Natural scientists have proposed that humankind has entered a new geologic epoch. Termed the “Anthropocene,” this new reality revolves around the central role of human activity in multiple Earth ecosystems. That challenge requires a rethinking of social science explanations of organization...

Climate change has been one of the most contested truths for the last two decades. Many social scientists within the academy and this volume have spent years discerning the nature of this truth and articulating its importance for business, organizations and society. Yet these same scholars face...

Social scientists have sketched four distinct theories to explain a phenomenon that appears to have ramped up in recent years, the diffusion of policies across countries. Constructivists trace policy norms to expert epistemic communities and international organizations, who define economic...

Both of these books are concerned with how global social movements are refracted through national cultural and legal systems. Both find that new norms spread across countries, in this case originating in the United States and then spreading through feminists to Europe. But both find diffusion...

The Economic Sociology of Capitalism might have been titled The Sociology of Economic Institutions. The chapters, presented at Cornell in September 2001, catalog current thinking about how institutions lead to regularities in economic behavior. They define institutions variously as cognitive...

Political scientists, sociologists, and economists have all sought to analyze the spread of economic and political liberalism across countries in recent decades. This article documents this diffusion of liberal policies and politics and proposes four distinct theories to explain how the prior...

What does globalization mean for the modern corporation? There is a lot of theory out there. Many have taken the intrepid step of speculating about the implications for the firm. Few have gone to the trouble to look into the matter. Looking at how a multinational actually operates is not for the...

Students of economic behavior have long subscribed to the common sense view that natural laws govern economic life. In the discipline of economics, the prevailing view is that economic behavior is determined exogenously, by a force outside of society,rather than endogenously, by forces within....

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...