ABSTRACT
In economic sociology’s flourishing research program, institutional fields, industry formation and transformation, interorganizational networks, and intraindustry status orders are all seen as central to understanding economic action and the ways it varies. Recent theoretical syntheses by White (2002) and Fligstein (2001) emphasize the constitution of markets and industries in “common discourses” or “conceptions of control.” Within macrolevel conditions—state policy and law, and global economic relations—numerous studies are now pointing to two general classes of mechanisms in the formation, maintenance, and transformation of markets and industries: networks and culture (i.e., trust, identities, discourses, cognitive frameworks, and status orders). However, while the case study evidence for these types of mechanisms is strong, routine institutionalized processes for producing networks and culture for industries and markets have received less attention, with the majority of studies focusing on the aggregated actions of firms—even though the importance of such processes was suggested long ago by DiMaggio and Powell (1991), who imply that institutional sites, not simply economic actors, are important routine producers of interorganizational networks and industry culture.
