Social Embeddedness in Economic Transactions through Informal Institutions in Rural China

Formal and Informal Market Institutions : Embeddedness Revisited

Market exchange involves many cognitive and non-cognitive processes — e.g., search, inference, prediction, negotiation. Much attention has been devoted to these issues both in theory and in experimental economics. I focus on the enforcement of market transactions against opportunistic behavior. I first discuss the different mechanisms that can deter opportunistic breach of contract. Some of the...

The Embeddedness of the Economy: Social Capital vs. Economic Institutions

Throughout the 1990s we witnessed the spread of the concept of social capital in many of the social sciences and in particular in socio-economics. Its theorisation is due to sociologists who aimed at correcting methodological individualism due to its poor understanding of the collective and interactive nature of society. Here we argue that, despite the adoption of methodological individualism, ...

Invigorating the content in social embeddedness: an ethnography of life insurance transactions in China.

Based on more than 14 months' ethnographic research in China, this article brings in culture and symbolic interactionism to understand the social embeddedness of economic transactions. First, an analytic frame linking tie strengths to defining principles, relational properties, and interactions is constructed and applied to changes in life insurance transactions in China. The data suggest that ...

Dual Embeddedness: Informal Job Matching and Labor Market Institutions in the United States and Germany

Understanding informal institutions: Networks and communities in rural development

A major theme within the literature on rural development is that the particular mix of formal and informal institutions present in any situation is a key determinant of development outcomes. However, there is some evidence that in policy and practice there are considerable difficulties in articulating formal organizational realities with the rules and norms embedded in informally constructed so...