A review essay on Avner Greif, Institutions and the Path to the Modern Economy: Lessons from Medieval Trade, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 2006, xx+503.

This paper is motivated by the observation that (1) socio economic analysis uses significantly less formalisms than mainstream economics, and (2) that there exist numerous situations in which socio economics could benefit from a more formal analysis. This is particularly the case if institutions...

This paper examines game theoretic models of coordination conventions. Firstly, the paper shows that static models of coordination cannot explain the emergence of coordination conventions. The best interpretation of these models is that they study the conditions under which coordination is...

This paper proposes a central idea in diffusion research is that influential –a minority of individuals who influence an exceptional number of their peers- are important to formation of public opinion. Here we examine this idea, which we call the “influential hypothesis”, using the...

Article about the role of determinism in the development of social processes. Author from the standpoint of the materialist dialectic analyzes the dynamics and patterns of social processes in Russia. Particular attention is paid to the criticism of religious and ideological concepts of...

An article about the origin, evolution and laws of formation of enterprise systems in the social environment of modern industrial society. The author analyzes the fundamental differ-ences between business and enterprise systems, proving the thesis of the monopolistic nature of corporations in...

The thesis is devoted to studying the role of systemic contradictions in social development, the consideration of objective reasons and the conditions of their occurrence, the relationship of systemic contradictions with the processes of formation of social interests, as well as the construction...

Institutionalist economists have always been criticizing the neoclassical way of studying the economy, especially because of its obsession to a very strict and flawed formalism. This formalism receives critique also from advocates of agent-based computational economic (ACE) models. The criticism...

An article about the dialectical laws of the genesis of social organization and social systems. The author suggests using a new classification of social relations for the methodological study of the evolution of social systems. The work is based on the methodology of general systems theory and...

The article seeks to contribute to the literature on social provisioning as an organizing concept in heterodox economics. Particularly, the article details social provisioning as an amalgamation of processes and as a part of a system of culture-nature life process. First, the article delineates...