The Emergence of Organizations and Markets

More about the book

This work presents a dynamic framework for understanding social emergence, addressing the gap in social sciences regarding the origin of novelty. It explores how new alternatives, organizational forms, and types of people develop, integrating biochemical insights about life's origins with innovative social network analyses. The authors propose a theory explaining the emergence of organizational, market, and biographical novelty through the coevolution of multiple social networks, highlighting that novelty results from spillovers across interconnected networks in various domains. While actors form relationships in the short term, these relationships shape actors over time. The theory is grounded in formal deductive modeling and diverse historical case studies. Building on the biochemical concept of autocatalysis, the authors extend this reasoning to social processes of production and communication. They analyze a broad range of emergence cases, including the rise of organizational novelty in early capitalism and state formation, the transformation of communism, and contemporary science-based capitalism, focusing on the biotechnology industry, regional high-tech clusters, and the open-source community.