This book contributes to emerging debates in political science and sociology on institutional change. Its introductory essay proposes a new framework for analyzing incremental change that is grounded in a power-distributional view of institutions and that emphasizes ongoing struggles within but also over prevailing institutional arrangements. Five empirical essays then bring th...(展开全部)

This book is about institutional change, how to recognize it, when it occurs, and the mechanisms that cause it to happen. It is the first book to identify problems with the "new institutional analysis," which has emerged as one of the dominant approaches to the study of organizations, economic and political sociology, comparative political economy, politics, and international r...(展开全部)

Continuing his groundbreaking analysis of economic structures, Douglass North develops an analytical framework for explaining the ways in which institutions and institutional change affect the performance of economies, both at a given time and over time. Institutions exist, he argues, due to the uncertainties involved in human interaction; they are the constraints devised to st...(展开全部)

China's rural industrial sector has been the engine driving much of the Chinese economy's dynamism during the reform period. The nature and development of this sector, also referred to as township and village enterprises (TVEs) defy easy explanation. Across regions, there is dramatic variation in property rights among TVEs, ranging from local government ownership to outright pr...(展开全部)

Ever since the origins of both linguistics and evolutionary biology in the 19th century, scholars have noted the similarity between biological evolution and language change. Yet until recently neither linguists nor biologists have developed a model of evolution to apply across the two fields. Explaining Language Change presents the first integrated theory of all aspects of lang...(展开全部)

More than 630 million Chinese have escaped poverty since the 1980s, reducing the fraction remaining from 82 to 10 percent of the population. This astonishing decline in poverty, the largest in history, coincided with the rapid growth of a private enterprise economy. Yet private enterprise in China emerged in spite of impediments set up by the Chinese government. How did private...(展开全部)

More than 630 million Chinese have escaped poverty since the 1980s, reducing the fraction remaining from 82 to 10 percent of the population. This astonishing decline in poverty, the largest in history, coincided with the rapid growth of a private enterprise economy. Yet private enterprise in China emerged in spite of impediments set up by the Chinese government. How did private...(展开全部)

In war, do mass and materiel matter most? Will states with the largest, best equipped, information-technology-rich militaries invariably win? The prevailing answer today among both scholars and policymakers is yes. But this is to overlook force employment, or the doctrine and tactics by which materiel is actually used. In a landmark reconception of battle and war, this book pro...(展开全部)