educated at Ashbury College in Ottawa, Ontario and the Choate School in Wallingford, Connecticut. He was accepted at Harvard at the same time that his father became the head of MetLife on the west coast, so North opted to go to University of California, Berkeley. During his time at Berkeley, North was a mem ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Émile Durkheim
David Émile Durkheim ( or ; 15 April 1858 – 15 November 1917) was a French sociologist. Durkheim formally established the academic discipline of sociology and is commonly cited as one of the principal architects of modern social science, along with both Karl Marx and Max Weber. Much of Durkheim's work was concerned with how societies can maintain their integrity and coherence in modernity, an era in which traditional social and religious ties are much less universal, and in which new social institutions have come into being. Durkheim's conception of the scientific study of society laid the groundwork for modern sociology, and he used such scientific tools as statistics, surveys, and historical observation in his analysis of suicides in Catholic and Protestant groups. His first major sociological work was (1893; ''The Division of Labour in Society''), followed in 1895 by ('' The Rules of Sociological Method''), the same year in which Durkheim set up the first European ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Avner Greif
Avner Greif (; born 1955) is an economics professor at Stanford University, Stanford, California. He holds a chaired professorship as Bowman Family Professor in the Humanities and Sciences. Greif received his PhD in Economics at Northwestern University, where Joel Mokyr acted as his supervisor, in 1989 and started his career at Stanford University in 1989 until he received tenure in 1994. In 1998 he received a 'genius grant' from the MacArthur Foundation. His works deal with economic history and role of institutions in economic development, including analysis of trade in medieval Europe and Levant. Work Greif specializes in the study of the social institutions that support economic development, and their history, incorporating game theory Game theory is the study of mathematical models of strategic interactions among rational agents. Myerson, Roger B. (1991). ''Game Theory: Analysis of Conflict,'' Harvard University Press, p.&nbs1 Chapter-preview links, ppvii–xi It has ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Economics
Economics () is the social science that studies the production, distribution, and consumption of goods and services. Economics focuses on the behaviour and interactions of economic agents and how economies work. Microeconomics analyzes what's viewed as basic elements in the economy, including individual agents and markets, their interactions, and the outcomes of interactions. Individual agents may include, for example, households, firms, buyers, and sellers. Macroeconomics analyzes the economy as a system where production, consumption, saving, and investment interact, and factors affecting it: employment of the resources of labour, capital, and land, currency inflation, economic growth, and public policies that have impact on these elements. Other broad distinctions within economics include those between positive economics, describing "what is", and normative economics, advocating "what ought to be"; between economic theory and applied economics; between rati ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Wolfgang Streeck
Wolfgang Streeck (; born 27 October 1946) is a German economic sociologist and emeritus director of the Max Planck Institute for the Study of Societies in Cologne. Early life Streeck was born "just outside Münster", the son of refugees – ethnic Germans from eastern Europe displaced by the end of the Second World War. His mother was a Sudeten German from Czechoslovakia. Streeck studied sociology at the Goethe University Frankfurt and pursued graduate studies in the same discipline at Columbia University between 1972 and 1974. Career In 1974 he became assistant professor in sociology at the University of Münster and in 1986 finished his habilitation in sociology at Bielefeld University. Between 1988 and 1995 he worked as professor of sociology and industrial relations at the University of Wisconsin–Madison, returning to Germany in 1995 to take up the post of director of the Max Planck Institute for the Study of Societies and working as professor of sociology at the Univer ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Economic System
An economic system, or economic order, is a system of production, resource allocation and distribution of goods and services within a society or a given geographic area. It includes the combination of the various institutions, agencies, entities, decision-making processes, and patterns of consumption that comprise the economic structure of a given community. An economic system is a type of social system. The mode of production is a related concept. All economic systems must confront and solve the four fundamental economic problems: * What kinds and quantities of goods shall be produced: This fundamental economic problem is anchored on the theory of pricing. The theory of pricing, in this context, has to do with the economic decision-making between the production of capital goods and consumer goods in the economy in the face of scarce resources. In this regard, the critical evaluation of the needs of the society based on population distribution in terms of age, sex, occupat ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Social Sciences
Social science is one of the branches of science, devoted to the study of societies and the relationships among individuals within those societies. The term was formerly used to refer to the field of sociology, the original "science of society", established in the 19th century. In addition to sociology, it now encompasses a wide array of academic disciplines, including anthropology, archaeology, economics, human geography, linguistics, management science, communication science and political science. Positivist social scientists use methods resembling those of the natural sciences as tools for understanding society, and so define science in its stricter modern sense. Interpretivist social scientists, by contrast, may use social critique or symbolic interpretation rather than constructing empirically falsifiable theories, and thus treat science in its broader sense. In modern academic practice, researchers are often eclectic, using multiple methodologies (for instanc ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Penal System
A prison, also known as a jail, gaol (dated, standard English, Australian, and historically in Canada), penitentiary (American English and Canadian English), detention center (or detention centre outside the US), correction center, correctional facility, lock-up, hoosegow or remand center, is a facility in which inmates (or prisoners) are confined against their will and usually denied a variety of freedoms under the authority of the state as punishment for various crimes. Prisons are most commonly used within a criminal justice system: people charged with crimes may be imprisoned until their trial; those pleading or being found guilty of crimes at trial may be sentenced to a specified period of imprisonment. In simplest terms, a prison can also be described as a building in which people are legally held as a punishment for a crime they have committed. Prisons can also be used as a tool of political repression by authoritarian regimes. Their perceived opponents may be imp ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Sociology
Sociology is a social science that focuses on society, human social behavior, patterns of social relationships, social interaction, and aspects of culture associated with everyday life. It uses various methods of empirical investigation and critical analysis to develop a body of knowledge about social order and social change. While some sociologists conduct research that may be applied directly to social policy and welfare, others focus primarily on refining the theoretical understanding of social processes and phenomenological method. Subject matter can range from micro-level analyses of society (i.e. of individual interaction and agency) to macro-level analyses (i.e. of social systems and social structure). Traditional focuses of sociology include social stratification, social class, social mobility, religion, secularization, law, sexuality, gender, and deviance. As all spheres of human activity are affected by the interplay between social structure and indiv ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
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