Centre
for Research on Innovation and CompetitionCentre
for Research on Innovation and CompetitionArchive
23-25 October, 2002
Venue: The Conference Suite, CRIC,
The University of Manchester & UMIST,
Harold Hankins Building, Booth Street West,
Manchester M13 9QH
HOME | PROGRAMME | PAPER ABSTRACTS | VENUE | MORE ON MANCHESTER
ABSTRACTS
Paper 1 - Institutions, Politics and Culture:
a Polanyian Perspective on Economic Change
Paper 2 - Economies as Instituted Economic Processes
Paper 3 - Reinstituting the Economic Process: (Re)embedding
the Economy in Society and Nature
Paper 4 - The Legacy of Karl Polanyi / Issues for a
Neo-Polanyan Research Agenda in Economic Sociology
Paper 5 - Moral Philosophy and Economic Sociology: What
MacIntyre Learnt from Polanyi
Paper 6 - Property, Markets and the State: Constitutive
versus Epiphenomenal Concepts of Law
Paper 7 - Using Karl Polanyi as a Stepping Stone for
a Critique of the New Institutionalist Orthodoxy
Paper 8 - Karl Polanyi and Instituted Processes of Economic
Democratization
Paper 9 - The Forgotten Institutions
Paper 10 - Call Connections: Call Centres and Varieties
of Socio-Economic Intermediation
Paper 11 - Brazilian Genomics and Bioinformatics: Instituting
Innovation Processes in a Global Context
Paper 12 - Labour Markets as Instituted Economic Processes
- A Comparison of France and the UK
Post Graduate Presentations
Paper 1 - Institutions, Politics and Culture:
a Polanyian Perspective on Economic Change
John Harriss (Development Studies Institute, London School of Economics)
Polanyi argues in The Economy as Instituted Process that 'The human economy is embedded and enmeshed in institutions, economic and noneconomic'. He continues, saying that 'mere aggregates of the personal behaviours in question do not by themselves produce (the structures of reciprocity, redistribution and exchange)', and in the development of this argument anticipates key problems that have more recently become evident in the New Institutional Economics. This paper considers these problems, focussing in particular on questions surrounding the treatment of 'culture'.
Paper 2 - Economies as Instituted Economic Processes
Mark Harvey (ESRC Centre for Research on Innovation and Competition)
This paper attempts to develop the theoretical position of an instituted economic process analysis of different historical economies, emerging from empirical work in various areas in contemporary capitalisms (food provision, genomics and bioinformatics, welfare regimes, labour markets, etc.). It has four main sections. It starts by stating the epistemological assumptions involved in an historically-based perspective, namely the absence of generalised axiomatics. If there are laws for capitalism, then, by extension there may be different laws between different historical capitalisms, and indeed, different contemporary capitalisms. That being the case, the epistemological starting points are historical transformations rather than first principles. Following a strand of Polanyan thought, the paper then argues that 'the economic' is specifically instituted within societies in various ways. Thus, in addition to, and in distinction from, the sociologising of the economic, expressed sometimes in concepts of 'embeddedness', there is a need to recognise this institution of the economic, and the specificity of economic processes.
It is argued that 'economies' are centrally constituted by four elemental processes: transformations of quality, ownership (exchange, allocation), use, and spatio-temporal location. The ways these four processes are instituted, and how their mutual interrelations are configured, are seen to be important in understanding major structural dynamics of historical economies. In this context, economies reproduce themselves, expand, contract, through the interrelationship between these instituted processes.
From this view, it is then argued that the type of explanation or causality invoked by an instituted economic process account is quite different from that of a closed axiomatic system. Different economic processes are structured in specific ways in time and space, and interact with differently structured economic processes, inducing constant disruption and change. The changes resulting from such interactions are in turn specific outcomes of specific structural differences between differently instituted economic processes with their own dynamics.
