Search results for ""Author Walter W. Powell""

This major two-volume collection presents a comprehensive overview of the scholarly literature exploring the emergence, functioning and forms of networks, focusing on their role in the economy. The collection draws from a broad range of disciplinary backgrounds to combine key writings that have defined the field with more recent contributions in emerging areas of network research.Volume I introduces networks as a distinctive governance structure. The collection explores critical antecedents and social exchange conditions of networks such as trust, reputation, power, and cohesion and also examines the vulnerability of networks. Volume II features pivotal network processes and dynamics such as access, learning and innovation, mobilization and recombination, and diffusion. The collection covers the spectrum of various network forms and elucidates the key features of regional, informal, business and project networks.These insightful volumes will be an essential source of reference for students and researchers alike.

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The nonprofit sector has changed in fundamental ways in recent decades. As the sector has grown in scope and size, both domestically and internationally, the boundaries between for-profit, governmental, and charitable organizations have become intertwined. Nonprofits are increasingly challenged on their roles in mitigating or exacerbating inequality. And debates flare over the role of voluntary organizations in democratic and autocratic societies alike. The Nonprofit Sector takes up these concerns and offers a cutting-edge empirical and theoretical assessment of the state of the field. This book, now in its third edition, brings together leading researchers—economists, historians, philosophers, political scientists, and sociologists along with scholars from communication, education, law, management, and policy schools—to investigate the impact of associational life. Chapters consider the history of the nonprofit sector and of philanthropy; the politics of the public sphere; governance, mission, and engagement; access and inclusion; and global perspectives on nonprofit organizations. Across this comprehensive range of topics, The Nonprofit Sector makes an essential contribution to the study of civil society.

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The social sciences have sophisticated models of choice and equilibrium but little understanding of the emergence of novelty. Where do new alternatives, new organizational forms, and new types of people come from? Combining biochemical insights about the origin of life with innovative and historically oriented social network analyses, John Padgett and Walter Powell develop a theory about the emergence of organizational, market, and biographical novelty from the coevolution of multiple social networks. They demonstrate that novelty arises from spillovers across intertwined networks in different domains. In the short run actors make relations, but in the long run relations make actors. This theory of novelty emerging from intersecting production and biographical flows is developed through formal deductive modeling and through a wide range of original historical case studies. Padgett and Powell build on the biochemical concept of autocatalysis--the chemical definition of life--and then extend this autocatalytic reasoning to social processes of production and communication. Padgett and Powell, along with other colleagues, analyze a very wide range of cases of emergence. They look at the emergence of organizational novelty in early capitalism and state formation; they examine the transformation of communism; and they analyze with detailed network data contemporary science-based capitalism: the biotechnology industry, regional high-tech clusters, and the open source community.

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Long a fruitful area of scrutiny for students of organizations, the study of institutions is undergoing a renaissance in contemporary social science. This volume offers, for the first time, both often-cited foundation works and the latest writings of scholars associated with the "institutional" approach to organization analysis. In their introduction, the editors discuss points of convergence and disagreement with institutionally oriented research in economics and political science, and locate the "institutional" approach in relation to major developments in contemporary sociological theory. Several chapters consolidate the theoretical advances of the past decade, identify and clarify the paradigm's key ambiguities, and push the theoretical agenda in novel ways by developing sophisticated arguments about the linkage between institutional patterns and forms of social structure. The empirical studies that follow--involving such diverse topics as mental health clinics, art museums, large corporations, civil-service systems, and national polities--illustrate the explanatory power of institutional theory in the analysis of organizational change. Required reading for anyone interested in the sociology of organizations, the volume should appeal to scholars concerned with culture, political institutions, and social change.

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