In this bold, sweeping study of the development of Western economies, Douglass C. North sets forth a new view of societal change. At the core of Professor North's investigation is the question of property rights, the arrangements individuals and groups have made through history to deal with the fundamental economic problem of scarce resources. In six theoretical chapters, Profe...(展开全部)

Ronald Inglehart argues that economic development, cultural change, and political change go together in coherent and even, to some extent, predictable patterns. This is a controversial claim. It implies that some trajectories of socioeconomic change are more likely than others - and consequently that certain changes are foreseeable. Once a society has embarked on industrializat...(展开全部)

Ronald Inglehart argues that economic development, cultural change, and political change go together in coherent and even, to some extent, predictable patterns. This is a controversial claim. It implies that some trajectories of socioeconomic change are more likely than others--and consequently that certain changes are foreseeable. Once a society has embarked on industrializat...(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)

In a closely observed study of two Indonesian towns, Clifford Geertz analyzes the process of economic change in terms of people and behavior patterns rather than income and production. One of the rare empirical studies of the earliest stages of the transition to modern economic growth, Peddlers and Princes offers important facts and generalizations for the economist, the sociol...(展开全部)

With little domestic fanfare and even less attention internationally, Japan has been reinventing itself since the 1990s, dramatically changing its political economy, from one managed by regulations to one with a neoliberal orientation. Rebuilding from the economic misfortunes of its recent past, the country retains a formidable economy and its political system is healthier than...(展开全部)

Mark Blyth argues that economic ideas are powerful political tools as used by domestic groups in order to effect change since whoever defines what the economy is, what is wrong with it, and what would improve it, has a profound political resource in their possession. Blyth analyzes the 1930s and 1970s, two periods of deep-seated institutional change that characterized the twent...(展开全部)

China has reemerged as a powerhouse in the global economy, reviving a classic question in economic history: why did sustained economic growth arise in Europe rather than in China? Many favor cultural and environmental explanations of the nineteenth-century economic divergence between Europe and the rest of the world. This book, the product of over twenty years of research, take...(展开全部)

Burkert's work is of such magnitude and depth that it may even contribute to that most difficult of tasks, defining myth, ritual, and religion. . [He] locates his work in the context of culture and the historv of ideas, and he is not hesitant to draw on sociology and biology. Consequently his work is of significance for philosophers, historians, and even theologians, as well as...(展开全部)