Paper 3 - Reinstituting the Economic Process:
(Re)embedding the Economy in Society and Nature
Pat Devine (School of Economic Studies, University of Manchester)
Polanyi argued that the project of creating a fully self-regulating market was utopian, in the sense of impossible. However, movement towards this utopia, the ever greater but never completed process of disembedding the economy from both society and nature, creates growing dislocations and tensions which call forth a counter movement. This double movement may be thought of as successive changes in the way in which the economic process is instituted. The focus of the paper is on the meaning of embeddedness, the ways in which the economy was reinstituted during the Great Transformation and the subsequent counter movement, and alternative approaches to further reinstituting the economy in ways that (re)embed it more firmly in society and nature. It is argued that prior to the creation of the capitalist market the economy was organically embedded in society and nature. However, the creation of separate economic institutions, the institution of the economic process as a distinct system with its own laws of motion, severed these organic links and the economy came to dominate both society and nature. Here, however, the symmetry between society and nature ends. Society has the capacity for conscious, purposeful action; nature does not. For the economy to be reinstituted in ways that create a sustainable organic relationship with nature, it must first be reinstituted in ways that bring it under social control.
Paper 4 - The Legacy of Karl Polanyi / Issues
for a Neo-Polanyan Research Agenda in Economic Sociology
Sally Randles (ESRC Centre for Research on Innovation and Competition)
Kari Polanyi-Levitt has commented that her father's writing was met with a 'deafening silence' in England, a silence which she suggests is 'yet to be explained'. Polanyi-Levitt's point is a very interesting one, given England is where The Great Transformation was written.
This paper contributes to a new but perhaps growing body of work in England attempting to redress this situation yet without, hopefully, falling prey to an equally valid charge of misusing the valuable Polanyi legacy.
It is in three parts. First it aims to provide an appreciation of the main normative, theoretical, and methodological themes in Polanyi's life-work, drawing attention at the same time to how contemporary authors have appropriated these themes. Second it attempts to balance a celebration of Polanyi's scholarship by opening up a space for critical appraisal. Third it raises some issues and questions as a small contribution to the much bigger project of defining and developing a Neo-Polanyan approach within the discipline of Economic Sociology.
Paper 5 - Moral Philosophy and Economic Sociology:
What MacIntyre Learnt from Polanyi
Peter McMylor
Despite renewed sociological interest in both morality and economic sociology, little attention has been paid to the connections between the work of the moral philosopher Alasdair MacIntyre and Karl Polanyi. The paper will look at MacIntyre's dependence for his understanding of key aspects of modernity on the work of Karl Polanyi's economic sociology. It will begin by situating the thought of both men revealing elements of complementarity. In particular the concepts of embededness and disembededness, so central for Polanyi, will be seen to play a major role in MacIntyre's understanding of the transformation of moral categories displayed in social practices.
Paper 6 - Property, Markets and the State: Constitutive
versus Epiphenomenal Concepts of Law Geoff
Hodgson (Business School, University of Hertfordshire)
This paper considers the status of laws and legal institutions in modern socio-economic systems, particularly those laws relating to property, contracts and trade. Are such laws mere reflections of other socio-economic relationships between individuals or social classes, or is law itself a part of the underlying socio-economic reality? Albeit in different ways, both Marxists and individualists (in an analytical sense considered here) have typically favoured the idea that law is an epiphenomenon. In contrast, it is argued in this paper that legal relations are partly constitutive of reality. This argument is extended to support Karl Polanyi's proposition that markets cannot function properly without some intervention by the state.
