Howard Aldrich's tour de force illustrates the potential of the evolutionary approach to explain change within organizations, within sectors, and across sectors. His 1979 Organizations and Environments set the stage for this new piece, but Organizations Evolving represents a major leap forward,...

During the nineteenth century, very different templates for organizing the economy emerged in Europe and North America. Perhaps the single most important difference across countries concerned the roles of public and private action. Is the state a legitimate and rational participant in decisions...

In Bold Relief, Edwin Amenta sets aside the conventional wisdom that the American welfare state was destined to be backward. He asks what might have been had the New Deal system of jobs provision and relief survived World War II. To do this he rejects the current view of the 1930s, as a time...

At the American Sociological Association meetings in August, Contexts sponsored a forum on recent trends in how corporations are run and for whom. The panelists were Frank Dobbin, Harvard University; Nicole Biggart, Dean of the Management School at the University of California at Davis; and Neil...

How do new business models emerge? Neoinstitltionalists argue that the process often begins when a policy shift undermines the status quo; groups then vie to define the best alternative. The authors explore the role of power in selecting between two alternative business models available to...

The diffusion of markets and democracy around the world was a defining feature of the late twentieth century. Many social scientists view this economic and political liberalization as the product of independent choices by national governments. This book argues that policy and political changes...

The worldwide spread of economic and political liberalism was one of the defining features of the late twentieth century. Free-market oriented economic reforms – macroeconomic stabilization, liberalization of foreign economic policies, privatization, and deregulation – took root in many...

Between 1970 and 2000, Stanford University enabled and supported a vigorous interdisciplinary community of organizations training, research, and theory building. Important breakthroughs occurred in theory development, and a couple of generations of doctoral and post-doctoral students received...

Review Essay on Terrence Halliday and Bruce Carruthers, Bankrupt: Global Lawmaking and Systemic Financial Crisis.In 1998, Bruce Carruthers and Terence Halliday published a magisterial 600-page tome on the reform of bankruptcy law in the United States (1978) and Britain (1985). Rescuing Business...

Greta Krippner submitted Capitalizing on Crisis to Harvard University Press at the end of the summer of 2008, before the Great Recession began. I read it as a member of the press board, and we all thought Krippner had a career ahead as a psychic