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Sub-Theme 1: Path Dependence and Creation Processes in the Emergence
of Markets, Technologies and Institutions
Convenors:
This theme is a continuation of the ‘organizing markets’
sub theme but with a preference for papers that address path dependence and path
creation processes in the co-evolution of markets, technologies and
institutions. Path dependence points to the role of temporally remote events in
shaping the progression of events in the present and into the future. In this
conceptualization, the perpetuation of artifacts such as the typewriter keyboard
"QWERTY" is historically determined. At an extreme, markets are
considered to be inefficient as they perpetuate inefficient choices and,
therefore, negative externalities over time onto concerned stakeholders. However,
in others views than Paul Davids, path dependence is not seen as a deteriorated
order, but where the common history of things conditions existence and
performance, and enable constituted continuity in the sense that the past
engages the future.
Path creation attempts to bring back human agency into an
understanding of the emergence of market, technologies and institutions. It is
an ontological position that suggests that humans may exercise "embedded
agency", that they can make a differences but at critical moments as they
draw upon a toolbox of tools, skills and competencies that they and others
posses. Path creation entertains the idea that individuals have the power and
the agency to negotiate and renegotiate the boundaries of interactions so as to
redefine externalities and internalities. Such an orientation suggests that
individuals demonstrate human agency not just by being entrepreneurs in the
marketplace, but also by being technology and institutional entrepreneurs as
well. Such individual capacity may be seen as emergent and not intrinsic, it may
depend on other institutional or material inscriptions, and it does not imply
mastery of outcomes.
We invite papers that explore path dependence and creation
processes in the co-evolution of markets, technology and institutions from wide
array of perspectives. We want to explore how actors shape emerging institutions
and transform existing ones especially in light of the complexities and path
dependences that are involved. In examining these issues, we would like to
explore how "black boxed" understandings are opened up, how new
categories of meanings emerge, if closure is accomplished, and how metrics of
valuation emerge or are transformed. We are open to multiple inquiry frames
including – narratives, actor network theory, social construction of
technological systems, social movements, frame analyses, and discourse analysis.
We are agnostic about specific methods and would like to use this opportunity to
explore different approaches. In addition, we hope to explore this phenomenon in
a variety of different empirical settings.
The following themes reflect (although they do not exhaust)
the kind of submissions we are inviting:
- Sponsorship of technological standards
- Emergence of new categories of firms/technologies/products
- Path dependence and path creation processes as they pertain to actor
networks
- Institutionalization and de-institutionalization processes
- Constructing, opening and closing of ‘windows of opportunity’
- Processes associated with commodification
- Attribution and valuation processes and involved metrics
- Processes whereby the identity of actors evolve with the markets,
technologies and institutions that they are associated with.
- The constitution and dynamics of calculative frames
- Processes of technology inscription and translation
About the Convenors:
Michel Callon
http://www.ensmp.fr/cgi-bin/whoswho?Qid=679
Raghu Garud
http://pages.stern.nyu.edu/~rgarud/
Peter Karnoe
http://old.cbs.dk/departments/ioa/staff/karnoe.shtml.
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