Polycentricity, Markets & Firms
WINIR Workshop on
Polycentricity, Markets & Firms
8-9 December 2021
Markets have been associated with polycentricity since Michael Polanyi formulated the concept, and this connection was at the heart of the Bloomington School’s analysis of competition in public service industries. Despite this long history, markets have received surprisingly limited attention by scholars of polycentricity during its renaissance over the past 20 years. And in the course of this renaissance, very little attention has focused on firms and other kinds of corporate entities.
The aim of the WINIR Workshop on Polycentricity, Markets and Firms was to advance concepts related to polycentricity (multiple decision-making centres, patterns of competitive and cooperative interactions, overarching set of norms and rules, multiplicity of evaluative criteria, and so on) to address conceptual and empirical questions pertaining to both the design and evolution of markets and the nature and governance of firms. The workshop addressed more general questions related to the scope and limits of centralization and decentralization in market economies.
The workshop was open to all and took place online (Zoom).
Organizers: Dustin Garrick (dustin.garrick@uwaterloo.ca) and David Gindis (d.gindis@herts.ac.uk).
Click the paper titles for abstracts and author bios.
Wednesday 8 December 2021
13:30-13:40 GMT
Welcome, Dustin Garrick (University of Waterloo, Canada) & David Gindis (University of Hertfordshire, UK)
13:40-15:00 GMT
Session 1 – The Challenge of Polycentricity
Chair: David Gindis
Dan Cole (University of Indiana Bloomington, USA), “Problems for Polycentric Governance Theory“
Dmitry Ismagilov (King’s College London, UK), “Degrees of Polycentricity, or How Polycentric Can a Governance Regime Be? The Case of the Village Communities in the Russian Empire after the Emancipation”
15:10-16:30 GMT
Session 2 – Polycentricity and Comparative Institutional Analysis
Chair: Pavel Kuchar
Sarah Moore (George Mason University, USA), “Systems of Anarchy: Analyzing the Dynamics of Violence and Coercion within Opposite Institutional Contexts“
Vlad Tarko (University of Arizona, USA), “Polycentric Status Contests“
16:40-18:00 GMT
Session 3 – Polycentricity and Market Institutions
Chair: Dustin Garrick
Pavel Kuchar (King’s College London, UK), “Why Should We Care About the Joint Production of Instruments of Interpretation?“
Erwin Dekker (George Mason University, USA), “How to Draw Boundaries Around Markets: A Knowledge Commons Perspective“
18:00-18:30 GMT
Session 4 – Networking
Thursday 9 December 2021
13:40-15:00 GMT
Session 5 – Polycentricity, Markets and the Environmental Commons
Chair: Dan Cole
Hita Unnikrishnan (University of Sheffield, UK) & Harini Nagendra (Azim Premji University, India), “Polycentricity, Perception, and Markets: Governance of Blue Urban Commons in Colonial Mysore“
Dustin Garrick (University of Waterloo, Canada), “Many Visible Hands: How Polycentric Governance Shapes the Evolution of Water Markets“
15:10-16:30 GMT
Session 6 – Polycentricity and the Firm
Chair: Dustin Garrick
Per Bylund (Oklahoma State University, USA), “Market Pioneership and the Firm as Decentralized Production“
David Gindis (University of Hertfordshire, UK), Pavel Kuchar (King’s College London, UK) & Dan Cole (University of Indiana Bloomington, USA), “Toward a Polycentric Perspective on the Business Corporation“
16:40-18:00 GMT
Session 7 – Discussion: Taking Stock, Looking Ahead
Chair: David Gindis