This paper analyzes the causes, responses, and consequences of the Fukushima nuclear power plant accident (March 2011) by comparing these with Three Mile Island (March 1979) and Chernobyl (April 1986). We identify three generic modes of organizational coordination: modular, vertical, and...

Abstract. In institutional studies various concepts and terms have been proposed to describe institutional phenomena and their nature. They include behavioral regularity, habituation, collective intentionality, common knowledge, shared beliefs, artifacts, rules of the game, system of signs, and...

This is a contribution to the Journal Symposium on Douglass North's book on Understanding the Process of Economic Change by Structural Change and Economic Dynamics. It tries to understand his dynamic theory as that of the belief-institution co-evolution process and applies contributions of...

The first part of this paper introduces a framework for dealing with the information systematic aspect of an organizational form as a choice variable rather than as technological data. It identifies two generic forms of organizations when economic agents are bounded in their information...

Abstract: This essay makes a conceptual distinction between societal categories, such as social networks, norms, and social status differentiation, on the one hand, and social capital, on the other. The former are institutional phenomena arising as outcomes of social-exchange games in which...

This paper argues that game-theoretic approach is incomplete for institutional studies, because comparative institutions as well as institutional changes involve a possibility of multiple equilibria. In order to solve the common knowledge problem, this paper proposes to unify game theoretic...

This article focuses on the roles of formal rules (laws) in institutional emergence, sustenance, crisis, and transition based on an examination of the Meiji Restoration and the Xinhai Revolution. It describes how formal rules in the polities of Qing China and Tokugawa Japan were enforced,...

Economists often identify a reduction in the share of agricultural employment as a quantitative indication of the economic growth of nations. But this process did not occur in earnest in the People’s Republic of China (PRC) until the 1980s and to some extent in Japan until well into the...

This article proposes a simple framework for understanding an emergent diversity of linkage between corporate governance (CG) and organizational architecture (OA). It distinguishes discreet modes of their linkage by different combinatorial patterns between three basic assets: managers' human...

This paper proposes an analytical-cum-conceptual framework for understanding the nature of institutions as well as their changes. First, it proposes a new definition of institution based on the notion of common knowledge regarding self-sustaining features of social interactions with hope to...