Here are some books that I recommend. Martin Pawley, Theory and Design in the Second Machine Age, Oxford: Blackwell, 1990. Architects' writing about architecture is very much affected by the way that architecture and related institutions are organized. Labor is divided among professions in a way that gives architecture an awkwardly small amount to do. In this context Martin Pawley's book is distinctive in that issues of political economy and engineering are fully integrated into the story. His discussions of architecture (and some extent other kinds of design) are located in both institutional and historical context. They are also well-written and full of interesting detail. Neil Fligstein, The Architecture of Markets: An Economic Sociology of Twenty-First Century Capitalist Societies, Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2001. Proponents of markets usually treat them as natural phenomena into which governments intervene, and they treat any discussion of government intervention as a foot in the door to socialism. This made some sense in an era when little intellectual basis existed for reasoning about the relations between markets and government. In the last decade, however, tremendous advances have been made in understanding these relations, particularly by means of studying how markets are embedded in their larger social context. This book by Neil Fligstein presents a theory of the ways that industries and governments routinely collaborate to establish rules that make competition in the industry feasible and routine. Everyone involved is very impressed by the hazards of pure price competition, and they recognize that the very survival of firms and industries depends on shifting competition toward different bases. Fligstein presents an extensive conceptual structure for studying this process in particular cases, and in doing so he greatly extends the already sophisticated project of analyzing firms as part of a social structure. Norman F. Cantor, The Civilization of the Middle Ages, New York: Harper Collins, 1993. This is the finest book I have ever read, a tremendously vivid and learned discussion of the growth of Western civilization from the dark ages to 1500. Cantor's method is deliberately eclectic. He does not organize his book around a single idea but rather assembles a narrative from a vast number of striking insights that could not be summarized. This is a history of civilization in a somewhat old-fashioned sense. Social history is found here and there, but for the most part Cantor's is a story of institutions and ideas. Many of his assertions have a bit of a caustic edge, conveying the sense that he is either a world-class dinner guest or a total jerk. But this is a small thing next to the sheer intelligence of the book. Millions of medieval documents remain unread, and Cantor's story is certain to undergo revision, but for the time being this is just about the finest work of history you will ever encounter. Adrian Johns, The Nature of the Book: Print and Knowledge in the Making, Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1998. This is a detailed account of the rise of the book trade in early modern England. It is probably not the most theoretically ambitious book ever written, but its conceptual structure is capacious enough to organize an incredible number of interesting facts and stories about people and institutions. Johns is particularly interesting on the architecture of the places in which books were distributed and sold, and in which printers and others organized themselves. Printers, not authors, are at the center of the story, and Johns is especially critical of those who treat printers as a simple conduit between authors and readers, or who presuppose a simplistic notion of a "copy", whether of a book or anything else. This book will be particularly interesting to those concerned with the history and current evolution of copyright, given the central role it accords to controversies about copying, and to those concerned with the history of ideas, given Johns' dual emphasis on the reciprocal influence between the institutions of print and ideas about knowledge and the larger world. James Cornford and Neil Pollack, Putting the University Online: Information, Technology and Organizational Change, Buckingham, UK: Open University Press, 2003. This is, to my knowledge, the best book on information technology in the university. It combines case studies with a serious and sensible intellectual perspective, and it opens up numerous original lines of inquiry on topics such as the role of technical standards in the university's evolution as an organization. Whereas much work in this area presupposes a shift from the concrete to the virtual, Cornford and Pollack present a much more complex and realistic story in which notions such as concrete and virtual take on a variety of not-always-obvious meanings that interact in complicated ways. I recommend this book to anyone who is concerned with the role of information technology in the evolution of any institution, and especially of course to those who are concerned with the university and its social purposes. Thomas M. Franck, Fairness in International Law and Institutions, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1995. This is one of the most excellent books that I have read in years. Franck is a scholar of international law, and his central thesis is that the world's people have a growing entitlement to democratic forms of government. His analysis is particularly strong on the ways in which different areas of law accrete and become intertwined, so that an entitlement such as democratic government can emerge by slow steps and become practically irreversible. His central theme is that of fairness, or equity, and he traces the evolution and embedding of particular constructions of this theme in various overlapping and interacting areas of law. Neither a formalist account of rules nor a wholly contextualized social account of their emergence, Francks' book is an argument with a single clear architecture that gathers momentum page by page. It is relevant not only to law but to the evolution of all institutions, to the extent that institutions are founded on the accretion of rules. end
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