Invisible Hands, Russian Experience, and Social Science
Approaches to Understanding Systemic Failure

This book investigates cases in which national and international activities have gone massively wrong, entailing seriously negative consequences.

Stefan Hedlund (Author)

9781107627819, Cambridge University Press

Paperback / softback, published 11 July 2013

324 pages
22.9 x 15.2 x 1.8 cm, 0.48 kg

'This is a stimulating contribution to the discourse about systemic failures of recent years and an overdue and substantiated call to balance accounts between current history, economics, and sociology.' Heinrich Vogel, Former Director, Federal Institute for Soviet and East European Studies, Cologne

This book investigates cases in which national and international activities have gone massively wrong, entailing seriously negative consequences, and in which the sophisticated analytical models of social science have ceased to be helpful. Illustrations range from the global financial crisis to the failure to achieve speedy systemic change in the former Soviet Union and the failure to achieve development in the Third World. The analysis uses as a backdrop long-term Russian history and short-term Russian encounters with unrestrained capitalism to develop a framework that is based in the so-called new institutionalism. Understanding the causes of systemic failure is shown to require an approach that spans across the increasingly specialized subdisciplines of modern social science. Demonstrating that increasing theoretical sophistication has been bought at the price of a loss of perspective and the need for sensitivity to the role of cultural and historical specificity, the book pleads the case for a new departure in seeking to model the motives for human action.

Preface
Introduction
1. Opportunity and self-interest
2. Scope and tradition of social science
3. Markets under central planning
4. Russia's historical legacy
5. Markets everywhere
6. Institutional choice
7. History matters
8. Concluding discussion
9. Implications for social science.

Subject Areas: International business [KJK], Economic history [KCZ], Political economy [KCP], International economics [KCL]