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In this chapter, the authors examine trust and social networks among entrepreneurs operating in a developing market context. At the centre of this study, trust emerges from the interplay of a range of cultural-specific factors, each of which describes how social relations shape economic action. Using case studies of exporting Nigerian small and medium sized enterprises, the authors document how exporting arrangements are enforced across West African markets. Interview data reveal how entrepreneurs take advantage of indigenous trust-based relationships to enforce exporting agreements. It is clear that exporting activities are shaped by trust and networks of kinship and market associations that permeate the West African region. This chapter facilitates a better understanding of trust and the range of indigenous relationships that underpin exporting activities in Nigeria and particularly across West Africa.

We focus on the internal workings of a university organization’s response to institutional plurality. In the field of higher education, both organizations and individuals are prescribed competing demands due to academic logic and the logic of managerialism. We interpret six individual experiences of institutional plurality and illuminate how social position, disposition, emotions, and apprehension regarding plurality affect their response to shifting emphases in the logics of the university. In addition, we show that although there may appear to be harmony in the organizational-level response to institutional plurality, turmoil may be affecting the organization’s members, highlighting the importance of looking at how people experience institutional logic multiplicity.

Recent research develops theory and evidence to understand how organizations come to be seen as “actors” with specified features and properties, a core concern for phenomenological institutionalism. The authors use evidence from changes in research designs in the organizational study of institutional logics as an empirical strategy to add fresh evidence to the debates about the institutional construction of organizations as actors. The case is the research literature on the institutional logics perspective, a literature in which organizational and institutional theorists grapple with long-time social theory questions about nature and context of action and more contemporary debates about the dynamics of social orders. With rapid growth since the early 1990s, this research program has elaborated and proliferated in ways meant to advance the study of societal orders, frames, and practices in diverse inter- and intra-organizational contexts. The study identifies two substantive trends over the observation period: A shift in research design from field-level studies to organization-specific contexts, where conflicts are prominent in the organization, and a shift in the conception of logic transitions, originally from one dominant logic to another, then more attention to co-existence or blending of logics. Based on this evidence, the authors identify a typology of four available research genres that mark a changed conception of organizations as actors. The case of institutional logics makes visible the link between research designs and research outcomes, and it provides new evidence for the institutional processes that construct organizational actorhood.

Social class has long existed in tension with other forms of social difference such as race, gender, and sexuality, both in academic and popular debate. While Marxist-influenced class primacy perspectives gained prominence in US sociology in the 1970s, they faded from view by the 1990s, replaced by perspectives focusing on culture and institutions or on intersectional analyses of how multiple forms of social difference shape durable patterns of disempowerment and marginalization. More recently, class and capitalism have reasserted their place on the academic agenda, but continue to coexist uneasily with analyses of oppression and social difference. Here we discuss possibilities for bridging the gap between studies of class and other forms of social difference. We contend that these categories are best understood in relation to each other when situated in a larger system with its own endogenous dynamics and tendencies, namely capitalism. After providing an historical account of the fraught relationship between studies of class and other forms of social difference, we propose a theoretical model for integrating understandings of class and social difference using Wright et al.‘s concept of dynamic asymmetry. This shifts us away from discussions of which factors are most important in general toward concrete discussions of how these factors interact in particular cases and processes. We contend that class and other forms of social difference should not be studied primarily as traits embodied in individuals, but rather with respect to how these differences are organized in relation to each other within a framework shaped by the dynamics of capitalist development.

Macroeconomic shocks such as the recent global economic crisis can have far-reaching effects on the levels and the distribution of resources at the individual and the household levels. A recession associated with a labor market downturn and turbulent property and financial markets gives rise to significant and widespread losses for workers and households. Identifying the likely pattern of losses is, however, not straightforward. This is especially the case at the outset of a severe recession, when up-to-date information about current household circumstances is patchy, and economic conditions are subject to rapid change.

The paper discusses various important issues of development aid in the context of the emerging new landscape for Official Development Assistance (ODA) and in particular how aid effectiveness issues are now perceived in a world of scaled-up aid. The paper also discusses the overall nexus between aid, growth and domestic policies in aid-recipient countries by reflecting on the relevant ongoing debate in this area. A substantial part of the paper is devoted to the discussion of the central issues involved in development aid, particularly in connection with recent calls in the international development community for scaling-up aid so that the Millennium Development Goals can be attained, as well as the challenging new policy agenda in this regard.