Powell

Trajectories The Emergence of Organizations and Markets

Fall 2014 Vol 26 No 1

Book Symposium

The Emergence ofOrganizations and MarketsPrinceton University Press

John F. Padgett and Walter W. Powell

The Emergence ofOrganizations and Markets:An Agenda-Setting Book

James MahoneyNorthwestern University



Crucially, one does not have tounderstand the biochemistryroots of this argument toappreciate the basic Padgett-Powell model of economicproduction. The model isbasically as follows: Firms arecontainers of skills. Skills arerules. Skills change productsinto new products. Tradeinvolves the movement ofproducts through firms, whichcan change skills. This model isuseful for understanding the co-evolution and co-constitution ofproducts and organizations.



Comments on The Emergenceof Organizations and Markets

Katherine StovelUniversity of Washington



Comments on The Emergenceof Organizations and Markets

Brayden KingNorthwestern University

I view this as an important bookthat offers a needed correctiveto the variable/attributecentered approach thatdominates much of Americansociology. That said, I think thatthe long-term impact of thisbook depends on the extent towhich others find ways toextract and develop some of thepowerful ideas embedded withinthe dense pages.



Response to Critics

Woody PowellStanford University

I would like to take thetheoretical machinery from thisbook as it describes actors asconcatenations and retheorize itfrom the bottom up. On a moremicro-level, I think there is moreto be gained from incorporatingthe human mindset andpassions into the creation ofnovelty.



...for us, autocatalysis is notchemistry, it is life, and it isfundamentally social.Autocatalysis helps us with ourlarger theoretical ambition thatwe are pursuing in ourcontinuing work - a generaltheory of development thatoperates at multiple levels andhas different rules, speciation,and selection at those differentlevels.



Response to Critics

John F. PadgettUniversity of Chicago



To study novelty within theconceptual frame of life is toyank our individualistic mindsout of their naturally egocentricgestalts toward the larger chainreactions of (transformational)flows into which all of our(heterogeneous) minds arelinked.



...we want not to eliminateagency at all but to endogenizeactorsby situating theiremergence and evolution withinlearning from their ownhistories (both macro andmicro). In other words, we wantto open up the solid-object blackbox of agency, to look insideand to see how its componentsare moving through time,thereby constructing theobjects we call actors, both atthe time scale of biographicaltime and at the time scale ofhistorical time. History is notseparate from individuals;history works through andwithin individuals.



Building, testing and extendingtheory to us means doingcareful, historicallycontextualized, and parallelcase studies. An easy and lazycount of adoption rates wontdo. This is because explanatorytheory to us is about dynamicprocesses and generativemechanisms, not aboutcorrelations.If such intellectuallabor limits the speed of ourown theorys adoption, then sobe it. We care more about thelong-run anyway.

Powell

Documents

Transcript of Powell