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Research examining the importance of path dependence and culture for institutions and development tells us that 'history matters,' but not how history matters. To provide this missing 'how,' we provide a framework for understanding institutional 'stickiness' based on the regression theorem. The regression theorem maintains that the stickiness, and therefore likely success, of any proposed institutional change is a function of that institution's status in relationship to indigenous agents in the previous time period. This framework for analyzing institutional stickiness creates the core of what we call the New Development Economics. Historical cases of postwar reconstruction and transition efforts provide evidence for our claim.

Despite the international growth of the service sector, an industrial paradigm defines the study of global labor This is because analyses of service work typically focus on firms in the United States, while studies of global labor concentrate on manufacturing. I develop a framework for analysis of global service work by comparing ethnographic cases of labor in two global luxury hotels in China. Each hotel is linked to the same U.S.-based global corporation, and both employ the same organizational template and recruit same-aged female workers. At the first hotel workers silently cater to the preferences of guests, using recorded customer preference data and enacting imported feminized practices, a labor regime I call virtual personalism. At the second hotel workers promote hotel products, displaying expertise to distinguish themselves from sex workers who frequent the hotel a labor regime I call virtuous professionalism. Why do distinctly gendered labor practices emerge in the two settings? To explain the divergent regimes of labor, I show that firms institutionalize localized consumer status struggles through the gendered organization of interactive labor Workers' interactive strategies and local workplace legacies mediate the forms institutionalism takes. I call the entwining of consumer markets and labor practices 'market-embedded labor.'

Fundamental uncertainty may affect the confidence of individuals seeking to understand the world and forecast events. This may occur in economic depressions, when there may be a loss of confidence in institutions. The structure of communications is important in social learning, and this is where rationality is to be found, rather than in individual learning. Experience is institutionalized within social groups, and there are debates between members of different social groups.

The development of preferences and rational behavior are both affected when institutions change. This means that theories using the idea of stable preferences may be misleading. An indirect evolutionary approach can be used to study how institutions affect preferences as well as behavior. There are a number of advantages to recognising that preferences can change. Behavior may be more understandable once one takes into account the fact that preferences can change, and it also becomes easier to influence behavior.