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Part I INSTITUTIONAL CHANGE AND STABILITY Organizations and their entr epreneurs engage in purposive activity and in that r ole are the agents of, and shape the dir ection of, institutional change. —Douglass C. North, Institutions, Institutional Change and Economic Performance (1990: 73) In neoclassical economics, equilibrium is the r eigning paradigm. Individual strategies ar e assumed to be optimal given expectations, and expectations ar e assumed to be justif ed given the evidence. We [evolutionar y theorists], too, ar e interested in equilibrium, but we insist that equilibrium can be understood only within a dynamic framework that explains how it comes about (if in fact it does). Neoclassical economics describes the way the world looks once the dust has settled; we ar e interested in how the dust goes about settling. This is not an idle issue, since the business of settling may have considerable bearing on how things look after wards. —H. Peyton Young, Individual Strategy and Social Structure (2001: 4) ...

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