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This chapter claims that there are characteristics of the institutional structure of some indigenous societies that in some cases prevent economic development by complicating the emergence of extra-family networks (social capital), and the transition from personal to impersonal exchange; this is illustrated in the context of the Wayúu people from the Guajira Peninsula of Colombia. They have a strong tradition of craft production, which has changed much in recent years due to exigencies of Wayúu and non-Wayúu consumers. Foreign elements, such as commercial brands, are commonly included today in their traditional crafts, sometimes even replacing conventional motifs. However, artisans behave strategically – selling different designs to different markets. The main economic difficulties of the Wayúu artisans are related to the lack of commercialization of their products. From an institutional analysis perspective, the absence of extra-family social and commercial networks in locations relatively far from markets, it is argued, is one of the factors explaining these problems. It is suggested also that the promotion of cooperatives should be attempted from the bottom-up given the particular legal characteristics of this society.

Those who know it, believe it

Those who don’t know it, don’t believe it

We who know, believe it

– Old Wayúu proverb

This paper aims to discuss the important and changing role of personal networks for transformation in Russia, and the related challenges for management. Formal institutions supporting the transformation to a market economy have been weak and Russian managers still tend to rely on personal networks. While these networks are important in all economies, they play a different role in full‐fledged market economies than in planned economies.

The paper is conceptual and is based on literature on the nature of markets, the Soviet planned economy, and the transformation process in Russia. A business network approach is used to understand markets and focus on the dynamics of overlapping business and personal networks.

Overlapping between business networks involving non‐Russian networks and between personal and business networks are important drivers of transformation. The challenges for management in Russia are both organizational and strategic, and transformation implies substantial changes in the network structures.

The authors recommend further empirical analysis of the role that the overlapping of business and personal networks plays in transformation, as well as its managerial implications.

This paper shows why firms must build business relationships during transformation that are integrated in nature and in which personal relations support the technical, logistical, financial, and knowledge exchange dimensions.

This paper challenges the dominating view of transformation, which says that market exchange is transactional, impersonal, and competition‐driven. The paper analyzes transformation in Russia as a network overlapping process in which the role of personal relations changes.

By drawing on ethnographic fieldwork conducted amongst waste-pickers and recycling traders in the waste paper, plastic and scrap metal sectors, and engaging with literature from economic anthropology and history, as well as archival sources, this paper documents changing perceptions of just price, morality and fairness in the Turkish recycling market. The paper suggests that multiple markets imply multiple prices, which are contingent and contested. When dealing with price mechanisms largely outside their control, actors tend to associate a fair price with the going market price, rather than factors such as state regulation. Approaches to morality and assessments of fairness become more ambiguous when prices are mediated by actors’ own practices. These range from gift relations to paternalism, envy and deception.

Trust is a binding force in most buyer‐supplier transactions. It is critical when uncertainty and asymmetric product information are present in the transaction of a supply chain. One of the important characteristics in developing trust among trading partners of an e‐enabled supply chain is stage‐wise trust development among partners. In the present work, alternatives for trust development among buyer and supplier have been identified. In order to evaluate the alternatives to evolve trust in an e‐enabled supply chain, a framework involving analytic networked process is proposed. It helps in synthesizing various characteristics of trust in the e‐enabled supply chain. For the illustrative example, the result indicates superiority of a community responsibility system for building on‐line trust along the e‐enabled supply chain.

The purpose of this paper is to examine how ethical leadership and empowering leadership are related to leader‐member exchange relations (LMX), affective commitment, and leader effectiveness.

Data were collected using questionnaires filled out by 259 subordinates of public and private sector managers. Relationships among variables were analyzed using structural equation modeling.

The results indicated that ethical leadership and empowering leadership have positive associations with LMX, subordinate affective commitment, and perception of leader effectiveness.

This study is the first to examine the independent and joint relationships of empowering leadership and ethical leadership with leadership effectiveness and the mediating role of LMX.

Purpose – How did cooperation emerge in large-scale, fluid societies? Standard theories based on direct and indirect reciprocity among self-regarding agents cannot explain the high level of impersonal exchange observed in developed market economies.

Approach and findings – Drawing upon recent research from across the behavioral sciences, we attribute the emergence of cooperation in early trade to an evolved characteristic of human psychology that makes revenge sweet: people are willing to pay a price to punish those who betray their trust. Once cooperative expectations became fixed, institutions such as the law merchant and ethnic trading networks, as well as certain “bourgeois virtues,” helped sustain and extend trade during the medieval period.

Contribution of the paper – Our argument continues the tradition begun by F.A. Hayek in The Sensory Order (1952), by providing an integrated explanation for the rise of the market based upon the coevolution of human psychology, culture, and institutions. In our conclusion, we revisit Hayek's (Hayek, 1976, 1978, 1988) analysis of the conflict between our instincts and the institutions that have created the market order.

