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Formal institutions, most prominently laws, impact society and also the economy by changing actors' behavior. How that impact can be conceptualized is in need of more elaboration. Klammer & Scorsone's (2022) recent publication opens avenues on how to understand the ways in which institutions can over-instruct, under-instruct and ambiguously instruct the behavior of actors. Sources of and direction for institutional change can then be better understood. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Suggesting socio-cultural values are selectors of institutions and institutional practices, and institutions in turn are selectors of (economic) behaviors, we investigate what explains the persistence of institutions that were aligned with past socio-cultural values when the values subscribed to in society have fundamentally changed. What, in other words, explains the persistence of obsolete institutions? We do so by investigating the labor market situation for academics in post-communist societies in Europe. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

We propose to analyze the supply chain not (just) as interconnected firms where products move from primary production, through processing, down to final consumer (user), but rather as collaborating firms that exchange information in order for each to function. This opens the analysis of supply chains up for institutional economic analysis and also allows one to acknowledge that information can be used strategically. Yet, information exchange can also be hampered because of a supply chain's structure—we focus on this. The difficulty of exchanging information is particularly important when an industry and its supply chain newly emerges or is disrupted. In such circumstances the way in which information is presented and used is not institutionalized yet in a way that works for the parties involved. We show the relevance of this approach to understanding supply chains by referencing the agrifood supply chain as it is on the cusp of being disrupted by the extensive use of Information Technology. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

How markets and firms function is critically related to what knowledge and information is exchanged between whom, how quickly. Exchange of (symbolic) information needs to be properly institutionalized in order to be understood by others, on the one hand, but, on the other hand, cannot avoid being ambiguous to some degree as well (Dolfsma et al. 2011). Ambiguity allows for the dissent that allows for innovation in the broadest sense of the term. Institutionalization of communication is community-specific. The tension between institutionalization of and ambiguity in communication explains why innovations cannot depart too much from what is known and accepted in a community to be (ultimately) accepted as a legitimate novelty. The view of markets and firms as settings for institutionalized communication and knowledge exchange offers a perspective that institutional economists are well positioned for to offer insights on. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The industrial development in sub-Saharan Africa is perhaps more affected by the quality of institutions than that of other regions. We investigate what alternatives managers may have and what their firms would need to function in case the institutional furniture they encounter is of low quality. We find that, in high quality institutional environments, management spending effort to deal with the authorities and to navigate regulations negates the effect of the institutional environment. Managers do not need to spend such efforts. Perhaps surprisingly, we find that the positive effect of high-quality institutional environments on firm performance is enhanced by making informal payments. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Chinese acquirers spent $38 million on mergers and acquisitions in 1990, and $666.1 billion on mergers and acquisitions in 2016. As the Chinese merger market has grown, so too has the literature on its performance. Little is known, however, about with whom Chinese firms can best do business. We aim to fill this gap. We suggest that because the liabilities of distance, foreignness, and outsideness complicate acquisition performance, targets in countries and regions which add fewer of these liabilities will outperform those that add more. We plot the overseas expansion of Chinese acquirers, and compare the performance of Chinese acquisitions, within the Greater China region, within the Confucian cultural sphere, and between Asian and the West. In each case, we predict that increasing cultural distance decreases performance. Then, because the Continental European governance system is institutionally more familiar to the Chinese system than it is to the Anglo-Saxon system, we consider the Chinese experience in each of these two systems. Our results largely support our hypotheses built on the partner location performance hierarchy argument, but we also point to the limits of the generalizability of existing literature in understanding the Chinese market. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In some societies, entrepreneurs coming from outside of a community (i.e., outside entrepreneurs) are more active than entrepreneurs from within the community (i.e., inside entrepreneurs). Institutions and relationships that entrepreneurs entertain may hamper insiders from starting or succeeding. Institutional economics and anthropology suggest that, rather than outside entrepreneurs having more resources, the case may be that inside entrepreneurs could be hampered by existing institutions that blind and social relations that bind. Outsiders, however, may be less inclined to generate societal value in a community. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Taking the idea that institutional reproduction is not obvious and that institutions are vulnerable has significant conceptual implications. Institutional vulnerability can arise through communication between actors in a common language. To apprehend this requires an elaboration of John Searle's (1995, 2005) argument that language is the fundamental institution. Ontologically, language delineates and circumscribes a community. A community cannot function without a common language, and language at the same time constitutes a community's boundaries, allowing for focused and effective communication within a community. Communication through language introduces ambiguity as well, however, and so institutional reproduction, mediated by language, is a deeply contentious process. Communication across boundaries may particularly "irritate" a system, as Niklas Luhmann has argued. How can institutions then be re-identified through change? Searle's general form for institutions is in need of elaboration. We develop arguments by drawing upon Luhmann's (1995) systems analysis and notion of communication. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Fashion is the quintessential post-modernist consumer practice, or so many hold. In this contribution, I argue that, on the contrary, fashion should be understood as a means of communicating one's commitment to modernist values. I introduce the framework of the Social Value Network, to relate such values to institutionalized consumption behavior, allowing one to signal to others. Modernist values are not homogenous, and are in important ways contradictory, giving rise to the dynamics of fashion that can be observed. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]