Essays
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Trust and Economic Organization - Cook, Karen S.
During the past four decades, the role of trust in the economy has gained increasing attention beginning with economist Kenneth Arrow's contention that trust is the lubricant of the economy increasing efficiency and saving on transactions costs. It is also important in the political realm, facilitating collective action. Robert Putnam, among others, contends that trust, as one component of social capital, is a key factor in the vibrancy of civil society. Both economists and social psychologists have used game theory and experimental methods to investigate trust and reciprocity. A key question remains How is trust maintained in the absence of monitoring, especially in the case of principal–agent relations? Economic historians and anthropologists have identified several mechanisms that serve to facilitate trust‐based interactions across space and time. In the context of organizations and management, a wide range of trust‐related issues have been explored, especially in the wake of Enron (a company no longer in existence) and the more recent failure of investment banks and other large financial institutions. At the macro‐level, Francis Fukuyama, among others, has explored the cultural underpinnings of differences in levels of general trust in various societies and its consequences for economic development. More recently, trust has become a central theme in the study of the sharing economy in which an astonishing array of goods and services is now offered by auction or exchange on the Internet. Detailed research on such enterprises (e.g., eBay, CouchSurfing, and AirBnB) is now possible through the development of computational social science. -
War and Social Movements - Tarrow, Sidney
In his scientific production, Charles Tilly broke new ground in two major areas: the study of war and state‐building and the study of contentious politics and social movements. Many scholars followed him and elaborated on each of these strands, but few—including Tilly—attempted to link them together. Both in the historical war and state‐building and in recent “new wars,” social movements—and contentious politics in general—play a vigorous but a poorly understood role. Drawing on Tilly's insights, this essay sets out five general hypotheses relating contention to war making and illustrates them with evidence from three historical episodes from French, American, and Italian history, and from the recent experience of the “global war on terror.” -
Why So Few Women in Mathematically Intensive Fields? - Ceci, Stephen J.
Women have made huge gains in all fields of science over the past four decades, greatly increasing their presence in PhD programs and in postdoctoral positions. But, their progress has been greater in some fields than others. Although women constitute a critical mass of faculty in fields such as biology, medicine, psychology, veterinary science, and sociology, they continue to be underrepresented in mathematically intensive fields such as engineering, physics, chemistry, economics, computer science, and mathematics. In this essay, we describe both data and argument pertinent to women's underrepresentation, organized around three alleged causes. After reviewing these three causes, we conclude that neither sex differences in mathematical and spatial ability, nor the often‐alleged bias against women in science, can explain their dearth, whereas choices and family formation plans go a long way toward doing so.