Joint Princeton-Northwestern Junior Scholars' Workshop April 11 - 14, 2002

Some Questions on Embedded Enterprise

A number of the following questions have guided contemporary research on the embedded enterprise and are posited in this workshop. Our intent here is to provide some orientating concerns shared by the disciplines represented by workshop participants in order to elicit discussion in the workshop sessions. Naturally, we do not expect all of the questions to be "answered", and additional questions are certain to be raised. On the other hand, we hope to come together at the end of our sessions with a better sense of the commonalities as well as the differences between our individual projects, all studying some aspect of the embedded enterprise. Ideally, we would depart with a clearer idea of how to proceed with the study of embeddedness - cross-nationally, in a systematic and rigorous fashion - and what utility this endeavor will hold for our individual disciplines. We hope that the questions below therefore provide a starting point for generalizations from the narrower discussion of participants' papers in the plenary and regional sessions.

Descriptions

What defines the so-called "systemness" of the embedded model of capitalism and how does this relate to the literature on "varieties of capitalism"? What are key institutional complementarities? How are power relations within organizational fields structured by the embedding of enterprise activities, and vice versa? What are the descriptive dimensions of embeddedness? For example, does a single scale of embeddedness of economic organizations exist? Through what factors (e.g., social, political, cultural) and by what measures do we assess embeddedness?

Utility

What is the utility of examining economies using the concept of "embedded enterprise"? That is, what is the explanatory, predictive, and perhaps prescriptive power of this approach? For example, under what conditions should firms embed or dis-embed? Conversely, to what extent are entrepreneurial and innovative activities dependent upon transcending organizational embeddedness in institutional environments? Further, under what conditions do economic organizations affect fundamental transformations in the institutional context within which they are embedded?

Variations

What are the variations across economies of institutional and other types of embeddedness? Do national level differences have the greatest respective effect on the actual nature of forms of embeddedness? Or rather, do sub-national (regional, district) differences matter most to the day-to-day operations of enterprises? What matters at each level of analysis? That is, are particular types of embeddedness associated with distinct levels? How does globalization affect embeddedness? For example, are certain sub-national agglomerations of firms becoming more alike across nations than like other agglomerations within nations?

Antecedents

What insights do area/regional studies bring to the analysis of embedded enterprise? To what extent have area studies presaged (or lagged behind) some of the theoretical discussions on embeddedness in broader social science? Given the earlier focus on the embeddedness of enterprise in literatures on non-Anglo-Saxon economies, what can this body of research tell us about the functioning of varieties of markets and enterprises? Is research on embeddedness primarily in the domain of (area, industry, local) specialists or are the contributions of these specialists generalizable at a more theoretical level?