Post-socialist agricultural cooperatives in Russia: a case study of top-down cooperatives in the Belgorod region

Through a study of agricultural service cooperatives in Russia’s Belgorod region, this article addresses two gaps in the literature: first, the dearth of empirical studies on cooperatives in post-socialist Russia; second, the lack of attention to top-down cooperatives in the global literature, and the overly negative approach to the topic in the few extant studies. Whereas state attempts to establish agricultural cooperatives in Russia in a top-down fashion have largely failed, such cooperatives have sprung up widely in Belgorod. The article investigates: (1) what influence the (regional) state exerts on the cooperatives, and how that affects their daily functioning and viability; and (2) to what extent such top-down cooperatives might evolve into less state-led forms, such as classic member-driven or business-like cooperatives.     

Social capital, inclusive networks, and economic performance

Empirical studies show that the relationship between social capital and economic performance is ambiguous. The paper points to the potential trade-off between the sustainability of self-enforcement and the magnitude of gains from trade in social networks as an explanation. Based on an infinitely repeated multi-player prisoners’ dilemma it is shown how self-enforcement of cooperation within a network is influenced by its inclusiveness, its communication capacity, and the complexity of the exchange setting. The paper shows that inclusive social capital can combine both low enforcement costs and high gains from trade even in a complex exchange setting.     

A Pathway Forwards for the Social Capital Metaphor

A major topic in economics is the analysis of a broad class of phenomena associated with interpersonal relationships, a topic that originally grew from theories of “social capital.” While the concept has been instrumental in bringing increased attention to social effects on economic outcomes, it has increasingly been replaced with approaches that consider instead networks and discrete interactions rather than aggregate measures of social capital. This has been an analytical improvement, but a great deal of work remains to bring empirical validity and relevancy to social network analysis. This paper presents two important approaches for achieving this, statistical analysis and agent-based modeling, and discusses their benefits, limitations, and complementary nature. Rather than waiting for either approach to achieve an ambiguous quality of maturity, integrating statistical analysis with simulation models of networks must begin now to push the frontiers of social network analysis forward.     

非营利组织社会资本对其筹资的影响

解释了非营利组织的社会资本对其筹资的影响。首先介绍了非营利组织概念的产生和界定以及其组织分类及标准;然后对有关社会资本的概念产生过程和测量的研究文献进行了回顾,进而讨论了非营利组织社会资本的测量方法、影响变量;最后利用我国14家非营利组织的相关数据,实证分析了其社会资本对收入差异的影响。     

Social networks and industrial geography

In many industries, production resides in a small number of highly concentrated regions; for example, several high tech industries cluster in Silicon Valley. Explanations for this phenomenon have focused on how the co-location of firms in an industry might increase the efficiency of production. In contrast, this article argues that industries cluster because entrepreneurs find it difficult to access the information and resources they require when they reside far from the sources of these valuable inputs. Since existing firms often represent the largest pools of these important factors, the current geographic distribution of production places important constraints on entrepreneurial activity. As a result, new foundings tend to arise in the same areas as existing ones, and hence reproduce the industrial geography. In support of this thesis, the article reviews empirical evidence from the shoe manufacturing and biotechnology industries.JEL Classification: L11, M13, R30Adapted from a plenary talk delivered at the 8 ^th annual meetings of the International Schumpeter Society in Gainesville, FL. Constança Esteves and Lee Fleming provided comments useful to developing this written version.     

社会资本视角下的新农村建设

本文通过分析新农村建设的两个方面和两种资本,指出了现阶段农村在社会资本方面的不足之处,认为通过成立农协的方式是合理构建农村生产性社会资本和分配性社会资本的重要途径,要实现社会主义新农村的宏伟蓝图,迫切需要进行农村管理体制上的改革.     

Information-sharing in social networks

We present a new model for reasoning about the way information is shared among friends in a social network and the resulting ways in which the social network fragments. Our model formalizes the intuition that revealing personal information in social settings involves a trade-off between the benefits of sharing information with friends, and the risks that additional gossiping will propagate it to someone with whom one is not on friendly terms but who is within oneʼs community. We study the behavior of rational agents in such a situation, and we characterize the existence and computability of stable information-sharing configurations, in which agents do not have an incentive to change the set of partners with whom they share information. We analyze the implications of these stable configurations for social welfare and the resulting fragmentation of the social network.     

