Building the Social Structure of a Market

Abstract

Motivated by the question of how to develop viable new markets and value chains in the resource-constrained settings of least developed countries, we adopted multi-year qualitative methods to examine the intervention of a nongovernmental organization (NGO) in developing the dairy value chain in Bangladesh. Consistent with the theoretical premise that markets and value chains are social orders, we found that the NGO's success relied on building the social structure of a market wherein market participants could negotiate relationships and norms of production and exchange and embed them in practices and technologies. To establish social structure among participants as a means of market building, the NGO acquired relevant knowledge, then used contextual bridging (transferring new meanings, practices and structures into a given context in a way that is sensitive to the norms, practices, knowledge and relationships that exist in that context), brokering relationships along the value chain (facilitating introductions and exchanges between value chain members) and funding experimentation (providing resources to test ideas and assumptions about new market practices). Market participants themselves also contributed to the development of the market's social structure by means of social embedding (building relationships and negotiating norms of exchange and coordination), and material embedding (implementing technologies and practices and integrating market norms into technology). Increased productivity and equity and reduced costs of transactions resulted from the creation of a social structure that, in this case, preceded and enabled the economic structuring of a market rather than the other way around.

International business responses to institutional voids

“…It is argued that such institutional pluralism provides room for discretionary action (Kraatz & Block, 2008). In other words, institutional voids are understood as 'opportunity spaces' for agency (Mair & Martí, 2009;Saka-Helmhout & Geppert, 2011;McKague, Zietsma, & Oliver, 2015;Venkataraman et al, 2016). Given that organization-specific advantages evolve through actively innovating around institutions (Cantwell et al, 2010), rather than through passive countering measures, there is a significant opportunity for IB scholarship to investigate ways in which institutional voids enable market and nonmarket actors to shape and transpose institutions in the pursuit of competitive advantage.…”

Can Environmental Regulations Promote Corporate Environmental Responsibility? Evidence from the Moderated Mediating Effect Model and an Empirical Study in China

“…It is becoming a popular pattern in modern business. So nowadays market competition has been evolved from the primary stage (individual-to-individual pattern) to the senior stage (group-to-group pattern) [62]. Therefore, business managers must set up the idea of altruism and integrate altruistic motivation into corporate culture.…”

Leitura do institucionalismo organizacional a partir da teoria do organizar de Karl Weick

“…It is understood that some studies that have proposed to use variants of institutional thinking in organizations to describe and explain organizational phenomena observed in the so-called developing countries or, as adopted here, in the Global South, ended up incurring in some order of theoretical or argumentative inadequacy, generating partial or selective explanations (MARTÍ and MAIR, 2009;MCKAGUE, ZIESTMA and OLIVER, 2015). We want to argue that, given the partial manifestation of what is understood in classical sociology as the most expressive vectors of the modernization process (secularization and the growing division of work), the enlargement of the sphere of instrumental rationality under the social world has not been observed in the aforementioned countries in the same way as in the case of so-called developed countries or, as recommended here, the Global North.…”