In biology, the laws that regulate the structuring and change of complex organisms, characterised by interlocking complementarities, are different from those that shape the evolution of simple organisms. Only the latter share mechanisms of competitive selection of the fittest analogous to those...

- In biology, the evolution of species is influenced by two types of complementarities. One type is mostly related to the synergies among and within organisms, while the other is the outcome of conflicts among different species and among members of the same species. In both conflictual and...

The last three decades have witnessed the emergence of a new species of capitalism. In spite of marked differences among its different national varieties, a common characteristic of this species can be found in the global monopolization of knowledge. This monopolization involves hierarchical...

The organization of information production is undergoing a deep transformation. Alongside media corporations, which have been for long time the predominant institutions of information production, new organizational forms have emerged, e.g. free software communities, open-content on-line wikis,...

The aim of this paper is to provide an assessment of John R. Commons’ adoption of Wesley N. Hohfeld’s framework of jural opposites and correlatives in order to construct his transactional approach to the study of institutions. Hohfeld’s influence on Commons, it is argued, was both positive...

This paper stresses that in order to understand the current restructuring processes in the food system it is necessary to take explicitly into account the role of power as a driving organizational force. Agricultural economics, drawing pervasively on the walrasian model, has mainly analysed...

In accordance with the concept of transaction as introduced by John R. Commons we willinvestigate the contractual and market remedies which labour law may implement to make ‘order’ in theemployer-employee relationship.In this view, one of the most important contractual remedies is the...

This paper investigates how employment intermediaries affected the inter-firm network of worker mobility in an region of Italy in response of the reform that first allowed for temporary employment agencies in 1997. We map worker reallocations from a matched employer-employee dataset onto a...

Studies in the social capital literature have documented two stylised facts: first, a decline in measures of social participation has occurred in many OECD countries. Second, and more recently, the success of social networking sites (SNSs) has resulted in a steep rise in online social...

This paper contributes to the knowledge-incentive based explanation of R&D networks. It argues that knowledge overlap and novelty are complementary inputs of any R&D alliance, and the complementarity coefficients depend on the incremental or radical nature of the research activity. The relation...