Commons and cooperatives: A new governance of collective action

The Social and Solidarity Economy (SSE) is emerging as a social movement capable of moving society beyond the imbalances of the capitalist market economy and its top‐down regulation by the state. But the SSE's progress has been slow while unresolved challenges (e.g., climate, inequality) continue to intensify. Among communitarian responses to these challenges, the commons have shown great potential as a shared governance mechanism for the responsible management of common‐pool resources. To the extent that this success encourages broader applicability for commons, we focus also on commoning as crucial social practice rooted in collective action and adaptive governance. Adding this dimension of activism opens the possibility of enriching the SSE both in theory and practice for the purpose of strengthening its institutional make‐up, in particular cooperatives occupying a central position in SSE. Commoning enables us to conceive of tangible connections between commons and cooperatives as complementary modes of anti‐capitalist organization. We can illustrate this complementarity by analyzing how Ostrom's “design principles” for commons can help strengthen the ICA's Cooperative Principles. Useful lessons can be learned from concrete examples of commons–cooperative alliances, such as Ecuador's Buen Vivir initiative, the Enercoop PACA project in France, and Oakland's OmniCommons space.     

Social media networks,fake news,and polarization

We study how the structure of social media networks and the presence of fake news affects the degree of misinformation and polarization in a society. For that, we analyze a dynamic model of opinion exchange in which individuals have imperfect information about the true state of the world and exhibit bounded rationality. Key to the analysis is the presence of internet bots: agents in the network that spread fake news (e.g., a constant flow of biased information). We characterize how agents’ opinions evolve over time and evaluate the determinants of long-run misinformation and polarization in the network. To that end, we construct a synthetic network calibrated to Twitter and simulate the information exchange process over a long horizon to quantify the bots’ ability to spread fake news. A key insight is that significant misinformation and polarization arise in networks in which only 15% of agents believe fake news to be true, indicating that network externality effects are quantitatively important. Higher bot centrality typically increases polarization and lowers misinformation. When one bot is more influential than the other (asymmetric centrality), polarization is reduced but misinformation grows, as opinions become closer the more influential bot’s preferred point. Finally, we show that threshold rules tend to reduce polarization and misinformation. This is because, as long as agents also have access to unbiased sources of information, threshold rules actually limit the influence of bots.     

A simple model of homophily in social networks

Biases in meeting opportunities have been recently shown to play a key role for the emergence of homophily in social networks (see Currarini et al., 2009). The aim of this paper is to provide a simple microfoundation of these biases in a model where the size and type-composition of the meeting pools are shaped by agents׳ socialization decisions. In particular, agents either inbreed (direct search only to similar types) or outbreed (direct search to population at large). When outbreeding is costly, this is shown to induce stark equilibrium behavior of a threshold type: agents “inbreed” (i.e. mostly meet their own type) if, and only if, their group is above certain size. We show that this threshold equilibrium generates patterns of in-group and cross-group ties that are consistent with empirical evidence of homophily in two paradigmatic instances: high school friendships and interethnic marriages.     

Regional social capital: Embeddedness, innovation networks and regional economic development

Technology is a necessary but not a sufficient condition for regional economic development. Regional innovation networks transform technology into competitiveness of firms and thus contribute to economic development. Intangible assets, such as social capital, decide how effective regional innovation networks function. Differences in regional social capital thus help explain regional differences in economic development. Regional social capital originates from the embeddedness of firms in regional webs of social relations. The norms, values and customs of these networks facilitate collaboration for mutual benefit. As innovation is increasingly a network effort, embeddedness and social capital also help explain how and why networks of innovating companies are successful, as the case study of the Stimulus Cluster Scheme shows.     

Diffusion in complex social networks

This paper studies how a behavior spreads in a population. We consider a network of interacting agents whose actions are determined by the actions of their neighbors, according to a simple diffusion rule. We find, using a mean-field approach, the threshold for the spreading rate above which the behavior spreads and becomes persistent in the population. This threshold crucially depends on the connectivity distribution of the social network and on specific features of the diffusion rule.     

The Organizational Embeddedness of Social Capital: A Comparative Case Study of Two Voluntary Organizations

Social capital is a popular, but contested concept. It draws attention to the way in which social relations and constructed forms of social organization can produce outcomes on individual and collective levels. However, it is often founded on individualistic, rational-choice models of human behavior that neglect its embeddedness. I explore the embeddedness of social capital through a comparative case study of two voluntary sport organizations in the UK. Through close analysis of in-depth interviews and longitudinal observation, I look at the processes of social capital development and the way socio-organizational context and identity shape these processes.     

