The paper, as such a draft of a chapter for the second edition of the 'Handbook of Economic Socielogy', Edited by Neil J. Smelser and Richard Swedberg, is meant to offer some sort of roadmap accross a few fields of investigation concerning the relationships between technological learning and...

This paper discusses the link between patterns of technological change and economic development taking an evolutionary perspective. We argue that the modes and timing of such coupled dynamics are deeply influenced by the emergence of new techno-economic paradigms or regimes. ICT-based...

This work builds upon some long-term secular regularities concerning the relation between consumption of energy, technological progress and economic growth and reassesses the old question raised around forty years ago in the limits to growth discussion (Meadows et al. [1972]), namely are the...

The aim of this work is to investigate the role played by the so-called 'globalization' processes of the last couples of decades on the international patterns of technological learning and on the distribution of incomes and growth. First, we re-assess the evidence on the general patterns of the...

In this work we discuss the impact of the new ICT techno-economic paradigm upon the vertical and horizontal boundaries of the firm and ask whether the change in the sources of competitive advantage has resulted in changes in the size distribution of firms and also in the degree of concentration...

In this work, we present an assessment of the nature and impact of current globalizing tendencies at various levels of observation. The evidence in this respect suggests that it has mostly concerned financial flows (especially short-term ones); to some extent trade flows; and only to very...

This paper investigates the determinants of vertical integration. We first derive a number of predictions regarding the relationship between technology intensity and vertical integration from a simple incomplete contracts model. Then, we investigate these predictions using plant-level data for...