Institutional and Organizational Analysis: Concepts and Applications
Abstract: Institutions and norms have increasingly been recognized as fundamental determinants of economic and political development. Institutions are rules that recognized authorities create and enforce. Norms are long-standing patterns of behavior, shared by a subset of people in a society or organization. These factors play a role in all organizations, including governments, firms, churches, universities, gangs, and even families. In this book we: (1) present a set of concepts, for example, institutions, norms, property rights, and transaction costs, used in Institutional and Organizational Analysis (IOA) that link institutions and norms to economic performance; (2) use the same set of concepts to better understand political organizations and performance; and (3) build a framework based on those concepts for understanding divergent developmental trajectories of nations around the world. In Parts I and II, we define the concepts needed to understand how economic activity is organized and how economic and political outcomes are shaped by institutions and norms. In Part III, we add the comparatively recent work on beliefs and leadership to better understand the fundamental question of why there has not been convergence in economic and political performance across countries.
