The DOI matches its Crossref record; 24 of the 24 references it cites were found in a registry or an index.
Cultural Beliefs and the Organization of Society: A Historical and Theoretical Reflection on Collectivist and Individualist Societies
Abstract
Lacking an appropriate theoretical framework, economists and economic historians have paid little attention to the relations between culture and institutional structure. This limits the ability to address a question that seems to be at the heart of developmental failures: Why do societies fail to adopt the institutional structure of more economically successful ones? This paper integrates game-theoretical and sociological concepts to conduct a comparative historical analysis of the relations between culture and institutional structure. It examines cultural factors that have led two premodern societies--one from the Muslim world and the other from the Latin world--to evolve along distinct trajectories of institutional structure. It indicates the theoretical importance of culture in determining institutional structures, in leading to their path dependence, and in forestalling successful intersociety adoption of institutions. Since the distinct institutional structures found in the late medieval period resemble those differentiating contemporary developing and developed economies, the paper suggests the historical importance of distinct cultures in economic development.
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Cites
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Cited by
HISTORICAL INSTITUTIONALISM IN COMPARATIVE POLITICS
Thelen, K. (1999) · Annual Review of Political Science · doi:10.1146/annurev.polisci.2.1.369 · Cited by 3,409
Toward a new economics of science
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Third-party punishment and social norms
Fehr, E., & Fischbacher, U. (2004) · Evolution and Human Behavior · doi:10.1016/s1090-5138(04)00005-4 · Cited by 2,417
Culture: An Empirical Investigation of Beliefs, Work, and Fertility
Fernández, R., & Fogli, A. (2009) · American Economic Journal: Macroeconomics · doi:10.1257/mac.1.1.146 · Cited by 1,264
Djankov, S., Glaeser, E., La Porta, R., Lopez-de-Silanes, F., & Shleifer, A. (2003) · Journal of Comparative Economics · doi:10.1016/j.jce.2003.08.005 · Cited by 1,204
Metadata
- Authors
- Greif, A.
- Venue
- Journal of Political Economy
- Publisher
- University of Chicago Press
- Published
- 1994-10
- Volume
- 102
- Issue
- 5
- Pages
- 912-950
- ISSN
- 0022-3808 (ISSN-L)
- 1537-534X
- OpenAlex
- W2034606455
- Cited by
- 2,384
- References
- 24
- FWCI
- 61.74
- Type
- journal article
- Language
- en
- Open access
- closed
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- Greif, A. (1994). Cultural Beliefs and the Organization of Society: A Historical and Theoretical Reflection on Collectivist and Individualist Societies. Journal of Political Economy. https://doi.org/10.1086/261959
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Contains information from the Semantic Scholar Academic Graph Datasets, made available under the ODC Attribution License (ODC-BY 1.0).
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