"From Invisible Hand to Visible Hand: Platform Governance and Institutional Logics of Independent Mac Application Developers, 2001-2012"

2014 ◽  
Vol 2014 (1) ◽  
pp. 14385
Author(s):  
Yixin Qiu ◽  
Il-Horn Hann ◽  
Anand Gopal
2021 ◽  
pp. 191-225
Author(s):  
Marina Yue Zhang ◽  
Mark Dodgson ◽  
David M. Gann

This chapter analyses the different institutional logics surrounding China’s innovation machine, including the ‘visible hand’ of the state and ‘invisible hand’ of the market. The idea of innovation in China resulting from centralized decisions in government is shown to be a myth; instead, it results from the interaction of initial bottom-up innovations and subsequent top-down direction, support, or correction. The cultural roots of China’s multiple institutional logics are explained, including the role of hierarchy, the tolerance of ambiguity, and the search for unity. Balance is sought within Chinese bureaucracies, between central and local governments, and between formal and informal authority. The chapter analyses Chinese policy frameworks for science and technology, innovation, intellectual property, education and talent, environment, industry, and the reform of state-owned enterprises. A case study of the car industry is provided, focusing particularly on how policy instruments are used to encourage carmakers to capitalize on the opportunities presented by the new technology trajectory of new energy vehicles.


Author(s):  
Viktor J. Vanberg

The purpose of this chapter is to take a closer look at the relation between the invisible hand paradigm that is at the heart of economists’ theoretical outlook at markets and its “visible hand” counterpart, the social contract paradigm as a theory of government. It is argued that in its generalized interpretation as an individualistic model of organized collective action the social contract paradigm consistently complements the invisible hand paradigm as an individualistic theory of spontaneous social order. What Hayek has referred to as “the two kinds of order,” spontaneous order and corporate order, can thus be accounted for within one coherent individualistic theoretical framework.


2005 ◽  
Vol 26 (12) ◽  
pp. 1885-1907 ◽  
Author(s):  
Stefano Brusoni

This paper builds upon current research into the organizational implications of ‘modularity’. Advocates of modularity argue that the ‘invisible hand’ of markets is reaching activities previously controlled through the visible hand of hierarchies. This paper argues that there are cognitive limits to the extent of division of labour: what kinds of problems firms solve, and how they solve them, set limits to the extent of division of labour, irrespective of the extent of the market. This paper analyses the cognitive limits to the division of labour, relying on an in-depth case study of engineering design activities. On this basis, it explains why coordinating increasingly specialized bodies of knowledge, and increasingly distributed learning processes, requires the presence of knowledge-integrating firms even in the presence of modular products. Such firms, relying on their wide in-house scientific and technological capabilities, have the ‘authority’ to identify, propose and implement solutions to complex problems. In so doing, they coordinate networks of suppliers of both components and specialized competencies.


1989 ◽  
Vol 24 (4) ◽  
pp. 391-400 ◽  
Author(s):  
Giovanni Sartori

MY SENSE OF OUR TIME IS OF A GROWING GAP BETWEEN THE good society that we seek and the ways and means of achieving it. As I have put it,Knowledge becomes more and more the problem as politics becomes more and more complicated. The growing complexity of the world of politics . . . results not only from increasing and global interdependencies, but from the very expansion of the sphere of politics. The more the visible hand and political engineering displace the invisible hand of automatic adjustments (and maladjustments), and the more politics enters everywhere, the less we are in control of what we are doing.And my conclusion repeats: ‘We are . . . living above and beyond our intelligence, above our grasp of what we are doing. The more we engage in remaking the body politic, the more I am struck by the uneasy feeling that we are apprentice sorcerers’.


2007 ◽  
Vol 2 (3) ◽  
pp. 317-325 ◽  
Author(s):  
CALUM PATON

Abstract:As England (unlike the rest of the UK) retreads the market route in health policy, it is worth asking two questions. Firstly, is the government right that the ‘new market’ (as it refuses to call it, except in private seminars) is fundamentally different from the 1990s’ internal market which New Labour allegedly abolished in 1997? Secondly, given that the new market is clearly not characterized by the invisible hand, should we characterize it as steered ‘economically’ by a visible (facilitating) hand, on the one hand, or managed ‘politically’ by a fist which would like to remain invisible in order to maintain its power? This article goes on to examine choice in the new NHS with reference to Hirschman (1970), arguing that genuflections to the latter by pro-choice advocates such as Le Grand (2003) are just that – genuflections. Hirschman is used as a taxi by which to reach a desired destination rather than a stimulus to critical reflection, Hirschman-style, upon how ‘exit’, ‘voice’, and particular combinations of ‘exit’ and ‘voice’ may produce perverse outcomes.


Author(s):  
Valery Yakubovich ◽  
Stanislav Shekshnia

This chapter features a case study of the emergence of the cellular phone industry in Moscow and St. Petersburg. These are local stories about how fragments of the old Communist state—in particular traditional telecoms and a military research lab, both of which had highly qualified engineers—mostly successfully reached out to foreign partners to jointly found six new cellular companies. These are the types of stories that Gorbachev promised but too rarely delivered. This chapter confirms the basic message of the previous chapter that “market formation” in post-Communist Russia was not the spontaneous invisible hand of Adam Smith and Friedrich Hayek but instead was the visible-hand emergence of business alliances and groups.


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