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concept of ‘instituted economic process’ with the other and more widely adopted Polanyan legacy of ‘embeddedness’, the chapter explores competition as an instituted economic process in five dimensions: the co-institution of competitive processes and markets; relations of power and mutual dependence between classes of economic agent; the formation of units of competition; the formation of scales of competition; and the development of formal and informal norms of competition. The chapter then provides an exemplification of this analytical framework through a schematic
2009, loans accounted for 75 per cent of their balance sheets, and trading assets had an extremely limited role. Fair value accounting on either the balance sheet or the income statement does not apply to loans held for investment or loans held to maturity. As far as the available-for-sale securities are concerned, these are subject to fair value accounting but changes in value are only reported in ‘other comprehensive income’, if the bank can claim that it has the intent and ability to hold the assets until prices recover, so that the losses can be classed as
controversy about the emerging market for kidneys and ova, or about the decriminalisation of prostitution and drugs. This already is a lengthy and diverse list of areas where the appropriate role of market and non-market modes of governance is under dispute. But let me stress their common properties. They all involve a particular class of goods or services that do or arguably should show up in the GNP accounts, because they employ scant resources to meet particular kinds of human needs. And they all involve disputes about the appropriate structure of governance, that is
the ways in which it can be governed more effectively. Here Nelson identifies three broad classes of argument to facilitate a judgement of the proper scope of markets. The first is the familiar economists’ class of market failure suitably Introduction 7 bolstered to reflect the fact that the strength of markets is not typically to be found in their efficiency at allocating given resources but rather in their adaptivity to unforeseen change and in their openness to innovative activity. The second concerns the role of the state in taking responsibility for the
, have co-operated in their productive activities. It is also entirely unsurprising that given the specific historical origins of capitalism in competition in early markets and expropriation of land there arose a class of people unable to produce for themselves and hence obliged to produce under the direction of others. The existence of firms is not a puzzle. What would be deeply puzzling would be precisely a market economy of individual commodity producers instead of firms. (It could be objected that it is naive to take the idea of markets producing things as anything
resolved through the exchange of knowledge which is embodied in goods and services? To do so immediately raises questions about the design of goods and services and also about the arrangements for exchange – or, in other words, about the working of markets. These are not necessarily distinct questions, for as Marshall (1919, p. 181) observed, [p]roduction and marketing are parts of the single process of adjustment of supply to demand. The division between them is on lines which are seldom sharply defined: the lines vary from one class of business to another, and each is
). Critics of post-modern and late modernity perspectives (for example, Warde, 1994, 1997; Gronow and Warde, 2001) have been correct in pointing to enduring continuities and routinisations of consumption, commodities and status/class in everyday life, and even to a lack of anxiety or even reflexivity in much mundane consumption. Nonetheless, even that takes place against a backdrop of flux and destabilisation. The situation is probably best described in terms of Simmel’s dynamics of objective and subjective culture: modern subjects, confronting an explosive objective
, intermediation has been provided by ‘market traders’, specialists in the provision of particular classes of good and service. That is still the case in many markets today, especially where the specification of the relevant goods or services is complicated. Traders accumulate the requisite knowledge and reap the economies of scale and scope that follow from turning that knowledge into flows of information valuable to consumers and producers. However, the relevant information involves more than the details of what is available and on what terms. As Casson (1982) usefully
in cash. Their own analyses showed that these instruments did not have the value Lehman assigned to them. Lehman's methodology for the valuation of its assets The Examiner's first step was to evaluate the reasonableness of Lehman's mark-to-market valuations, in two distinct but related contexts. The first was to consider whether there was enough evidence to show that Lehman's valuations were ‘unreasonable’ for a particular asset class, such that ‘the court could adjust, or even disregard, such valuations in determining the
, combines networking and optical technologies. Each of the companies, however, specialises in a distinctive technological capability and uses open-system architecture. Principals in nine of eleven of the startups had been employed at Cascade (Zizza, Pelczar and Eisenmann, 1999). Several principals had worked at the Advanced Network Group of MIT’s Lincoln Laboratory, at Motorola/Codex, and at DEC. The examples of data-storage equipment and telecommunications switching equipment are leading cases. But they represent a large class of business enterprise genealogies in which