The role of natural capital in supporting national income and social welfare

Using life satisfaction as a proxy for social welfare, this study contributes to the extant literature by empirically demonstrating that natural capital contributes to social welfare, functioning in part through increasing national income and in part through its direct effect on life satisfaction; the direct effect is approximately 40% greater than the indirect effect. This suggests that the true welfare benefits of natural capital may not be adequately reflected in conventional economic data and, therefore, studies seeking to evaluate the contribution of natural capital to human well-being should consider employing data sets that capture subjective elements of welfare. The magnitudes of the reported marginal effects of natural capital on social welfare, however, are small. This is perhaps due to the fact that (1) there are shortcomings in the measure of natural capital; (2) life satisfaction effects are unlikely to reflect the poorly understood benefits that natural capital provides; and (3) keystone species (such as mosquitoes) and integral ecosystems (such as wetlands) may be negatively associated with life satisfaction, even though such components of natural capital are vitally important to sustaining ecosystems and human life     

Returns from social capital in open source software networks

Open Source Software projects base their operation on a collaborative structure for knowledge exchange in the form of provision or reception of information, expertise and feedback on the creation of source code. Here, we address the direction of these knowledge flows among projects throughout social networks and their impact on project success. We identify the roles of membership or contribution that individuals play within projects. We found that connections through contributors who bring their knowledge to the project, improve project success, and that connection through members, who transfer their knowledge towards other projects, enhance project success. Finally, we found that ties through shared membership and contributions hamper project success. The analysis of knowledge flows and their impact on project success imply a translation of returns from investment in social capital, where investment takes the shape of knowledge flows and the returns mean the projects’ diffusion over the network.

Engaging with Social Networks: The Bourdieu-Becker Encounter Revisited

Economic implications of social networks are of great importance and economic motives may well play crucial roles in network formation and dissipation. Although historically speaking the mainstream economics' attention to the subject had rather been limited, in the previous couple of decades, the economics discipline developed its own branch of social network analysis and incorporated in their analysis individuals' networking decisions based on a standard Beckerian cost-benefit calculus. In understanding the scope of this new branch in economics discipline to incorporate social dimensions of the economy, this article aims to bring a Bourdieusian critique toward this approach, given that Bourdieu had been critical to a Beckerian cost-benefit reductionism in decision-making and had himself developed his own approach to social relations.     

Migration,community networks and welfare in neoclassical growth models

This paper proposes a Ramsey-Like model of growth with endogenous migration to study the effects of migration networks on the macroeconomy and welfare of hosting economies. In the model, migration is assumed to be made of two different components: a first, forward-looking component in which the rate of net migration depends on the wage gap between countries; a second, backward-looking component in which in-migration depends on the immigration history of the destination country through the formation of immigrant networking. We find that the model exhibits a unique saddle-path steady-state equilibrium and that introducing pro-immigration policies aimed at enhancing community networks have asymmetric impacts on the welfare level of natives and immigrants that hinge on the relative size of immigrant communities.     

Risk aversion,cooperative membership,and path dependences of smallholder farmers in Ethiopia

Smallholder farmers in Sub‐Saharan Africa often mitigate production risks through cooperative membership: institutionalized arrangements where they pool resources and collectively manage production and marketing chains. Cooperative membership has a significant advantage: it cushions detrimental effects of external forces, placing a premium on a risk‐seeking attitude (experimenting and innovating), which can yield greater accumulation. However, cooperatives are self‐selective institutions: relatively better‐endowed farmers, who are usually less risk‐avoidant than poorer ones (a consequence of their broader material bases), tend to be overrepresented. These two realities complicate the causal assessment of the relationships between risk attitudes, farmers’ socioeconomic status, and cooperative membership that is essential to comprehend the role of cooperatives in local capital accumulation. To help resolve this thorny analytical problem, an experimental study was carried out in eastern Ethiopia—a risky production environment where cooperatives feature prominently and relatively affluent farmers exist alongside poorer ones. It unveils the working of specific path dependences: poorer cooperative members are less risk seeking than nonmembers, but at an interval much less than that observed for affluent farmers. For development policies, this suggests that a greater payoff can be expected from investing in farmers’ material bases than from further improving cooperative membership.