Contributors ix
List of Illustrations xiii
List of Tables xvii
Acknowledgments xix
Chapter 1 The Problem of Emergence

John F. Padgett and Walter W. Powell 1
Part I Autocatalysis 31

• Chapter 2 Autocatalysis in Chemistry and the Origin of Life
  John F. Padgett 33


• Chapter 3 Economic Production as Chemistry II
  John F. Padgett, Peter McMahan, and Xing Zhong 70


• Chapter 4 From Chemical to Social Networks
  John F. Padgett 92

• Chapter 5 The Emergence of Corporate Merchant-Banks in Dugento Tuscany
  John F. Padgett 121


• Chapter 6 Transposition and Refunctionality: The Birth of Partnership Systems in Renaissance Florence
  John F. Padgett 168


• Chapter 7 Country as Global Market: Netherlands, Calvinism, and the Joint-Stock Company
  John F. Padgett 208


• Chapter 8 Conflict Displacement and Dual Inclusion in the Construction of Germany
  Jonathan Obert and John F. Padgett 235

• Chapter 9 The Politics of Communist Economic Reform: Soviet Union and China
  John F. Padgett 271


• Chapter 10 Deviations from Design: The Emergence of New Financial Markets and Organizations in Yeltsin's Russia
  Andrew Spicer 316


• Chapter 11 The Emergence of the Russian Mobile Telecom Market: Local Technical Leadership and Global Investors in a Shadow of the State
  Valery Yakubovich and Stanislav Shekshnia 334


• Chapter 12 Social Sequence Analysis: Ownership Networks, Political Ties, and Foreign Investment in Hungary
  David Stark and Balázs Vedres 347

• Chapter 13 Chance, Nécessité, et Naïveté: Ingredients to Create a New Organizational Form
  Walter W. Powell and Kurt Sandholtz 379


• Chapter 14 Organizational and Institutional Genesis: The Emergence of High-Tech Clusters in the Life Sciences
  Walter W. Powell, Kelley Packalen, and Kjersten Whittington 434


• Chapter 15 An Open Elite: Arbiters, Catalysts, or Gatekeepers in the Dynamics of Industry Evolution?
  Walter W. Powell and Jason Owen-Smith 466


• Chapter 16 Academic Laboratories and the Reproduction of Proprietary Science: Modeling Organizational Rules through Autocatalytic Networks
  Jeannette A. Colyvas and Spiro Maroulis 496


• Chapter 17 Why the Valley Went First: Aggregation and Emergence in Regional Inventor Networks
  Lee Fleming, Lyra Colfer, Alexandra Marin, and Jonathan McPhie 520


• Chapter 18 Managing the Boundaries of an "Open" Project
  Fabrizio Ferraro and Siobhán O'Mahony 545


• Coda: Reflections on the Study of Multiple Networks
  Walter W. Powell and John F. Padgett 566

A dynamic framework for studying social emergence
The social sciences have sophisticated models of choice and equilibrium but little understanding of the emergence of novelty. Where do new alternatives, new organizational forms, and new types of people come from? Combining biochemical insights about the origin of life with innovative and historically oriented social network analyses, John Padgett and Walter Powell develop a theory about the emergence of organizational, market, and biographical novelty from the coevolution of multiple social networks. They demonstrate that novelty arises from spillovers across intertwined networks in different domains. In the short run actors make relations, but in the long run relations make actors.
This theory of novelty emerging from intersecting production and biographical flows is developed through formal deductive modeling and through a wide range of original historical case studies. Padgett and Powell build on the biochemical concept of autocatalysis-the chemical definition of life-and then extend this autocatalytic reasoning to social processes of production and communication. Padgett and Powell, along with other colleagues, analyze a very wide range of cases of emergence. They look at the emergence of organizational novelty in early capitalism and state formation; they examine the transformation of communism; and they analyze with detailed network data contemporary science-based capitalism: the biotechnology industry, regional high-tech clusters, and the open source community.

John F. Padgett is professor of political science and (by courtesy) professor of sociology and history at the University of Chicago. Walter W. Powell is professor of education and (by courtesy) professor of sociology, organizational behavior, management science, communication, and public policy at Stanford University.