Paper 7 - Using Karl Polanyi as a Stepping Stone
for a Critique of the New Institutionalist Orthodoxy
Daniel Ankarloo (School of Health and Society, Sweden)
This paper forms a critique of the New Institutional Economics (NIE) of Douglass North, Ronald Coase, Oliver Williamson et al. from the viewpoint of Karl Polanyi's thoughts on markets and capitalism. Contrasting the two approaches to one another, I argue that in their views of markets the two approaches are inherently and fundamentally dissimilar. Polanyi's approach sustains the idea of a history of different market forms, the idea that qualitatively different economic systems have prevailed in human history and that market capitalism is a latter-day product of history, brought about by a "great transformation" in human societal existence. Thereby Polanyi's conception is potentially historical, social and realistic. NIE on the other hand, although it was once conceived in recognition of the problems of the lack of history, sociality and realism in orthodox economic theory, cannot overcome these problems pinpointed by (among others) Polanyi. Hence, contrary to the promise of above all North, NIE remains ahistorical, asocial and non-realistic in its approach. This is so, because with its focus on the market as a universal yardstick, used in order to explain all other institutions, NIE cannot fully allow for a history of different market forms, nor can NIE conceive of the capitalist market system as the product of history, but tends rather to see the market as the very beginning as well as the end of human history. The paper concludes that in light of the continuing influence and spread of NIE, Polanyi remains a valuable and necessary corrective to this "economistic fallacy" of old, in its new disguise.
Paper 8 - Karl Polanyi and Instituted Processes
of Economic Democratization
Margie Mendell (Concordia University, Montreal, Canada)
In the document summarizing the objectives of this conference, it states that "the general aim of this workshop will be to develop a dynamic perspective on the Polanyi notion of an instituted economic process". Polanyi spoke of an "instituted economic process" with special emphasis on the liberal agenda to install a free market economy in the 19th century and the paradoxical need for a social and political apparatus to put the self-regulating market economy in place. Would we use this term to describe other social systems, which, of course, set parameters for economic activity that correspond with and reflect a variety of norms - social, cultural, political - that shape economic activity? The richness of Polanyi is found in his historical analysis of "economies" governed under very different principles, economies that feature production, consumption, exchange, but are not coordinated by the market system. And, his foray into non-market societies (with extensive reference to the literature in economic anthropology) likewise details economic activity that is "embedded" in societal forms or represents "an instituted economic process" that can be understood only in its societal context. This is familiar to Polanyi scholars. What is very interesting today and resonates with the objectives of this conference is the expressed interest in "process". In my paper, I would like to focus on the idea of "process" by bringing in another Polanyi dimension, his interest in economic democracy and his attempts to develop a model of functional democracy (functional socialism) which was influenced to a great extent by the guild socialism of G.D.H. Cole, the writings of Robert Owen, but especially by the experience in "Red Vienna" in the 1920's. Today, we might refer to Polanyi's writings in this period as part of the contemporary interest in associational democracy or democratic associationalism. I would like to take this further and suggest that today, there is a process or, rather, there are processes of economic democratization under way that are re-embedding the economy in social contexts and that these are taking many forms: community economic development initiatives, the social economy, new instruments of capital accumulation, participatory budgets, industrial districts, etc., with demonstrated socio-economic objectives. One would normally consider these as a catalog of counter-movements in response to the (predictable) failure of the neo-liberal agenda. While this is certainly true, they are also demonstrating the importance of "process" as these new forms take shape. In particular, they are most often the result of a great deal of negotiation and participation; they also often call for hybrid partnerships between various social actors. What are the processes that underlie these new initiatives? What does this say about institutional change? Work in this area has focussed on the political dimension with growing reference to deliberative democracy. This has generated a debate among political theorists, which is worth exploring. In economics, the work of Geoffrey Hodgson and others on the two way causation of institutional impact (from above - shaping economic activity; from below - as social action has an impact on institutions) and within the "reality of society", the many experiences occurring in the North and the South that challenge any notion of institutional isomorphism or inertia as institutions are forced to react, however slowly. Indeed, these experiences occur within a larger institutional setting that maintains its grip on the economy. That said, the processes of change are having an impact on individual and collective behaviour and institutions are responding.
