We study how tape drive producers respond to the almost continuous emergence of new drive formats across the technology's history. The analysis characterizes the technological formats of tape drives according to their degree of contrast (distinctiveness and visibility) from other formats. High...

In the early transition era in Russia entry barriers for commercial banks were about absent. It resulted in the mushrooming of hundreds of small, poorly-endowed and inexperienced banks. In this paper we address the question whether the claimed benefits of low entry barriers - competition and...

Sociologists and other social scientists have long recognized that certain economic transactions involve more than a simple trade of goods or services for money. A long-standing theme in economic anthropology and sociology emphasizes the symbolic or moral character of certain economic exchanges...

We examine the classic question of how religious diversity in a community affects church membership in a period of high growth and social change. Culling the literature, we develop hypotheses about five possible mechanisms underlying a diversity-growth relation: (1) secularization; (2)...

Using retrospective career life-history data from West Germany, the process by which individuals move into and out of self-employment is studied by separately examining the rates of movement into self-employment and family employment. A general framework of how the self-employment process...

Neo-institutionalists have criticized organizational ecology's density-dependent theory of legitimation for being a "black box" leaving the details of the legitimation process unspecified, and ignoring the pre-eminently political nature of the creation of new organizational forms. In the present...

This book presents a stock-taking of the work that has been done since the appearance of Oliver Williamson's seminal book Markets and Hierarchies (Free Press 1975), that gave new life to the concept of transaction cost analysis (introduced by Ronald Coase in the 1930s). It derives from an issue...

Organization theory highlights the spread of norms of rationality in contemporary life. Yet rationality does not always spread without friction; individuals often act based on other beliefs and norms. We explore this problem in the context of restaurants and diners. We argue that consumers...