This chapter highlights the agency of Nigerian immigrant business owners in constructing their business-related social networks. Literature on immigrant business owners emphasizes their social network embeddedness as a key explanatory factor in their economic integration. I show here ways in which members of one immigrant group purposely shape these networks into the most advantageous form: impersonal/socially distant suppliers, personal/socially close employees, and impersonal/socially distant customers.

Data for the chapter come from 36 semistructured qualitative interviews conducted in New York City with Nigerian small business owners and participant observation in their businesses.

Nigerian immigrant business owners in New York tend over time to shift from business networks of primarily Nigerian or other socially close suppliers, employees, and customers, to networks of mainly socially close employees, and socially distant suppliers and customers.

The chapter’s concern is limited to Nigerian immigrant business owners in New York City. Others in other places may behave differently.

The literature on immigrant business owners is dominated by Asian and Latin American examples while this chapter features the experiences of Nigerian immigrants. It also presents a group that does not fit the widely accepted disadvantage hypothesis of immigrant self-employment. Finally, where many studies treat social networks as static structures, this chapter emphasizes the agency of immigrants in altering the composition of their networks to maximize their position in it.

The purpose of this paper is to report on one high school English‐language‐learner's (ELL) breadth and depth of vocabulary as he communicated with his teacher through e‐mail across geographic boundaries for over 18 months.

The authors began by separating 358 e‐mails into three time periods (first beginning, second middle, and third end) to calculate breadth using lexical density (type‐token ratios). Then, we sampled e‐mails based on personal and impersonal topics within these time periods and linguistically analyzed them for lexical cohesion, semantic usage, and derivational morphology. Interviews with participants before and after the analysis served as member checks.

The quantitative results showed a steady improvement in the breadth of the student's vocabulary over time. Qualitative analyses revealed four major uses of vocabulary within the context of e‐mail and the teacher‐student relationship.

Given our findings, we offer educators insights into ELL strategies and vocabulary assessment, not only with e‐mail but in all written communication.

A social writing tool like e‐mail can be useful for learning English in a safe, non‐threatening environment. Moreover, a trusting social relationship between communicators that develops over time can expedite the language learning process.

Very few studies have looked at the strategic ways ELL students use vocabulary to learn English through e‐mailing.

This paper explores the interface between institutional theory and Austrian theory. We examine mainstream institutionalism as exemplified by D. C. North in his work with Wallis and Weingast on the elite compact theory of social order and of transitions to impersonal rights, and propose instead an Austrian process-oriented perspective. We argue that mainstream institutionalism does not fully account for the efficiency of impersonal rules. Their efficiency can be better explained by a market for rules, which in turn requires a stable plurality of governance providers. Since an equilibrium of plural providers requires stable power polycentricity, the implication goes against consolidating organized means for violence as a doorstep condition to successful transitions. The paper demonstrates how to employ Ostroms’ Bloomington School Institutionalism to shift, convert, and recalibrate mainstream institutionalism's themes into an Austrian process-oriented theory.

Although social exchange theory has long been used to explain employees’ positive work attitudes in response to perceived investment in employee development (PIED), few studies have examined this theoretical mechanism by introducing a direct measure of social exchange between employees and their personified organization. Furthermore, most studies have focused solely on one type of exchange (i.e. social exchange) and have ignored another type of exchange characterized as economic exchange. The purpose of this paper is therefore to uncover the process by which PIED affects employees’ attitudes, including affective organizational commitment and job satisfaction, by examining the mediating roles of both social and economic exchanges.

To test the hypothesized mediating model, this study conducted a three-phase, time-lagged questionnaire survey and collected data from 545 full-time employees. The model was tested based on structural equation modeling with a bootstrap test of indirect effects.

In line with social exchange theory, the findings showed that social exchange perceptions positively mediated the relationships between PIED and affective commitment/job satisfaction, whereas economic exchange perceptions negatively mediated them. Additionally, social and economic exchange perceptions were found to partially mediate the relationship between PIED and affective commitment but fully mediate the relationship between PIED and job satisfaction.

These results suggest that employers would benefit from investing in employee development, provided workers see the training investment as the employer’s side of social exchange, which in turn leads to increased affective commitment and job satisfaction. When employers do not achieve the expected returns from the training investment, they should check not only hard data (e.g. training attendance rate, hours of training, etc.) but also soft data (e.g. employees’ perceptions of training investment, social exchange, etc.) by conducting employee surveys and communicating with line managers.

The main contribution of this study is that it provides important empirical support for social exchange theory in the context of organizational training investment and employees’ attitudinal outcomes, by directly testing the positive mediating role of social exchange and the negative role of economic exchange.