Paper 9 - The Forgotten Institutions
Michele Cangiani (University of Venice)
In Karl Polanyi's works, the concepts of "market" and "market system" concern the peculiar features of the capitalist society, in comparison with other forms of economic organisation, and its development from one "institutional structure" to another.
Those concepts are particularly suitable for pointing out the method and the object of Polanyi's institutional analysis, and its close relation to the "classical" social theory (e. g. Veblen and Weber, not to mention Marx). Generally, on the contrary, present-day economic sociology, economic history and institutional economics have dropped the analysis of the social system as a historical whole, and try to supplement the economic theory with "institutional" evidence rather than thoroughly criticise it. This kind of analyses can be sound and useful, within their own range of problems: insofar as they do not deny or conceal a different range of problems, at a different level of abstraction.
The recovery of the classic paradigm would allow us to question again, as Veblen, Weber and Polanyi did, the efficiency of the market system from the point of view of society. Furthermore, particular cases too could be better examined; for example, the case of the interaction among firms, markets and society in the course of the development of an "industrial district" in Italy.
Paper 10 - Call Connections: Call Centres and
Varieties of Socio-Economic Intermediation
Miriam Glucksman (Department of Sociology, University of Essex)
Call centres represent one of the most rapidly expanding forms of business organisation of recent years. Instead of considering them as self-standing sites of work with a distinctive labour process, this paper uses a Polanyian perspective to explore the connections to and place of call centres in the wider overall process of which they are a part. Building on my earlier framework of the 'total social organisation of labour', I develop a relational conception of the call centre as one phase in an integral process of production through to consumption, relating upstream to production and distribution, and downstream to delivery and consumption. The configuration of the circuit or network is likely to vary according to the type of activity undertaken, resulting in varying configurations of the relation between production, distribution, exchange and consumption, and in call centres being positioned quite differently in the various fields in which they are involved. For example, those dedicated to giving out train timetable information occupy a very different place within an organisational ensemble than those selling insurance or clothing or answering emergency calls. Similar considerations apply to the work that is done in them, which may occupy a different place in a varying overall division of labour. The socio-economic functions of intermediation of call centres and of call operating work are various and multiple, rather than unitary and homogeneous.
Paper 11 - Brazilian Genomics and Bioinformatics:
Instituting Innovation Processes in a Global Context
Mark Harvey and Andy McMeekin (ESRC Centre for Research on Innovation and
Competition)
Genomics and bioinformatics are transforming wide areas of scientific, technological and economic activity. New areas of innovation are opening up across the life science industries, agriculture and food provision. But at the same time, there are high levels of uncertainty of how, when, and where new markets, products, and services will emerge. Early expectations from genomics as the 'key to life' of many organisms have subsequently been seen to be too simplistic, with intervening complexity at every level from genome to organism (transcriptome, proteome, metabolome). In pharmaceuticals, the promised systemic shortening of innovation pipelines remains a promise. In agrigenomics, developments have largely remained at the primitive stage of enabling specific chemicals to be sprayed on specific crops. An informatic explosion of data and problems of interoperability within and between these different biological levels, present new challenges. In the context of this uncertainty, there are many alternative firm strategies, shifting boundaries and interchanges between public and private sectors, and pre-competitive co-operation. New classes of economic agent appear and disappear, or in the case of an Incyte or a Celera, change economic function.
Moreover, the development of these alternative institutional innovation trajectories have a geopolitical significance and specificity. The different major centres of gravity in the US, Europe and Japan also reveal forms of competition and diversity. The significance of Brazilian genomics and bioinformatics is that distinctive processes of innovation are being instituted that have achieved global leadership in specific domains and applications, linked to the needs and socio-economic interests of the country. The paper reports ongoing research on the sugar transcriptome, bacterial genomics and models of pathogenesis, and structural genomics of leishmaniasis, as examples of these processes.
The paper concludes by arguing that distinctively instituted and distributed innovation processes lead to processes of variation and comparative advantage in an area of rapid institutional change and increasing complexity of organisational interactions.
Paper 12 - Labour Markets as Instituted Economic
Processes - A Comparison of France and the UK
Nathalie Moncel (Marie Curie Research Fellow, European Employment Work and
Research Centre, Manchester School of Management)
Starting from the limits of the mainstream labour economics in explaining labour market functioning, the paper will try to develop an approach of labour markets as an instituted economic process following a Polanyian perspective and with an application to a comparison of labour markets in France and the UK. Three points will be argued in order to show how societal employment systems are instituted in a specific way in each country. First the paper examines the constitution of labour supply and demand and how the allocation process within employment structure market reflects the segmentation of both demand and supply side. Second it considers how the exchange is regulated through structured relations between and within economic groups of agents acting on the labour markets. Levels and contents of these relations involve a specific regulation of employment in each societal space. Last but not least, the question of price is addressed through the definition of wage as the social recognition of work within capitalistic societies that result from a set of social norms, rules and structures that participate to the total reproduction of labour.
Post Graduate Presentations
James Baker
Data from a survey of Environmental Technologies and Services (ETS) firms in North West England is used to investigate the structure of the Water and Wastewater Treatment (WWT) industry in the region. The WWT industries geographical distribution is mapped and compared to the ETS sector and examined in a social context, using Polanyi's key theoretical principles of "Instituted Economic Process" (IEP) and stressing market variety and specificity. The UK and French WWT industries provide a comparative context of how the same industry can be instituted in different ways. The WWT firm analysis also explores the scope and construction of the of the firms with regard to their inter-firm linkages and the role of regional and cluster policy in the development of those linkages. The instituted structure of the industry suggests that regional and cluster policy aimed at increasing competitiveness requires very specific industrial and locational targeting and implementation. The growth and competitiveness of the industry is also highly dependant on role played by National and EU environmental policy.
Andrea Mina
The market for mobile phones and mobile telephony services has been one of the fastest growing at a global level in the past decade. The development of a complex network of technical infrastructures and the transformation of the relevant institutional settings have been necessary and complementary conditions to allow for the co-ordination of the system. The development of GSM - the first digital pan-European standard for mobile communications - certainly was a key drive to market growth in the 1990s (and in fact in 2001 about 500 million users relied on its protocol and infrastructures). The development of the standard, jointly with the evolution of the regulatory framework of the telecoms sector in the late 1980s, played a crucial role in the institution of the market for mobile telephony. In the process, market and out-of the-market transactions emerged as different modes of exchange and significantly impacted the patterns of sectoral growth. At the same time, the transformation of standard setting procedures and institutions proved to be pivotal for the achievement of political and economic goals as set in the 1980s by the European Commission, who backed the GSM project from the very start. The paper is thought of as an empirical investigation of an instituted economic process where socio-economic agents shaped the market for mobile telephony through the interplay of innovation, regulation and competition dynamics.
HOME | PROGRAMME | PAPER ABSTRACTS | VENUE | MORE ON MANCHESTER
CRIC has combined with PREST to form the Manchester Institute of Innovation Research (MIoIR).
New book: Trust in Food, A Comparative and Institutional Analysis by Unni Kjaernes, Mark Harvey & Alan Warde.
CRIC Final Report to ESRC:"Main Report" and "CRIC Performance Indicators 1997-2006".
'Instituted Or Embedded? Legal, Fiscal and Economic Institutionalisation of Markets' by Mark Harvey
'Beyond Efficiency and Market Shares: Competition within the Finnish Games Industry' by Mirva Peltoniemi
'Accounting for Economic Evolution: Fitness and the Population Method' by Stan Metcalfe
'Innovation and Final Consumption: Social Practices, Instituted Modes of Provision and Intermediation' by Andrew McMeekin & Dale Southerton
'Alfred Marshall’s Mecca: Reconciling the Theories of Value and Development' by Stan Metcalfe